Beauty
is Pain:
Transsexuals
do not go gentle into that good night
ROME, April 2009 – An ambulance arrives
with screaming siren at the San Pietro hospital. The medical staff rush the
patient to casualty. Overdosing on cocaine, he is about to exchange the temporal
for the eternal. When the patient finally recovers, he rages: “It’s Marrazzo’s
fault. It’s Marrazzo’s fault.” Nobody pays attention to the allegations against
the president of Lazio –just another ranting transsexual.
Six months later, the Marrazzo scandal
explodes. Collateral damage includes the carbonised corpse of a transsexual prostitute
and a drug dealer who overdosed after a police officer had given him a lethal mixture
of heroin and cocaine. Rome’s mayor announces he
is planning a unit for transsexuals in Ponte
Galeria, Italy’s
largest detention centre.
July 2010, city councillor Pier Paolo Zaccai is
standing naked on an apartment terrace in Via Manlio Torquato. Like a madman he
shouts that two Brazilian transsexuals are holding him hostage. When the police
take Zaccai to hospital, it appears he is high on cocaine. Falsely accused of
kidnapping, the Brazilians remark: “That’s how Romans are: gay and malicious”.
***
"Sei operata? Sei dotata? Quanto costa?" Four youngsters in a sports car are hassling all
prostitutes on the square in front of the abattoir. Valeria, an elegant
mulatta, turns her head away and scans the square for clients. She has to make
hundred fifty Euros tonight.
The youngsters look like students; the car is
obviously daddy’s. Earlier this night, they tried their luck with tourist girls,
now they are on a “puttan tour” –Via Salaria, the abattoir, Viale Guglielmo
Marconi, EUR ... They are Valeria’s age. Later on this night, they will score
drugs before going back to hotel Mum and Dad.
Valeria had to leave home when she was fifteen.
Her father had gone berserk when he discovered
that his son Valerio liked dressing up as a girl, to become Valeria. Whereas
her classmates were going through puberty, Valeria was thrown straight into
adulthood. No holding hands, no romantic strolls, but impersonal paid sex:
thirty reais for a blowjob, fifty for the full menu.
Unlike her peers, Valeria never used drugs.
Violence became part of everyday life. She carried a razorblade to cut her
forearms in case the police would arrest her –in Brazil it was safer ending up in
hospital than in a police station. In Europe,
however, life would be better.
Hot air twirls the smell of meat, excrements
and waste around the abattoir. Shattered glass, empty perfume sprays and used
toilet paper clutter the pavement along the graffiti wall. Valeria tries to
balance herself in high heels. Cars are jamming the square. Motorcycles roar
through. The students turn around the corner. Almost midnight and it is like
rush hour!
Neither clients nor prostitutes care about the
camera surveillance. When the previous city council installed CCTV, the Casale
Rosso neighbourhood hoped that recording licence plates would deter clients.
Below the windows of the apartment buildings,
clients and prostitutes are having sex. Valeria knows that the residents,
mainly young families, are trying to sleep. Her gaze slides over the playground
and its iron fencing. She would never want to live in a place like this, let
alone raise a child.
Yet, Valeria has to make a living. She will
have to earn the money by dawn. Since her visa expired, every public space is
off-limits by day. Especially in August, when the city is near empty, a tall
mulatta does not go unnoticed. “Every morning I pay a private cab to go home,”
she says. “Unemployed and retired Italians make fortunes driving us girls.”
Right next to the square a sandwich van
radiates like a beacon in the night. A client drops Valeria off. She spots
Paula standing at the van. Paula is Argentinean. Valeria and Paula occasionally
chat in between tricks. At first, they communicated in a mix of Spanish,
Portuguese and Roman dialect they picked up from clients. Still, they are not
close. In this square nobody is. Here, everybody is either a client or a
competitor.
“Look at them,” Paula kicks off. “Office
workers, civil servants, builders: ordinary men longing for adventure.
Europeans chasing tropical fantasies.” Turning to the row of cars, she yells
“How does it feel, shagging the Third World at home?”
“Well Paula, the client I just had treated me
really nice. He said I am very feminine. Maybe one day he’ll invite me for
dinner.”
“No, my dear! Stop dreaming. Italians would
rather be caught dead than being seen in public with a transsexual.”
Valeria knows. She once got involved with a
client. She hoped that he would be her ticket out. But as soon as fresh meat
had hit the abattoir, her beloved traded her in for the latest South-American
plaything.
It is 2
a.m. A police car patrols the square. Instantly, clients stop
examining the girls, accelerate their cars and leave the square hoping the
police will not make them pull over. Valeria removes her high heels and runs
off barefoot. In fifteen months’ time, the police have detained five hundred
eighty transgendered prostitutes on this square.
She hides in the high grass on the hills. The
neighbourhood committee periodically asks the municipal services to burn it.
Crouched between used condoms and rubbish, Valeria considers working in an
apartment. She could rent a room in a side street of Via Condotti. The authorities
do not control this apartment: the owner is an ex-carabiniere.
