Chapter 10 – Standard Body, Soul Out of the Frame

🩸 Chapter 10 – Standard Body, Soul Out of the Frame or Venus in a Standard Body (like a boy)

To be read to the sound of “Venus as a Boy” sung by Björk

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🩸 Record 10.1 — The Zipper that Scratched the Silence

He undressed in front of the mirror with ease, with the tacit certainty of a lover who trusts his own reflection.

His body anointed itself in the mirror, in an intimate, silent gesture. Each muscle looked like a promise, each vein, a penance.

The reflection was liturgy.

And I, on the outside, was the exile from the temple.

Standing in the doorway, I was a body on high alert: heart out of rhythm, dry mouth, skin burning as if I’d taken an electric shock.

He noticed my gaze.

And then, as someone who marks territory, he slipped on any random pair of shorts. The tiniest gesture cut me open like a blade.

It was a sentence. I didn’t belong to the world to which he offered his nakedness.

The zipper went up with a dry scrape, as if it were scratching the silence.

There are men who move through life as if the wind never touched them, serene statues, almost motionless.

And there are the others, the ones who burn like embers, so much that just looking at them is enough to feel the vertigo of getting burned.

Rafael had dark, alive skin that didn’t need the sun to look lit up.

His body was the sculpture of the “gay standard”: abdomen carved in firm grooves, muscles chiseled by sheer force of renunciation.

His jaw drew a firm, angular line, almost a sculpture beneath the skin. The eyebrows were dark, thick, arched, hovering over cognac-colored eyes — eyes with the clarity of a tide about to rise: steady, but with something submerged that no one could reach. With a fire that doesn’t go out even when the whole night closes in.

His tattoos spread like thick black boundary lines, marking his body like a map of power.

I knew the standard was a construction — muscles as medals of survival after AIDS, bodies sculpted by algorithms and guilt, beauty manufactured as if it were universal.

I also knew that even those who live in the shop window feel the weight of the gilded cell.

His body was currency — it opened doors without effort.

And, as I watched him, I understood that that beauty wasn’t destiny: it was a construction repeated until it turned into myth.

He embodied the affirmation of a Nietzschean warrior: affirmation of life without guilt.

And I was the opposite, the one who negates, who turns desire into thesis so as not to admit that, deep down, he envies.

The mirror showed the abyss: on one side, the body that exists; on the other, the body that denies.

And there I realized that resentment can be elegant, sometimes it dresses up as lucidity. But it’s still the morality of the weak.

That’s what I was doing: adorning resentment with analysis, like someone perfuming a wound. It was a strength born of lack.

Knowledge was no use to me. Even knowing that what we desire is socially constructed, I couldn’t escape desiring that way. It didn’t make me any more desirable either. I didn’t control what I desired. My desire was molded but not a conscious choice.

It was knowing without being able to, philosophy instead of flesh.

He ran his hand through his hair and, without looking at me, asked if everything was okay.

I nodded, mute.

His presence lit up even what I wanted to hide, and even when it hurt, it hurt with the beauty of a flash.

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🩸 Record 10.2 – Talk to Him

Marco: A woman's mind is a mystery, Benigno. Even more in her state. We can't say she's switched off. — Talk to Her (Pedro Almodóvar, 2002)

We went out walking whenever the air in the room got too heavy.

The humid night carried remnants of rain. The sound of sandals scraped against the wet sidewalk.

We walked in silence, placing yet another piece in the museum of things unsaid.

He held my arm for a moment, the touch brief, too warm to be casual, but he didn’t go further. We stood too close to be friends, too far to be lovers.

The street was empty, lit by a single lamp that drew long shadows on the wall.

The wind lifted the curtain of a ground-floor window. Everything seemed to be waiting.

The smoke traced arabesques in the air, veils that both separated and joined us.

It was as if the cigarette exhaled what his mouth didn’t know how to say.

“Do you want me?” I asked in silence.

The reflection answered before he did: “Maybe.”

We went back home and the living room was in semidarkness, lit only by the cold glow of the switched-off TV. The air conditioner blew a thin current of air, saturated with silence. Rafael was sprawled on the sofa, like someone who trusts the other too much. His body lay there like a forgotten statue, his breathing too calculated to be real sleep. There was something of an invitation in the scene. The smell of the drug still hovered in the air, mixed with the scent of crushed lemongrass from his skin.

I knelt down slowly. The cold floor burned against my knees. But what was burning was my whole body. I stretched out my hand, touched him. His skin was warm, alive. He didn’t open his eyes. He seemed to be pretending to sleep.

My desire made me grotesque: I bent over before a body abandoned to its own absence.

I touched where I wanted to touch. He didn’t move. He only adjusted his leg, pushing me away with the naturalness of someone brushing off a mosquito.

I covered him with the sheet. That small, late gesture of care was also a disguise for my guilt.

Rafael slept on his side, one arm folded under his head.

The tattoo on his shoulder rose and fell with his breath.

He was masculine and delicate at the same time —

as if Björk had sculpted “Venus as a Boy”

in flesh and muscle, not in sound.

I burned with shame and excitement. His breathing, too light for sleep, was like a metronome that made me believe: he was awake. And that lit me up.

It was foolish to feel so much for so little. But you have to have gone through years of nothing to understand how a simple possibility can suddenly set you on fire. Knowing that he was awake and allowing me to touch him was confirmation that one day he would have the courage to own me.

Suddenly I heard his breathing steady, deep, like a straight line on a hospital monitor. I, beside him, waited for the miracle of a startle, but only silence came. And a faint snore.

In that moment, there was no sentence — just the weight of his breath, calming, regular, deep. He really was asleep. And realizing that weighed more than any unspoken “no”.

When my hand touched the warm skin, I woke up. The sheet was on me, not on him. I was sweaty, alone. I was still trembling as if that dream had been real.

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🩸 Record 10.3 — Library: Sanctuary of Excess

“It is not you who deceives me, what deceives me is my dream.” — Alfonsina Storni, Ode to Death

The library was a sanctuary of excess: solid wood table, moss-green chairs, books in perfect rows. The lamp’s light, warm and oily, reflected on the Bahia-beige floor, creating long shadows.

