Rute Bianca - Quem?

2025, Portugal, Portuguese, Rute Bianca,

Original title: "Quem?" (Who?) by Rute Bianca.

Rute Bianca’s autobiography Quem? arrives in the reader’s hands like a confession whispered after a lifetime of storms. It is not a book that hides behind stylistic flourishes or careful literary embroidery. Instead, Bianca writes with the urgency of someone who has lived intensely and who now feels compelled to lay her story bare. She writes as a woman shaped by resistance, using that word with the weight of personal history. Resistance marks every chapter of her life, because for her growing up was never simply growing up. It was surviving a cultural, religious, and social dictatorship that tolerated no deviation from a rigid gender model. She calls herself a child of April, a reference to the Portuguese revolution that promised freedom, although many of those promises never reached the lives of people like her.

 

In Quem? Bianca recounts the adventures and misadventures that made her who she is, never pretending that the path was tidy or dignified. She admits that her life may appeal to some and repel others, but she insists that it is hers. She writes from the perspective of someone who tried to be happy and, in many moments, succeeded with a joyful intensity that still echoes through her memories. Yet she also writes as a woman aging in a world that once felt endlessly vibrant. The contrast between her youth, full of motion and appetite, and her present life, shaped by routine and quiet, fills her with a bittersweet understanding. She goes to the sea, walks, shops for groceries, takes care of her mother, reads, and savors the awareness that life is precious precisely because it ends. She knows she cannot be young in this era, nor would she want to be. Her youth belonged to a different world, one she remembers as warmer and richer in human feeling.

 

Bianca’s honesty is unvarnished, even when she describes subjects that many memoirists would soften. She speaks openly about her sexuality, about the period of her life when she lived with a ferocious hunger for sensual experience, and about the twenty years when her body and desires worked together with a kind of blazing freedom. She recalls the moment when, searching for spiritual grounding in Fátima, she felt compelled to abandon her old habits. This decision created an abrupt rupture. She jokes about declaring sexual bankruptcy, but behind the humor lies a deeper truth about human change. She felt that prayer demanded a kind of internal cleanliness she could not reconcile with the life she had been leading. Her body, aging faster than she expected, pushed her further along that path. The sensual fire dimmed, and she learned to find comfort in faith, in stillness, and in the feeling of having survived the poisons she once used as escape routes.

 

Her physical journey is described with a candor that is sometimes painful. She does not hide the suffering caused by medical interventions, botched procedures, and the silicone that once gave her the curves she longed for but which slowly turned against her. Many young trans women of her generation walked the same dangerous road. Bianca describes it with the raw clarity of hindsight, remembering how desperately she wanted a body that matched her soul and how few safe options existed. She injected what she could afford, trusted who she could find, and lived with the consequences. Today, parts of her body bear the scars of those decisions, sometimes literally decaying from the inside. Yet she refuses to condemn her younger self. At that time, she believed it was the only path to the femininity she envisioned, and she still understands why she chose it. 

 

There is humor in her voice, even when she speaks of tragedies. She laughs at her past excesses, at the size of her breasts, at the ridiculous comments of men, at her own reckless courage. She laughs because laughing has always helped her carry the weight of life. When she tells the story of being celebrated on television, of being adored, of feeling desired, she also remembers the exhaustion that followed the death of her beloved Zé. She describes drifting through those years, detached, tempted again by alcohol and cocaine, craving proof that she was still wanted. Then came her final turning point, her return to Fátima, her decision to rebuild herself spiritually, her long walk away from addiction. She calls it a new existence, one in which the doors of earthly pleasure closed but other doors opened.

 

Her daily life now might seem quiet in comparison to her past, but the intensity has not vanished. It has simply transformed. She tends to her aging body with humor and tenderness, hides her breasts in tight sports bras to avoid unwanted attention, wears stylish clothes because they make her happy, and proudly displays the tattoos that allow her to bare her arms again after many years. She walks along the Douro with music in her ears, sometimes dancing in disguise, admiring the river, the bridges, and the Rabelo boats that glide through the water. She has lived through addiction, illness, loss, silicone poisoning, and emotional upheaval, yet she still delights in the simple fact of being alive. Even her two degenerative diseases cannot destroy her gratitude. She knows that she could have died many times before and takes each day as a victory.

 

In Quem? Bianca never attempts to present herself as a saint or a martyr. She contradicts herself, laughs at her contradictions, and admits that she is a creature of moods. She writes exactly as she has lived, with complexity, intensity, and a kind of spiritual restlessness. What remains constant is her pride in having become the woman she wanted to be. She did not simply accept her destiny. She carved herself out of the chaos, paying a high price, but receiving moments of beauty and freedom that she would not trade for anything. She insists that she is just one human being among billions, but her story resonates because she commits to telling it without embellishment. She is not interested in sounding noble. She is interested in sounding true.

 

At its core, Quem? is a book about becoming, surviving, and learning to love oneself after the world has judged, rejected, exoticized, or misunderstood. It is the testimony of someone who claims her femininity, her mistakes, her joys, and her faith with the same unrestrained honesty. Bianca invites the reader into a life that was not easy, but was unquestionably lived. By the end of the book, one realizes that the question Quem? does not seek an answer from others. Instead, it reveals a woman who has already answered it for herself.

Available via livrariasnob.pt

Photos via rutebianca.blogspot.com