Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
and intended as a temporary lodging place for Ayoreo-speaking people
during their visits to the city.
14
At Casa Campesina, she learned how to
smoke coca paste from other Ayoreo. At the time, her mother was away
working on ranches. When she found out that Rosy had become a
viciosa
or one living “the life of vice,” she began to cry. “She told me that she
had heard that vices will kill me, that they are bad, that they are against
God. That is why she began to cry, she began to feel bad all over.” Her
older sister tried to make her quit by tying her up with rope and beating
her. “She beat me badly with a piece of wood but I am strong and I did
not pay attention to her.”
Rosy told of passing out and waking up in strange places, snatches of
incoherent conversation, bribing police with money or sex, and a life
defined by violent confrontations with Ayoreo and
Cojñone
alike. Rosy
could not leave anything in their camp because the other
Puyedie
would
steal it. Many of the
Puyedie
gave themselves the names of animals, like
Víbora
(Snake),
Caballo
(Horse),
Por-si-acaso
( Just in Case),
Salvaje
(Sav-
age). Rosy said that she knew her vices were dangerous: “The vices kill
us.” Many of her friends had already died from their vices, more than she
could keep track of: “More than ten, more than twenty, I don't know.”
She herself was frequently sick these days, from what she didn't know:
“When you are a
viciosa
, any illness will grab you, you know.” Even so,
she said she wouldn't give up her vices: “They are sweet,
unejna
, to me.”
She said if she was taken somewhere else, away from her vices, she would
return. Over the course of the interviews with Irene Roca Ortíz, the sto-
ries unraveled into disaggregated fragments: “She was jealous of her hus-
band.” “Snake.” “I would fuck an animal or the Devil.” “Who are you?”
“Here comes Horse.” “Let's go.” Laughter.
Rosy emphasized that her deadly vices gave her life. She said that with-
out her vices, she became more like an animal. She said she could not
leave them: “You'd better tie me to a tree,” she smiled, “or I won't stay.”
The same coarse rope is used to tie down all those afflicted with the
urusori
of madness or vice, to keep them from running off to an alterity at once
inhuman and legitimating. And it is the same knot that always slips.
This slippage is comparable to what Gilles Deleuze, as part of his ef-
forts to understand drug causality, referred to as the “lines of flight”
constituting a social that is constantly escaping or leaking out in all di-
rections: “The drug user creates active lines of flight. But these lines roll
up, start to turn into black holes, with each drug user in a hole, as a group
or individually, like a periwinkle. Dug in instead of spaced out.”
15
João
Biehl extends this insight to the analysis of pharmaceutical subjectivity
in general, as a “continuous process of experimentation . . . an art of
