Arriving beyond Abjection

ORIGINS

"Jardim Gramacho was a paradise."

My neighbor, Deca, told me this on an unusually quiet afternoon at his open-air bar. I was the only one seated on one of the plastic stools that lined the counter, though a couple of guys were busy choosing a song at the jukebox in the corner of the bar. Deca seemed to be in the rare mood to talk, and so I had asked him what he remembered of the neighborhood before the garbage dump existed. I knew that his family, having migrated from the northeastern state of Paraíba in the 1960s, was one of the first to arrive in Jardim Gramacho.

"This road," Deca recalled, indicating the main street in front of us, "was just a dirt path. I think my house might have been the seventy-eighth in the whole neighborhood. We were surrounded by fruit trees and natural springs."

I thought of the old stone hitching post at the edge of Jardim Gramacho where the nineteenth-century Emperor Dom Pedro II would stop on his way from Rio de Janeiro to his summer residence in Petrópolis so that his horses could drink from the spring. Today, the dust-covered hitching post is the only sign that a natural spring once flowed nearby.

There were also tidal pools, Deca told me, where neighborhood children would go swimming and where crabs could be caught among the mangroves. Residents supplemented their income by catching these crabs and other fish that entered from Guanabara Bay to lay their eggs. It was possible to fill a whole bag with mussels (sururu), mullets (parati), or blennies (maria-datoca) — too much for any one family to eat. Lacking refrigeration, they would lay the excess fish on the tin roofs of their homes to dry in the sun.

Not that life was easy at the time. Like most early residents, Deca spoke of everyday struggles resulting from a lack of electricity, sanitation, paved roads, and bus service. There was also no pedestrian bridge over the highway, Washington Luiz, that borders Jardim Gramacho. Leaving the neighborhood required crossing eight lanes of traffic moving at speeds of sixty to seventy miles per hour. I recalled Glória telling me, soon after we first met, that her older brother had been hit and killed crossing the highway when he was nineteen years old. When I mentioned this to Deca, he shook his head.

"Before the garbage began arriving, they told us that Monte Castelo would be paved. We were told about the dump, but none of us knew to what extent the garbage would affect our lives." His words hung in the air, as if laden with sadness or perhaps saudades, the bittersweet remembering of something loved and lost.

"Did you know my wife?" Deca asked me. "Did you know her before she died?"

I recalled the day that I found a house to rent in Jardim Gramacho, not an easy feat in a place where most families built their own homes. Mariana, who sold clothing door-to-door in Jardim Gramacho and knew more about neighborhood news than did the most committed gossiper, had offered to take me to a couple of residents who she thought had a vacant house in their family's yard that they might be willing to rent out. We arrived at Deca's bar. Deca was not there, but Tom, another longtime resident of Jardim Gramacho, was working the bar and showed me a house behind the bar owned by Deca's brother, who had moved in with his grown children. As I finished making arrangements with Tom to rent the house, Mariana inquired about Deca's wife, and Tom replied that she had recently passed away. "She was such a good person, kind to everyone," Mariana kept repeating, her voice trembling, as we walked away.

I told Deca what Mariana had said.

"My wife had breast cancer," Deca replied. "We fought it. We did the mastectomy and the reconstructive surgery. After five years, the cancer came back. When it comes back, there is nothing to be done, não tem jeito."

"I'm so sorry," I replied.

Deca picked up a rag to wipe the counter and then stopped, shaking his head. "There are so many diseases in Jardim Gramacho. Cancers. Tuberculosis. Skin diseases. Other horrible diseases. I think it's the garbage. It's the dust that we breathe in Jardim Gramacho, a dust like no other dust, a dust that comes off the garbage trucks on their way to the dump. The leachate drips from the trucks onto our streets. All this toxicity. It causes these diseases."

I wanted to ask Deca why he had stayed in Jardim Gramacho, but I knew enough to realize this question had no simple answer. Most of the clientele who frequented Deca's bar were tied in some way to the dump. Truck drivers often stopped for a plate of Deca's rotisserie chicken on their way to and from recycling plants in the south of Brazil. A team of engineers working on a new piping system for the dump's methane gas had drinks each night at Deca's bar before heading to the local motel where they were staying. And many catadores unwound at his bar after a day of collecting — sharing rounds of drinks, playing dominoes, and listening to music that blared from the bar's jukebox.

Instead, I asked about the early days of the bar. How did it start? Deca's voice became more animated, as he described how he sold quentinhas (togo lunches kept warm in an aluminum container) to the employees of Queiroz Galvão, the company contracted to remediate the dump in the 1990s. It was possible to sell sixty quentinhas at lunchtime and another forty throughout the day. At a certain point, Queiroz Galvão began giving employees tickets that they could use to go out and buy lunch at one of several locations. The bar was established to provide these sit-down lunches. Eventually the rotisserie was acquired. In a single week, 120 chickens were sold.

Deca paused, seemingly lost in a memory and then smiled: "Those were good times, you know, very good times."

FOR A LONG TIME, I understood the history of Jardim Gramacho as a straightforward story of environmental degradation. The arrival of garbage in Jardim Gramacho polluted the surrounding bay, clogged springs, smothered mangroves, and dripped on its streets and into its groundwater leachate — a black, acidic, nauseating liquid that seeps through decomposing waste, carrying concentrated amounts of copper, lead, nickel, and mercury, among other contaminants. The neighborhood that derived its name Jardim, meaning "gardens," from its history as a densely vegetated plantation dating back to the eighteenth century, had now become a toxic site. Deca's own story of loss certainly echoed this narrative. It recounts the loss of beauty, the loss of resources in fruit trees, crabs, and fish, and most painfully, the loss of life. For Deca, there was never any doubt that it was the garbage that caused his wife's cancer and ultimately her untimely death.

Yet Deca's story also speaks to what I began to see as the entangled relations of life, labor, and the dump. The everyday labor of running his bar — a business that first emerged to serve sanitation workers...