Lines streaked the table. Thursday, but it could have been any day. The blade cut the night into white lines. Each stroke, a sentence.

I was trembling, but I pulled another one: it wasn’t just a drug, it was a pact. A way not to leave him alone — not even when he was digging his own ruin. I had the money; he had the hunger for coke. It was an intimate economy. I paid to be close to the fire.

“Why are you making that face?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Thinking what people would say if they knew we’re doing drugs on a Thursday.”

He answered, “No one tells you who you are. You’re the one who writes that” — he said calmly, like someone dictating a universal rule.

“It’s true, I’m always worried about pleasing others, about seeming perfect.”

“And you do have to seek perfection. Not for others: for yourself. But the only thing standing in your way is you.”

“I always try to do my best in everything,” I said.

“You know what I’d like? To see you naked now.”

“Naked? I’m ashamed.”

“I see the White Swan in you. But I also need to see the Black Swan,” he said, smiling, with that rehearsed-movie shine in his eyes.

I took off my clothes.

He laughed, “With a limp dick.”

He grabbed my hand, shoved it inside his underwear and brought it up to my nose.

“And now?”

Shame turned into vertigo.

He ordered, “Get down and suck my dick. Then go get another five grams of coke. My limit is the sky.”

I obeyed.

The subjects came and went like lightning — from philosophy to delirium. Then he spoke about his grandmother with an affection that bordered on pride. He said he’d always been the favorite grandson because he listened to her patiently. But while she talked, he was thinking of other men, parties, lines of coke — and still he got an allowance from her pension.

He ran his fingers through his hair, distracted, like someone remembering a film they barely watched. I laughed at the anecdote, but inside I wondered: did he do the same with me? Was my presence also only tolerated because it was worth something in another currency?

The encounter of two souls was like a chemical reaction — certain elements, when they touch, don’t choose: they simply combust.

We were Carbon and Nitrogen face to face: one solid trying to stand, the other always on the verge of collapse. It only took one breath of Oxygen for everything to ignite.

Detonation was just a matter of time.

The blade opened the ivory envelope — not letters: more lines. The powder settled on the tabletop like frost. The lamp cast shadows on my fingers; my heart beat out of sync with the bass from the living room.

“You’re pale,” Rafael said, almost tender.

“I’m fine,” I answered, tongue thick, mouth dry.

“You still have that face. That look of someone who just saw the ghost of his conscience,” Rafael said, stopping the dance. His body seemed immune to the night, in brutal contrast to mine.

“I don’t know. I’m thinking about the cost. You talk to me about striving for perfection, being the best version, but the finish line always seems to be this table.”

Rafael laughed — a dry sound, with no joy. He looked at the lines of coke under the oily light of the lamp.

“Perfection isn’t a gift. It’s work. It’s the price of the ticket to walk through this world. You see the body at eight in the morning, the iron discipline, the White Swan, and think it’s easy. It’s not. It’s exhausting maintenance. If you don’t uphold the myth, the world discards you. They buy the image, not the tiredness that comes with it.”

He came closer and placed his hands on the table, right beside the paperweight shaped like a boat.

“All this rigor is just the façade. It’s what lets me pay for treatment. This here — the coke, the ruin that fascinates you — isn’t the addiction. It’s the anesthetic. It’s the only moment when I can stop trying to fix what can’t be fixed from the outside.”

“And what needs fixing?” I asked.

“The engine. What’s inside, that has no diet, no workout, no money that can fix it. You try to give your best in everything, but you destroy yourself inside because you refuse to accept that you don’t have to be the perfect pose. You’re ashamed of your Black Swan, but it’s him who gives you the spark.”

He picked up the blade and carved a new path through the powder.

“And that’s why you’re here, right? Paying to watch the fire. You pay me not to collapse, because you’re afraid that if I fall, your own castle of appearances will crumble. Our souls don’t collide by chance. I have the hunger. You have the money. We’re gunpowder already lit, with no disguise.”

He pushed the new line of cocaine toward me.

“You can’t fix what you can’t see. So stop being the audience and accept that you’re part of the show. The night is still young and the boat isn’t moving. Come on. Write your next sentence.”

On the table, the paperweight in the shape of a boat was trapped in glass. I stared at it for a long time: a ship that never sails.

“Exotic,” he said.

We laughed, but neither of us thought it was funny. The boat remained our private metaphor: the whole night stranded in a sea with no water.

Later, when the body asked for water and got silence, his hand touched my arm. Between the touch and the glass boat, I understood: I paid to postpone shipwrecks.

Even after nights like that, Rafael was at the gym at eight. The body that looked like a genetic miracle was a daily construction — timed workouts, a diet measured in grams, a discipline that fascinated me.

While I collapsed into hangover days, he lifted weights like someone lifting an invisible password that keeps the world in order.

Later, already put together again, he changed the track playlist. A deeper beat filled the room, and Rafael started talking about men who wanted him. He flaunted his conquests like trophies.

I watched him.

“The one who deceives me isn’t you,” I murmured. “It’s my dream.”

He didn’t hear — or pretended not to.

“What was that, my friend?”

“Nothing.”

And he started dancing, as if my sentence had dissolved in the air.

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🩸 Record 10.4 – Queen of the Night (Part 1)

“Life rolling around like a ferris wheel with everyone inside, and me standing here, dumb, sitting at the bar.” – Caio Fernando Abreu

I went with Rafael, Fábio, Alan and Léo to San Sebastian, the temple of the night that had replaced the old club in Barra. Facing the sea, the club breathed Rio Vermelho: art, faith, salt in the air. Three floors, VIP boxes, outdoor area; a maze of lights that made both body and floor tremble. The gay night that used to hide in back alleys now had lines out in the open street, as if the city could finally no longer pretend it didn’t see.

San seemed to breathe through its cracks. Outside, corner-salt; inside, cold air smelling of spilled energy drink, damp metal of handrails, smoke that doesn’t rise — it settles in your chest.

