And all the while, the boy worked on his appearance, improving his makeup and clothes, avoiding the older hookers and pimps till one day he gave lip to a marginal who wanted his money. The man was going to cut him bad and would have too, if it hadn’t been for the tall, raven-haired figure who buried a knife in the man’s ribs. That was his first meeting with Cledilce Macedo. He was sixteen, street-smart, and was making more money than the boy had thought possible from giving head. Cledilce’s johns—American and European tourists—were a long way up from the factory workers and dockers among whom the boy plied his trade. They had to be, because Cledilce was a Bird, a preoperative transsexual on a female hormone program, and like any other route out of the gutter, hormones cost big money. He took the boy home to a shabby apartment on the sixth floor of a block on Rua Toneleiros. He got him on to hormones, too, and told him he needed a new name.
For three years he… I learned, developing and refining my body, making contacts, saving money, and loving Cledilce. At first, I worried that I would no longer be able to perform sexually, that it would feel like nothing at all, but the strength of Cledilce’s erection soon put my mind at rest. There would be no loss of libido he, or rather she, explained, not until after the operation. And even then, we wouldn’t have to ejaculate to experience orgasm; sex, she said, was mainly in the head. As my breasts grew and I lost my facial hair, I began to worry about the operation itself. I had heard tales of the awful consequences of the gender reassignments carried out in the Centro clinics, even saw the evidence of their botched surgery with my own eyes. Till Cledilce had finally shared the dream with me, the dream of escaping to ‘sanctuary,’ where Parisian surgeons—not Centro butchers—would sculpt us anew, transforming us so that we would feel what women were meant to feel.
As Heinrich sits me up to arrange my jet black hair into a dazzling coiffure, one that, like my body, will impress Spengler’s important friends, I think: they lied to us.
Heinrich guides the Mercedes through rain-slick streets, along Kanstrasse past shabby, smoke-filled kneipen, into Kurfürstendam, past sidewalk cafes with glassed-in terraces where unblemished middle-aged women sit alone with their drinks, past the Komödie theater till it pulls up outside the The Blue Angel. Young Babes—sexually precocious girls of nine or ten—flaunt themselves outside the entrance, some of them menstruating so profusely that, even through their heavy padding, blood streams down their stockinged legs. Images of Sally Bowles and Marlene Dietrich fill their minds, feeding the awful need that has drawn them here to plead with implacable doormen, seeking to gain entrance to the scene of their inspirations’ former glories. One crumbling, anemic beauty falls to the pavement. The others start bickering over her as she crawls away to die. Then the doormen step out onto the pavement and form a cordon around Spengler, who comes out into the rain to greet me. The Babes try to grasp his arms and legs, but he strides through them, all lean arrogance and efficiency clothed in a black lounge suit. I get out of the car and he holds me at a slight distance, surveying my array of scarlet feathers and blue chiffon as if I were some prized possession. I move past him, into the club where a troupe of Birds reenact a Sapphic orgy on the main stage, while in the discreet alcoves an assortment of Birds and Babes provide a range of sexual favors for the rich clientele.
Backstage, I pop an Aktive ’poule against my neck, to blunt reality. A house null leads me down a blue corridor to Spengler’s private suite, reserved for the entertainment of important friends. The null clips wires to my costume as Spengler introduces the queen of The Birds of the Crystal Plumage, and then a taped barrage of Brazilian drums heralds my entrance. There are twelve men in the room, seated on leather couches, their desires caged in refinement and respectability. I ruffle my feathers in time to the music as I strut across the marble stage, offering them glimpses into hidden dreams. Then Claudio swoops into view, suspended over the stage like a magnificent condor, the twelve-inch penis that Dr. Kleinfeld has crafted for him erect beneath the black plumage that adorns his laburnum flesh. He sweeps me up in his arms and lust thrums in the air like the sound of swarming insects, hot and feverish, no different from the lust of the dockworkers at Maua who came to be blown by a half-formed Bird. We glide over the stage, Claudio and I, borne on sensuous rhythms as we act out an improbable seduction. Until finally, in midair, he plucks my feathers with exaggerated care and then plunges his meat into me. Whatever perfunctory pleasures I once might have derived from these performances has been worn down by soulless repetition. We fuck like birds on the wing, Claudio’s precision tool grinding against the template of my vagina. The only thing I feel is numb. He withdraws before he comes so that the audience may appreciate the bounty he showers over my breasts, a seemingly endless rain of semen; another of Kleinfeld’s miracles.
The applause is thunderous as Claudio flies from view, while I wait without curiosity to see which of his guests Spengler has selected for participation in the second act of my performance. I feel no surprise as all twelve men begin to undress and crawl up onto the cool, white marble like hungry dogs, ravenous for a taste of game.
Backstage later on, as Heinrich bathes my bruised and battered body, I reflect on the bitterness I feel; it’s not the taste of semen or any sense of degradation—I became inured to such things long ago on the docks at Maua—it’s the realization of what I did to get here.
Spengler enters the room. “You pleased them, Estela,” he says. “You may go now.”
“Rudy called me,” I tell him.
“You are looking forward to seeing him again?”
“He says Cledilce Macedo is coming to Berlin.”
“So I hear. It’s nothing for you to worry about.”
“I don’t feel well,” I tell him. “I’m not sleeping.”
He frowns. “Kleinfeld said you were in prime condition. It’s the dust perhaps? You mentioned bad dreams.”
“It helps me to remember,” I say, wondering at his immunity to the poison in my words.
“There are things we can give you to help you forget.”
“I want to remember.”
Spengler sighs, a pained expression on his face. “You mustn’t make things difficult,” he says. “For either of us.” Then he leaves and I tell Heinrich to fetch the car and drive me home.
Rudy is waiting, lounging on the bed, drinking my cognac. He smiles behind his wire-rim spectacles, then gets up and kisses me lightly on the cheek. I hate it when he does that, like a dog pissing against a tree, marking its territory. “It’s late, Rudy, what do you want?”
In his white chinos and loose, Hawaiian shirt, he looks like a lost tourist, lacking only a camcorder. He runs a hand through his thick, brown hair and says, “You have been wondering about Cledilce?”
I ignore the question and pour myself a cognac.
He follows me to the drinks cabinet. “In two days she starts performing for the Birds of Paradise,” he says.
“So soon?” I ask. “What about refinements?”
Rudy sips his drink. “They don’t place the same emphasis on refinements anymore. She had one week with a Chinese courtesan. You’re unique, Estela, a jeweled Bird. But these days, there isn’t the same demand for cultured conversation; nobody wants to discuss Günter Grass or the poetry of Ernest Newboy, they just want to fuck you. This bothers you?”