Eleven Minutes

But life was teaching her--very fast--that only the strong survive. To be strong, she must be the best, there's no alternative.

From Maria's diary a week later:

I'm not a body with a soul, I'm a soul that has a visible part called the body. All this week, contrary to what one might expect, I have been more conscious of the presence of this soul than usual. It didn't say anything to me, didn't criticize me or feel sorry for me: it merely watched me.

Today, I realized why this was happening: it's been such a long time since I thought about love or anything called love. It seems to be running away from me, as if it wasn't important any more and didn't feel welcome. But if I don't think about love, I will be nothing.

When I went back to the Copacabana the second night, I was treated with much more respect--apparently, a lot of girls do it for one night, but can't bear to go on. Anyone who does, becomes a kind of ally, a colleague, because she can understand the difficulties and the reasons or, rather, the absence of reasons for having chosen this kind of life.

They all dream of someone who will come along and see in them a real woman--companion, lover, friend. But they all know, from the very first moment of each new encounter, that this simply isn't going to happen.

I need to write about love. I need to think and think and write and write about love--otherwise, my soul won't survive.

However important Maria thought love was, she did not forget the advice she was given on her first night and did her best to confine love to the pages of her diary. Apart from that, she tried desperately to be the best, to earn a lot of money in as short a time as possible, to think very little and to find a good reason for doing what she was doing.

That was the most difficult part: what was the real reason?

She was doing it because she needed to. This wasn't quite true--everyone needs to earn money, but not everyone chooses to live on the margins of society. She was doing it because she wanted to experience something new. No, that wasn't true either; the world was full of new experiences--like skiing or going sailing on Lake Geneva, for example--but she had never been interested. She was doing it because she had nothing to lose, because her life was one of constant, day-to-day frustration.

No, none of these answers was true, so it was best to forget all about it and simply deal with whatever lay along her particular path. She had a lot in common with the other prostitutes, and with all the other women she had known in her life, whose greatest dream was to get married and have a secure life. Those who didn't think like this either had a husband (almost a third of her colleagues were married) or were recently divorced. Because of that, and in order to understand herself, she tried--as tactfully as possible--to understand why her colleagues had chosen this profession.

She heard nothing new, but she made a list of their responses. They said they had to help out their husband (Wasn't he jealous? What if one of her husband's friends came to the club one night? But Maria didn't dare to ask these questions), that they wanted to buy a house for their mother (her own excuse, apparently so noble, and the most common one), to earn enough money for their fare home (Colombians, Thais, Peruvians, Brazilians all loved this reason, even though they had earned enough money several times over and had immediately spent it, afraid to realize their dream), to have fun (this didn't really tally with the atmosphere in the club, and always rang false), they couldn't find any other kind of work (this wasn't a good reason either, Switzerland was full of jobs for cleaners, drivers and cooks).

None of them came up with any valid reason, and so she stopped trying to explain her particular Universe.

She saw that the owner, Milan, was quite right: no one ever again offered her a thousand Swiss francs for the privilege of spending a few hours with her. On the other hand, no one ever complained when she asked for three hundred and fifty francs, as if they already knew or only asked in order to humiliate her, or wanted to avoid any unpleasant surprises.

One of the girls said:

"Prostitution isn't like other businesses: beginners earn more and the more experienced earn less. Always pretend you're a beginner."

Maria still didn't know who the "special clients" were; they had only been mentioned on the first night and no one ever spoke of them. Gradually, she picked up the most important tricks of the trade, like never asking personal questions, smiling a lot and talking as little as possible, never arranging to meet anyone outside the club. The most important piece of advice, however, came from a Filipino woman called Nyah:

"When your client comes, you must always groan as if you were having an orgasm too. That guarantees customer loyalty."

"But why? They're just paying for their own satisfaction."

"No, that's where you're wrong. A man doesn't prove he's a man by getting an erection. He's only a real man if he can pleasure a woman. And if he can pleasure a prostitute, he'll think he's the best lover on the block."

