When The Meninas Came To Town

(4 of 5)

Iwould not trade my hometown for anything in the world," says Podence, owner of Top Model — and perhaps Bragança's biggest booster after the mayor. Podence, 37, wears red Puma sneakers, jeans and a gold cross. He slouches across town smoking Marlboros, shaking hands with police officers and kissing meninas on the cheek. He is the quintessential southern European businessman — making the work look incidental, never rushing a drink. But Podence is at Top Model seven nights a week until 5 a.m., chatting with the clients, cueing the pole dances, watching everything.

Over a dinner of wild boar and pig's ears, Podence makes no apologies for what he does. As he sees it, he runs a nightclub where people have a good time. "After work, the women can go wherever they want. But I know they're not going for free," he says smiling. Podence helps arrange hotel reservations for clients. And he loans the women money to get from Brazil to Bragança. But it is the market that drives the trade, he says without sentiment: "It is like an anthill — one woman comes here and everyone follows."

As for the men who spend money they don't have on these women, and the families that suffer because of that, Podence is a realist. "There are hundreds of marriages that break up, and it's not just because of Brazilian women," he says. Married men buy sex because there is something missing at home, he says, and not just in the bedroom — a theory echoed by many of the prostitutes. Recently, a man paid j150 for three bottles of champagne and a long talk with Anita. "And he didn't even touch me!" she says. Another man called her repeatedly from his business trip in Germany, relaying stories from his day. "I said, 'Why don't you call your wife?' He said, 'Well, she doesn't listen to me.'" The meninas, says Podence, "are like psychologists. They listen to these guys. And these guys tell them things they don't even tell their lawyers."

One day last spring, the wife of one of Podence's customers showed up at his club and demanded to know which woman her husband was seeing. "'What does she do that I don't?'" Podence says she wanted to know. "I felt I had to be very blunt," he says. "First of all, you weigh 15 kilos more than she does. Second of all, these women will do anything for money." He blames the "conservative Portuguese" wives for forcing the husbands to go elsewhere — and a surprising number of his countrymen seem to agree with him. "In marriage, women see themselves almost exclusively as mothers rather than wives," says Marília Neres, spokeswoman for the Portuguese Department for Foreign Immigration and Frontiers. "The women forget that they should also be good wives and companions."

Even Ramos, who says she was tricked into becoming a prostitute 10 years ago, is reluctant to condemn the johns for creating demand. Sitting at a café on a sunny afternoon, Ramos talks about prostitution less as an industry and more as a natural phenomenon. "Before marrying, women make themselves attractive to men. Then they let themselves go. Time is scarce; people worry about finances; kids arrive," she explains in the patient voice one might use to relay a recipe for soup. "The men have a macho, Latin mentality. They have to feel they can conquer other women. And Brazilians — it's true — are very exotic, very sensual. It's no one's fault," she says, just the logical result of a modern Latin culture bumping up against a traditional, European one, the old colony coming home.

The wives, then, do not even enjoy the thin righteousness of victimhood. No one is very interested in how their husbands "let themselves go" after marriage, or whether the wives are sexually and emotionally satisfied. So rage is layered upon jealousy, which is layered upon sadness. And that is not a sustainable combination, as a student of male-female relationships like Podence should have known. "Of all the places I have been, Bragança is the only paradise," he says, sipping his port, "except for four old hags who are going to ruin that for me."