One Hundred Years after Tomorrow: Brazilian Women's Fiction in the Twentieth Century

Márcia Denser / The Vampire of Whitehouse Lane (1980)

Marcia Denser Marcia Denser was born in Sao Paulo in 1949. In the late 1970s she became fiction editor for the woman's journal Nova. She has contributed to various newspapers and magazines in Sao Paulo and has published two collections of her own fiction: Tango Fantasma (1976) (Phantom Tango) and 0 Animal dos Motet» (1981) (The Animal of the Motels). She is perhaps best known for having edited two collections of erotic fiction by women: Muito Prazer (1980) (Very Pleased to Meet You) and 0 Prazer eTodo Meu (1984) (The Pleasure Is All Mine). With these anthologies, Denser called attention to women's widespread activity in a genre normally associated with men. She also introduced several new authors to the Brazilian reading public. Although Denser is a writer of erotic literature, she disdains romantic ideas of sexual love and portrays the sex act as a quasi-mechanical function, bordering on the grotesque. There is a hard-boiled quality about her stories, which are typically narrated by women. A good example is the story published here, which originally appeared in Muito Prazer. 204 The Vampire of Whitehouse Lane (1980) If the Japanese film hadn't been showing, I wouldn't have had any interest in going out with that guy, a poet, who billed himself as maudit just so he could mooch caviar canapes off the upper crust. A sham guru, a cosmic charlatan, follower of an esoteric Oriental sect, a prick like so many others, he used everything to his own advantage. At least he wasn't stupid. He gave transcendental "massages" by appointment , or even without appointment, to ladies who suffered from constipation , lovers' dumpings, and other, more general pyorrheas. He wasn't at all stupid. Somewhat ugly, he must have been starved for real meat, but at least by passing himself off as a spiritual type, he got his crumbs. His conversation was incoherent, full of pedantries, but despite his syntax-a tangle of meanderings that obviously had no goal-one sensed the guy's eternal hunger. He had a kind of vague, pious anxiety, and his talk, which seemed to go round and round, might have found a target, if he hadn't had his sights on something else. While his mouth went on about the evolution of cosmic energy, his eyes (the windows of his soul) were fixed on some point just between my breasts; the talk of cosmic energy came and went, up and down, never getting lost, coiling itself up, then unfolding itself, arriving nowhere, since the true object of his sterile chitchat remained out of his reach. His tedious discourse could be hypnotizing: I felt like a petulant child who doesn't want to go to sleep, or an animal reluctant to fall into the trap. That Japanese film was really good, a poetic monument, a profound study of human passions, etc. I could have talked about it ad nauseam, but the Poet merely exclaimed: "It was awesome! So awesome! How awesome!" He pitched the tone of his voice in such a way that the words exited his trachea and exploded with a dry, hoarse sound, like an oral fart, so that the word "awesome" seemed to contain, if not the meaning of the entire universe, at least of the entire film. This was at the end of the movie. During the movie he was all the time trying to grab my arm. A real drag. I asked myself: why did I go out with this guy? It was one of 205 206 Marcia Denser those tedious holidays when all my best friends, all the interesting guys, and all my available female acquaintances were traveling, leaving only the neurotics, the bores, and the vampires in the city. It seemed like a good reason. Then, again, I still didn't have a clear image of the Poet in my head, I merely had my suspicions. At the zero hour I was overtaken by a fucking panic to please-more concerned with the effect I could create than with him as object, properly speaking. I can end up fascinating Dracula himself, without realizing what I'm doing. Getting rid of the monster is another story altogether. Like in a classic horror film, an icy wind passed over us as we left the theater. I confess I wasn't surprised when the Poet suggested we pass by his apartment to get his pullover...