The police car is gone. One by one, the girls
resume their places. Despite the risk of being sent to a detention centre,
Valeria enjoys working the streets. She likes being in the open.
All day she hides in a “monolocale” that is
tucked away in a Pigneto backstreet –Italian women call the police right away
when they spot a transsexual in their building. An aged Brazilian transsexual
with Italian citizenship owns the studio flat. The previous generation still
succeeded in sham marriages. These naturalized transsexuals buy property and
set up businesses in Italy and Brazil. They pass customs and do not worry about
police controls when driving –they even took their driving licence in Italy.
Meanwhile, the Mario Mieli volunteers are on
their weekly tour. The organisation has been helping foreign transsexuals since
Rome replaced Paris as the world’s capital of transgender
prostitution. While some volunteers distribute condoms, others follow up on
girls taking medication –half the girls have hepatitis, more than one in ten
has syphilis and two-third of the older ones have HIV. The organisation helped
Valeria to take a course. Valeria would like to become a hairdresser. But apart
from the hair salon a Brazilian transsexual owns near Porta Maggiore, only one
other salon in Rome,
the one in Via Urbana, employs a transsexual hairdresser.
Hence, the beat goes on. “Sei operata? Sei dotata? Quanto costa?” Again and again. How much rudeness
can a person take? Valeria is saving up for that last operation; she wants to
become a woman. “But how then would I make a living?” she sighs. “I would lose
all my clients!”
Around 4
a.m. loud and rasp voices fill the square. The girls, strung out on
alcohol, drugs and hormones, are giving come-ons to the drivers and the passengers.
Cars are speeding. One driver twirls his car in the middle of the square, making
the tires squeal.
Albanian gangs encircle the square. At this
time of the night, many girls carry in their purse a night’s takings. They
leave the square in small groups. Empty spots appear. Valeria wants to leave
but she still needs hundred Euros to send a remittance.
Valeria sends money home to help her mother out.
Last time she called even her father spoke to her. They had not spoken since
she had to leave home. He told her that he was sorry and that she was always welcome.
He used the remittances to buy himself a car.
A 4X4 pulls over beside Valeria. The stereo is
pumping electronic dance music. The passengers, a middle-aged couple, are
visibly under the influence.
“Hey,” the woman shrieks. “Are you trans… gressive?”
Her husband bursts out laughing. He clearly enjoys that his wife is doing the
talking. At night, these women are more masculine, and these men more feminine
than Valeria. By day, of course, they are beyond suspicion. “We’ll pay you a
hundred Euros.”
“I don’t mind the two of you snorting cocaine,”
Valeria says, “but I won’t. I don’t do drugs.”
“I see,” the woman says, turning a superior smile
to Valeria. “Fifty Euros then. Take it or leave it.”
Valeria gets in the car.
Oh dear. They have dropped her on a desolate
stretch of Via Emilio Longoni, two blocks east of the abattoir. Veteran
transsexuals –women actually, since they are operated– are skulking the
scarcely lit pavement. A motorist cruises down the street. Two parked cars have
their headlights left on. Valeria distinguishes wooden shacks between the trees
and the rubbish. Each time a client comes up, a woman walks him to the shacks.
The women live a hand-to-mouth existence. They
also dwell in the shacks. Hardly a month after Gianni Alemanno had become mayor
of Rome, and announced an anti-prostitution decree, the Tor Sapienza neighbourhood
took to the streets to protest against the prostitutes. Ordinary family men raided
the shacks. The prostitutes recognised several clients among them!
Valeria notices the women’s plastic surgery is
unravelling. Clients solicit them “cabrio”, unprotected sex. Valeria shivers. These
old women are at death’s door!
Valeria rushes up the road to where the lights
are. In front of the American Hospital, barely thirty metres from the shacks, Rome’s most stunning
transsexuals parade. Their silhouettes turn the pavement into an open-air
catwalk.
Amid young colleagues and frenzied clients,
Valeria looks back into the darkness, towards the shacks: “Ordinary people confine
us to the pavement, night-time, and youth. Not beauty –dresses, hormones or a
sex operation– but money will secure me a place in this world.”
Almost dawn. The early train passes the Palmiro
Togliatti station. Heavy traffic is picking up on the Via Prenestina. The
square in front of the abattoir looks desolate. Valeria is still short of
eighty Euros.
An exclusive BMW approaches. It slows to a stop.
Valeria sashays to the car. The driver is a distinguished forty-something
wearing a suit. Valeria notices his wedding ring.
“Hi honey. Got lost? Next door, they do meat.
Here, we trade in flesh.”
“Davvero? You must be Brazilian,” he says.
“No. Colombian, actually.”
“I see. So, you can get the best coke in the
world, can’t you?”
“Of course I can.”
Sensing blood, the hunter moves in for the
kill: "Let’s walk on the wild side!”
“Do you have eighty Euros?”
"Eighty? Vabbè. Tell me,” he pauses, “are
you into kinky sex?"
"Yes my dear,” Valeria says, forcing a
smile. “Sono come mi vuoi.*"
(* I am as you want me to be.)
