Like everyone else, I grew up without any sex education. On the one hand I’m grateful to have had a delightful journey of discovery, on the other hand I’m grateful that I wasn’t abused in the process and on the other hand (how many hands can there be?) I condemn my parents, the priest, my teachers, my family and everyone else who was around me while I was growing up.
***
A serious note about sex and children: it doesn’t go together. I don’t even need to go into the moral field to discuss this: medicine proves that we need to let the human body develop until it is old enough to reproduce. Can we feel horny before then? Of course, and this must be accompanied by a solitary journey of discovery of one’s own body, supported by sufficient information and a safety net of people around.
This brings me to another, even more serious note: for me, all kink and all fetishes must be respected. The state of mind we enter during horniness is a magnificent thing, of the highest physical and spiritual order, and should be treated with due honor and admiration. Here’s the limit I’d like everyone to agree on: that all kink happens between humans with full mental alertness and the right biological age.
Having said that, I know that I can’t prevent this chapter from arousing adults about a teenage girl and that shouldn’t stop me from sharing this part of the story with you. My greatest wish is that this story can help other teenagers without sex education and adults who are educating others to have a little more clarity and pleasure in their journey, as well as avoiding any abuse.
***
When I was six, I had to have my appendix removed. It was horrible. I have memories of the despair on my mother’s face, of the ambulance and the hospital. The nurse catching me at the window because I believed, for a moment, that I was able to fly out of there.
My long, beautiful red hair had to be cut short and I resembled a boy. Recovered, I went to play with them on the streets, flying kites. Running around bathed by the sun, we all got hot. The boys took off their shirts and kept running. I took it off too.
My mother saw me running shirtless with the boys and came running in desperation. I was beaten up. It didn’t make any sense to me. It was hot, I took my shirt off!
– You can’t, you’re a girl.
The next day I went to play again and, without her seeing, I took my shirt off. Among the children, nothing special. With short hair and a child’s body, I was just another shirtless kid chasing a kite. Evil is in the eye of the beholder.
There, too young to understand, a question came to me that would stay with me for life: what’s wrong with nudity?
***
It was around this time that my father came home from another tour. He spent so much time away that sometimes I didn’t recognize him and called my mother, thinking that some encyclopedia salesman or Jehovah’s Witness was knocking at the gate. This time he had left me a task: to listen to some K7 tapes and try to sing.
A treasure trove. All the golden throats of Brazilian root country music (we call it Sertanejo Raiz) there with me. Tonico and Tinoco, Tião Carreiro and Pardinho, Milionário and José Rico and so on. I spent my days listening to the tapes, memorizing the lyrics and trying to imitate the two singers’ voices.
When my father came back I was ready. Standing in the living room with a wooden spoon in my hand like a microphone. He stopped at the door. He was haggard, tired in a way that I would only understand years later. I opened my mouth and began to sing. In the first few notes I could see his opaque eyes brightening, a smile forcing its way onto his face. He was amazed at what he was seeing and hearing. My mother’s gaze, on the other hand, had a look of desperation, as if she foresaw what was coming.
A week later, I was standing up on a table at a factory’s lunchroom. My father’s incredulous gaze spread to every face. That little red-haired six-year-old opening her throat like a bird and leaving everyone amazed. From there, onto a truck and onto a stage for thousands of people.
When I realized it, I spent my 7, 8, 9 years old on the road. I studied in yellow envelopes that my mother would pick up and take to school. It was the incredible 80s and you could do a lot more than you can today – I’ll never know if it was for better or for worse. I sang at all-night dances with people smoking and drinking around me, I sang in the streets at popular festivals, I sang in churches and brothels.
At the age of 10 I was a seasoned traveller and over the next few years I went home less and less, living in an 82 Caravan with my father going from town to town and cheering people up with my increasingly powerful voice. I already knew how to drive, shoot a gun and had many adventures.
In one of them, my father and I were looking for a safe place to sleep after an all night gig. I was talking to keep both of us awake and out of the complete darkness in front of us two round headlights came on, standing in the road.
