When The Meninas Came To Town

(5 of 5)

Paula is a large woman with a wide smile and fierce eyes. She is not the type to be shamed into silence. One day last year, she ran into Maria, another Bragança wife, on the street. (Both women have requested their real names be withheld.) They started talking, and Paula asked her, ever so delicately: "Does your husband run around with those bitches?" Maria said yes, and they agreed to meet at a café later. They shared parallel stories — of husbands who came home later and later with increasingly dubious excuses, of money that leaked away inexplicably, of women's names programmed into their spouses' cell phones. "I used to always have to tell my husband to change his shirt, that it was dirty," says Maria, an attractive, petite woman with dark, deep-set eyes and a soft voice. "And he'd say, 'Oh, I'm fine like this.' Now, he changes his shirt all the time."

For a long time, says Paula, "I was stupid. My eyes were closed." Now that her eyes are open, there is precious little that Paula does not see. "I know where these whores live. I can take you there at 9:30 at night and four of them will come out and taxicabs will take them to M.L.," she says. What she does not see, she hears about. "Even if I don't know the secrets of my husband, people come and tell me," she says. "What he did to me in my life, I could kill him."

"I think they give the men drugs," Paula continues. "He used to work day and night. Sometimes we had arguments, but then it passed." If not drugs, then maybe witchcraft; some Brazilian immigrants are known to practice magic. They put flowers at crossroads to win men's hearts and the names of their enemies on the soles of their shoes. So some Portuguese wives have tried counterspells, going to witch doctors to have their husbands cleansed.

Men around here have been using prostitutes forever, though they used to travel farther to find them. What's changed — in addition to the meninas' arrival — is the attitude of the wives. "It has always been considered correct to have an arranjo [kept woman]," says José Lopes, a psychology professor at the University of Trás-os-Montes. "In the mountains, the [wives] still walk behind the men, burdened down with loads on their heads." The wives tolerated the cheating because they had no choice. But thanks to television and better job opportunities for women, this is changing, he says. "Women have got more autonomy."

Eventually, Paula, Maria and two other Bragança wives decided to go above their husbands' heads. "Our lives are already buggered. These women must not bugger anyone else's lives," Paula says. They produced a manifesto: "It is not a time for indifference and adjustment, but rather a time to fight, fight for a town with more dignity where it is possible to breathe in peace," they wrote. And then, ominously: "We wish to avoid taking justice into our hands, but if we are obliged to, we won't turn aside." They signed it "the Maes [mothers] of Bragança."

Last May, they took the manifesto, along with several hundred signatures, marched to the Bragança police station and demanded to see the chief. "They just arrived and said their husbands are spending all the money with the Brazilians," remembers the chief, António Magalhaes de Oliveira. "I told them I would look into it."

Prostitution used to be legal in Portugal. Between the 1940s and 1970s, especially under the suffocating dictatorship of Ant�nio de Oliveira Salazar, brothels were permitted. But the women were under constant police surveillance and their bosses kept 90% of their earnings, according to VISAO magazine, the Portuguese weekly. Today, prostitution dwells in a messy netherworld. "It's not permitted but it's not prohibited," says Ana Maria Rodrigues, Bragança's deputy police chief. Forcing or tricking women into prostitution is illegal, as is "pimping," or facilitating prostitution. But these are hard crimes to prove. Any arrests that do get made usually stem from the women's immigration violations.

In other words, "In Portugal, there is no such thing as prostitution," says chief Oliviera in his office in September. The meninas do not sound like a priority. "It's the wives' problems to solve with their husbands, not the problem of police," he says. "It's an emotional problem, not a social problem." The wives, he says laughing, "better start making themselves more interesting to their husbands!"

After getting no satisfaction from the police department, Paula and the others went down the street to the mayor's office. "I told them that family differences can happen for a multitude of reasons," remembers Nunes, a very calm man. This is a parable about globalization, he says, about the increasingly seamless exploitation of desperate people. But it is at the same time "an ancient situation," he says, "about relations between men and women."

Had the women stopped there, that would have been the end of it: a couple of startled officials and a nice walk. But then the maes went to the media. Fidalgo, the news agency reporter, wrote the first story on April 30. And suddenly everyone wanted to hear from the maes. THE MEN OF BRAGANCA HAVE LOST THEIR HEADS, announced Jornal de Notícias, a Lisbon daily. But most of the coverage ridiculed the maes. The weekly Expresso quoted one disco owner summing up a common theory: "The husbands arrive home and find their wives smelling of [cooking] fat, full of problems and in a bad humor, but the Brazilians are clean, smell nice and are sweet and affectionate." This outrages the maes, of course, but they sound too weary to care much anymore. "I have always treated my husband very well. We lived together for 12 years," Maria says quietly. "I was always his friend. I was absolutely destroyed."

Maria and Paula say they have no regrets. At least they forced people to stop acting as if everything was normal. After the media blitz, Mayor Nunes called for the legalization of prostitution. The Bishop of Bragança, D. Ant�nio Montes Moreira, tried to use the ordeal as a teaching moment. "Recent events in our city form a basis for an appeal to all of our Christian community," he said. "We must all make a redoubled effort to bring dignity and sanctity to Christian marriage." The police have conducted more raids, and five discos have recently closed, but the sex industry adapts quickly. A large number of apartments sprinkled throughout Bragança are used as "private" brothels. And the slumping economy may have had more to do with the disco closings than the police. "There could be five or six more opening tomorrow," says Rodrigues.

New clubs filled with dancing meninas and lonely men are opening in nearby towns. In Chaves, a man named Carlos, his wife of 13 years and his Brazilian mistress spoke to a reporter from tvi, a national TV station. Then his mistress returned to Brazil, and Carlos returned to his wife. He seriously considered following the mistress to Brazil, he told Time, but decided to stay for the sake of his baby daughter. He doesn't see anything special about Brazilian women. "Portuguese women are very pretty. I fell in love with the Brazilian girl because I liked her. It was one of those things," he says. "I am sorry but not repentant."

Maria's divorce has been finalized. Her son is seeing a psychologist, and she is on antidepressants, having lost 14 kilos. She has taken an hiv test, which was negative. Paula is in court, pursuing her own divorce. Her small daughter remains visibly terrified of male strangers. Paula says she would like to leave, start a new life somewhere she does not have to see her husband or his mistress while on her way to the grocery store. But she has a life here — and an obsession — and cannot easily imagine a way out. There is one thing the women say they know for sure. They know that if they need to circulate another petition in Bragança, the people who laughed at them will not laugh anymore. Now they will sign.

Outside the strip club called M.L., which is guarded by dogs and large bald men, Pedro, the manager (who requested that his last name be withheld), complains of police attention. As he talks, early on a Wednesday night, a steady stream of men walk past him and into the club. But Pedro insists business is down. "Every two days the police are here. They ruin the ambience." Worse than that, Pedro says, he senses a permanent change in tone in Bragança. "This has been talked about too much to be forgotten."

— With reporting by Martha de la Cal/Bragança