They say that whatever you've heard about Brazil, it's all true. Read on and believe...
*
Senhora Fabiola sat back in her chair and gazed out of the window at the long stretch of Rio's Ipanema beach.
'You know,' she said with satisfaction, 'it is only the rich who can afford to live here. I used to think I was a whore but when I see the girls today and what they do, then I think I was more like a nurse.'
'I don't regret anything, and most of all I don't regret this,' she continued with a smile, indicating the view with an outstretched arm.
The man sitting opposite her had never met her face-to-face before; he'd only encountered her hands and that was over thirty years ago. She must have been in her sixties but, with her latin features, she was still an attractive woman.
'So you say you work for a magazine and you are interested in my story,' she said, appraising the man. 'You don't look like a writer, but you can never tell a book by its cover, isn't that right?'
He nodded in agreement and repeated his reason for being there.
'And I hope I don't offend the senhora if I say that she, too, is a book which cannot be judged by its cover,' he added.
*
So, this was the fabulous Fabiola. During the early nineteen seventies, she'd been the star attraction of a famous Sao Paulo brothel known as The House of Glory. Their novelty was colloquially as the shuffle.
The shuffle worked like this. The customer would be greeted at a front desk and, provided he wasn't obviously drunk, he'd pay the equivalent of 50 dollars and be shown through a door into a small cubicle. In one of the walls, at about waist height, was a small opening or a 'glory hole'. He would stand in front of this opening, unfasten his pants and release his equipment. A pair of hands would then appear and begin to lightly fondle and massage him. Although he could talk with the owner of the hands, he never saw her. It was meant to be a preliminary arousal and to last for 5 minutes, after which he would go through another door into an identical cubicle. It was said that, depending on who might be working at the time, there were many that never made it through the second door.
In the second cubicle, another pair of hands would continue the work, but now it became more serious. Oil would be applied and the whole thing would be more vigorous. If, after 5 minutes, it hadn't done the trick, the customer went into a third cubicle. Here would be applied various lotions and potions, rumored to be extracted from the roots of rare, rain-forest shrubs. They had the effect of creating a powerful heat. It was thought that few could last 5 minutes in the third cubicle but, for those who did, there was a fourth and final stage.
The fourth cubicle was the station of the fabulous Fabiola. No man had ever been known to last more than 5 minutes in her hands. She was reputed to have the voice of an angel and the hands of the devil, though some liked to believe it was the other way around.
