Eleven Minutes

"The fact is that I don't look away, and you don't know what to do. Should you approach? Will you be rejected? Will I call the guard? Or invite you for a coffee perhaps?"

"I'm on my way back from Munich," Ralf Hart said, and his voice sounds different, as if they really were meeting for the first time. "I'm thinking about a collection of paintings on the many personalities of sex, the many masks that people wear in order never to experience a

real encounter."

He knew about the "theater." Milan had said that he too was a "special client." An alarm bell rang, but she needed time to think.

"The director of the museum said to me: What are you going to base your work on? I said: On women who feel free enough to earn their living making love. He said: That won't work; we call such women 'prostitutes.' I said: Fine, they are prostitutes; I'm going to study their history and create something more intellectual, more to the taste of the families who visit your museum. It's all a question of culture, you see. Of finding a palatable way of presenting something that is otherwise very hard to take.

"The director insisted: But sex is no longer a taboo. It's been so over-exploited that it's difficult to produce any new work on the subject. I said: Do you know where sexual desire comes from? From our instinct, said the director. Yes, I said, from our instinct, but everyone knows that. How can you make a beautiful exhibition if all we are talking about is science? I want to talk about how man explains that attraction, the way, let's say, a philosopher would explain it. The director asked me to give him an example. I said that if, when I caught the train back home, a woman looked at me, I would go over and speak to her; I would say that, since we were strangers, we had the freedom to do anything we wanted, to live out all our fantasies, and then go home to our wife or husband and never meet again. And then, in the train station, I see you."

"Your story is so interesting it's in danger of killing desire."

Ralf Hart laughed and agreed. They had finished one bottle of wine and he went into the kitchen to fetch another; and she sat staring into the fire, knowing what the next step would be, but, at the same time, savoring the cozy atmosphere, forgetting about the English executive, and regaining that sense of surrender.

Ralf filled their two glasses, and Maria said:

"Just out of curiosity, how would you end that story with the museum director?"

"Since I was in the company of an intellectual, I would quote from Plato. According to him, at the beginning of creation, men and women were not as they are now; there was just one being, who was rather short, with a body and a neck, but his head had two faces, looking in different directions. It was as if two creatures had been glued back to back, with two sets of sex organs, four legs and four arms.

"The Greek gods, however, were jealous, because this creature with four arms could work harder; with its two faces, it was always vigilant and could not be taken by surprise; and its four legs meant that it could stand or walk for long periods at a time without tiring. Even more dangerous was the fact that the creature had two different sets of sex organs and so needed no one else in order to continue reproducing.

"Zeus, the supreme lord of Olympus, said: 'I have a plan to make these mortals lose some of their strength.'

"And he cut the creature in two with a lightning bolt, thus creating man and woman. This greatly increased the population of the world, and, at the same time, disoriented and weakened its inhabitants, because now they had to search for their lost half and embrace it and, in that embrace, regain their former strength, their ability to avoid betrayal and the stamina to walk for long periods of time and to withstand hard work. That embrace in which the two bodies re-fuse to become one again is what we call sex."

"Is that a true story?"

"According to the Greek philosopher, Plato, yes."

Maria was gazing at him, fascinated, and the experience of the previous night had vanished completely. She saw that the man before her was full of the same "light" that he had seen in her, entirely involved in telling her that strange story, his eyes alight now not with desire but with joy.

"Can I ask you a favor?"

Ralf said she could ask anything she wanted.

"Is it possible to know why, after the gods had split the four-legged creature in two, some of them decided that the embrace could be merely a thing, just another business transaction, which instead of increasing people's energy, diminished it?"

"You mean prostitution?"

"Yes. Could you find out if, in the beginning, sex was something sacred?"

"If you like," replied Ralf, "although it's not something I've ever thought about, nor, as far as I know, has anyone else. Perhaps there isn't any literature on the subject."

Maria could stand the pressure no longer:

"Has it ever occurred to you that women, in particular, prostitutes, are capable of love?"

"Yes, it has. It occurred to me on that first day, when we were sitting in the cafe and I saw your light. Then, when I decided to offer you a cup of coffee, I chose to believe in everything, even in the possibility of you returning me to the world I left a long, long time ago."

There was no going back now. Maria, the teacher, needed to rush to her own aid, otherwise she would kiss him, embrace him and ask him never to leave her.

"Let's go back to the train station," she said. "Or, rather, let's come back to this room, to the day when we sat here together for the first time and you recognized that I existed and gave me a gift. That was your first attempt to enter my soul, and you weren't sure whether or not you were welcome. But, as you say in your story, human beings were once divided and now seek the embrace that will reunite them. That is our instinct. But it is also our reason for putting up with all the difficulties we meet in that search.

"I want you to look at me, but I want you to take care that I don't notice. Initial desire is important because it is hidden, forbidden, not permitted. You don't know whether you are looking at your lost half or not; she doesn't know either, but something is drawing you together, and you must believe that it is true you are each other's 'other half.'"

Where am I getting all this? I'm drawing it up from the bottom of my heart, because this is how I always wanted it to be. I'm drawing up these dreams from my own dream as a woman.