Fernanda Farias de Albuquerque

Maurizio Jannelli

Maurizio: What is the story of this name?

Fernanda: It is quite a peculiar story. When I was twenty, in 1983, I used to work in a very popular restaurant owned by two brothers, both air force officers. Their names were Omar and Risomar. I worked in the kitchen. I replaced a cook named Arlindo. One day Risomar complained to Arlindo. He told him not to take his two weekly days off when he came to lunch, because no one knew how to make his favorite dish: filé a parmegiana. Arlindo replied that there was someone else who could make the dish as good as he did. Risomar asked who this person was and Arlindo said: it is Fernandinha. Then, in front of everyone, Risomar told me: Listen, my princesinha (little princess), if you can make filè a parmegiana the way I like it, then you will be the princesa of my restaurant. After a while, I called for the waiter to bring Risomar my filé a parmegiana. Everyone in the kitchen expected me to be scolded. Instead, Risomar complimented me and increased my pay. That was how I became Princesa. Then, at night, many customers looking for me would ask: Who is the bicha called Princesa? Here in the transgender community in Rebibbia I was also known as Princesa, when I arrived in 1991. Today I prefer to be called Fernanda. It is more discreet, Princesa is hard to understand. One time I was in a bar and a trans person called me Princesa and all the customers turned around to see who this princess was. Fernanda is more discreet.

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M: Can you tell me about your encounter with Severina?

F: We met in September 1985. I came from Salvador, Bahia. I moved to an apartment facing hers, on the same street. In Bahia, I had already heard that Severina was the best. I had been in Rio for three days, when I was walking past five or six trans people, who were all talking to a woman. I decided to stop and ask the two of them who I had met before, if they knew Severina the bombadeira. The lady answered: that's me. She was a trans woman. It was her, Severina. She asked me if I wanted to get “pumped”. I answered that I was scared. She said, you’re scared? If you want to be a woman, you have to endure pain. Only then, can you become a woman. I was already planning to get silicone to make my hips more feminine. Then she asked me where I was from, and I answered: from Campina Grande, Paraiba. Quite surprisingly, twenty years earlier she had also left Campina Grande to come to Rio. We were paesanos. She asked me why I had not come to Rio immediately. I told her my life story. She did likewise. She told me that if I wanted, I could have the injections right away and pay later. When I went to her house, I saw many different photographs of some of the most famous transgender people, all of them had passed through her hands. Their bodies were beautiful. All made with silicone, beautiful as hell. I worked two weeks to get the money together—working the streets, of course. Then I saw the body of a trans woman and I asked Severina to make me look like her. It was Perla, a dark-haired and dark-skinned trans woman, like me.

When I saw Perla again in 1988, in Madrid, many people mistook me for her. It pains me that she died, in Spain. A heroin overdose. She committed suicide, injecting herself with five grams, shortly after learning she had developed AIDS. We were copies of each other, Perla and I. However, in order to have a body like Perla’s I required a second application. Perla & Princesa—Carlos & Fernando.

Severina was one of the first transgender people. I want to say that she had already transitioned by the time I was born. She lived as a prostitute and in 1980 she went to Paris, but after a while she was down on her luck and got evicted. In 1981 she went to Curitiba to start doing silicon injections with Daniela. When she returned she brought a large quantity of silicon with her. She did all the injections by herself, after which she started to make a name for herself as a famous bombadeira. Severina also worked on the bodies of some cis-gender women. She had a bit of practice because she used be a nurse in her old life, when she still identified as gay, and lived with her family. She knew where to inject the silicon. Today she is an expert. I saw her her in Italy too, in 1988, in Milan. She had come to perform some injections on some trans people. When you are having the procedure, you cannot eat for six hours before or afterwards. You can’t drink alcohol either, no wine or whiskey, nothing. On the agreed day, Severina took me into a room with an iron bed and a hard mattress. I could have invited someone to help, but who would have the courage to come along? A colleague did, and when she saw me with all those needles in my skin, she squealed so much that I was even more scared. However, usually the bombadeira does not want any strangers in the room while administering the injections. After the operation is over, you have to stay in bed for three or four days: you can walk for no more than five or ten minutes at a time.

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M: You mentioned Daniela as the first transgender person who used silicone in Brazil, in 1981. Can you tell me a little bit about her?

F: Daniela was a transgender woman who succeeded not because of her natural beauty, but because of silicone. In 1980, she went to Paris and had breast implants done by a local surgeon. She returned from Paris with quite a lot of money. As a transgender woman, she was perfect. After the journey to France, she no longer needed to prostitute herself. She started administering silicone injections to trans people and to cis-gender women as well. It was her who made the body of the most beautiful trans woman in Brazil, Roberta Close. Roberta is a performer on Brazilian television. She had surgery with Daniela, she lives in Rio now. She has quite a reputation among the French, the Swiss, and the Italians.