An Opala. My father managed to swerve, accelerated and they started chasing us. The Caravan was flying down the road and the Opala behind it, trying to catch up. I heard shots. We reached an intersection where several other cars were waiting for us. We had no choice but to stop.
Some men got out of their cars and Opala’s driver stopped next to us. Gun in hand, he asked my father to surrender. Let me tell you about my father: a beautiful man, red-haired like a lion and completely nuts. He looked at me and said, with his bass voice: put your head down.
Pulling the car out, he threw us against the parked cars, making room and running away. I heard a lot of shots. They still tried to chase but none of their cars could beat our Caravan. Just another day on the southern roads.
***
Several years later, goose bumps broke out all over my body. I didn’t know what it meant and I was scared enough of adults to know that it wasn’t possible to ask. It got worse: I didn’t even know what the right questions were. It was delicious and scary at the same time. Was it a disease? Did anyone else feel that way?
As is human nature, I went straight for the wound. And this time it was different from a scratch, a cut or a splinter. This time, putting my fingers where it was itching was a surreal experience.
It was like turning on a switch that never went off again. If I was alone, without any scary adults around, my fingers were there. I had no idea what I was doing, I didn’t understand what that liquid gushing out further and further as my legs trembled and my eyes rolled was. I didn’t know I was reaching orgasm.
I knew I had to hide. When the adults around me talked, I noticed that they sometimes looked different. I’d see them exchanging small looks, turning red, laughing embarrassedly and acting very strangely. Someone would see me paying attention and would slap the others to make them change the subject. They looked like imps talking about an evil plan.
The doubts and hiding from adults part was easy. The real problem began one Sunday morning at church. My family is Catholic, Italian, and mass was sacred. That day the priest told the children and teenagers that god was watching everything we did. He knew everything, he was everywhere and not only was he watching, he was also writing it down in a notebook that would be read out on the day of judgment.
I felt my head spin and I lost my footing. I was already doomed. I started to get depressed and didn’t want to travel or sing anymore. I lay in bed with that itch calling to my fingers and biting my nails. A man nailed to a cross on my bedroom wall, his head bleeding to death, looked down at me just waiting for me to give in and make another note of my name.
I ran to the only place I knew could save me. On a table reserved just for that purpose in the house, next to an always loaded revolver, was a book. It was big, heavy, with a black cover and has beautiful gold-edged pages. If there was an answer to what I was feeling, it was there. With effort, I picked up the book and ran to my room , sat down on the bed and opened it.
When in doubt, read the bible, the priest also said. It was a lot of pages, so I decided to start at the beginning. It was a story about god creating things and I didn’t quite understand it. I had to get a dictionary as I didn’t know what the word firmament meant. Then came the fish and the birds and God told them to be fertile. I went back to the dictionary.
- Biology. Able to reproduce.
- having a high reproductive capacity, fecund.
What do you mean, reproduce? Bible aside, dictionary in hand, we continued to discover.
- show, show again.
- produce again.
I didn’t got it. The dictionary wasn’t helping. I went back to the bible, where god made the other animals and made man to reign over everything he made, including ordering man to be fertile and reproduce too. So, according to the dictionary, god wanted man to show off everything he created. That’s probably why we invented zoos.
That didn’t answer anything about my itch. I moved on. Hours passed. Back and forth from bible to dictionary and finally I found something interesting: an illustration. It was a beautiful painting, one of those from antiquity, and something immediately caught my eye: the people were naked and there was something very wrong with the men, something coming out of them right where my itch was.
I put the dictionary aside and continued leafing through the pages and admiring the illustrations. I was straining my eyes to see in the darkness of the late afternoon when I came across Daniel in the lions’ den. That naked man, prostrate, and the lions all around him. That image imprinted itself on my mind so strongly that I have never forgotten it.
I put the book back and went to dinner in silence. Instead of answers, I had even more questions and I couldn’t ask my parents. I almost couldn’t sleep, tormented by the itch and the lions that were going to devour that man.
