LICIT AND ILLICIT LOVE IN MODERNIZING SÃO PAULO
(or Mme Pomméry's Brothel)
Margareth Rago
Department of History
Universidade de Campinas (Unicamp)

INTRODUCTION: MME POMMÉRY'S ARRIVAL
Coming from the major European centers, Mme Pomméry arrived in São Paulo around 1912 and was immediately astonished by the tremendous primitiveness of the city's sexual life and bohemian world, in contrast to the deep modernization process in which the city had embarked. She soon noticed that many streets were being paved and remodeled, squares were being built, the Municipal Theater was open to the cultivated public, while new theaters, restaurants and cafés concerts started offering important services to their customers. However, she noted, the jeunesse dorée* remained without options for the construction of modern sexual references. As the character of Hilário Tácito's novel, published in 1920, said: drinking was restricted to domestic beverages, as beer, and the refined pleasure provided by champagne was unknown. So, she concluded, the city was lacking a luxury brothel: the Paradis Retrouvé.
By electing São Paulo's modernization process as subject, the novel written by engineer José Maria de Toledo Malta — Hilário Tácito's pseudonym — provides images that are simultaneously distant from and close to those worked on by historiography. They are distant because they talk about a world that no longer exists; about a time when prostitution played a major role in the city's social and cultural life, bringing together graduated professionals, intellectuals, artists, workers and bohemians belonging to various social classes, along with female singers, artists, ballet dancers or mere prostitutes; a time when the presence of luxury courtesans, most of French and Polish origin, allowed the association of that universe with the nation's entry into modern times.
Close, for these images also record the architectural changes implemented by Mayor Antonio Prado, inspired by the "Haussmanization" of Paris; they provide information about the city's population growth, from 69,934 in 1890 to 239,820 in 1900 and 579,033 in 1920; and, finally, they supply several evidences of deep changes in the moral practices of a society that, eager to seem modern, copied the latest fashion in terms of consumption and leisure in vogue in the civilized world, particularly in Paris. Close also because they work on a fiction developed from the very plausible meeting of a foreign prostitute and madam with a rich "colonel," eager to experience the sexual novelties of the modern world.
This novel provides accurate information about the new sensitivity under formation in the modernizing city. Between 1890 and 1930, São Paulo became the most industrialized state in Brazil. Along those decades, the free labor market was developed in the country; the industrial working class emerged, as a result of the massive European immigration; and a very combative labor movement was established, leaded by anarchist, anarcho-unionist and socialist groups. In few decades, this state surpassed Rio de Janeiro, the former federal capital, in terms of economic, political and cultural importance.