Daniela has worked on other models too, Tuca Rubirosa, for example, who lives in Geneva now. Tuca’s body is gorgeous. Jarley’s is another body modeled by Daniela. The most famous trans woman’s body in São Paulo, Telma Lipe, was also reshaped by her hands.

Today the trans people who had their bodies pumped by Daniela are the most beautiful of all. Daniela was able to transform any male body into a female one. To make them as perfect as women’s ones. Daniela was also a performer, like Roberta Close. They both started from prostitution to get where they are today. Perhaps, prostitution was not for them, but if you want to achieve great things in life, you need to be a whore, so to speak.

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M: Let’s talk about your clients. You have had hundreds of them, both in Brazil and in Europe, and in your story you write that the Italian clients—I am referring here to your experiences in Milan and Rome—are more polite, less violent than those in Rio or São Paulo, but also naughtier. Can you touch on these differences? What do you mean by naughtier?

F: Italian clients, or rather, the majority of Italian clients, eighty percent, like to also see the male parts of transgender people, not just the female body. To give you an example, when a client comes to me and pays in advance, almost straightaway I think: he is paying because he wants my butt and that’s it. Here, in Italy, most of the time this is not the case.

There are clients who, yes, want my butt, but they also insist that I masturbate. These clients insist on seeing and touching my penis. It happened to me several times, I had clients who would only pay if I showed them that I was masturbating. Whether I came or not didn’t matter; what was important to them was seeing that show. Many of these clients are not actually fags, they’re just guys who are able to vent their latent homosexuality with us.

Before I went to jail, I had a regular client in Rome who paid me two hundred thousand lira per performance. In the car,  he would not touch the front of me, he would only take me up the ass. But first I had to masturbate in front of him. The first time he asked me to do that, I didn’t understand, and I said, I don’t like to be a man for you. But he replied, I only want to see you get hard and masturbate. He insisted, and because there was two hundred thousand lira on the line... in short, I focused on what he wanted, even if I was not pleased that I did it. I felt like a woman and a man at the same time. It was part of my job and I had to do it, I needed the money. […] I can’t hide it, I can’t deny that I have done this and tried all of this. I am not ashamed to say that I have given satisfaction to many clients many times by letting them explore my male parts. I tried everything, even what didn’t suit me. But I was driven to do it by money! And I want to say that I did it only with men. With other trans people, as well as with women, even under threat of death, I would never have had sex!

[…]

These are the most frequent vices of Italians. There are clients in Rio or São Paulo who demand these kinds of services too. However, they are a minority. Conversely, here in Italy, they are the majority. However, I only consider the clients who perform blow jobs or get penetrated by trans people as homosexuals. As for the others, I don’t criticize them. They like the show. As I see it, these others are not gay.

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M: How is transgender emigration organized?

F: There is no special organization for this kind of emigration. It can happen, however, that when a transgender person is deported from Europe, once they are in Brazil they do not have the money to go back. So they often ask for help from another trans person, who has already settled down. They make a deal, and the latter pays their fare. The trans person who financed the other sometimes comes to Europe to claim their credit. On other occasions, they wait for their debtor to return. A kind of loan shark. Some of these financiers are bullies or work in complicity with the Carioca or Paulista police. They sometimes also wait for the return of those who have already paid their debt and then ask them for more money, because of some other reason, such as a late payment. It can happen that those people who are being asked to pay will then decide to fight their creditor. However, the majority of Brazilian transgender people come to Europe on their own, as I did. You go to an agency, you ask for the address of a hotel or a guesthouse, and off you go. The hardest thing you experience is the language gap. It’s hard at first, but generally you always find someone who knows some Portuguese, and most of the time, at the destination, you meet other trans people...

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M: What routes do Brazilian transgender people use to illegally enter Italy?

F: They often enter from France, through the Ventimiglia border. Or from Switzerland (Chiasso and Lugano). They cross the border, hidden inside trucks, taking advantage of the empathy of some truck drivers or by taking the mountain route from Austria or Yugoslavia, at night, on foot. As for me, I have crossed the Ventimiglia border twice, hidden inside a truck. Another time, I crossed it while quietly sitting in a car with a gentleman who knew the border police well. Every now and then, some people manage to enter the country with false documents. There are trans people who have got through by fooling the police with passports with female names. All the problems that trans people face in entering Italy today are due to the to the issues that occurred when they used to arrive in large numbers. The first trans people who arrived in Italy in the 1985-1986 entered peacefully as tourists at Malpensa or Fiumicino airports, or by train. In 1986, twenty-six trans people disembarked at the port of Genoa. They arrived on ships from Barcelona, all with tourist entry visas. Today you cannot get such a VISA to be issued anymore, not even with ten million in your pocket. They only let you in if you have a job, or a certificate of residence with a family. Today there are more checks.

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M: In Madrid, you had conflicts with Spanish trans people because you were on the wrong sidewalk. Can you tell me about the relationships between Brazilian and Italian trans people? Is there any conflict?

