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.
Fabiola's prowess at manipulating the male member became legendary. Some said that she had lived with an Amazonian tribe and learnt it from them. Others said that she had received special training in the Orient. Whatever it was, The House of Glory's notoriety, not to mention profits, grew and grew.
Techniques for surviving the first three cubicles in order to get to Fabiola were openly discussed and some even sought to sell their 'full-proof' methods. Everyone had a theory about how he might do it, though how many succeeded was never known.
Why was it known as the shuffle? There was one school of thought which said it was the name for Fabiola's special method. In reality, the shuffle was a name invented by the girls because, with their pants around their knees, that is how the men moved from cubicle to cubicle.
*
Fabiola talked freely and at length about her life and about how she had become a member of the oldest profession but she didn't mention the shuffle until the man prompted her.
'Let me tell you how the shuffle came to be,' she smiled. 'The boss, Pedro Paulo, went to Miami for a vacation and saw one of those American car washes. As you know, we didn't have such things here in those days and he was fascinated by it. He started to read serious magazines about business and he even read a book. Then he met an Englishman who told him about glory holes.
'He was a crazy one, that Pedro Paulo. He got the idea that if four girls worked on one customer then we'd get through the customers quicker than if it was one to one. And the cubicles took less space than bedrooms. And because the customers couldn't see the girls, it didn't matter if they were ugly, but he could pay them less. I tell you, he once had two gay boys working there who did it for free. We were like a production line,' she laughed.
