Francis Levy - Seven Days in Rio

Naturally, this also brought up childhood memories of my mother, whose vagina was visible to me through the diaphanous nightgowns she insisted on wearing around the house. But China crossed her legs and said, “We’ll continue next time,” just as I was about to address the memories that the constant exposure to my mother’s genitals elicited in me.

Even though the next session would start seconds later, it was always a major break in momentum for me. I found myself behaving as if I were a patient in any conventional therapy, first talking about how I was feeling that day before reviewing the themes I had brought up in previous sessions, if I could remember them. For years, my therapists and analysts had told me that the tendency to forget or repress is totally natural, but I found it upsetting that the frequent interruptions totally disrupted my chain of thought.

Of course, I could have proposed that we abandon the Lacanian approach and undertake a shorter number of sessions of the traditional 50-minute length, but I wanted to return from my vacation able to tell everyone I knew that I’d not only had sex with a lot of beautiful Brazilian Tiffanys, but that I’d undergone a complete analysis to boot.

At one point, China asked me if she reminded me of my mother. My first response was, “Why do you ask?” Analysts never answer when you pose a question, and never respond when you pour out your heart. In any case, the session was over before we could delve any further into the subject, and by the time we started our next session, I had forgotten why I’d even asked the question.

It struck me as obvious that she should ask me if she reminded me of my mother — after all, she was a woman and she was exhibiting her cunt to me just the way my mother had. If anyone was guilty of not being forthcoming, it was I. I was the one who was resistant to seeing the connection. I was the one who was avoiding analytic insight by posing the kind of rhetorical question a logical positivist might ask, rather than allowing my mind to soar to a vibrant state of free association. I was the one who was being literal, who didn’t understand the symbolic, metaphoric element that existed in all things. Of course, China didn’t look like my mother. She was much better looking.

Even in Lacanian analyses there are relatively long periods of time when nothing seems to happen. In my case, ten minutes passing could seem like a lifetime, since over ten sessions were involved. In actuality, the subject of the relationship between China and my mother’s vagina would eventually become more prominent and take up even more time than that. Psychoanalysis is often invidiously compared to short-term behavioral therapy or drug regimens, in which a good degree of affect modulation can become apparent in fewer than ten visits. My analysis with China was paradoxical, in that while it was nominally long-term analysis, it was taking place in much less time than your classic short-term therapy would. But, living in a universe in which the uncertainty principle was used to explain the facts of life, I was not at all surprised by the existence of such contradictions. All these ideas were swimming in my head, but I rarely had a chance to communicate them to China, who seemed constantly prepared to end a session the moment it began. There was no doubt that her insistence on keeping to the therapeutic regimen we had established was an attempt to make a point about the limits of what an analytic session could be.

I looked at this relatively long middle stretch of the analysis, which in the end must have added up to a full day’s work, as the period in which we forged a true therapeutic bond. I was learning to trust China even at those moments when she pulled her legs into her chest so that I was looking straight up her snatch. This is what is known in analysis as “working through.” I was coming to terms with the distrust I felt toward my mother during my childhood, a period of my life when I was powerless to do anything about the stimulation I experienced.

What was emerging from the therapeutic interaction was the notion that, under normal circumstances, if I met a woman like China who showed me her vagina, I was totally empowered to touch it. I could even enjoy the notion that I might like to stick my penis into it. I think we agreed that in a situation like this, it was imperative that I follow the laws of whatever land I was in, being careful to ask permission prior to insertion.

In retrospect, I think that seeing China’s vagina for so many sessions in a row, particularly in the early period of the analysis, had a profound effect on our relationship. Analysis has come a long way from the days when the analyst was regarded as a distant figure who rarely uttered a word. Many of the blatantly non-egalitarian elements of the relationship (in particular, the one in which the therapist gets to know everything about the patient, but the patient knows virtually nothing about the person treating him) have been legislated out of existence in some of the recent amendments to the Civil Rights Act of 1968. The study of transference can no longer be used as a vehicle for discriminatory behavior against patients. I am thankful to the great civil rights leaders of the ’60s, like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who in bringing about racial equality also opened the doors for affluent analytic patients whose rights were being violated on the Upper East Side by double standards that evoked the plantations of the Old South. Patients in analysis were no longer treated like indentured slaves who toiled to pay for their therapy and often received little in return. On the other hand, what was going on between China and me was perhaps going a step beyond the liberties that had been envisioned by the courageous freedom fighters who had come before us.

After our 480th session came to a close at the end of the first day, I decided to go out on the town to see what kind of effect my newly gleaned insights had on my relationships with the local Tiffanys. I had to get out of the frying pan and into the fire, as it were, and The Gringo was probably the best place to start.

The acquisition of knowledge can be a double-edged sword. As I walked through the lobby of the hotel, I found that my view of the world had changed. I was painfully aware that looking for Tiffanys had become a job, and that my mind, and heart, was hopelessly preoccupied with China.

I had been a good student at Columbia and always got my assignments in on time. If my reason for coming to Rio was to fuck as many prostitutes as possible, I was going to do my homework and turn in the term paper, or in this case give the oral report. But my heart wasn’t in it. My face wasn’t hot and I didn’t experience skin respiration when I thought of Tiffanys.

I was like a ghost walking through the lobby. I didn’t even stop at the concierge desk to speak to Adolphe. Soon enough, I was filled with still more trepidation. There are many rough barrios in Rio, and I’d heard that there were some occasions when sex tourists were susceptible to being mugged — for example, when they got stinking drunk in the Copa and someone slipped them a Mickey and rolled them. More commonly, their minds were so consumed with desire they were unaware of dangerous characters who leaped out of doorways with machetes and lopped off their protruding sex organs. The more passionate they were, the more likely they were to be relieved of their money-clip or even their penis by a Tiffany who also happened to be a serial castrator, a Jack the Ripper in reverse. I didn’t want to get sidetracked, let alone victimized, by extraneous carnal desires. I had to stay focused on one question: could I allow myself to seriously contemplate the notion of having an affair, let alone a full-blown relationship, with my analyst? I was reminded of the predicament faced by the Duke of Windsor, who abdicated the throne to marry the woman he loved. Of course, I didn’t have to abdicate anything, but I sensed in myself the willingness to go to similar lengths. Perhaps what I was thinking about was abdicating my role as patient in order to become China’s lover for the remainder of my vacation in Rio.