On the ground floor, the sub-bass made my stomach vibrate as if some creature were beating its wings inside. The lights scored the skin: flashes that made the sweat feel rough to the touch. The night wasn’t darkness: it was stretched black leather.

Rafael moved one step ahead: when he stopped, I slammed the brakes inside.

“Relax,” he said without looking. I lied with my shoulder: I relaxed.

The club was an ecosystem. In the center, the standard bodies: boys in sculpted relief, discipline, holders of the invisible password that guaranteed them a seat on the ferris wheel of visibility. A tiny gesture was enough — a stray word, a quick smile — and the mechanism opened for them. They spun like satellites of themselves. They didn’t dance, they described orbits.

Around them, the rich and influential who didn’t have ideal bodies, but bought the expensive ticket to spin along. They wanted to be, or at least to have, a standard. People with money bought gravity.

In the penumbra, the invisible ones. Without bodies that fit the standard, but insisting on occupying space: fans as weapons, drugs as passwords, ten minutes in the bathroom as a privileged view.

The travestis, all their own light, cut through the hall like a profane procession, a luminous affront to the hierarchy of the night; the “mariconas” held their ground with the humor of those who’ve already lost almost everything and still know the password for return. They were the resilient, survivors nobody celebrated, but who upheld the memory of the space. Excluded for so long, they had unlearned the language of desire.

I was a tourist with a credential. The stamp burned on my wrist.

And even so, when the DJ dropped an old vocal, the hall breathed as one — and for two bars the whole city fit inside my chest.

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🩸 Record 10.5 — Queen of the Night (Part 2)

“The tyranny of merit does not result only from the rhetoric of rising. It consists of a set of attitudes and circumstances that, together, have made meritocracy toxic.” — Michael Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit

I was in an in-between place: the place of those who paid dearly for the ticket, knowing that without it they’d stay outside, trying — in vain — to decipher the language of those who belong.

I entered the dance floor like someone coming home: red wristband. Lucas and Sérgio waved from the DJ booth; the sound was thick, dirty, electric. Rafael pulled me to the center. The lights sliced across the high ceiling, reflected on sweaty bodies, and the noise seemed to hold the entire city in place.

Drag queens floated in heels and glitter, like inverted stars. A couple danced with eyes closed, in a choreography only the late night allows. Next to Rafael, I felt both heavy and weightless — root and vertigo — as if my body finally had a place.

That’s when a man touched my shoulder.

Tight shirt shaping his arms, expensive cologne sharp as a blade.

In ten minutes, he said fourteen times:

“I’m a surgeon.”

Each “I’m a surgeon” sounded like the hymn of a silent religion — merit.

He looked around with the serenity of someone who believes he’s earned his own altar.

Deep down, he wanted to be recognized not for his body, but for the title he wore like a medal on his chest: “I worked, I deserved, I got here.”

And I thought — maybe that’s what meritocracy does: turns luck into virtue and privilege into narrative.

As if birth were a merit. As if talent could bloom the same way in concrete and in a watered garden.

The word merit is a shop window that hides the stockroom: no one shows the real price of the ticket.

Léo, beside me, counted the repetitions with the patience of someone sharpening his mockery.

On the fourteenth “I’m a surgeon”, he leaned close to my ear and said, low, just for me:

“Being a doctor doesn’t matter much right now. Nobody’s dying here… yet.”

Then he gave a sly little smile and looked back at the guy:

“But you’re kind of cute. Take your dick out. That interests me way more than your job.”

The surgeon gave a shy laugh, straightened his collar, as if he were trying to sew up an invisible tear.

For a moment, the night’s hierarchy flipped: status stepped down a rung; desire climbed one.

The dance floor breathed like a collective lung.

Bodies spun with no job title, no diploma, no last name.

In the penumbra of the strobe lights, merit dissolved — and the body was the only grammar allowed.

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🩸 Record 10.6 — The Wristband and the Ring

“Under the test of the ring, how will I be to myself? What Giges am I?”

— Eduardo Giannetti, The Ring of Gyges

I saw a boy at the bar. He ordered vodka, gave up and ordered beer instead — a quick gesture that exposed an empty wallet. Broad shoulders, hip resting against the counter, firm forearm, veins showing under the blue light. His right hand spun the label nonstop: relaxed virility with a restlessness begging for a lap. Every microgesture hit me: tugging at the too-short sleeve, the small arching of his neck as he drank, the posture of someone who takes up space without asking permission.

When he came up to me, there was no charm, just frankness:

“You’re friends with the owner, right? I’m easy. Can you get me an open-bar wristband? I want to get drunk. And, if you do, I’m yours tonight.”

I nodded. Walked down the dark hallway to the wristband room: an acrylic fish tank that seemed to exist outside the party. I had access there because I was friends with the owner — I crossed restricted areas as if I had some sort of invisibility.

I held one. The cold plastic weighed more than it should. I remembered The Ring of Gyges: Glaucon would say that, invisible, almost everyone yields; Socrates, that justice is worth it in itself, even in the dark.

I wasn’t pure: I had already crossed lines. Maybe on another night I would have caved. But there, I weighed the risk and I weighed my soul.

I put the wristband back in the acrylic.

If I couldn’t be a successful man, then at least I could be someone who didn’t betray himself.

Putting the wristband back gave me back to myself for five minutes. On the sixth, I stepped into the bathroom.

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🩸 Record 10.7 – Bathroom: Microphysics of Power

“Everyone prostitutes themselves, Grace. We just sell different parts of ourselves.” — Peaky Blinders

Waiting in line for the bathroom was a ritual. Few went in alone: the stalls were for drugs, sex, favors. The sound from the dance floor came muffled, the smell of cigarettes, sweat and expensive perfume clung to the walls.

The bathroom line looked like a confession queue — everyone with their sin already at the tip of their tongue.

The mirror was triple: face, mask, mask of the mask.

On the tiles, layered smells: cheap disinfectant, niche perfume, old sweat.