Over the next few months I continued to read the book every day. My parents were proud and commented to the priest and the people about my great interest in the book of god. At some point I gave up reading and began to spend my afternoons admiring the pictures. I identified with the women, most of whom were redheads and had a belly shape like mine.
I realized that all the men had that thing between their legs and people were touching each other all the time. It was different from what I was used to see in the German and Italian colony where I lived. People who were always dressed up and barely hugged each other. Maybe that’s why the priest had to insist so much to people read the bible.
***
My parents argued a lot. It took me a while to understand that my mother, now with two more children, wanted the whole family at home. My father argued that he needed to earn money, but she had already built a small grocery store that paid the bills. They bickered even more. In the end, he went on tour and left me at home.
I went back to school where I felt like a fish out of water. I had seen so much of the world and been through so much that everyone there seemed completely retarded. Even the teachers seemed silly and lacking in life experience.
I kept to myself, got an A in everything and got beaten up every day on the way out. I was too pretty, the girls said. The boys didn’t have the same opinion. They called me a white cockroach, skinny, alemoa aguada (brazilian for a non-attractive german little girl). My classmates had bulging breasts and huge butts and I was all small and skinny. Nobody was interested in me.
A note: I lived in south Brazil, european colony of Portuguese, Germans, Italians, Russians and Polish. The Polish people suffered a lot of prejudice and being a redhead was very hard. Even in Rio de Janeiro Polish woman were made hookers and still today the word Polaca means you’re a sex worker.
At playtime I spent a lot of time alone watching the girls kissing the boys in the corridors. It didn’t arouse me at all and I didn’t find it funny. After school, some of them would go to an abandoned building behind the school with the boys. I didn’t know what they were doing there, but god was watching.
One day a girl approached me. Shyer than me, we became friends. Thinking about the bible, I touched her all the time. I caressed her, combed her hair, did her make-up and nails. Soon another friend arrived and we spent our time looking after each other. The weirdos.
Finally, at a school party, a boy kissed me. It was repulsive. Too much saliva, too much teeth. It definitely wasn’t for me. My friends didn’t like what I’d done, they were very hurt andsent me a letter, on those old illustrated letterheads, telling me that they wouldn’t be my friends anymore.
***
Without much to do, not being able to travel and sing, no friends and tired of the book that didn’t answer anything, I sat listening to my mother talking to her friends. With my father gone, I didn’t recognize my mother, she was someone else. She drank and smoked with her friends and talked about things I didn’t understand.
Between sentences in Italian, German and Polish, I picked up something. They talked a lot about men and that thing between their legs. It seemed to be floppy and small but when it received some caress it became hard and soft at the same time. Their tone of voice always changed and they spoke more quietly, with that imp look, about it.
I realized that the men’s thing was a good fit for the itch and, apparently, it was designed to scratch. Then I discovered that it wasn’t just where my fingers went, on the outside, but deeper down. I hid in the bedroom and, covering myself so that the man on the cross wouldn’t write it down in his notebook, I stuck my finger in. It hurt and I didn’t want to try anymore.
They called the man thing a cock, despite the complete lack of resemblance. It has no feathers, no beak, no paws, it doesn’t make any noise and it doesn’t eat corn. And one of them said she had put a man’s cock in her mouth. Ew. They laughed, it seemed like a good thing.
The women’s thing was called a perereca (brazilian word for tree frog). I’ve never seen one that was pink, but it was always wet. One of them said that a man had put his mouth on her perereca and that she liked it very much. Ew, again. Weirdos.
After a while my father came back from a trip and my friends decided to make up. They came to visit me and when my father saw how affectionate we were with each other, he threw them out of the house screaming. I didn’t understand a thing.
My mother never received her friends again.
My father was thrilled. He got us an interview on a local television channel and wanted to take me with him. When I arrived at the station I felt like home. I had been playing being a TV host so much that I gave the interview and sang naturally.
The next day thirty girls were waiting for me at school. I was beaten up. Too pretty and on TV. When I got home, my father was packing for another tour. I packed too. I’ll never set foot in this city again.