First Stop in the New World: dollar-a-dance hostess

This week MexicoReporter.com will be publishing a series of extracts from David Lida’s book “First Stop in the New World,” which has just come out in paperback. The book is divided between long chapters that deal with topics of great importance in Mexico City (crime, inequality, food, sex and even shopping), and shorter chapters that provide vignettes on certain sectors of the city.

Lida is an accomplished author and journalist who has lived in Mexico City for the last 15 years. He has written a number of books, which you can read about here on his website.

The following is a short chapter about a dollar-a-dance hostess known as a fichera in Mexico City.

Paty
The Villa Rica is a low-lit bar with amber lighting, wood-paneled walls and a jukebox that doesn’t have a single song recorded after 1980. It is an example of what are known as antros de ficheras, and I have never seen them outside of Mexico City.

A fichera is a woman who, despite what is usually a boiler-shaped body, dresses in a short skirt and a snug blouse, and sells her company to a male clientele. Most of a fichera’s clients are after nothing more than her sympathetic presence: a woman he can flirt with who will not rebuff his advances; a woman to whom he can recount the various misadventures and misunderstandings of his life; a woman with whom he can dance to the familiar ballads on the jukebox. Ficheras earn no salary, but are given tips as well as a percentage of the price of the drinks the customers order for them; hence, most have cast-iron constitutions and, as they say in Mexico City, toman como cosacos (drink like Cossacks).

Some ficheras are game for further adventures; if the customer pays an exit fee to the management, she will accompany him to a nearby hotel. Still, most customers prefer companionship; ficheras are closer to geishas than to prostitutes.

Many men like to visit ficheras when they are feeling low. Mexican males, the weight of machismo on their shoulders, are emotionally diffident and cannot express their feelings to the people with whom they are supposedly intimate; a fichera is a convenient receptacle for their sorrows and shames. There is a particular fichera at the Villa Rica named Paty that I like to visit, but not to recount my anguish. Like Sheherazade, Paty has a thousand and one stories, and listening to her invariably makes whatever troubles I may have recede in the rearview mirror.

Paty wears enormous eyelashes and thick makeup, changes her hair color on a regular basis, and flaunts her enormous breasts with low-cut blouses. About five feet tall, she tends to sport nine-inch heels. Her smile is wide, perpetual and, as far as I can tell, genuine. She has been working at the Villa Rica since 1985, her anno horribilus, when not only did the earthquake leave her and her family homeless, but her husband was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (a disease she refers to as “European”). Her salary as a waitress in the coffee shop at Sanborn’s wasn’t enough to sustain them and her two children, so she began her career as a fichera.

One of Paty’s regular clients is an ancient Spaniard who owns the Hotel Toledo down the street where the ficheras take their customers. He only likes to watch – Paty assures me hasn’t had an erection in the 20 years she has known him – so he takes her to swingers’ clubs, where men are not allowed to enter unaccompanied by women.

“But he makes me take off my clothes, and in those places if you’re naked, you have to let anyone do what they want. You can’t say no. Even when you have your clothes on, they still get handsy with you – with their fingers and everything.” She made a face like she had sipped spoiled milk. “Having sex is better because at least they’ve got a condom on. That guy’s fingers …” She uses the Mexican’s universal expletive for disgust: “Guácala. I couldn’t sleep that night.”
Another man, who always dressed in a suit and tie, would take her to a four-star hotel. Before entering, he would buy a bunch of roses on the corner. He would ask Paty to strip and eat the rose petals. “And that was that. He never got naked; he always kept his boxers on. He’d let me have whatever I wanted from the minibar and would pay me more than three times the going rate.”

After losing the 2006 presidential elections, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (who had resigned his post as mayor of Mexico City to launch his campaign) arranged mass demonstrations on Avenida Juárez and Paseo de la Reforma, the two biggest streets near the Villa Rica. Getting around that part of the city became close to impossible, and nearly all the bar’s customers disappeared. Paty, who usually earns about $45 a night, was coming home with less than ten. “The other night a guy came and bought me 40 tequilas,” she said one night while the protests were in full swing. Not knowing when the next time a big spender would arrive, she drank them all. “After all that, I vomited through my nose, but at least I made some money.”

Paty didn’t blame López Obrador for her hard luck. “It’s God’s will,” she said. “In the Bible you’ve got the years of the fat cows and the years of the skinny cows. Right now it’s skinny time. God squeezes us but he doesn’t strangle us.” She put her hand on my thigh. “You want to go to the Señorial steam baths? They remodeled them. You don’t know how beautiful they came out. We can go to a private room. They have cable TV with a porno channel.”