• The medical power and the project of social sanitation

Hilário Tácito's novel is dedicated to the Eugenics Society of São Paulo, which was founded in 1918 and, in compliance with its objectives of "eugenic control of the human species" and race improvement, was devoted "to study the regulation of prostitution." On the one hand, this latter information alludes to the doctors' concern with the establishment of a public policy regarding prostitution, considered as a "necessary evil"; on the other hand, it recalls the physicians caricatured along the novel as frequent customers of the brothel, where they amused themselves in company of beautiful "cocottes*."
It is almost certain that many doctors enjoyed the life of luxury prostitution in the city, as Dr. Mangancha or Dr. Narciso de Seixas Vidigal did. Both were buffo characters in the novel, who, ironically, used their scientific knowledge to justify alcohol consumption. However, outside there, they stated a very conservative and moralist discourse on the world of prostitution, specially at a time when their power over society was growing remarkably.
In reality, considering themselves to be responsible for the orientation of the State in the management of the population, as substitutes for the Church due to their scientific authority over the body and infirmities, physicians gained rapid admission to public institutions, State agencies, and to the country's social and political life. After all, coming from the powerful local elites composed of large landowners and businessmen who were often educated in Europe, physicians already participated, in a direct or indirect manner, in the political elites that governed the country.
Dr. Luiz Pereira Barreto, for instance, who was the first president of the Medicine and Surgery Society of São Paulo, established in 1895, acquired a degree in Medicine from the University of Brussels, in 1864, where he made contact with positivism, which he tried to disseminate in Brazil. He had been a distinguished member of the Republican Party and a representative in the State Constitutional Assembly of 1891, where he held the office of president. The Society's second president, Dr. Carlos Botelho, a graduate from the Medicine College of Rio de Janeiro, was son of the Count of Pinhal, owner of large coffee plantations and of the railroad linking the cities of Rio Claro and São Carlos. He was one of the founders of the Polyclinic — a medical office supported by the institution with a view to providing assistance to the poor people of the capital of the state —, and, during Jorge Tibiriçá's term as President of Republic (1904-1907), he was Secretary of Agriculture. The Society's third president, Dr. Augusto César de Miranda Azevedo, was a founding member of São Paulo Republican Party and was a state representative at the Constitutional Assembly in 1891. Thus, the medical and political elites' common interests contributed to increase the power of the State over the public and private life of the rest of the population. Many physicians had gradually begun to hold public and political offices, highly increasing the power of that professional category; at the same time they were replacing the power of priests in the management of private life, counseling both the rich and poor families.
Basically, the medical doctors started to define the modern codes of sexual behavior to be adopted by women and men, by the young, adults, old people and children, by the rich and poor, in a nation-wide scope. In this sense, they tried to abolish the old traditions and conceptions that informed the moral and sexual behavior of the population, classifying them as primitive, ignorant and irrational. Dr. Moncorvo Filho, for instance, who was in charge of the pediatric department of the Medicine College of Rio de Janeiro, was responsible for the creation of the Institute of Infant Protection of Rio de Janeiro in 1901, and, thereafter, by the many branches established all over the country: in Minas Gerais (1904), Pernambuco (1906), Maranhão (1911), and in Paraná and Rio Grande do Sul. In 1922, the Institute held the First Brazilian Congress of Infant Protection, supported by, among others, Dr. Moncorvo's disciple in São Paulo, Dr. Clemente Ferreira. The medical teams commanded by him throughout the country were engaged in works of consultation and counseling to poor mothers of the cities' outskirts, as well as in seminars of diffusion and even in films exhibited in Buenos Aires. This example provides evidence of how rapidly the medical class was articulating all over the country, implementing an overall project of social intervention that, if not totally fulfilled, obtained clearly evident results.
In Rio de Janeiro, many studies suggest that since the 1830s, with the creation of the Imperial Academy of Medicine and the Medicine College, physicians had begun to organize themselves corporately and started a scientific production devoted to diagnosing the problems afflicting the city, which was viewed fundamentally as a diseased space. Instituted as the competent authorities to manage the urban space, they have gradually worked out an extensive project of social sanitation; for its accomplishment they relied on the State's support, in its struggle to refrain the large landowners' huge powers that were firmly fixed in the private world.
Within the context of deodorization of the urban space; disease and epidemic control; elimination of swamps; water and sewage piping; and control of infant mortality, the legitimate and illegitimate sexualities — prostitution, homosexuality, masturbation and other "sexual perversions" — were considered as matters of exclusive medical domain.
In São Paulo, physicians and policemen had started to perceive the dangerous sexualities as presenting higher relevance since the end of the last century, with the arrival of huge masses of European immigrants at the port of Santos. Among them, "undesirables" of all sorts were landing: Italian and Spanish anarchists, French and Portuguese prostitutes and madams, Slavic pimps, volunteer or forced Polish "white slaves," destined to supply the attractive market of prostitution.
The efforts to prevent those menacing figures from even disembarking led many authorities to search for radical solutions, supported by the newspapers that were promoting a campaign against moral corruption. According to the newspaper O Tempo, of February 13, 1903,
"With the police's decision of capturing the pimps that infested the city of Santos, they are fleeing to this capital, where they will proceed with their demoralizing and disgraceful industry, which deserves a strong police repression."
Thus, beginning in 1907, the penalization of foreign pimps began to include deportation in the 1890 Penal Code, a procedure that, by the way, had already been put into practice.
From then on, several measures of sanitary control started being implemented by public authorities and were progressively centralized in the Sanitary Service of São Paulo, created in 1894. In the following year, some physicians founded the Medicine and Surgery Society, aimed at acting as counselor of the public powers in the formulation of policies for the sanitary control. In 1913, the Medicine College of São Paulo was founded to be a place where doctors would find a broader institutional space to discuss their ways of intervention in the city and to exercise their power over the public and private spheres in a more organized way. And, in 1918, the already mentioned Eugenics Society is established with a view to improve and purify the race.