Dealers leaned against the wall with crossed arms, watching calmly. Customers paced nervously, disguising their glances. The bathroom was a clandestine stock market: drugs, bodies and secrets changing hands in silence.

The tradition was: upon leaving, check your nose in the mirror, clean off the powder before going back to the floor. Muffled laughs mixed with the sound of moans and fists pounding on stall doors.

I went in with Rafael, Fábio, Léo, Alan and a boy who laughed out of focus, stumbling.

Rafael looked at him and asked if he had any drugs.

He dropped his pants and showed his dick as if that were his ticket.

Rafael raised an eyebrow, impatient:

“Two sins, bitch: never show your limp dick to anyone, and never come into a stall with me without drugs.”

The boy just stood there, embarrassed, pulled his pants back up and stumbled out.

Outside, a dealer in a Superman T-shirt was handing out mechanical hugs. Rafael called out:

“Bitch, what did you take?”

“I’ll give you a tasting. Crushed pill with K, baby. I’ll do three for 150.”

Rafael smiled, feline:

“Look, bitch… if it’s bad, I’ll ruin your life.”

I bought all three. Rafael poured a whole bag onto his phone screen, rolled up a bill and snorted half of it in one go, leaving even the dealer speechless. He laughed, satisfied:

“That’s what I like: abundance.”

He turned to us:

“You can give the tasting to them.”

He put his hand on my shoulder and said:

“Get 5g of this and we’ll go back to play a little.”

I answered, laughing.

“You’re a whore.”

He brushed it off with a shrug.

“Everyone prostitutes themselves, love. Some with their body, others with their soul. The rest calls it survival.”

My stomach churned at the scene. The powder still shimmered on the phone, and I, beside him, felt the back of my neck sweat. I envied him for having that presence that rearranged a room around him. I felt anger for having paid to snort and, in a way, to be made a fool of. But deep down, I also felt happy to be there, next to him.

The moon doesn’t light up on its own: it reflects another body’s shine — and even so, it is seen.

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🩸 Record 10.8 — The Shop Window

The counter in the restaurant was pale wood and quiet. The sushi chef sharpened the knife in a back-and-forth that sounded like breathing.

Henrique was in the corner seat — a position of command without seeming so.

He ordered otoro. I said I trusted his choice.

He smiled:

“Trust is the first currency.”

Marcelo spread the files of the clients who might become VIPs across the glass table like someone piecing together a jigsaw puzzle.

“These people are loyal to us. They’ve been coming for years, always spend well.”

“I agree,” said Alan, straightening the papers.

“Loyalty has value.”

Henrique thought for a moment:

“Rodízio temakis. Packed, predictable, indispensable to pay the bills. But nobody remembers their taste.”

He made a gesture with his chopsticks, not like a knife, but like a baton. He conducted the air.

The first dish arrived: otoro is that tuna that almost melts just by looking at it. He picked up the nigiri with the delicacy of a priest holding a host.

“This is the kind of person I want in the house,” he said. “Rare, expensive, rich in just the right way. Melts and leaves you wanting more.”

Henrique held up a photo, studied the face with the patience of someone evaluating a work of art.

“The events house is a concept,” he said slowly. “Not a charity.” He placed the photo back on the table.

Marcelo laughed, shaking his head:

“Henrique, what you really want is to fuck the young ones.”

Henrique didn’t deny it. He smiled with that calm that could be frightening:

“It’s part of my show.”

The waiter poured the champagne. Henrique raised his glass:

“I see people like champagne.” The waiter popped the bottle and Henrique finished: “I want a client list like this, an explosion.”

Alan brought a new selection, organized in colored folders.

Henrique flicked through them fast, very fast. Then, without warning, he tore everything in half.

“Start over.”

Alan stood there, the two halves of the papers in his hands. “Henrique…”

“Start over,” he repeated, but his voice held no anger. It held method.

I was shocked by the coldness of the gesture.

Later, we were alone. Henrique adjusted his tie knot, the reflection of the aquarium trembling in his green eyes.

“I do this because I want to extract excellence from people.” He paused. The glass in front of him reflected his own moving mouth, as if he were talking to another man.

“Alan is a rough diamond. I pay for his college. I love him like a brother.”

He turned to me, and for the first time he didn’t seem in control:

“I was the chubby kid at school.” The sentence came out straight, without self-pity — but in it there was the weight of someone who still hears the others’ laughter echoing.

“I only got where I am by delivering excellence.” He tapped lightly on the table, the gesture of a tired maestro.

“In business, you have to be tougher. You’ll learn.”

On the way out, he lined up the chopsticks, perfectly parallel. They weren’t knives, they were rulers.

He measured the world again and said:

“Tomorrow, new list.”

I replied that tomorrow I wanted pastel.

He laughed:

“Air-filled pastel is enough of a goal for a lot of people. My air needs to have body.”

I asked if he didn’t get tired of cataloguing the world.

“I do,” he smiled. “But it’s that or be eaten alive.”

I went back home with a salty taste in my mouth and a silence that wasn’t uncomfortable — it was the silence of seeing someone who, for a moment, stopped pretending he didn’t feel.

Outside, the city looked as if it had been sliced by the same knife as the sushi chef’s: an invisible cut, so precise it would only bleed when the lights came on.

🩸 Record 10.9 — Miranda Priestley

“Perfection isn’t just about control. It’s also about letting go. Surprising yourself and then the audience.” — Black Swan

Rafael already knew about the sale of one of my family’s farms — and we already had plans for how to use the capital. My capital. He talked about the dental clinic like he was offering a rare invitation. I would put in the money; he would bring the work and the patients.

He took me to an orgy, sold as an initiation promise. I said yes.

The main room was minimalist, almost aseptic: black and white abstract paintings, vases of orchids, expensive perfume hanging in the air. Men walked around naked with the naturalness of someone wearing a suit. The space looked like a film set: indirect lighting, low sofas, glasses aligned on discreet side tables.

