The Empregadas and the Epidemic
COVID-19 Lays Bare Brazil’s Deep Societal Divide
The coronavirus pandemic is hitting Brazil harder than
most other countries, in part because social inequality is so massive. Armies
of maids commute between favela slums and middle-class neighborhoods. Taking a
closer look at them tells a lot about the country.
By Marian
Blasberg
28.05.2020,
18.49 Uhr
I can’t
remember whether it was just curiosity or a certain desire to provoke, but at
some point, I started an informal survey among my Brazilian friends. From the
men, I wanted to know whether they urinate while standing up or sitting down.
The number of doubtful looks I got suggested that I was the first to confront
them with this alternative. "Sitting, what do you mean?" they asked.
"Do you think I'm gay?"
I actually
consider these men to be fairly enlightened people. They read newspapers, they
don’t eat meat, they change their children’s diapers, but it would never occur
to a single one of them to sit down for a pee. At first, I thought it was an
expression of machismo deeply rooted in their Latino souls. Over time, though,
it became clear to me that there was something else behind it.
In contrast
to Germany, toilets in Brazil seem to lie in a blind spot of emancipation. Sit
down when you pee, others aren't going to clean up after you - those were words
that accompanied me throughout my German youth. Brazilian mothers, on the other
hand, didn’t impose such demands on their boys. They didn’t have to because others
did the cleaning for them. And when my friends moved away from home in their
mid-to-late twenties, they earned enough to afford their own maids.
The
Brazilians call these workers empregada doméstica. They’re the true reason that
men in Brazil don't sit to pee.
In the
eight years that I’ve been living in Rio de Janeiro, a theory has emerged from
my survey. Just as I explain my home country Germany to Brazilians through the
institution of volunteering, I explain Brazil to my German friends through the
institution of the empregada. When you crack that door open, it provides a look
at one of those extremely unequal societies that have never really overcome their
dysfunctional colonial structures. The subliminal racism that poisons relations
between the classes. The irresponsibility and the hatred.
Now that
only the United States and Russia have more COVID-19 cases than Brazil, with
public hospitals collapsing all over the country and a growing number of people
dying a silent, unnoticed death in their homes because the ventilators of
private, high-end hospitals are out of reach for them, this gap is also
revealing how ill-equipped Brazil is to counteract this virus. Is the situation
here really that different than in South Africa? Or in India or Mexico?
Steering
Toward an Iceberg
There are a
few things that have accumulated over the years, thoughts and observations,
that only marginally have to do with a misguided president who long dismissed
COVID-19 as a "mild flu” that wouldn’t be able to overcome the immune
systems of his compatriots. Jair Bolsonaro recently growled that Brazilians are
constantly traipsing through sewage and nothing happens. That basically says
everything you need to know about him.
Bolsonaro
is a man who cares about himself above all else, even in the crisis. Fearing
the collapse of the economy and that it could be held against him, he has
encouraged people to go out and work. The newspapers have described him as a
blind captain steering Brazil toward an iceberg. So, it somehow seems fitting
that a saxophonist outside plays Frank Sinatra’s "My Way” punctually at 6
o’clock every day. There’s actually something "Titanic” about the way the
echo reverberates among the apartment blocks.
I’m writing
this on the 16th floor in the tiny cubbyhole that is my office. A table fits in
here, as does a chair and a chest of drawers on which a fan hums to combat the
almost unbearable heat. There is no air-conditioning, of the kind found in the
other rooms of the apartment. This part of the flat, located behind the kitchen
and equipped with its own bathroom, was once reserved for the empregadas. Back
in the 1960s, when this building was built, maids usually lived at their
workplace.
Rio de
Janeiro is a city whose infrastructure, which has grown up over the centuries,
was designed to ensure that the paths of servants and the people they are
serving do not cross unnecessarily. Like most residential buildings, ours has
two elevators. A slightly nicer one with gold bars is called the "social”
and is reserved for residents and their guests. A second elevator, called the
"serviço,” is used by workers – the servants, nannies, cooks and doormen
as well as the "motoboys,” who now deliver the online purchases from the
supermarket and place them at the back entrances of apartments.