The discomfort of public authorities and doctors

Whether participating or not in the French-like brothels spreading over the city — as the Palais de Cristal, the Hotel dos Estrangeiros (Foreigners' Hotel), the Maxim's —, the discomfort felt by those cultivated men in relation to a universe that was both unknown and attractive is visible. For, if by one hand, prostitution was considered as a "social cancer," on the other hand, no one denied the need of it, specially in a moment in history in which there was a widely spread notion that the male sexuality was more pressing than the female and needed, therefore, a geographic space allowing its liberation.
Thus, both police officials, involved in the social control and moralization of conduct, and sanitarists tried to warn against the evils of the world of prostitution. They "dissected" the prostitutes' bodies by producing scientific theses and conducting empirical investigations in which they codified women's behavior according with typological classifications copied from French physicians as Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet and the "father" of criminal anthropology, Cesare Lombroso. Their pseudo-scientific theories passed to serve as basis for the police practices of sexual vigilance, which most of the time targeted the poor prostitutes.
The impact of the city's modernization, the rapid social and economic growth and demographic expansion were dramatized in the worried discourses of police officials and other public authorities: prostitution, pandering, increase in criminality rates, vagrancy, drug use, gambling and infant abandonment were among the major issues, at the side of the invasion of immigrants and the social struggles.
Already in 1879, police officer Pádua Fleury complained about the need of creating a sanitary-police regulation in order to control prostitution, to meet the demands of the public opinion, and of turning pandering into a crime, for, at that time, the activity was not included in the Penal Code dated 1830. According to him:
"It is urgent to put an end to the insubordination of shameful speculators who affront our civilization with the exhibition of disgraceful women on public streets."
Along with pimps, the "scandalous" prostitutes were targets of police action for their offense against public morality. In 1896, police officer Bento Pereira Bueno took a position favorable to a more globalizing policy in relation to the higher visibility of prostitutes, instead of sporadic repressive measures, urging for the attribution of a stronger legal power to police authorities:
"Those houses, generally called hotels, clubs and 'maison meublées,' tend naturally toward streets and squares located in the city's downtown, harming the public order and decency; and the Police, in order to keep them under control, only possess occasional instruments which, besides being transitory in their effects, expose authorities to irreflective disavowals as occurred in September with Dr. Galeno Martins de Almeida, 3rd police officer."
In that same year, police officer Cândido Motta proposed the decree of the first Provisional Regulation of the "Polícia de Costumes" (Morals Police), aimed at the direct control of the sexual life in the central districts of the city where, in his opinion, the existence of prostitution hurt the sensitivity of passersby and inhabitants. Distributed to the 220 prostitutes who lived in the zone of low prostitution — on the former Beco dos Mosquitos, on the streets Líbero Badaró, Benjamin Constant, Senador Feijó, do Teatro, do Quartel, Esperança —, the regulation established:
"a) that hotels or brothels are forbidden, public women being authorized to live only in private houses, and never exceeding the number of three;
b) the windows of their houses should be furnished inside with double curtains and outside with shades;
c) it is not allowed to call or provoke passersby with gestures or words or to engage in conversations with them;
d) from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., during the months of April to September inclusive, and from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. in the other months, they should keep window shades closed, so that passersby will not be able to see the interior of their houses, being forbidden that they stay at the door of their houses;
e) when staying by the windows or going to the streets, they should dress decently, with clothes hiding completely their body and bosom;
f) when going to theaters and places of public entertainment, they should behave with reserve, being forbidden to engage in conversation with men in corridors or other places where they can be watched by the public."
The modernist writer Oswald de Andrade, a regular visitor to the bohemian world, seemed to be less disturbed with the presence of "merry women." According to him:
"Going home down Líbero Badaró street, after classes, I used to stop at the grocery of Ponzini's father. It was a popular and curious environment (...). It is known that before the enlargement of the street (...), it was a distinguished passageway in São Paulo's downtown, leading from the end of José Bonifácio street to São Bento square. In that central alley, harlots gathered and stayed, from the afternoon through the night, seminude and appealing by the windows and doors that were open to anyone. At Ponzini's I established relations with more than one prostitute, specially a fat and motherly madam named Olga, who used to sit with me at table."
Sharing this same opinion, that denied the State's right to invade private matters as sexuality, other writers, lawyers, police officers and journalists, chiefly abolitionists, attacked directly the imposition of the regulation, criticizing it in the newspapers and magazines of the time. In spite of this reaction and although the prostitution zone was not confined to a specific district as the advocates of the regulation wanted, the booking of prostitutes at the Morals Police Station turned into a common practice, specially after 1915. Furthermore, the Civil Police were later authorized to keep vigilance over the behavior of prostitutes "so that the quietness and peacefulness of the neighborhood won't be disturbed."