I walked down the stairs behind Rafael. The cold handrail burned my hand, in contrast with the warm air in the basement. Down there, the scene froze for me: perfect bodies under calculated light. Boys who looked like Bel Ami actors. I stood still, shallow breaths, remembering that scene in The Devil Wears Prada: Anne Hathaway in the taxi, dazzled, seeing Paris through the window — each light, each building a discovery; Meryl Streep beside her, looking at the same city with the boredom of someone who already knows all its secrets. I was Anne before those perfect bodies. Rafael was Meryl — blasé, gliding through that world as if it were just another Tuesday.

“You look at this city as if it were Feira de Santana while I see Paris.”

“Oh, honey. If I got that mileage, I’d go to Mars and back. I’ve been to so many of these.”

“I don’t get invited to these orgies. Not with men like this.”

“The price of not being perfect,” I said, and felt like an idiot.

“Everyone here has their role. Not everyone is cover material. There are those who pay. There are those who are funny.”

“You’re very controlling. You don’t know

🩸 Record 10.14 – Henrique: Venus as a Boy

The bathtub looked like a movie set: too small for four bodies, which only made the intimacy greater. The smell was of expensive wine mixed with the steam of hot water. The low lights from the living room reflected on the white tiles, creating a humid, almost feverish glow.

Henrique, reclining, commanded the room without needing to speak. Rafael slid in beside him, muscles tense under the water. Alan laughed, pulled me by the hand, and we got in too. Champagne glasses rested on the edge; cigarettes went out on their own in crystal ashtrays.

We were there because we were the only ones who knew about Rafael and Henrique. That was where we’d receive instructions on how to proceed.

“We’ll tell later,” Henrique said in a low voice. “First, you finish things.”

It wasn’t advice. It was a sentence.

“Until then, it stays between just us.”

The warm water glued our bodies together. Rafael ran his fingers along the edge of the tile; Henrique watched him like someone who had already decided the future.

Henrique stood up in the tub. The thick foam covered his arms completely, erasing them from sight — like the Venus de Milo, only made of flesh and steam instead of marble. The same classical beauty, the same eloquent absence of arms.

“He looks like that Venus without arms — the one from Milo,” I said.

Alan burst out laughing, mocking:

“Here he goes with his craziness again. What is that?”

“It’s a compliment, Alan,” Henrique answered without hurrying.

Henrique smiled slightly:

“I saw that Venus at the Louvre. It’s like he’s saying I look like a Greek statue.”

Alan made a face:

“Greece? Only if it’s Mykonos, bitch.”

We all laughed.

In the window’s reflection, the city looked distant, blurred. Inside, the four of us were wet statues, sealing a wordless pact: a kiss under the surface, low laughter, a toast.

Power doesn’t need volume. Violence can be clean.

In the heat of the water, the discreet script was agreed upon: months of silence, time for Rafael to end things with Fábio. Only then would they go public. No one toasted to that. We just let the water speak.

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🩸 Record 10.15 – The Darts

The bathtub was still overflowing with steam and laughter.

Henrique, immaculate even in just briefs, rolled a glass of whiskey between his fingers.

Rafael, euphoric, talked about putting on a performance — “for the four of us, an experiment,” he said, with bright eyes.

Henrique just replied:

“I’m not going to cum in front of an audience.”

The tone wasn’t scolding, it was control.

Rafael smiled with irony.

“Then let’s play. Whoever wins decides the show.”

Henrique stood up, his body rising in dense light.

“Darts,” he announced.

He opened the cabinet in the living room and took out the round dartboard. The darts, red and blue, gleamed under the warm light.

Each one looked like a sharp word about to be spoken.

That night, the darts took the place of Querelle de Brest’s dice.

The game wasn’t just a bet — it was a pact.

It decided who would possess and who would be possessed, but what was really being measured was power: who commanded desire and who embodied it.

Henrique stood with his back to the target, three meters away. Rafael took his place at his side, muscles tense, breath under control.

Rafael’s first throw cut through the air with violence.

Thump.

The dart hit the center — not of the target, but of him.

The red tip quivered for an instant, as if the body had answered the impact.

Henrique raised his arm with surgical calm. The blue dart left his fingers with slow, penetrating precision.

Thump.

Deeper than the first. More accurate.

Rafael inhaled through his nose, adjusted his stance. Threw again.

Thump.

Another blow to the center.

With each throw, the sound grew damper, denser. The felt of the target gave way, the foam compressed, the darts piled up like fingers crossed over the same point.

Henrique threw three more — slow, calculated, each one opening space between the others. Rafael answered with strength, drawing muffled gasps from the board.

It wasn’t a game. It was choreography. Every dart that went in pushed the others aside, rearranging the center.

The target was overflowing with colored shafts. Red and blue mixed in the felt — like blood diluted in paint.

The whole room seemed to pulse to the rhythm of the throws.

Thump. Thump.

Alan and I watched in silence, witnesses to something sacred and obscene at the same time.

When there was no more room at the center, Henrique lowered his arm.

“It’s over.”

Rafael laughed, sweaty, resigned.

“Now choose who watches.”

Henrique looked at me and at Alan.

“You two play. One of you will watch.”

Alan and I stood in front of the dartboard. The shafts still trembled, as if the panel were still breathing.

I picked up a red dart. The tip was warm.

I took aim. I breathed. I threw.

Thump.

I missed the center by a hair.

Alan took a blue one, settled his fingers at the base, and threw without hesitating.

Thump.

Bull’s-eye.

Henrique made the smallest gesture — permission or sentence, I don’t know.

Alan stayed; I left.

From the hallway, the door closed slowly.

There was a narrow crack — filtered light, almost liquid.

Smoke — not just incense.

In the fogged mirror in the living room, I saw blurred reflections: movements, shadows, breaths that seemed to merge.

It wasn’t a scene, it was ritual.

Their pleasure was happening as a living metaphor for what had always escaped me — the power of being inside the story and not just watching it.

The sound of the darts still echoed in me.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

As if the air were still a blade. As if each throw were still piercing me.