Even in the
modern buildings with their narrow corridors, this hierarchical separation is
still there symbolically, even if it is frequently by way of two apartment
doors located directly next to each other. It’s a basic pattern that is
repeated across the city. If you go up to the famous Sugar Loaf Mountain or the
statue of Christ, you can clearly recognize the neighborhoods where people with
servants live. They’re located at sea level behind the famous Copacabana and
Ipanema beaches. And you can see the favelas that are home to the servants,
which have been built over the years on the adjacent hillsides.
The rich
have swimming pools on their rooftops. The poor further up have vats which they
use to collect rainwater.
The very
idea of distancing is an illusion. I don’t know anyone who was surprised that
the first COVID-19 victim in Rio was an empregada. Newspapers reported that the
employer of 63-year-old Cleonice Gonçalves had been in Italy for Carnival
celebrations. The woman was tested for the coronavirus after her return, but
she didn’t feel it was necessary to tell her servant. Gonçalves, who as a
diabetic belonged to a risk group, continued working. Days later, she died in a
public hospital where no doctor had been able to figure out what malady had
struck her.
In a way,
Gonçalves' death was an eye-opener. It showed that the people who commute
between the upper and the lower strata of society could also be transmitters of
the disease. The daily newspaper O Globo distilled these fears into an image on
its front page that required no explanation at all: All you could see were
buildings nested closely together, crooked little huts rising up a hill. You
could just imagine the people crowded together there in those tiny spaces – six
or eight of them sleeping in damp rooms. Not to mention the trash that nobody
removes from the alleys. The urine that runs down the hill in open streams. The
weak water pipes from which many ask whether they should be using the drops
from the faucet to wash their hands or cook.
What
happens, the picture asked, once the virus infects these hills from which the
state withdrew long ago? And what, wondered the middle class sitting at their
pools, would happen when the people living there brought the virus out of the
favelas?
A Feeling
of Being Overwhelmed
Even within
my circle of friends, there were now discussions about how to deal with
empregadas. Many of them, as became apparent from the messages they sent, were
horrified by the idea of the mountain of domestic activities that seemed
insurmountable – cleaning toilets, working from home, taking care of the
children. Just the thought of it triggered a feeling of being overwhelmed,
which led some to succumb to the conjecture that perhaps the virus was, in
fact, just a mild flu.
Others, the
elderly in particular, who are reliant on help, were searching for compromises.
Aided by the architecture of their apartments, they considered creating
corridors so that they wouldn’t have contact with their empregada. Yet others
believed it would make a difference if they reduced the number of days or if
they ordered an Uber so that their workers didn’t have to be exposed to crowded
buses. For many, the idea of sending someone on paid leave for an indeterminate
period of time was unimaginable, and that feeling was also mutual.
Money for
just sitting around? That’s what the empregada of my psychoanalyst Francisco
asked.
Iraní
received our instructions just as stoically as she does all of our
instructions. It’s impossible to guess what was going through her mind at the
time. She has no bank account of her own, so her daughter got in touch the next
day with an account number. That was six weeks ago. Her brown imitation leather
apron is still hanging in the small bathroom next door, with her flip-flops
underneath. It’s as if she’ll be coming back tomorrow. The last contact we had
with her was at Easter. She left a message and said she was doing fine, but she
missed the children.
Is she
really OK though? And what is she doing right now? Is she staying safe?
It took
years for me to get over the unease I felt because of her. I wasn’t familiar
with this world in Germany – that someone was always there to empty the
ashtrays and run the iron over my underpants. I still remember how, in the
beginning, I sometimes lurked and waited for her to disappear into the bedroom
with the vacuum cleaner before I scurried into the kitchen to get a cup of
coffee. I avoided her as if I could have suppressed her presence by doing so,
but I basically didn’t have a choice, I had to accept her as a part of the
family.