• The geography of pleasure

Prostitution concentrated in the central and commercial areas of the city, near bars, cafés concerts, theaters, cinemas and cabarets. Those places attracted the wealthy bourgeoisie, politicians, landowners, lawyers, students, workers and social outcasts of all sorts. There, they could find the new figures of prostitution, in special the "French" and "Polish" women, the real or imaginary ones, who, in the social imagery, appear as introducers of civility habits from the European world, as well as of the refinements of the erotic practices.
Initially concentrated on the streets listed in police officer Cândido Motta's First Regulation, prostitution spread over new commercial areas, as the city was being remodeled and acquiring a modernizing feature. Around 1913, the activity of prostitution in that commercial center was coming to an end, informs memorialist Paulo Duarte, and beginning to expand toward the streets Ipiranga, Timbira and Amador Bueno, while the low prostitution was concentrated on the streets Senador Feijó, Riachuelo, on the Riachuelo and São Francisco steeps, up till Piques, the meeting point of black prostitutes. But it was mainly in the Brás district that the "scum" of black meretrices gathered, as defined by the misogynous memorialists of the period.
Although the capitalist expansion had directly changed the location of outcast spaces, pushing them to the city's outskirts, there had been no regular planning, as the one implemented around 1940, with the confinement of prostitution during the administrative term of the city's interventor, Ademar de Barros. On that occasion, the illicit loves were confined to the Bom Retiro district, near the railroad stations Sorocabana and Santos-Jundiaí.
Evidently, many luxurious prostitutes were far more lucky, as the courtesans that Jorge Americano found in the city around 1908. Many of them became "rabos de saia", that is, exclusive lovers of wealthy "colonels" — as the ignorant and poorly civilized landowners were known — who tried to diversify their social participation in the urban world.
Many of them installed their favorite prostitute in apartments located in the residential district of Higienópolis or in sophisticated mansions of Paulista avenue.
"Such was, for instance, the one named Margarida, for whom a distinguished gentleman had built a mansion house on Veridiana street and, in order to praise her name, ordered daisies ('margaridas') sculptured in mortar to ornate the windows."
Others financed the construction of luxury brothels, as Colonel Gouveia did for Mme Pomméry's Paradis Retrouvé. None of them, however, did without the company of other young prostitutes, preferably foreigners, known as "cocottes," with whom they liked to circulate in the bar of the Municipal Theater, built in 1911, or by the elegant pastries and restaurants of the city's downtown, in a clear display of virility and power.
Less privileged were those women living in private houses, either rented or of their own, where they received their customers and friends, without the commitment of conjugal fidelity implied in the aforementioned relationship. However, they had the advantage of being free from the ties of dependence on a madam, that were so common to the prostitutes living in the famous "casas alegres" (merry boarding houses) and "casas de tolerância" (houses of tolerance). This was the situation, for instance, of
"a certain Mrs. Glória who, about 1910, used to drive her coupé around there. Some years later, she sold her house on Angélica avenue in an auction, and the families went there discreetly, as if they were doing something evil, to see the previous exhibition of objects, curious to feel the smell of sin."
Many of those meretrices were artists, ballet dancers or singers, linked to musical groups that worked at cafés concerts, cabarets and "merry boarding houses," where intellectuals, "colonels," artists, lawyers, journalists and other night-lovers met. Those night clubs used to adopt Parisian names, presenting themselves explicitly as branches of large erotic establishments that were well known in France: the Palais Elegant, owned by the Colibri sisters; the Pension Royale; the Palais Cristal, of Mme Sanchez, that was portrayed by Hilário Tácito as Paradis Retrouvé; the Hotel Paris; or the Maxim's, Salvadora Guerreiro's brothel, translated into novel by Armando Caiuby in O Mistério do Cabaré.
One of the most famous and elegant night establishments of São Paulo was the Hotel dos Estrangeiros, that lodged, in fiction, Mme Pomméry on her arrival in Brazil. Having São Paulo high society as habitué, it was celebrated in a poem by Moacyr de Toledo Pisa, "Tradições," written in 1923, a little before the serious incident that touched deeply the city at the time: the murder of his lover, the prostitute Nenê Romano, immediately followed by his suicide.

