Life in Debt. Clara Han
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in the house she shared with her husband. He could stay if he worked and helped pay the bills. Some months later, Rodrigo arrived.
When Rodrigo came to the house is when the problems started. Because during this time, my husband continued to beat me…. Rodrigo and Ricardo heard everything. Ricardo never dared to do anything, because he was scared of my husband. But Rodrigo, on the other hand, did not have fear of anything. And he said, “I can't stand it, that you are sacando la cresta [beating yourself up] working to maintain the house and this desgraciado [wretched person] is arriving to the house to hit you and harass you. I cannot bear it.”
On New Year's Eve of 1977, Sra. Flora and Rodrigo threw a party. They waited for her husband, but he did not return home. After several drinks and much conversation, Sra. Flora woke up the next day in Rodrigo's bed.
I was so ashamed. I could not look him in the face…. He left for a few days, but returned. He looked for me at my work. He was persistent. He told me that he was in love with me, that he did not have any fear of my family or my husband. That he could care less about them. He told me he wanted to throw my husband out of the house. But I told him I could not do it, out of respect for my family. He was angry. Then he came back to the house [and stayed] for months…. After having relations with Rodrigo, I separated from my husband. We had separate beds, and I did not let him have relations with me. But one night, I arrived to the house exhausted…. And because I was not vigilant, my husband searched for me [me buscó], and he obligated me to have relations with him again. Three months later, I felt really ill, and I discovered I was pregnant again. I told Rodrigo I was pregnant, and he left the house for six months. But, when he returned, he said that he continued to be in love with me. And my husband left the house, because he could not stand it. And I never asked anything from him. Afterward, Rodrigo and I started to move up [surgir]. We constructed the room where Florcita and Kevin stay. We constructed the second floor. Rodrigo says that Valentina is his daughter because he raised her. And she calls him papá because she does not know her father by blood.
Sra. Flora's narrative reveals that there are two different elements composing “house relations”: blood and everyday labors of caring for another. In this case, these everyday labors “cut” blood relations, limiting the network of actual kin while producing new kin relatedness, paternity: Valentina calls Rodrigo “Dad,” while her biological father is an inactivated memory (see Strathern 1996). Her narrative also shows the ways in which a break with a male partner occurs in an “unstated” register. In maintaining her family's respect, Sra. Flora married her husband and endured his sexual violence. She also maintained this respect in the way she recounted these experiences to me, by focusing on the actions and desires of the two men while leaving her desires unstated. “He continued to be in love with me.” “He returned.” “He left because he could not stand it.” Yet, at the same time, she shows how her patience allowed for that break and allowed for new house relations. She took on this tone again with Rodrigo. She patiently absorbed the darkness of the home while protecting Florcita. Alongside this awaiting, however, she also asserted a determined ability to live without Rodrigo. As she told me after another argument with him: “But when we fought again last Saturday, I said, ‘If you want to go, then just go’ [said in a defiant tone]. Don't feel committed to me. I will lose weight and look for work. I don't need your contribution here in the house. I will not be here begging that you stay here.”
Then in early October, Sra. Flora fell ill. After her return from the hospital, I visited her. Covered by an old blue quilt, she convalesced in their cramped bedroom. I asked her what had happened. The night she fell ill, she and Rodrigo had fought. Rodrigo had discovered department store bills that Sra. Flora had been hiding and paying piola (“quietly,” or “without notice”). She had bought clothes for Florcita and her children. Rodrigo threatened to leave the home. Sra. Flora confronted Florcita, telling her to leave Kevin. Florcita refused. She loved Kevin, she said, and she hated her mother for bending to Rodrigo's demands. Sra. Flora felt a terrible pain in her abdomen and stabbing pains in her heart. She thought she was having a heart attack. Rodrigo took her to Hospital José Joaquín Aguirre. She had an acutely inflamed gallbladder and underwent surgery. When she returned home, Rodrigo had momentarily put aside his demands. “It seems that Rodrigo got more enthusiastic about the house [after I got sick]. He took pity on me, seeing me in this condition,” she said. “He can't leave me now.” Sra. Flora's surgery and recovery not only affected Rodrigo but also seemed to dampen family tensions. Kevin and Florcita, for their part, had turned down the music.
The damage Sra. Flora embodies through this waiting raises questions as to the limits of this mode of care. In circumstances of precarious employment, targeted state programs for those who do the work to qualify as “extremely poor” (see chapter 3), and a fragile and underfunded public health system, the sense of responsibility for kin can feel infinite.5 Such a sense of responsibility is heard in women's differentiation of la casa (house) and la calle (street), in which the “street” is spoken of as unpredictable, faceless violence and scarcity—“He might be killed or stabbed; how would she survive?”—while in the “house,” moments of scarcity and interpersonal violence are engendered in flesh-and-blood relations and can be mitigated, assuaged, and endured as part of life itself. Waiting, then, can be understood as a manifestation of the desire to be infinitely responsive (see Das 2010b).6 Realized through domestic relations and credit, this desire orients subjects toward “the possible,” the lived sense of indeterminacy in the present that provides hope for relational futures. But this sense of responsibility can become unbearable with, for example, the threat of deadly violence in the home. Indeed, when such a threat arose, Sra. Flora had to face the fact of her finite responsibility even as she held on to this desire for infinite responsiveness, a desire to continue waiting.
GIFT OF BREAD
December 28, 2004. Two months had passed since I had last seen Sra. Flora. When I entered the house, she was standing in Florcita and Kevin's room, cleaning up what she called “the disorder.” She greeted me with a warm hug, telling me that she had “good news.” Kevin and Florcita had left the house three weeks earlier, she said, and “ahora estamos tirándonos pa' arriba” (literally, “we are throwing ourselves upward,” or “moving up in the world”). She seemed exuberant. We walked across Florcita and Kevin's room, where mounds of clothes lay strewn across the floor.
Leading me to a new interior patio, she said, “Look, I enclosed all of this. I put a little garden, and the grass is growing well.” A cement walkway separated a patch of grass on one side from a small fruit tree and plants on the other. She led me back through the house. “We are repairing the house. We are moving the kitchen over there, and putting the bathroom here [pointing to where the kitchen was], because the kitchen and bathroom had rats. After thirty-four years, the wood bathroom had a terrible stench.” The new kitchen would replace the passageway to Florcita's former room. As we returned to the patio, she said, “I am going to put floor tiles in all the bedrooms, and new ceramic tiles in the living room, kitchen, and bathroom. We have all this projected for this year 2005. It will be a good year.”
Sra. Flora walked with more energy in her step. She projected her voice instead of guarding it closely in hushed whispers. She recounted to me the events that led up to Florcita and Kevin's leaving. Shortly before they left, Kevin got high on pasta base. “He was walking around aggressive,” Sra. Flora said. “All of a sudden, he took an iron bar and hit her and hit her. Florcita was underneath the covers [of the bed]. If she had not been, he would have killed her. With blood coming out on all sides. We had to take her to the emergency room. I told them to leave after that. ‘If you can't leave Kevin, I won't have you die here like this. Please. Just leave.’ And finally, they did. They just got up and left.”
Sra. Flora's narrative was not one of abandonment or social death. Rather, by telling Florcita to leave the home, Sra. Flora reaffirmed her life within it. At the same time, however, by marking out the home as nonviolent, she established a boundary around this spectacular violence and the everyday, unaccounted-for violences through which the home was being produced (Price 2002). As we talked further about Florcita, Sra. Flora justified to me why she told Florcita to leave the