It’s been
40 years since Iraní began working in the household of my mother-in-law, who
was a public school teacher until her retirement. She had hardly reached the
age of majority at the time. She experienced the family’s grief when my wife’s
uncle disappeared forever because of his resistance against the dictatorship.
She was there when my wife’s baby teeth fell out. And when she graduated from
law school. Iraní was always there. Now, she’s watching our children grow up.
Staying Out
of the Way
Ever since
my wife moved into her first apartment, Iraní has been splitting her time. She
spends three days a week at my mother-in-law’s and then she is with us for two
days. She’s a small, stocky woman with strong arms and an inscrutable look of
pride. She goes about her work quietly and correctly. The routing is always the
same. She starts with the laundry before ironing and then preparing the food.
She cleans the bathrooms and makes the beds in the afternoon, when the children
are at the daycare center.
With
everything she does, she is careful not to disturb anyone. When her old Nokia
phone hums, she retreats to her small bathroom, and she waits to eat when no
one else is in the kitchen. Unlike other empregadas, she doesn’t have the
television running in the background as she does her work. She doesn’t sing,
she doesn’t complain and occassionally even has a smile on her face. When we
compliment her on her food or when the children call out "Ciao Iraní” as
they leave, she turns away from the sink for a moment and beams. She can also
turn to stone if she perceives something as unjustified criticism or if her
routine is somehow disturbed by special requests. Otherwise, though, she’s
always consistent. She's someone very familiar, but she's also still a
stranger.
But what
goes through her mind when she irons over the holes in my T-shirts?
Iraní hears
what we laugh about at lunch. She hears what we argue about. She wipes the dust
off the records and the photos of my parents. My life lies before her like an
open book, but I don’t even know her last name. I don’t know where she lives or
her birthday. There is no document in our apartment that tells us anything
about her, and when I scroll through the photos on my mobile phone, it’s as if
Iraní doesn’t even exist.
Of course,
that’s a bit of an exaggeration.
There are a
few things that I can say for sure – that she wasn’t at school for long, for
example. You can tell by the shaky writing on the notes she leaves to remind us
that we are out of beans and rice. I have also picked up on other things, like
the fact that she didn’t tell my mother-in-law about her pregnancy. When her
secret came out, she said through tears that she had been afraid of losing the
job she had just started. Iraní raised her daughter Luciene on her own. She
finished school and is doing something with computers today. She once came to
our house to pick up a bed we wanted to get rid of.
As far as I
know, they live together on a piece of property my wife’s father helped to buy.
It’s located somewhere in one of those bedroom towns that were built when the
hills in the city got too cramped. Drug gangs and militias wage bloody wars
there today. Sometimes, when we rush through the area toward the mountains with
our car windows closed, I wonder if Iraní becomes a different person in this place,
a self-confident woman who others look up to, someone who not only nods to
orders but also explains things to others?
Does she
speak before the congregation in an evangelical church? Does she dance when
samba is played in her neighborhood? Is there stunned laughter when she tells
stories from the open book of life in our apartment? I can sometimes imagine
that. When she stands in front of the elevator and ties her headscarf over her
hair, it seems as though she is going through a transformation.
Brazil is
home to some of the most pronounced inequality in the world. The top 10 percent
of society accounts for 55 percent of all income, but half of all citizens live
on a mere 66 euros a month. That includes many of the 500,000 or so women who
work as empregadas in Rio alone. Almost two-thirds of them are dark-skinned
like Iraní. Most are no longer so young and aren’t particularly svelte. Many
women who employ domestic help insist on it so that their husbands aren't
tempted.
Streets of
Mistrust
To assess
the significance of their work, it helps to look at another dividing line, one
that sociologist Roberto DaMatta calls the "dichotomy of house and
street.” DaMatta writes that you have to think of the street as being like a
wilderness. It is the site of fleeting encounters, mistrust and dubious
intentions. Most importantly, it is the place of filth. As a European, you
sometimes wonder why Brazilians never put their bags on the floor. Or why
parents stop their children when they try to pick up a stick – but they have
their reasons, and by that I don’t just mean that every time it rains, the
drains overflow and the pavements flood with bacteria. What I mean are the
collective fears that are deeply rooted in the consciousness of a Brazilian
middle class that for centuries has feared little as much as deadly epidemics.