I understood then that desire also has a target: sometimes it hits the other, sometimes it goes through the one who watches.

The game had already shown everything. Whatever happened after the door closed was just repetition.

Sometimes, the one who loses the game is the one who feels the impact the most.

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🩸 Record 10.16 — The Precipice

It was almost midnight when Henrique called me to drink champagne on the rooftop of the events venue.

The city flickered below, golden lights reflecting in the glass of the flute.

He was quiet, more than usual. He swirled the champagne slowly, like someone watching stars in a planetarium.

“Rafael disarms me,” he said suddenly, without looking at me.

The sentence came so out of nowhere I almost dropped my glass.

“He’s beautiful like a Ferrari out of control,” he went on, voice low.

“He just needs a driver.” He paused, met my gaze. “He’s gorgeous as if he’d been painted with brushes… with a magnetic field that can reverse the Earth’s gravity.”

I chuckled under my breath:

“You’re being a little hyperbolic.”

Henrique smiled, but it was a sad smile:

“That’s an understatement.”

The wind ruffled his hair. For a moment, he looked like a boy.

“The last time I lost control like this was when my mother had cancer.” His voice came out rougher.

“I could barely make it to the end of the day without feeling sad.”

He said he cried even at *Philadelphia*.

“Everybody cries at that movie,” I tried to lighten the mood.

He looked straight at me: “But I didn’t.” Pause.

“I never cried. At anything. Until she got sick.”

Henrique knocked back another glass in a single gulp.

“It’s like seeing the precipice and not being afraid of jumping.” He set the empty glass on the glass table. The sound echoed dry.

“Only one thing worries me.” He turned to me, his green eyes now dull:

“His use of cocaine. I want you to help me with that. Try not to use during the week. I don’t want him to lose himself.”

The city below kept blinking, indifferent. The wind carried a smell of salt and something that felt like an ending.

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked.

Henrique straightened his jacket, putting the mask back on:

“Because you’ll understand when he starts to fall.” He paused, looking out at the abyss of lights.

“And because… sometimes, when you love, you need an accomplice.”

The silence weighed like warm champagne. I understood I’d just been named guardian of a runaway Ferrari — and that Henrique, for the first time, wasn’t sure he’d be able to hold the wheel.

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🩸 Record 10.17 – The Show Must Go On

“I wish someone would just tell me what to do all the time… because I don’t think I know.” — *Fleabag*

On New Year’s Eve we went to Rio. The party was on an open dock, the sea pounding the rocks, the ferris wheel in the nearby park turning slowly against the sky.

Henrique walked in with no line. Rafael by his side, smiling like someone who already knows he’s won. I followed them like someone watching a movie with no right to speak.

The party looked like the set of a futuristic music video about industrial ruins. Purple and green lights cut through the humid air; the deep bass made the ground shake. Performers spun from aerial silks, breathing fire; sparks fell over the crowd like golden rain.

The dance floor boiled. Sweaty bodies, lights cutting through the dark, bass shaking the ground. Rafael and Henrique danced too close for it to be casual. Fábio was a few meters ahead, pretending not to see.

And then it happened.

Rafael grabbed Henrique by the back of the neck and kissed him. It wasn’t quick, it wasn’t discreet. It was a declaration.

Fábio froze. For a second, the whole dance floor seemed to pause — as if the world recognized that something had just cracked.

But it was only a second.

People around them thought it was just a New Year’s Eve threesome. When they saw Fábio, eyes brimming, crossing the crowd toward the exit, a few flashes of shock showed up.

Whispers. Glances exchanged.

Soon the discomfort passed. Fans went back to slicing the air, random couples formed and dissolved, and the boldest snorted lines off their own fingernails in the middle of the floor.

The show has to go on.

I said to Rafael, “This isn’t right.”

He protested, “You remember I’m with you too, I just can’t be with you in public.”

I blushed and said, “I know. I’m lost.” The pill started to kick in and I said, “I think sometimes I just wish someone would tell me what to do all the time — because honestly, I never know.”

But in that moment I felt I needed to be by Fábio’s side and went after him. He was standing on the sidewalk, looking at the ferris wheel.

The cabins went up and down slowly, full of people laughing, taking selfies, waving downwards. The cycle went on: up, down, up again. Impassive. Mechanical. Unbothered.

Fábio wasn’t seated. He was standing, watching the wheel spin without him.

The world carried on — the party, the music, the bodies dancing inside. And there he was, standing still, while everything spun.

Fábio didn’t cry. He just stood there looking at the ferris wheel as if he were waiting for it to stop. As if something, anything, might acknowledge that his world had just collapsed.

But the wheel didn’t stop.

It never does.

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🩸 Record 10.18 — *Closer* and *An Andalusian Dog*

*Closer* — The Fall of Mirrors

Back at the rented apartment, the music from the party sounded distant, muffled by the thick walls. The air smelled like funeral flowers.

Fábio was already there when Rafael and Henrique arrived together. The air between the three of them was dense, loaded with a tension that no longer fit inside the body.

They went to the bedroom that used to be theirs, and Fábio followed.

“You don’t know what love is, because you don’t understand what commitment means,” Fábio said, steady.

Rafael took a deep breath, leaned against the doorframe, voice too calm for what was coming:

“You’re a good person. But I’m practical. And I’ll be happier with him.”

Fábio clenched his fists.

“Don’t tell me I’m too good for you. I am. But don’t say it.”

“Why didn’t you say that before? You made me come all the way here.”

He looked at him, eyes filled with water:

“Telling the truth is what makes us human.”

Rafael looked away, a brief, bitter smile on his face.

“There’s no truth or lies. Everything is only a version of something else.”

Fábio left the room without waiting for an answer. The hallway was full of voices, but Rafael only heard one sentence repeated, as an echo: “He doesn’t like Henrique. Called him old. He’s only in it for the money.”

Nobody had said that — or maybe someone had. But in Rafael’s head the sound was clear, cutting.

Fábio came back seconds later, asking for the keys to the apartment in Salvador.

“They’re not with me,” Rafael said, cold.