• The prostitute's power

The incident, mourned by many friends of the lawyer and poet, happened in the afternoon of October 25, 1923, when, from inside the car that strolled by the aristocratic Angélica avenue, came the noise of the shots fired by him at the young prostitute, aged 23, and later at himself.
In reality, the story reached dimensions of a scandal much more due to the fact that it involved the suicide of a gifted young man belonging to São Paulo elite than for the murder of the foreign prostitute. It had been a long time since physicians and public authorities started to appoint the presence of foreign prostitutes, supposedly more experienced and menacing, as a moral danger to the native youth. According to the doctors, they were responsible for the increasing moral dissolution, for the feminization and weakening of the race and for the loss of old moral references. Dr. Orlando Vairo, in his studies on "The Elegant Vices, Particularly in São Paulo" ("Os Vícios Elegantes Particularmente em São Paulo"), published in 1926, warned against the increase in drug consumption among the "jeunesse dorée," regular customers of "pensionnières" and "cabarets" where the wicked prostitutes introduced them to the world of vices.
Not even Nenê Romano was spared from the violent adjectives that attributed Pisa's crime to her capacity for moral perversion and disguised wickedness. The seductive image of "femme fatale" was frequently invoked to designate the beautiful yet wicked prostitutes who were responsible for male foolishness. Thus, the city newspapers reported the incident as undoubtedly the insatiable courtesan's fault:
"Moacyr Pisa — the brilliant, daring, brave writer that the whole state of São Paulo admired — killed himself. He committed suicide after having killed Nenê Romano, the femme fatale who had an angel face and a wicked soul." (O Combate, October 26, 1923.)
Remembering the episode many decades later, a journalist reinforced that image of the powerful super-sexualized woman, endowed with terrible sexual powers. On August 26, 1979, the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo published an article signed by Paulo José da Costa Jr. in which he stated:
"She was, to say the least, a fatal woman (...) with eyes that were both sweet and dreadful, melancholic and deep. This was her major beauty. At the bohemian circles of the time, she was known as 'the woman with a swan neck.' (...) At last, a Marguerite Gauthier of both Italian and São Paulo origin, who led many men to madness and was the favorite of Senator Rodrigues Alves."
On the one hand, a victim of misfortune; on the other hand, powerful heart devourer; the prostitute was depicted according to the parameters collected from the Romanticism and fin-de-siècle artistic imagery, a time when, along with the innocent, poor and irrational girl, it was popular the figure of the "spider woman," the Salomé who was responsible for the destruction of man and his work, the civilization . Fragile or powerful, the prostitute was represented as a figure of irrationality, a symbol of the predominance of the ferocious instinct over the peaceful reason, thus pernicious to society's development.
Worried about the moralization of social conduct, about the preservation of family and marriage, physicians elected prostitution as a ghost menacing the balance of social values. The increasing attention they started to devote, to the illicit loves since mid-19th century, as well as their concern about the need of defining rigorously the symbolic frontiers between the permitted and forbidden sexual practices, between the figures of the "honest woman" and the "born-degenerate," according to the Lombrosian terminology, attest less to an interest in improving the living conditions of exploited meretrices, and more to a concern with the establishment of modern codes of sexuality.
It is in this sense that one may assert that physicians' interest in the world of prostitution resulted in the creation of a ghost able to oppose the female entry into the urban space or to organize the way in which such entry could be gained. One must remember that at least up till the 1980s in Brazil, the figure of the "public woman" referred to the image of a prostitute and not to a politically active woman manager, who, today, is elected by political parties. And, from the very beginning of feminism in the country, one of the liberal and libertarian feminists' major concerns was to avoid the eventual confusions that could be established between the fight for women's emancipation and the "sexual freedom" of "mulheres alegres" (merry women)."
Therefore, the medical and police design of the prostitute's identity contributed to the internalization of the ideal model of good wife and mother. To smoke or to whistle in public, to wear colorful or low-neckline dress, to go to bars and restaurants without a male company, to participate in social movements passed to be viewed as reproachable attitudes for "honest women," being thus included among the signs of deviant conduct.

to be continued in issue 2