The Testimony of Irene

***Irene authorized me to post her story and her picture


“My mother is an Indian. Her skin is very dark. My father was a gypsy. I have premonitions and dreams.” (Irene’s own skin is light and yellowish. She says these words as if she were explaining that she is not what she looks, that her background is complex, difficult to explain to someone like me from Rio de Janeiro.) She has a native’s flat face, not unattractive. She speaks with an accent and the long storytelling style from the North.

I nod and respond; “Good!” in a manner that wishes to convey to her that I accept her difference and her background that seem to have been internalized as something suspicious and inferior. Irene is clearly very aware of race, ethnicity, and social class differences and knows where she stands as a half breed from the less developed Northern region. I wanted her to feel valued and an equal to everyone else in this Brazil so diverse, with Brazilian itself recalling the image of the mestizo, resulting from the continuing mixing of so many tribes from our continent, from Africa, Europe and the East throughout our history.

Irene is a couple of inches taller than I am, about five-four. Her body is solid, maybe a size 10. She is not fat and she is always commenting derogatorily about other women who “look like a refrigerator, a stove, so big they are…” Irene watches her figure. Her legs are strong and carry her through the small apartment, from the kitchen and service area to the living room, bedroom, bathroom and office. She works fast. She looks focused, like she is thinking about the steps of the work, what to do first, next. Separate the clothes and throw sheets and towels in the washing machine. Soak fine blouses and dresses in soapy water in plastic pails. Change the cat litter. Straighten up, vacuum and dust the premises. She moves fast from one task to another, non stop. She knows what she is doing and she does it. (“A great maid”, I think.)

“I have a son, Edu.” The child’s full name is Marcio Eduardo Conceição Santos, she tells me. Eduardo lives with one of her sisters in Sao José de Ribamar, a small town in the state of Maranhão. “I am not with his father. He lives in Brasilia. I ran away from him.” Irene proceeds to explain that when she was about 16 she ran away from home to go to work as a maid and a nanny for a comadre in Ceará, another state. A few years later she returned to the small town in Humberto de Campos, Maranhão, where her mother lived (“I do not have a father, more or less, to speak of… He never paid attention to us. He is a drunk and never gave us anything.”) She left again about a month later, this time for the nation’s capital, Brasilia. It was there that Irene met the father of her child.

“I took a false step in my life being with him. He was no good, very jealous and controlling. He learned from his father how to beat women. People used to say that his mother died from his father’s beatings.”

I tried to explain to Irene that men learn to beat women from society. “It is like men beating women is allowed and they learn to do it.” Irene was not very interested in my feminist sociological explanation but I continued anyway. “It is up to women to stop men from doing that. We cannot allow them to beat us. With this new one, Irene, don’t let him do that.”

“This one is a good one” she essentialized. And she is right, some are good, not beaters, and others are not, just to complicate matters. Society, still, condones misogyny and violence against women and children, the weak ones. It is always hard to make people understand these abstract notions. The immediacy of the individual with a body clear in front of you is so much more visible, much easier to assign blame and responsibility than to an idea of society and social institutions.

“Once when I was pregnant the father of my son wanted to beat me in the middle of the street. His father came out and beat him instead, telling him that he was not going to beat me! But when my son was three months old he beat me and threatened to beat my son too. I stood in front of the crib and did not allow him to touch the child. He said he would kill us both. It was because I had said I was going back to work but in a different place. I worked as a maid for this very nice family that treated me like if I were part of the family. My son had everything that they gave me, a real good crib, clothes, everything like a child of rich people. He kicked the crib and broke it.”

Irene went on to explain that one of the members the well off family for whom she worked during her pregnancy had opened a store. They invited her to work there instead of as a maid at the house. They would have allowed her to bring the baby in a carriage and leave him in the back of the store while she worked. “Everything was arranged. Imagine, I would work at a store!” She said that proudly, happy with the possibility of upward mobility.

“But he said I was not going to work at the store where other men might come in and I would be involved with these men!” Irene was indignant. “I was scared after the beating and ran back to my mother’s home again. My friend took us to the bus depot. I left everything behind. Rentals are cheaper in Brasilia and I had a little house there, with a sofa, a bed, the baby’s crib, everything right.” Irene seemed sad for having left a “real life” behind because of the batterer.

“Then I could not go back to Brasilia. I hear that the father of my son has another woman now who he also beats. I came to Rio.”

Now 30, Irene lives with her now boyfriend, a younger man from the state of Paraiba, in Rio das Pedras. This is a sprawling slum like community in the outskirts of Rio where migrants from the poorer regions of the North and Northeast of Brazil build their rackety houses very close to each other in miniscule spaces. Irene faces over an hour’s bus ride to and from plush Ipanema district where she works Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at my sister’s, and Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays for Carmô, my sister’s friend. “Too much work at Dona Carmô’s,” Irene says, “too many people, lots of silver to polish.”