Francis Levy - Seven Days in Rio

It all reminded me of a very wealthy friend I once knew who couldn’t tell the difference between his prostitutes and his wives. His wives had married him for his money, and naturally he lavished money on his prostitutes, but generally the whores ended up costing him less than the wives, and were a lot easier to maintain. Eventually, like me, he began to experience some disorientation, mistaking his wives for hookers and his hookers for wives. It’s unclear whether this had any bearing on his tragic demise. He was a licensed flier and died in a freak accident when he lost his bearings during a routine non-instrument landing with a Piper. Apparently, like a dizzy diver, he couldn’t tell down from up.

“ Puta, Puta ,” came the cry of a woman with a high trembling voice. “Girls, Girls, Girls, Triple X,” she said in perfect English. I noticed an old lady in a chair who bore a striking resemblance to Susan Sontag, whose obituary I’d read shortly before leaving for Rio. She had Sontag’s striking good looks and the same streak of white in her otherwise jet black hair. I could see that she had once been an attractive Tiffany, just the kind of sexloving Rio girl I was after. I was thinking about how I could ask her where I could find a girl who looked like her, only younger, without insulting her sexuality. I had heard that Brazilian women remain sexually active until very late in life, and one of the sex-tourism sites even advertised that you could have sex with retired Tiffanys for free. The Guinness Book of World Records documents the oldest woman to have had sex as a Brazilian who remained sexually active until she died at 124. She was still having orgasms at 110. Prostitution is the world’s oldest profession, but Rio was home to the world’s oldest prostitutes.

An intimation of the moon was beginning to appear in the darkening sky, and a solitary street lamp created a scene of desolation that reminded me of an Edward Hopper painting. My mother always told me I was artistic, but she had forced me to choose a secure profession characterized by deadening and repetitive work (her favorite line was, “It’s rewarding to work for remuneration”). Apparently, she wanted me to have the kind of steady income that allowed me to take trips to Rio to run after prostitutes. If I had been a struggling artist, I would never have known as many Tiffanys as I had, and I probably would not have found myself staring up at a sign that read “31 Março Revolução.” With a start, I realized I was on a street that commemorated one of Rio’s most notorious uprisings. Perhaps out of fear, or a need to make a firmer connection with someone who could help me out of the morass I found myself in, I blurted out to the old whore, “Are you by any chance related to Susan Sontag.”

“You mean the one who wrote Against Interpretation ?”

“Yes! And Styles of Radical Will, Illness as Metaphor , and Regarding the Pain of Others , not to mention the novel, The Death Kit , and also the movie, Duet for Cannibals . Did you know that she directed Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo during the bombings?” I knew I was just trying to show off my knowledge, which had never gotten me anywhere and often inspired resentment.

Just as she said, “I lived in the States for many years, but I never became a Sontag fan. I’m a simple woman. I like the kind of art that’s about life. I don’t buy her whole idea about the autonomy of art,” it hit me that I needed more reality . I asked her if there was a cash machine nearby. She told me there was one around the corner, but that I should be careful of the banditos , who kidnapped American tourists and held them for ransom. I had read a gruesome story about an American who had gotten drunk in a Rio brothel and had been kidnapped by a gang. Though he had finally been released, his penis had been cut off because his wife had refused to pay the ransom.

Though it had probably been a long time since she’d earned the name, I knew this old Tiffany was someone I could talk to. One of the tourist guides indicated that the older Tiffanys often gave good hand jobs when they experienced the kind of vaginal dryness that made repeated sexual intercourse too painful. I could ask her for a hand and even pay her for the trouble.

“I’m a traveler who’s become waylaid,” I said holding out a real . “I’m a little like Odysseus. I started out my journey looking for beautiful prostitutes, but I have been experiencing famine amongst plenty. Now I feel like Robinson Crusoe. Except I haven’t been washed up on an island, and consequently have found no Man Friday to show me the way.”

“Remember Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz ?” she asked with a shy smile. “She was told to click her heels together three times and say, ‘There’s no place like home.’ All you have to do is go up to the first good-looking woman you see, click your heels three times, and say, ‘Show me your vagina.’ Before you know it you will be lying in a hotel bed with a beautiful, young whore. That’s all there is to it.” She held her hand out and I produced my last wad of reals , realizing that I would soon have to take my chances and hit the cash machine she’d directed me to.

I looked down by Tiffany’s chair and noticed she was reading Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man . The Marxist tome, which had been popular in the ’60s, proposed the theory of “repressive desublimation.” It was a book that I was sure was out of print. It would have been hard to come by in Rio or anywhere else. In any case, I imagined it must have once been banned in a country where hedonism was a religion. It was doubly odd to find it in the hands of an aging hooker.

Just then, I noticed two beautiful Tiffanys walking right toward us. “ Senhoras !” I said, trying as best I could to tamp my eagerness. “Let’s get real. Show me your vaginas.”

The darker of the two, who seemed an exotic mix of African, Indian, and Asian, walked right up to me.

“You want to see my vagina?” she said in perfect English. “Are you familiar with Gracie Jiu-Jitsu?” It turned out I was looking at two members of Brazil’s championship martial arts club, and before I knew it I was indeed staring right at her vagina, from the ground, as she administered a punishing submission.

I had studied enough Jiu-Jitsu when I was in high school to realize that the hold she had me in was like a noose. The more I resisted, the tighter it would become. I wrapped my legs around her waist as I had been taught to do. The next step, as I recalled from my early lessons, was to try to roll her over. But I was starting to enjoy having her on top. It gave me an excellent view down her blouse, the areolae of her lovely breasts just visible over the top of her lacey black brassiere.

I have always liked a little bit of pain. Fingernails clutching at my back, the feeling of being smothered by tight buttocks descending over my face, teeth tugging at my ear, all figure in my repertoire of pleasures. Finding myself on the ground, knowing that my fate was in the hands of a beautiful Tiffany, added to the list of titillations and thrills that constituted my ideal of love. Maybe during the rest of my trip I’d seek out beautiful Tiffanys who would lock me in my hotel room closet, handcuff me to the bed, or just hogtie me for sport. I’d seen the usual S&M imagery — whips, rubber bodices, leather masks, pierced penises and testicles — but I had never so clearly related such esoteric pleasures to my own life. For the most part, my sex life was limited to the missionary position and what is known as “half and half” or “around the world,” meaning your basic suck and fuck.

I had previously enjoyed being smothered because it reminded me of my relationship to Mommy, but that really was as far as I would go when it came to sexual experimentation. Now, lying under the light of a street lamp on a deserted Rio street, I felt I was on the verge of experiencing a totally new realm of the senses.