I’m forty years old and have been separated for three. I live with my children a quiet, peaceful life, hardly ever going out, except, of course, when hunger bites and I have to go out and fight for it. That’s how it is. But on this night I wasn’t in heat, nor wanting anything. I was going through one of my total-quiet phases. I’d only gone out to buy cigarettes. I had on a little flimsy dress thrown over my body, no makeup at all, my skin taut and bronzed by a winter sun, sandals on my feet. In short, by the relaxed way I dressed, I must have looked a lot younger. Besides, the easy life I lead — lots of sleep and almost no financial worries, plenty of care, of course — doesn’t let me age.

I live in Santa Teresa, but I don’t usually hang out at the famous meeting spots, like the Americana in Largo das Neves or Armando’s in Guintarães. Much less the Carvelo. That scene is a bit too rough for my bourgeois little life. The thing is, at eleven at night, there’s nothing open in Santa Teresa except Curvelo’s little bar. And that’s where I ended up.

As I walked in, I immediately stirred everyone’s attention. New blood in the place — that’s what I represented. Since I’m very outgoing and warm, when a boy who looked about twenty took my hand, I was friendly and receptive, maybe a little motherly, thinking: “What a nice, upbeat bunch. I need to come here more often.” Without leaving my cougar skin behind, I figured the boy was just being a good host. After all, he was one of the owners of the place. And I drank from his glass, which was being passed from mouth to mouth, hearing comments like: how beautiful you are! Where have you been hiding? And they started wanting to know everything about my life. A little embarrassed at being the target of so much attention and praise, I began apologizing and heading out, even forgetting to buy the cigarettes, with the boy (whose name I later learned was Beto) trailing after me. “Hey, where are you going?” “Home, of course,” I answered. “Can you give me a ride?” “Sure, get in.” And I let him climb into my car, intending to drop him off along the way, at the door of his house, which he kept dodging whenever I asked where it was.

