The Parisian autumn began suddenly and late this year, with a glacial wind that plucked the last golden leaves from the trees. The café terraces closed at midday, life became unsettled, and the radiant summer that had lasted longer than it should have turned into a fickleness of memory. It seemed as if several months had passed in a few hours. Dusk was premature and gloomy, but nobody really complained, for this misty weather is natural to Paris, what most often and best suits this city.
The most beautiful of the women for rent who routinely stroll the alleys of the Quartier Pigalle was a splendid blonde who in a less obvious place would have been mistaken for a movie star. She was wearing a black pantsuit, which was the height of fashion, and when the icy wind began to blow put on a real mink coat. There she was, offering herself for two hundred francs in front of an hourly rate hotel on Rue Duperré, when a car pulled up in front of her. From the driver’s seat, another beautiful and well-dressed woman shot straight at her seven times with a rifle. That night, when the police caught the murderer, that outskirts drama had already echoed through the newspapers, because it had two new elements that made it different. In fact, neither the victim nor the killer was blond or lovely, but were two fully grown men, and both were from Brazil.
The news did nothing but demonstrate what is already well known in Europe: street prostitution in the big cities is now a job for men, and the most sought after among them, the most expensive and best dressed, are young Latin Americans disguised as women. According to press reports, of the two hundred cross-dressing street workers in France, at least half of them have come from Brazil. In Spain, England, Switzerland, or West Germany, where the trade seems to be even more lucrative, the number is much higher and the nationalities more varied. The phenomenon has different nuances in each country, but in all of them it presents itself as a fundamental change in the oldest and most conservative profession in the world.
When I was in Europe for the first time, twenty-five years ago, prostitution was a prosperous and orderly industry, with precise categories and very well shared out territories. I was still clinging to my idyllic image of Caribbean brothels, those courtyards full of dancing with colored garlands in the almond trees, undaunted hens wandering around pecking the ground amid the music and the lovely untamed mulatas who sold themselves more for the fiesta than for the money and who sometimes committed the enormous naïveté of lovelorn suicide. Sometimes, I would stay with them, not so much for straying—as my mother would say—but for the pleasure of hearing them breathe in their sleep. Breakfasts there were more homey and affectionate than at home, and the real party started at eleven in the morning, under the dull almond trees.
Brought up in such a human school, I couldn’t help but be depressed by the commercial rigor of the Europeans. In Geneva they prowled the lakeshore, and the only thing that distinguished them from the upstanding wives were the colorful open parasols they carried rain or shine, day or night, like a stigma of their class. In Rome I heard them whistle like birds among the trees of the Villa Borghese, and in London they became invisible in the fog and had to turn on lights that seemed like ship’s lanterns so one could find their course. The ones in Paris, idealized by the maudit poets and bad French films of the 1930s, were the harshest. Nevertheless, in the all-night bars of the Champs-Élysées one suddenly discovered their human side: they cried like girlfriends over the despotism of their pimps, unsatisfied with the night’s takings. It was hard to understand such meekness of heart in women hardened by such a brutal job. So great was my curiosity that, years later, I met a pimp and asked him how it was possible to dominate with an iron fist such rough women, and he answered impassively, “With love.” I didn’t ask anything else, in fear of understanding even less.
The irruption of transvestites in that world of exploitation and death has only managed to make it more sordid. Their revolution consists of carrying out two jobs at once: that of prostitutes and that of their own pimps. They are autonomous and fierce. Many nocturnal territories that women have left as too dangerous have been taken over by them and their concealed weapons. But in most cities they have confronted the women and their pimps with hammer blows, and are exercising their right of conquest over the best street corners in Europe. The fact that many Latin Americans are participating in this apotheosis of machismo is nothing to boast of. It is yet another proof of our social disturbances and shouldn’t alarm us any more than other weightier ones.
The majority, of course, are homosexuals. They have splendid silicon busts, and some of them end up realizing the gilded dream of a drastic operation that leaves them forever installed in the opposite sex. But many are not, and they have taken to the life with their weapons—borrowed or usurped by force—because it is a bad way to earn a good living. Some are peaceful family men who spend the day in charitable work and at night, when the children are asleep, take to the streets in their wives’ Sunday dresses. Others are poor students who are thus able to pay for their studies. The most able make up to five hundred dollars on a good night. Which—according to my wife, here at my side—is a better wage than writing earns.
December 2, 1980, El País, Madrid