The time a girl spat in my mouth in Brazil

Rio de Janeiro, the historical capital of Brazil, is quite simply everything. It’s beautiful, poor, fun and dangerous. Surrounded by mountains, the glimpses of nature it provides are stunning; at the same time, it’s as dirty as any other city that I’ve been to. Its beautiful people are coloured in every shade of brown one could imagine, and every nook and cranny is oozing with either culture, music or signs of drug abuse. I loved my time in Rio. It was the beginning of a kind of African awakening that I went through in my twenties and it’s easily one of my favourite cities in the world. When it comes to Brazil, I could write for hours about so many nuanced and complicated things, but for now, I’m just going to tell you about the time a girl spat in my mouth there.

Unsurprisingly, it was a sex thing. During one of my many nights out in the local neighbourhood of Lapa, I met a young woman – let’s call her Zeila. Now, I would like to note that without a doubt I found Zeila beautiful, but what I was struck by, when she first caught my eye from across the outdoor bar we were at, was how unique she looked. Rio, while undoubtably black, is also a very ethnically mixed place, and I saw the truth of that when I looked at Zeila’s face. Zeila looked like she was from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. I presumed she was of some kind of African descent because of her dark caramel skin tone, but other than that I couldn’t place her at all, and I found that captivating.

I cut through the crowd of people that separated us and introduced myself. Her English, while far better than my Portuguese, objectively wasn’t great, but still we managed to communicate well enough that we were soon laughing and smiling together. We carried on talking, got drinks and danced together several times, and when the evening had long since become the night, Zeila turned to me, and with a mischievous sparkle in her hazel-green eyes, said, “I like you. Do you want to come with me?” I nodded enthusiastically and off we went.

Zeila took me to a nearby love hotel, which is just a hotel that charges hourly rates for its rooms, and as the name suggests, those rooms are typically furnished for the purpose of having sex. The walls of our room were painted pink and red, and the sheets and linens that clothed the large double bed in the room’s centre were a uniform magenta. It was nice. It was like being inside a giant cartoon vagina.

In any case, we quickly became physical. After some time, when we were at, what I will optimistically describe as the mid-point of our sex, something strange happened. Zeila, who was on top of me at the time, suddenly became very silent. I remember that silence with crystal clarity because it was accompanied with a noticeable change in the tone of the moment. I asked her if everything was okay, and in response she coughed once and then twice. I asked her a second time if she was okay, and without saying a word, she leaned forward and kissed me, right before emptying the contents of her mouth into mine.

To say she spat in my mouth, feels like a gross understatement. If that was all she had done, to be honest, I would have carried on unfazed. But what I had previously thought was her coughing, was in fact her hocking up everything either her nose or throat – possibly both – could muster. She did not spit in my mouth; she bombed my mouth with a giant mucus payload. I’m tempted to describe this part of my experience in further detail, but instead just take my word for it that it was gross.

Despite my surprise and disgust with what was happening, more than anything, I just found the whole situation kind of funny. I made a kind of moan-whining sound in an attempt to make it gently known that I wasn’t into this, and in response Zeila pulled away from me and clamped down both her hands over my mouth. I looked into her face and saw what I can only describe as pure sexual aggression.

At 6ft 2 and possessing a fairly wide build, I wasn’t really scared or intimidated by what was happening, but I did no longer find it funny. With one hand, I shoved Zeila off of me and onto the floor, and then got up to spit out her lukewarm glob of affection into the nearby sink. I was angry that she had tried to hold my mouth closed, and she was angry that I had shoved her off the bed. We both thought that we each had behaved perfectly reasonably and within the norms of modern-day sexual encounters, while the other had been at the very least rude. We argued shortly, before calling it quits and going our separate ways.

I considered writing this piece in a way that centred around the importance of consent or taking the time to at least touch on expectations before engaging in a sexual encounter, and while I do hope there is some kind of take away concerning those things, it would have been disingenuous to tell this story that way. The truth is, that for me, more than anything else, this encounter represents a really strange, kind of funny, reminder about just how weird life can be.