The house,
meanwhile, is everything the street is not. It’s a bunker, usually sealed off
by bars, a place where you feel safe and secure and to which mostly family and
close friends have access. In addition to that are the exterminators, who use
their poison to drive away the vermin. And the men who service the air
conditioners. And then there are the empregadas who, in the eyes of many of
their employers, are essential workers. The brightly polished surfaces are more
than just an indicator that there is no street dirt contaminating this safe
space – they are also an issue of health.
But there's
more to it than that. More than 5 million men, women and children crossed the
Atlantic from Africa in several waves up until the end of the 19th century. For
most, the journey led via the slave markets in the old port of Rio further
inland, where they toiled on the plantations of coffee and sugar cane barons as
slaves. But many remained in the city and became domestic slaves owned by
simple families. Even if the conditions were modest, there was always a damp
attic available as roof over their heads.
Slavery in
Brazil wasn’t just the preserve of a small, rural elite – it extended deep into
the center of society. Having someone to keep the house in order was a status
symbol that many people were willing to save money to buy. Those who could
afford slaves were tapping a bit of the glamour brought by the royal court,
which had moved from Lisbon to Rio in the 19th century.
When it
ended slavery in 1888, Brazil was the last country on the continent to do so.
The resistance that prevented the abolition of slavery for years and the
hesitation to dispense with the use of empregadas during the coronavirus crisis
is rooted in the same sentiment: The idea that once they were gone, the
societal decline would be complete.
Rage
Against the Establishment
Bolsonaro's
ascent is also based on a fear held by many that no one else is beneath them in
society. At a time when Brazil was staggering through a deep economic crisis
and large sections of the middle class feared for their very existence,
Bolsonaro succeeded in transforming those anxieties into rage against a corrupt
political establishment.
Although
slavery itself may have been abolished, the existing structures changed very
little. The same people were still doing the same jobs, only now they were
informal cheap labor. The dependence remained, the reliance on benevolent
employers who treated domestics like family members in an emergency. Up until
the 1960s, there were still job listings for "maids with black skin.” When
those same listings today call for a "pleasing appearance," it is
little more than politically correct code for the same thing.
It wasn’t
until 2013, under the left-wing president Dilma Rousseff, that a law came into
force that placed the empregadas on an equal legal footing with other workers.
Anyone with an employment contract can now get paid for overtime work and
obtain pension and unemployment benefits.
The rich
have swimming pools on their rooftops. The poor further up have vats which they
use to collect the rainwater.
But the
law’s impact has been modest. The vast majority of all domestic workers are
still employed informally. Their children go to public schools, where the
quality is so poor that few are able to make the leap to one of the prestigious
public universities. It’s hardly surprising that the children of those who
employ domestic workers, who acquire their qualifications at expensive private
schools, make up the majority of the student bodies in those universities. In
his book "Tristes Tropiques," French anthropologist Claude
Lévi-Strauss noted that large cities like Rio or São Paulo had bypassed
civilization, jumping directly from barbarism to decadence.
I realized
how deeply ingrained these ideas are when we once visited the parents of a
friend of mine in one of those old houses on Flamengo Beach in Rio. It was the
World Cup summer of 2014, and the Colombia-Uruguay game was on TV in the
antique-filled living room. It was the first time I had met our friend's
parents. When I entered, she introduced me to her father. My eyes then fell to
a woman sitting on the sofa between a couple of people with a baby in her lap.
Her skin was dark and she was wearing white clothing, which led me to conclude
that she was probably a nanny. But I was wrong. It was our friend’s mother.
Later,
sitting in a taxi in high spirits, I shared how I had fallen into the trap of
my own prejudices. It was unbelievable, I said, I actually thought your mother
was a nanny. Silence fell. The mood shifted. Hours later, I was told that the
problem wasn't my prejudices, but that I had expressed them. By naming the
mother in the same breath as a nanny, I had equated her as being at the same
level. It was as if I had just walked into a perfectly translucent glass door.