Fábio rummaged through his things and found the keys.

“You’re crazy. And high.”

Rafael’s hand came fast. The slap cracked louder than the room itself.

The silence that followed felt bigger than the space.

Love is an accident lying in wait.

Desire, a stranger we swear we know.

Intimacy, a lie we tell ourselves.

And the truth… only a game nobody wins.

It was there that I realized that that perfect world could stink of tragedy, and that love, when intersected by power, leaves marks that elegant clothes and polite gestures can’t erase.

Rafael loved Henrique, but he saw his thorns.

Henrique loved Rafael without seeing them.

*An Andalusian Dog* — The Wounded Vision

Fábio left the apartment with no destination, like someone looking for air in the middle of a fire.

I followed him to a friend’s place, where the sweet smell of ketamine dominated the hallway.

In the bedroom, limp bodies looked like leftovers from a party that never ended.

The sound from a portable speaker pulsed in a bass too low to be music, too loud to be silence.

Fábio inhaled deep, the powder burning his nose. He laughed alone, then cried, then laughed again.

His muscles were still perfect, but they carried a new tremor — as if the form could no longer contain what was breaking inside.

With each blink, the world tore open. First a blurred image; then, a burst of light.

Until, suddenly, the impossible: an eyelid opening and being cut from the inside.

There was no blood, only brightness.

It was vision that was wounded.

Lying on the sweaty mattress, Fábio’s body looked like a crumpled gym poster stuck to a damp wall.

Perfection fell apart before my eyes.

Behind the symmetry, there was only ruin.

Fábio was naked before the half-darkness.

His beauty — once sharp, almost insolent — now seemed disfigured by pain.

His face, contorted, was a mask trying to hold up what remained of the beautiful: a cracked architecture, propped up by pride and silence.

What once seduced, now cut.

A dark streak ran down from his crotch, blending into sweat and shadow.

It wasn’t a wound, it was an inscription — the body writing its own fall.

His shaved armpits, his smooth groin, gave him an androgynous, almost mystical look:

as if he’d erased the marks of gender to become pure symbol.

His skin — wet, tense — seemed to reflect the tired light of the lamp as if it were varnish over wax.

It was impossible not to think of Picasso’s *Vénus et l’Amour, 2e variation*:

the disfigured goddess, body twisted under black lines, face split into planes as if pain had become a method of seeing.

In that print, Venus bears the same paradox as Fábio — a body of desire that is also a wound,

a belly stained with dark ink that is not ink: it’s testimony.

And the little Cupid at her side, offering arrows to the shattered mother, seems to laugh at lost innocence.

In Fábio there was the same absent smile, the same lucid abandonment.

Androgynous and tragic, he was the contemporary reflection of that Venus:

flesh that still pulses but already knows itself to be art —

and that bleeds not for dying,

but for insisting on existing.

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🩸 Record 10.19 – The Phantom Clinic

The receptionist had a waiting-room voice — warm, with no edges.

A neutral landscape painting filled the wall: motionless lake, trees that cast no shadow. Anaesthetic décor.

I signed. The pen left a groove — not in the paper, in me.

I remembered the day we sketched the clinic’s façade on a greasy café napkin. We laughed loud, the three of us. The napkin became trash. The laughter became protocol.

Henrique looked at me with his green-glass eyes, firm like old glass. Light eyes that wound, that seem to see what shouldn’t be seen. When he fixed his gaze on me, I feared he’d pull every confession out of me.

The room was a stage designed to impress: cold-beige floor, smooth walls reflecting the dull-golden light of expensive lamps. He wore black from head to toe, the kind of deep black that magnified his presence, as if his body were a solid comma in space.

“Fábio was an adolescent, and you meddled too much in the relationship. I’m a man. With me, it won’t be like that. We can be friends or enemies. It’ll depend on you.”

The words went in like a slow, cold blade. Henrique, who had once offered me shelter, now spoke like a judge. And in that room of costly silence, I realized he could also destroy me without raising his voice.

The clinic we’d dreamed of had never existed outside our conversations. It became a specter: imaginary address, furniture chosen only in my mind, patients who never came. Little by little, I realized I didn’t want to be chained to that project — I didn’t want to carry on my back the same discipline that Rafael flaunted. I was the one who gave up.

But quitting wasn’t enough. There was a price.

Henrique pushed me out with gestures too polite to be innocent: “It’s more practical to handle this by message.” “We’ll take care of it.” By the time I noticed, I was just a silent investor. The money was already in their account.

And then the contract came: not one of partnership, but of termination. Rafael called it “compensation for frustrated expectations.” I signed to give up, and they signed to shut it down.

Henrique at the head of the table, back straight; Rafael drumming his fingers, too distracted to be innocent. Between us, white pages that weighed more than stone.

“It’s simple,” Henrique said. “We close expectations.”

The word “expectations” floated as if they were mine alone; the plural, theirs.

The pen slid until it reached my hand. The dry line on the paper sounded like a cut.

I signed. Henrique collected the document calmly, like a judge delivering a sentence. Rafael adjusted his watch on his wrist, the click of the clasp sounding like an open wound.

I left the room without saying goodbye. The automatic doors closed behind me with a cold sigh.

Deep down, I knew: I hadn’t only lost money or a project. I had struck the match inside a house of paper and later blamed the wind for the fire. Rafael wasn’t the flame — he was just the name I gave the fire.

On my way out of the building, the door sensor blew cold air on my back.

I thought: contracts are bridges from a distance — up close, they’re planks that creak.

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🩸 Record 10.20 — Ghost Train

“You’re a greedy bitch who just likes to suck the life out of people.” — *Euphoria*

Rafael told Henrique I was doing too many drugs — not to save me, but to discard me with the elegance of someone who uses danger as an excuse. He was more addicted than I was. He had just found someone to bankroll him and wanted to toss me aside.

The building’s automatic door shut like a tired mouth when I came back from signing the termination. The receipt still felt warm in my pocket — my signature turning into expensive dust.

I went up to his apartment.

