Life in Debt. Clara Han
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[sweet]. These times, they've been very difficult, much worse than before.”
Three months earlier, Sra. Flora had had a stroke. “Look at my eye, it's desviado [off-track]. The doctor said that it would not come back, and that there is nothing I can do now.” Her right eye was deviated laterally. She was short of breath as she spoke. It seemed that she experienced a pressure to find words, as well as a difficulty breathing. The doctor, she said, also told her that her heart was not working well. But she had sensed this herself. “I'm broken. My body is broken. The house, everything is broken.”
My husband does not speak Spanish. He attempted to understand through my translations and through bodily gestures and tones. But when Sra. Flora began to tell me about her sister, I stopped translating. Receiving this pain took its own time. Sra. Flora's evocation of her sister at this juncture in her life might help us attend to the feelings of violence she may be embodying as she tries to respond to her kin but is faced with the limits of their responsiveness. As such, Sra. Flora's memory of her sister and the political conditions that produced her pain affectively resonates with conditions in which she experiences her own body as “broken,” Florcita's body as violated, and “the house, everything is broken”: fractured between the multiple relational ties that produced the home itself.
A LOAN FOR ANOTHER LIFE
To leave you with this scene of destruction would obscure how the use of the credit system can also provide different relational futures. In August 2008, I returned again to La Pincoya. On a bright, chilly afternoon, I stopped by Sra. Flora's home. The blue-painted patio gate was wide open, and the sound of hammers rang out into the street. The facade of the house had been completely renovated. An oval front step covered with salmon-colored tile introduced a carved wooden antique door. This new front door was framed by new rectangular, mottled-glass windows. Rodrigo emerged from inside the house and greeted me with a big hug, sweating from the renovation work that he was completing. Sra. Flora then appeared and also gave me a tight hug. “Look, we are renovating the house. Beautiful, you see,” she said. Surprised, I asked her to give me a tour. We walked through the house. It was almost unrecognizable. The kitchen was enlarged and decoratively tiled in black and white. A long wire was strung across the kitchen with hanging bunches of onions, peppers, and garlic. There were now two sparkly bathrooms on the first floor with deep tubs and shiny shower heads. Florcita's former room was transformed by a large sliding glass door that opened onto the interior patio of the house, where a few white chickens and a large black-and-green rooster pecked the grass. “See,” Sra. Flora said, pointing out the details of the renovation to me.
As we stood in Florcita's former room, I told Sra. Flora how struck I was by the changes. “How did…?” She interrupted me, answering, “I took another loan on the house.” She refinanced the house in order to afford the renovations. “But, how…?” My voice trailed off. Sra. Flora responded, “Well, Rodrigo was drinking, drinking all the time. And I said one day, ‘Ja, ja, no more. No more. Never.’ I confronted him: ‘Look. You are going to change or you leave this house. I can't bear you like this.' I took out the loan, and I said, ‘We are going to renovate the house. We will have a new life.' He got enthusiastic, and went out with the money and bought all the materials. So now, he is working in construction, and we save a little at a time to be able to renovate the house just the way we want. With a different style than everyone else.” This time, the loan provided the materials to hold Rodrigo's attention and allowed time to work on relations.
I asked her about Florcita. Florcita, she said, was now living three houses up, renting a room from a neighbor with Kevin. Sra. Flora had used a portion of that loan to help pay for their rent. After several months of pasta base use, Florcita had joined another Pentecostal meeting to regulate her addiction. Kevin, on the other hand, continued to consume, but Florcita persisted in a relationship with him. Sra. Flora asked Florcita to move out of the house but made arrangements with the neighbor. She brought food to them each day, and Florcita occasionally stopped by the home but did not stay long. With the move, Sra. Flora and Florcita had, for the moment, crafted a new way to maintain proximity while distancing Kevin from the home. In this way, they forged a new lease on life—in a different style—staking the everyday again in an uncertain future.
Attending to the tensions between waiting and the ongoing demands of debt, scarcity, and multiple kinship obligations reveals how intimate relations of the house are simultaneously constructed, made possible through, and also threatened by the mechanisms of credit. Moving with these relations in time helped me attend to the force of possibility within intimate relations. We might call it a sense of hope that another can reveal a different aspect of herself in time, and the sense of obligation that arises with it. Care-as-waiting relies on that hope, which is actualized within the house as illness and momentary renewal. In the face of disappointment with this hope, such caring can become conditions through which the past of state violence are made available within one's present and within the ordinary itself.
CHAPTER 2
Social Debt, Silent Gift
LOWER THE POINTS
We sat in the living room on a couch covered with thick plastic. Paz's two-year-old daughter, Felicidad, sat in the lap of her grandmother Sra. Ana. As she combed her hands through the child's blond hair, Sra. Ana told me how Paz had begun smoking pasta base again two months earlier. Paz had started intermittent pasta base consumption six years previously. She had stopped consuming when she became pregnant after selling sex to a fifty-year-old neighbor. Paz's return to pasta base had palpable effects within the home. She sold her daughter's formula, received from the local primary care center, as well as the child's diapers.
Sra. Ana was sixty-five years old and widowed. She lived with her two daughters, Paz and Pamela, on a housing site comprised of a two-room house and a provisional shack. Pamela worked in subcontracted office-cleaning, and her husband worked in construction. They had three children and lived in the shack. Sra. Ana worked as a security guard in the women's prison in the municipality of San Joaquín in the southern zone of Santiago. Her other daughter, Paz, had had a number of temporary jobs, the last one working for the municipality in park maintenance, picking up trash in the plazas and parks in the neighborhood.
Woven into these difficulties were Sra. Ana's feelings of shame produced by Paz's thefts from one neighbor's almacén (shop) and another's liquor store and, just recently, from Susana and her husband, Antonio, Sra. Ana's friends across the street. Paz had broken into Susana and Antonio's house while they were visiting relatives on the coast. She passed their DVD player, their son's PlayStation, and Susana's heirloom clocks to a youth in the neighborhood who sold stolen goods in other neighboring poblaciones. The next-door neighbor's son, Miguel, noticed the door open and found Paz lying on the couch asleep. He called the police. She was arrested.
Sra. Ana recounted, “Paz robbed my purse that had 28,000 (USD 46). She is stealing from the neighbors. I don't even want to walk in the street and show my face. The others say, ‘She is the mamá of this girl who walks around robbing.’” Sra. Ana's husband had died of pancreatic cancer eleven years earlier. She commented that, after his death, she thought, “Now we can have a happy family, all tranquil. But, no. One son of mine has been in prison for the past six years for the same porquería [filth]. He walked around robbing, and was jailed for robbery with intimidation. And I say, What mamá has so many bad children? We have a big cartel [media cartel] here in the house. I think I did what I could. I don't know how I failed.”
Sra. Ana apologized “a thousand times” to Susana. She bought another PlayStation for her son on credit, the only item left that they had not been able to recuperate through neighborhood channels. On top of monthly utility bills and food, which she shared with her daughter Pamela, Sra. Ana was paying for replacements for the stolen powdered milk for her granddaughter and monthly quotas on the PlayStation, as well as monthly payments to the neighbors for stolen goods and money. She and Susana usually relied on each other when faced with a “critical moment,” moments when they would not make it to the end of the month. But, in the midst of the gossip over the thefts, she told me that she had “shame” (vergüenza) to ask Susana for a loan.
Sra.