Rio de
Janeiro is full of these invisible barriers. At some point, I noticed that you
can go out in the evenings for days on end and not a word will be said about
work. Pretty much nobody asks you what you do for a living. Now I know that
there’s a danger lurking behind this question. In contrast to Germany, where
your job can be a conversation starter, in Rio it can open up an abyss that can
no longer be bridged.
The people
who live at the sea level and the people from the hills live in the same city,
but the chasms between their frames of reference are so great that they have
little to say to each other.
This
speechlessness can be unsettling. And it can hurt. I learned this on the day
when Iraní didn’t come to work for the first time since I had arrived. On the
phone, she told my wife that her pregnant daughter’s partner had somehow
stumbled across a shoot-out. She mentioned that there had been a police
control, but the circumstances were unclear. After his mobile phone had been
silent for days, Iraní said the authorities had only just now, fully a week
later, informed them that he was dead. A stray bullet.
A few days
later, though, she was standing at her ironing board again, as if nothing had
happened. When I went into the kitchen early in the morning, I asked her how
she was doing and if her daughter and the baby in her belly were alright. Iraní
looked up. "Tudo bem,” she said very briefly. Everything’s OK. She
cursorily reported what she knew about the incident, but it wasn’t much and
only raised more questions. Then, she fell silent.
I remember
that the seconds I stood before her, rooted to the spot, felt like an eternity.
I could feel the invisible glass wall between us. But instead of tearing it
down and simply embracing Iraní, I went to the stove and made coffee.
It haunted
me for weeks. I did a number of Google searches to see if I could find any
information out about the deceased man. Sometimes I would ask Iraní if she had
any news, but she usually just shook her head laughing, as if she wanted to
say: You are so naive! Of course, I know that the experience in her world is
probably that a crime of that nature will never be solved, but that’s not what
this was about. I was hoping to make up for something.
An
opportunity to do so presented itself two months later. When Iraní told me she
had become a grandmother, I finally hugged her. I cried. It felt like
redemption.
It was as
if I had just walked into a perfectly translucent glass door.
Since that
day, our relationship has relaxed a bit. Iraní seems looser, even though we
will probably never sit down at the table together and chat the way others do
with their empregadas. I prefer it that way. Closeness, I have learned to
accept, comes in the form of thoughts. Through questions that are never posed.
What, after
all, should I expect Iraní to say? That she likes the children so much because
their eyes aren't full of judgment? Because they still don’t understand the
hierarchy? Or should I ask her how we can prevent them from intuitively merging
the idea of dark skin color and servitude?
Such are
the things that go through my mind when I sit in front of the elevator and
cover the potentially dangerous surfaces of supermarket products in a fog of
disinfectant spray. A few days ago, a friend stood there in the dim light of
the ceiling lamp. He was delivering a few boxes of fruit to us from his organic
food store. It was late. He leaned against the wall and said through his beard,
which has grown quite bushy, that they can no longer manage on their own.
Working from home. The children. He said they now had domestic help again.
Another
friend also confessed that her empregada had returned. The woman, she said, had
promised that she wouldn’t see any other people on her days off. It must have
been similar with a family whose story I heard a few days ago. Nobody could
explain why they had all come down with COVID-19, one after the other. They
finally interrogated their servant until she admitted that she had visited her
mother after work.
Her mother,
she said, was suffering from pneumonia. She had wanted to see her one last
time.
It’s
becoming more and more difficult to avoid the virus. It lurks in the lines of
people waiting to receive the 100 euros in immediate aid the government is giving
its citizens. It lurks at the food banks, where there have been clashes, in the
groups of people mourning in front of cemeteries, where bulldozers regularly
dig new mass graves, in the waiting rooms of the family clinics, where
overworked students offer free preliminary treatment to the people from the
hills.