Rafael was waiting for me in the hallway, gym shirt on, body on alert, soul far away.

“Why did you do that?” I asked before the elevator could breathe. “Why did you take me out of the story under the pretense of protecting me?”

On the way to the bedroom, I saw that the glass boat I’d given him — the same from our night of excess — was on the shelf, sailing on dust. I grabbed it without thinking. It slipped.

It hit the rug and didn’t break.

The silence made more noise than if it had shattered. I picked up the boat. No visible crack, only my hand shaking. I put it back, crooked, a finger’s width off-center — as if the object were silently confessing the shock of having survived.

I understood then: there are shipwrecks with no sound. Sometimes it isn’t the crash of glass that declares the end — it’s the discreet misalignment of things returning to the wrong place.

I turned off the light. The boat stayed there, whole and out of line. I went down.

I walked back down the hallway toward the elevator.

He lifted his chin, rehearsal of calm.

“I tried to help you.”

I laughed — that dry laugh that splits your lips.

“Help? You pushed me out of the frame and called it a cure. You told him I was destroying myself so you could throw me away without guilt. It’s beautiful to have ethics when the discard is already decided.”

“You were destroying yourself,” he said softly. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

“Stay,” I answered. “Loving is holding the train door, not jumping in and leaving me on the platform.”

The elevator opened just to watch. We stepped inside. The cold light left us without shadows. Rafael leaned against the mirror — old accomplice — and whispered:

“I love you.”

“Don’t say that,” I cut him off. “You don’t love me. You like the reflection of your heroism in Henrique’s eyes when I go under. You like the feeling of being loved. That’s gluttony. It’s a cult to the mirror.”

Silence. The elevator went down two floors like someone going down a well.

“I talked to Henrique because I thought you were going to…” he searched for the word and didn’t find it.

“Die?” I offered, sharp. “Right. And now I die every day in a place with no death certificate. You saved me so you could say you saved someone. No one comes back the same from a fire. And you know it: you told Henrique I was a risk to turn him into your emergency exit.”

The door opened on the ground floor. The lobby smelled of chlorine and used napkins. We stepped out onto the sidewalk. The city was breathing in short bursts: honking, motorcycles, a man selling water, a dog sniffing the same corner as always. My head pounded — that old hunger for anesthesia. My backpack weighed inside my memory.

“Right” cut through me like a rail.

“Right is your order,” I said. “The rest you call illness or drama, whichever suits you in the moment. To Henrique, you named me a danger to justify the leap. There: I’m the noble reason for your abandonment.”

“I can’t handle being your anchor,” he said firmly. “I sink too.”

“Then say the whole truth,” I stepped closer. “You don’t love me. Because loving is staying when it’s impossible. And you always leave. You always leave. You boarded the damn train and left me there.”

The sentence came out of me like glass. His shoulders — temple columns — trembled just a little.

“I…” he began.

“Spare me the speech,” I asked, softly. “I gave you everything. The money, keys, ideas, trust, faith. I gave up what held me up to be your floor — and you used my planks to build the bridge to him. And, so it wouldn’t look like cruelty, you christened me ‘addict.’ It’s a beautiful liturgy: the saint, the sinner, the absolution.”

Rafael clenched his jaw, a stone diagonal.

“I need to breathe without being your medicine.”

“I prefer cocaine to you because when you say ‘I love you’ and turn your back, it’s coke that holds my hand.”

For a moment, I saw the fear behind the sculpture. I wanted to touch him. I didn’t.

“I want to help you,” he repeated, weak.

“Do you?” I asked. “Then stop lying to yourself. And to me. Admit to Henrique that you’re just as addicted as I am, that you helped make me this way, that you went looking for someone to sponsor your habit, that you told on me so he could want you without the weight of guilt. You offered me as a preemptive corpse.”

From a window, a bus sighed like a big animal. I thought of the tracks that don’t exist here — and even so abandon me every day. Every engine in the city was a ghost train leaving without me.

Absence has weight. I wore it like someone putting on a sentence.

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

“Leave,” I answered. “And try not to die from the name you gave me.”

“What name?”

“The addict. The mess. The laugh of someone who ‘will be fine if he wants to.’ Your names for me.”

He dropped his head. For a second, he was a boy. I almost forgave him. Almost.

“I thought…” he began.

“Don’t think,” I asked gently. “See. Look at me as I am when I’m no use to your storyline. And look at yourself: you didn’t discard me because of the drug. You used the drug to justify discarding me.”

We stood still, two actors expelled from our own scene. The clock hands on the wall turned slowly in the background, impassive. The world doesn’t stop for any intimate tragedy.

“Goodbye, Rafa,” I said at last.

“Until when?” he tried.

“Until you manage to love me without looking at yourself in the reflection. Or until I learn to exist without waiting for you to stay.”

I turned my back. I walked away. The city swallowed me with its mouth of lights. At the bend in the street, the air cut my chest like a zipper scratching fabric: dry, exact, irrevocable.

I didn’t look back. If love is abstinence, that night I was starting my withdrawal. And for the first time, it was mine. Only mine.

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🩸 Record 10.21 – I Live in Venice

After signing the termination and feeling my signature erase me from their story, I went to the same beach where, months before, I’d been with Rafael — the day I agreed to go into the sea despite my fear, and came out feeling reborn under his eyes. Now I was going back to say goodbye.

A boy very similar to Rafael was there. Far away, near the water, his body gilded by the bright light. Inaccessible like an apparition. He walked into the sea and kept getting farther and farther away.

And I suddenly understood that much of what I thought I’d lived had existed only inside my head.

Cruel game. I had been playing alone the whole time.

The heat started to wear me down. Sweat stuck my clothes to my skin, my hair puffed up, the makeup slowly smudged under my eyes. I saw myself as the character in *Death in Venice*: foolish, ridiculous, melting under the sun while the object of desire drifted farther and farther away.

The mask was sliding off, yes — but it wasn’t taking me with it.

I was still there, whole.

Loser of the game, but still alive.

Listening to the sea.

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