I was already a block from my place when I stopped and asked him to get out. “You’ll have to stay here. If you’d given me your address, I could’ve dropped you home. But I’m not a fortune teller.” Cynically, he shot back: “Too bad. Then you’d know what I’m dying to do to you.” Bewildered, I replied: “What nonsense. I’m old enough to be your mother.” “If only! With a mother that hot, I’d never leave the house.” And he grabbed me and gave me a tremendous kiss on the mouth that left me breathless. The sleeping beast inside me was suddenly awakened. But prejudice spoke louder. “How old are you?” I asked childishly, perhaps hoping he’d lie. “Twenty-six.” And he grabbed me again, with fifty hands at once. The only reason I didn’t give in was the possibility of being seen by a neighbor and because I truly thought it was far too disproportionate to have an affair with someone fourteen years younger than me. And I kept thinking about that while I pushed him away, rejecting his caresses. He seemed to guess my reasons and said: “You women are funny. You talk so much about feminism and don’t think there’s anything wrong when you see an older man dating a girl. And when it’s girls, you even hand them over to the old guys.” “Nothing of the sort,” I shot back. “I think it has to be equal on both sides.” “Really? Then be equal with me and give me a proper kiss, because I’m crazy about you.” “All right, all right. I just can’t stay parked here. Let’s go down so I can buy the cigarettes I never bought.” He had such an incredible way of getting what he wanted that he won me over. We headed down toward Lapa and I finally bought my cigarettes. I did, however, impose one condition: he wasn’t to touch me until I gave him permission. We were now accompanied by a couple I had given a ride to at his request. The two of them rode in back, silent, when his hand started sneaking up under my dress, and no matter how hard I shoved it away with the one hand I had free while driving the VW, I didn’t have the strength to keep repelling him. The only thing I could do was make a radical decision: stop and make him get out, humiliating him in front of his friends. And that didn’t even occur to me, because I was truly enjoying being the object of such interest on his part. I went on with that unequal struggle, with his hand slipping inside my panties and him feeling how wet I already was, and then there was no more fooling myself. I wanted him just as much as he wanted me, and when I understood that I opened my legs so he could work me better. By then my vagina was throbbing madly and he was sticking his tongue in my ear and biting my neck. Then I began to soften and think I might as well give myself to him, that he really deserved me, because he had awakened me after such a long recess. I imagined how good he must be in bed with all that hunger. We dropped the couple off in Paula Matos and a little farther on, where we left them, Beto asked me to stop. By then I was as desperate as he was to kiss, hug, and trade every kind of caress. And the way he kissed me and handled me was delicious. I melt just remembering it. Then he pulled his cock out of his pants and I, startled, looked in every direction. “Don’t worry, I’ve got this covered; I know this place,” he said. And he made me grab his big, hard penis. I was so hungry and he was offering me so much that I took his silky, perfumed sex into my mouth. Impatient to know me in the deepest sense, he pulled me by the hair, settled me on the seat, and I, to help, opened my legs, already raised up, and he entered me hard and eager. I moaned and cried out so much that he had to cover my mouth so as not to wake people up. When we were about to come, he pulled out in alarm, pulling himself together. I, of course, by reflex, pulled myself together too. It was a patrol car, already about fifty meters away. I nearly died thinking what would have happened if they’d caught us. So he took the wheel and drove me to a house where, he said, we could be at ease. The house was on a little dead-end street, in one of those narrow alleys of Santa Teresa. Only then did I look up at the sky and notice it was a full-moon night. Before going inside the house, he pressed me against the wall and, tucking his hard cock as far as possible between my panties and my labia, made a back-and-forth motion. I said nothing, seeing stars, completely at the mercy of that devilish boy, who wanted everything at once: he lifted my dress and pulled my pants down in the middle of the street. We went in. The house was all dark and there was someone sleeping in the living room. “Who is it?” I asked. “I don’t know, this is like a commune, a new face turns up every day. It’s not really a commune, because nobody actually lives here. The house belongs to a friend of mine. She lends it out to anyone who’s down on their luck; the crowd hangs out here every weekend.” Once again assaulted by my fears and bourgeois modesty, I was about to regret being there when he took me by the hand and invited me into the bedroom. The bedroom had no bed and no light, only a window letting in the moonlight. My partner looked around and found, rolled up in a corner against the wall, a cowhide rug. He spread it out carefully and, kneeling on it, began kissing me up my legs, disappearing under my skirt to work his tongue into my sex and suck it, until I could no longer stand it and went down on my knees to give myself to him, not before stripping off all the clothes that kept our bodies from touching completely. When he saw my breasts bursting free of my clothes, he grabbed them and sucked them noisily, and only then stretched himself over me and made me feel what was good. Then I raised both legs and opened myself as wide as I could to feel him deep inside, to give him all of me, and I came moaning and crying out like I hadn’t in a long time. Only then did I realize it must have been around two in the morning and that I had commitments the next day. I went to the bathroom to wash up, and when I was getting ready to leave, I ran into my partner, who was coming toward me. When he hugged me, I felt he was ready for more. This time it was standing up, in the middle of the bathroom. Before I had time to say or think anything, he took his cock and, bending my legs, managed to fit it divinely into my vagina. The contact of the skin of his member with the inside of my freshly washed cunt, almost without any lubrication, was so good, the upward angle of his cock and the nimble way he could move our bodies in that position, that I came again in a few seconds. Without wanting to break that incredible contact of our skin, we walked to the bedroom still joined together. Even though he had come, his cock hadn’t gone soft; it still stayed there like a coat rack, a support for my hips. Of course I walked on tiptoe, the muscles of my vagina clenched so as not to let out what it was holding, and I hung on him, wrapped around his neck. We managed to reach the bedroom stuck together, and such was the understanding of our bodies that, with my legs around his waist, we made it to the floor in that Last Tango in Paris position. And we started all over again until the next day, when the girl sleeping in the living room came in to ask something, without caring about our nakedness. And you know what? I hardly cared either. I was so fulfilled as a woman that for me there was no difference at all between the three of us. Neither age, nor generation, nor lifestyle. I only realized one thing: it was time to go home.