F: Yes. The reason for this lies in the fact that European clients are very naughty, and they like trans people to put on a show for them. Europeans notice that Brazilians show off more, they make more of a spectacle than trans people from Milan or Rome. Furthermore, Brazilian trans people are more willing to please their client in any way they want, which does not always happen with Italian trans people. Many clients state that they come to us because we are more effeminate than Italian trans people and we are more fun. That’s why European trans people lose their clients.

Italian clients are really naughty. They like to see new faces all the time. A customer who comes by every week and always sees the same faces, will often leave with the first novelty that comes along. And that novelty is usually us. However, there are also regular customers. I remember I had a client in Milan who went out with me rather often because he was afraid of the possibility of being robbed by other trans people. So it can happen that a client will get along with a particular trans person and then will choose to stay with them.

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M: Is there any difference between walking the streets in Rio or São Paulo and in Milan or Rome?

F: Yes, there is a difference. A very big difference. On the sidewalks of Rome or Milan, a transgender person who works honestly, without assaulting clients or getting involved in drug trafficking, is never killed or slaughtered on the street like what, on the other hand, can happen in Rio and São Paulo. In Brazil, all it takes to get killed is a gesture of dislike, say, if you don’t want to have sex for free with certain individuals. Other times, you pay with your life for mistakes made by other trans people. There is violence and discrimination there.

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M: Can you tell me about a night of prostitution in Milan and Rome. About the places, the episodes, the context?

F: In Milan, the area around Via Melchiorre Gioia, near Garibaldi station, looked like a catwalk, like a parade. In the summer, it goes from nine in the evening to five in the morning. We were all almost naked. I used to work in miniskirts and high heels. Conversely, in the winter I used to wear a fur coat down to my knees, underneath I had panties and nothing else. Many trans people, in the winter, would take that off as well and just cover themselves with fur. You needed to do some striptease there because the competition was really strong. We were all stripping at a certain point. You had to do it if you wanted to work. Those who were serious had to do it, too. For the Milanese especially, who are way naughtier than the Romans. In our routine, when someone had served fifteen cars in one night, then the bickering would start. Jealousy. Someone would start saying that someone was giving discounts, and that person would have to go away. Those who were brave enough would tell the jealous ones to go fuck themselves and they would keep working. Those who were different would also leave. Then somebody would insult the customers. Then the discussions would start about who had worked the hardest, who had made ten thousand dollars in two or three months, who had made fifteen, twenty thousand; who was being deported, who was doing drugs. There were conversations about the regulars on the street, those who paid well, those who took an evening to snort cocaine with the trans people. We would undress to see who had the most beautiful body among us, who had the longest hair, the most beautiful chest. Who had had plastic surgery, who had a boyfriend and who didn’t. Those were our topics of conversation.

However, in Rome there were less troubles than in Milan. In the EUR, the business district, work was good. Via Flaminia was the messiest one. I never used to go there. In my first night in Rome, I worked on Cristoforo Colombo, a sidewalk on Via Padre Semeria, near the Fiera di Roma. It was November 1988. No bickering, no stripping, no messing around. The police didn’t allow that. However, there was no need, because Roman clients like more serious people. At least, this is what I understood about the difference in my work between Rome and Milan. In Rome, I never needed to undress in the street, as I did in Milan. Yet I used to make more money than in Milan. I only went to via Flaminia when I needed to talk to some bicha. I preferred to walk the streets of EUR and the Lungotevere.

In Milan, there was always great entertainment on Via Melchiorre Gioia. The summer nights, the beautiful sky, the street all lit up. People were on vacation, but via Melchiorre Gioia was never short of cars. From evening to morning. All the trans people were working. I worked about ten cars a night. Five hundred thousand lira would steadily trickle into my pocket. I spoke almost no Italian then. In the car, they would show me the monuments of Milan, Piazza Duomo, Porta Venezia, Corso Buenos Aires, and so. Every now and then, some Brazilian trans people who I met in Brazil would take me around. I still didn’t do heroin (I snorted cocaine occasionally) and maybe I wasn’t even HIV-positive. I was happy with what I was doing. I felt proud to be a prostitute. People would come to me and would rent my body, even though I was a foreigner and could not carry out a conversation. They were using me, but they understood that that trade was my way of living, of surviving. Nonetheless, amid that fantasy I always had a sense of anguish deep inside my heart. I was visited by many throughout the night, but all of a sudden I had to go back to the hotel and stay locked there all day. Then I felt down. A rejected person, outside of society. I had to spend the day with the other trans people in the hotel. I had to stay in the room until the evening, when I was ready for via Melchiorre Gioia again, for via Abruzzi, for the show. I would go to via Abbruzzi after two o’clock in the morning, when the women left the sidewalk. Everyone knew me by the stage name of Princesa. Some of the Milanese would laugh and ask me, why are you called Princesa? It’s just a name, José, like any other, I would answer.