More than a
thousand names are now on the waiting lists for a hospital bed. The city has
laid off countless doctors in recent years to save money, with almost 2,000
intensive care beds subsequently being taken out of commission. Footage of
those decommissioned wards could recently be seen on television. It showed
ventilators that are rusting because there are no longer people there to
operate them. At Ronaldo Gazolla, Rio’s referral hospital for the treatment
COVID-19 patients, painkillers are rationed. At the beginning of May, two
patients died there because generators didn't start for several minutes after a
power failure. And in this pandemic, it is dark-skinned Brazilians who face a
greater risk of death.
"So
what?” Bolsonaro said when asked about the dramatically rising death toll in
late April. Why purchase a large number of ventilators when you won’t need them
after the crisis, asked Nelson Teich before Bolsonaro tapped him as his health
minister?
In theory
there were other possibilities for easing the situation a bit. Given that many
private hospitals are now able to carry out routine operations again because of
a lack of COVID-19 patients, mayors or governors could decree a central waiting
list, he said. Whoever is next in line would then be provided with a hospital
bed, no matter where it was. The Brazilian constitution gives the authorities
this power, but in practice, Brazilian politicians aren’t elected to lead a
revolution.
Patients
with money from the north can fly to São Paulo on chartered jets for 13,000
euros.
The people
who installed them in office with their money wouldn’t like to see their own
lives end in a line like that.
Everyone
has their place.
The truth
is that it’s more likely that more unfinished prefab hospitals will be
commissioned in Brazil than it is that hordes of poor people will be allowed to
cross the invisible threshold. And the truth is that if Iraní doesn’t want to
rely on us covering the high costs of one of those luxury suites for her, then
she'll have to be careful that nothing happens to her.
Even today,
eight weeks after his premiere, my neighborhood saxophonist is still playing
his ironic version of "My Way” each night. I read in a newspaper a few
days ago that of the 325 first-class passengers on the Titanic, 202 were saved.
Of the 706 in cattle class, only 178 survived. It was a metaphor for a country
where many still believe that this virus doesn’t discriminate between rich and
poor. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The World
Bank believes that 5 million Brazilians will slide into absolute poverty as a
result of the crisis. Some 50 million people can't make ends meet without the
100 euros the government is doling out. If there were a curve showing
inequality, it would likely run quite parallel to the current virus curve.
Banging
Pots against Bolsanaro
I have long
been convinced that in countries like Brazil, it isn't so much the elites that
stand in the way of a society beset by inequality, but the much larger middle
class which idealizes the lifestyles of the elites. As such, when this crisis
and our isolation began, I recognized an opportunity. I imagined that my
friends, now that they were having to do the dirty work at home themselves,
might learn how to pee sitting down. It was possible, I thought, that they
might emancipate themselves from their empregadas.
Many stood
on the balconies in the evening and banged on their pots to express their
indignation over a "genocidal president.” It seemed like a moment of
empathy – one in which middle-class people felt as exposed and vulnerable as
the ones in the hills.
But nothing
came of it. The clatter eventually ebbed away. Perhaps it was no coincidence
that the return of the silence also coincided with the return of the
empregadas. Either way, a Bolsonaro supporter could now be clearly heard,
roaring loud threats in an opera singer's voice that the communists should
stick their pots up their asses.
Brazil is a
deeply divided country today, one where neighbors spew hatred from their
balconies. It’s a country that is treading water because the decisive
distinguishing feature running through society is still whether a person does
household chores themselves, or whether they hire someone else to do them. How
is anything ever going to change, I wonder, if millions of employers insist
that there be millions upon millions of servants? Or when one life is
considered more valuable than another?
A full 132
years after the abolition of slavery, when the mayor of Belém declared a
lockdown in his city, he classified empregadas as "essential workers.” At
the same time, in light of the overcrowded hospitals, airlines are offering
emergency charters that fly patients with money from the north to São Paulo for
13,000 euros.
The last
message from Iraní came on Mother’s Day. Everything was OK so far, she said,
before sending her greetings to Dona Carmen, my mother. On her first visit, she
hadn't felt any of the inhibitions that I had. She hugged Iraní right
away.
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