And so six months passed: Maria learned all the necessary lessons, for example, how the Copacabana worked. Since it was one of the most expensive places on Rue de Berne, the clientele was largely made up of executives, who had permission to get home late because they were out "having supper with clients," but these "suppers" could never last longer than eleven o'clock at night. Most of the prostitutes who worked there were aged between eighteen and twenty-two and they stayed, on average, for two years, when they would be replaced by newer recruits. They then moved to the Neon, then to the Xenium, and the price went down as the woman's age went up, and the hours of work grew fewer and fewer. They almost all ended up in the Tropical Extasy, who accepted women over thirty; but once they were there, they could only just earn enough to pay for their lunch and their rent by going with one or two students a day (the average fee per client was just about enough to buy a bottle of cheap wine).

She went to bed with many men. She didn't care how old they were or how they were dressed, but whether she said yes or no depended on how they smelled. She had nothing against cigarettes, but she hated cheap aftershave or those who didn't wash or whose clothes stank of booze. The Copacabana was a quiet place, and Switzerland was possibly the best country in the world in which to work as a prostitute, as long as you had a residence permit and a work permit, kept all your papers in order and paid your social security; Milan was always saying that he didn't want his children to see his name in the tabloid newspapers, and so he was as strict as a policeman when it came to keeping an eye on his "employees."

Once you had got past the barrier of the first or second night, it was a profession much like any other, in which you worked hard, fought off the competition, tried to maintain standards, put in the necessary hours, got a bit stressed out, complained about your workload, and rested on Sundays. Most of the prostitutes had some kind of religious faith, and attended their respective churches and masses, said their prayers and had their encounters with God.

Maria, however, was struggling in the pages of her diary not to lose her soul. She discovered, to her surprise, that one in every five clients didn't want her in order to have sex, but simply to talk a little. They paid for the bar tab and the hotel room, and when the moment came for them both to take off their clothes, the man would say, no, that won't be ne

cessary. They wanted to talk about the pressures of work, about their unfaithful wife, about how lonely they felt, how they had no one to talk to (something she knew about all too well).

At first, she found this very odd. Then, one night, she went to the hotel with an arrogant Frenchman, a headhunter for top executive jobs (he told her this as if he were telling her the most fascinating thing in the world), and this is what he said:

"Do you know who the loneliest person in the world is? The executive with a successful career, earning an enormous salary, trusted by those above and below him, with a family to go on holiday with and children whom he helps out with their homework, but who is then approached by someone like me and asked the following question: 'How would you like to change your job and earn twice as much?'"

"The executive, who has every reason to feel wanted and happy, becomes the most miserable creature on the planet. Why? Because he has no one to talk to. He is tempted to accept my offer, but he can't talk about it to his work colleagues because they would do everything they could to persuade him to stay. He can't talk about it to his wife, who has been his companion in his rise up the ladder of success and understands a great deal about security, but nothing about taking risks. He can't talk to anyone about it and there he is confronted by the biggest decision of his life. Can you imagine how that man feels?"

No, that man wasn't the loneliest person in the world. Maria knew the loneliest person on the face of this Earth: herself. Nevertheless, she agreed with her client, hoping to get a big tip, which she did. But his words made her realize that she needed to find some way of freeing her clients from the enormous pressure they all seemed to be under; this meant both improving the quality of her services and the chance of earning some extra money.

When she realized that releasing tension in the soul could be as lucrative as releasing tension in the body, if not more lucrative, she started going to the library again. She began asking for books about marital problems, psychology and politics; the librarian was delighted to see that the young woman of whom she had grown so fond had stopped thinking about sex and was now concentrating on more important matters. Maria became a regular reader of newspapers, especially, where possible, the financial pages, because the majority of her clients were business executives. She sought out self-help books, because her clients nearly all asked for her advice. She read studies of the human emotions, because all her clients were in some kind of emotional pain. Maria was a respectable, rather unusual prostitute, and after six months, she had acquired a large, faithful, very select clientele, thus arousing the envy and jealousy, but also the admiration, of her colleagues.