Eleven Minutes

And she felt alone.

And she thought: "I'm going to set a trap. The next time the bird appears, he will never leave again."

The bird, who was also in love, returned the following day, fell into the trap and was put in a cage.

She looked at the bird every day. There he was, the object of her passion, and she showed him to her friends, who said: "Now you have everything you could possibly want." However, a strange transformation began to take place: now that she had the bird and no longer needed to woo him, she began to lose interest. The bird, unable to fly and express the true meaning of his life, began to waste away and his feathers to lose their gloss; he grew ugly; and the woman no longer paid him any attention, except by feeding him and cleaning out his cage.

One day, the bird died. The woman felt terribly sad and spent all her time thinking about him. But she did not remember the cage, she thought only of the day when she had seen him for the first time, flying contentedly amongst the clouds.

If she had looked more deeply into herself, she would have realized that what had thrilled her about the bird was his freedom, the energy of his wings in motion, not his physical body.

Without the bird, her life too lost all meaning, and Death came knocking at her door. "Why have you come?" she asked Death. "So that you can fly once more with him across the sky," Death replied. "If you had allowed him to come and go, you would have loved and admired him even more; alas, you now need me in order to find him again."

She started the day by doing something she had rehearsed over and over during all these past months: she went into a travel agent's and bought a ticket to Brazil for the date she had marked on her calendar, in two weeks' time.

From then on, Geneva would be the face of a man she loved and who had loved her. Rue de Berne would just be a name, an homage to Switzerland's capital city. She would remember her room, the lake, the French language, the crazy things a twenty-three-year-old woman (it had been her birthday the night before) is capable of--until she realizes there is a limit.

She would not cage the bird, nor would she suggest he go with her to Brazil; he was the only truly pure thing that had happened to her. A bird like that must fly free and feed on nostalgia for the time when he flew alongside someone else. And she too was a bird; having Ralf Hart by her side would mean remembering forever her days at the Copacabana. And that was her past, not her future.

She decided to say "goodbye" just once, when the moment came for her to leave, rather than have to suffer every time she thought: "Soon I won't be here anymore." So she played a trick on her heart and, that morning, she walked around Geneva as if she had always known those streets, that hill, the road to Santiago, the Montblanc bridge, the bars she used to go to. She watched the seagulls flying over the river, the market traders taking down their stalls, people leaving their offices to go to lunch, noticed the color and taste of the apple she was eating, the planes landing in the distance, the rainbow in the column of water rising up from the middle of the lake, the shy, concealed joy of passersby, the looks she got, some full of desire, some expressionless. She had lived for nearly a year in a small town, like so many other small towns in the world, and if it hadn't been for the architecture peculiar to the place and the excessive number of banks, it could have been the interior of Brazil. There was a fair. There was a market. There were housewives haggling over prices. There were students who had skipped a class at school, on the excuse perhaps that their mother or their father was ill, and who were now strolling by the river, exchanging kisses. There were people who felt at home and people who felt foreign. There were tabloid newspapers full of scandals and respectable magazines for businessmen, who, however, were only ever to be seen reading the scandal sheets.

She went to the library to return the manual on farm management. She hadn't understood a word of it, but, at times when she felt she had lost control of herself and of her destiny, the book had served as a reminder of her objective in life. It had been a silent companion, with its plain yellow cover, its series of graphs, but, above all, it had been a lighthouse in the dark nights of recent weeks.

Always making plans for the future, and always being surprised by the present, she thought to herself. She felt she had discovered herself through independence, despair, love, pain, and back again to love--and she would like things to end there.

The oddest thing of all was that, while some of her work colleagues spoke of the wonder or the ecstasy of going to bed with certain men, she had never discovered anything either good or bad about herself through sex. She had not solved her problem, she could still not have an orgasm through penetration, and she had vulgarized the sexual act so much that she might never again find the "embrace of recognition"--as Ralf Hart called it--or the fire and joy she sought.

Or perhaps (as she occasionally thought, and as mothers, fathers and romances all said) love was necessary if one was to experience pleasure in bed.

The normally serious librarian (and Maria's only friend, although she had never told her so) was in a good mood. She was having a bite to eat and invited her to share a sandwich. Maria thanked her and said that she had just eaten.

"You took a long time to read this."

"I didn't understand a word."

"Do you remember what you asked me once?"

No, she didn't, but when she saw the mischievous look on the other woman's face, she guessed. Sex.

"You know, after you came here in search of books on the subject, I decided to make a list of what we had. It wasn't much, and since we need to educate our young people in such matters, I ordered a few more books. At least, this way they won't need to learn about sex in that worst of all possible ways--by going with prostitutes."

The librarian pointed to a pile of books in a corner, all discreetly covered in brown paper.

"I haven't had time to catalogue them yet, but I had a quick glance through and I was horrified by what I read."

Maria could imagine what the woman was going to say: embarrassing positions, sadomasochism, things of that sort. She had better tell her that she had to get back to work (she couldn't remember whether she had told her she worked in a bank or in a shop--lying made life so complicated, she was always forgetting what she had said).

She thanked her and was about to leave, when the other woman said:

"You'd be horrified too. Did you know, for example, that the clitoris is a recent invention?"

An invention? Recent? Just this week someone had touched hers, as if it had always been there and as if those hands knew the terrain they were exploring well, despite the total darkness.

"It was officially accepted in 1559, after a doctor, Realdo Columbo, published a book entitled De re anatomica. It was officially ignored for fifteen hundred years of the Christian era. Columbo describes it in his book as 'a pretty and a useful thing.' Can you believe it?"

They both laughed.

"Two years later, in 1561, another doctor, Gabriello Fallopio, said that he had 'discovered' it. Imagine that! Two men--Italians, of course, who know about such things--arguing about who had officially added the clitoris to the history books!"