Eleven Minutes

"I don't understand why I want to step into this slime."

"One thousand francs."

"No, that's not the reason."

Terence seemed pleased with this response.

"I've asked myself the same thing. The Marquis de Sade said that the most important experiences a man can have are those that take him to the very limit; that is the only way we learn, because it requires all our courage. When a boss humiliates an employee, or a man humiliates his wife, he is merely being cowardly or taking his revenge on life, they are people who have never dared to look into the depths of their soul, never attempted to know the origin of that desire to unleash the wild beast, or to understand that sex, pain and love are all extreme experiences.

"Only those who know those frontiers know life; everything else is just passing the time, repeating the same tasks, growing old and dying without ever having discovered what we are doing here."

In the street again, in the cold again, and again that desire to walk. The man was wrong, it wasn't necessary to know your own demons in order to find God. She passed a group of students coming out of a bar; they were all happy and slightly tipsy, they were all good-looking and bursting with health; soon they would finish university and start what people call "real life." Work, marriage, children, television, bitterness, old age, the sense of having lost many things, frustrations, illness, disability, dependence on others, loneliness, death.

What was happening? She too was looking for the peace in which to live her "real life"; the time spent in Switzerland, doing something she had never dreamed of doing, was just a difficult phase, the kind of thing everyone goes through at some time or another. During this difficult phase, she frequented the Copacabana, went with men for money, played the Innocent Girl, the Femme Fatale and the Understanding Mother, depending on the client. But it was just a job, which she did with total professionalism--for the sake of the tips--and minimum interest--for fear she might get used to it. She had spent the last nine months controlling the world around her, and shortly before she was due to go back to her own country, she was finding that she was capable of loving without demanding anything in return and of suffering for no reason. It was as if life had chosen this strange, sordid way of teaching her something about her own mysteries, her light and her darkness.

From Maria's diary on the night following her first meeting with Terence:

He quoted the Marquis de Sade, of whom I know nothing, apart from the word "sadism." It's true that we only know each other when we come up against our own limits, but it's wrong too, because it isn't necessary to know everything about ourselves; human beings weren't made solely to go in search of wisdom, but also to plough the land, wait for rain, plant the wheat, harvest the grain, make the bread.

I am two women: one wants to have all the joy, passion and adventure that life can give me. The other wants to be a slave to routine, to family life, to the things that can be planned and achieved. I'm a housewife and a prostitute, both of us living in the same body and doing battle with each other.

The meeting of these two women is a game with serious risks. A divine dance. When we meet, we are two divine energies, two universes colliding. If the meeting is not carried out with due reverence, one universe destroys the other.

She was back in Ralf Hart's living room, with the fire, the bottle of wine, the two of them sitting on the floor, and everything she had experienced the previous night with the English executive just a dream or a nightmare--depending on how she was feeling. Now she was searching once more for her reason for living, or, rather, for the kind of utter surrender by which a person offers his or her heart and asks for nothing in return.

She had grown a lot while waiting for this moment. She had finally discovered that real love has nothing to do with what she imagined, that is, with a chain of events provoked by the energy engendered by love--courtship, engagement, marriage, children, waiting, cooking, the amusement park on Sundays, more waiting, getting old together, an end to the waiting, and then, in its place, comes your husband's retirement, illnesses, the feeling that it is far too late to live out your dream together.

She looked at the man to whom she had decided to give herself, and to whom she had resolved never to reveal her feelings, because what she was feeling now was far from taking any definite form, not even physical form. He seemed more at ease, as if he were embarking on an interesting period of his life. He was smiling and telling her about his recent visit to Munich to meet an important museum director.

"He asked if the painting about the faces of Geneva was ready yet. I said I had just met one of the principal people I would like to paint, a woman who was full of light. But I don't want to talk about me, I want to embrace you. I desire you."

Desire. Desire? Desire! That was the point of departure this evening, because it was something she knew extremely well!

For example, you awaken desire by not immediately handing over the object of that desire.

"All right, then, desire me. That's what we're doing right now. You are less than a yard away from me, you went to a nightclub, paid for my services, and you know you have the right to touch me. But you don't dare. Look at me. Look at me and imagine that perhaps I don't want you to look at me. Imagine what's hidden beneath my clothes."

She always wore black to work, and she couldn't understand why the other girls at the Copacabana tried to look provocative in their low-cut dresses and garish colors. It seemed to her that it was more exciting for a man if she dressed like any other woman he might meet at the office, on the train or in the house of one of his wife's friends.

Ralf looked at her. Maria felt him undressing her and she enjoyed being desired like that--with no contact, as if she were in a restaurant or standing in a queue at the cinema.

"We're in a train station," Maria went on. "I'm standing next to you, waiting for a train, but you don't know me. My eyes meet yours, by chance, and I don't look away. You don't know what I'm trying to say, because, although you're an intelligent man, capable of seeing the 'light' in other people, you are not sensitive enough to see what that light is illuminating."

She had learned about "theater." She had wanted to forget the face of that English executive as quickly as possible, but there he was, guiding her imagination.

"My eyes are fixed on yours, and I might be wondering to myself: 'Do I know him from somewhere?' Or I might just be distracted. Or I might be afraid of appearing unfriendly; perhaps you do know me, and so I give you the benefit of the doubt for a few seconds, until it becomes clear either that you really do know me or that it's a case of mistaken identity.

"But I might also be wanting the simplest thing in the world: to find a man. I might be trying to escape an unhappy love affair. I might be hoping to avenge myself for a recent betrayal and have gone to the train station looking for a stranger. I might want to be your prostitute just for one night, to do something different in my otherwise boring life. I might even be a real prostitute on the look-out for work."

A brief silence; Maria had grown distracted. She was back in that hotel room, remembering the humiliation--"yellow," "red," pain and a great deal of pleasure. That encounter had stirred her soul in a way she did not like at all.

Ralf noticed and tried to take her back to the train station.

"In this meeting, do you desire me too?"

"I don't know. We don't talk. You don't know."

She grows distracted again. The "theater" idea is proving really very helpful; it draws out the real person and drives away the many false people who live inside us.