Eleven Minutes (19 page)

And she begins to stroke it as only virgins know how because prostitutes have long since forgotten. The man
reacts, his penis begins to grow in her hands, and she slowly increases the pressure, knowing now where she should touch, more at the bottom than at the top, she must wrap her fingers around it, push the skin back, towards his body. Now he is
excited, very excited, he touches the lips of her vagina, still very softly, and she feels like asking him to be more
forceful, to put his fingers right inside. But he doesn't do that, he moistens the clitoris with a little of the liquid pouring from her womb, and again makes the same circular movements he made on her nipples. This man touches her
exactly as she would touch herself.

One of his hands goes back to her breast; it feels so
good, she wishes he would put his arms around her now. But, no, they are discovering the body, they have time, they need
a lot of time. They could make love now; it would be the most natural thing in the world, and it might be good, but all
this is so new, she needs to control herself, she does not want to spoil everything. She remembers the wine they drank on that first night, how they sipped it slowly, savouring each mouthful, how she felt it warming her and how it made her see the world differently and left her more at ease and more in touch with life.

She wants to drink that man too, and then she can forget forever the cheap wine that you gulp down and that
makes you feel drunk, but always leaves you with a headache and an empty space in your soul.

She stops, slowly entwines her fingers with his, she hears
a moan and would like to moan too, but she stops herself, she feels heat spreading throughout her body; the same thing must
be happening to him. Without an orgasm, the energy disperses, travels to the brain, not letting her think of anything but going all the way, but this is what she wants, to stop, to
stop halfway, to spread the pleasure through her whole body, to allow it to invade her mind, renewing her commitment and her desire, restoring her virginity.

She gently removes the blindfold from her own eyes and removes his too. She turns on the bedside lamp. Both are naked; they do not smile, they simply look at each other. I am love, I am music, she thinks. Let's dance.

But she doesn't say anything: they talk about something
trivial, about when they will next meet, she suggests a date, perhaps in two days' time. He says he would like to invite
her to an exhibition, but she hesitates. That would mean getting to know his world, his friends, and what would they saY, what would they think.

She says no, but he realises that she really wants to say yes, and so he insists, using a few foolish arguments, but
which are all part of the dance they are dancing now, and in the end she agrees, because that is what she would like.

they arrange where to meet - in the same cafe where they met that first day? No, she says, Brazilians are very
superstitious, and you must never meet in the same place where you first met, because that might close a cycle and bring everything to an end.

He says that he's glad she doesn't want to close that particular cycle. They decide to meet at a church from where you can see the whole city, and which is on the road to Santiago, part of the mysterious pilgrimage that the two of them have been on ever since they met.

From Maria's diary, on the eve of buying her ticket back to Brazil:

Once upon a time, there was a bird. He was adorned with two perfect wings and with glossy, colourful, marvellous feathers. In short, he was a creature made to fly about freely in the sky, bringing joy to everyone who saw him.

One day, a woman saw this bird and fell in love with him. She watched his flight, her mouth wide in amazement, her
heart pounding, her eyes shining with excitement. She invited the bird to fly with her, and the two travelled across the
sky in perfect harmony. She admired and venerated and celebrated that bird.

But then she thought: He might want to visit faroff mountains! And she was afraid, afraid that she would never feel the same way about any other bird. And she felt envy, envy for the bird's ability to fly-

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 realised that what had thrilled her about the bird was his freedom, the energy of his wings in notion, 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
Ore 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.'

i
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, a 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 realises 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 Pacabana. 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 any more'. So she played a mind 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 colour 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 passers-by, 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 peach 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 be
surprised by the present, she thought to herself. She felt
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 vulgarised 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 in the other woman's face, she guessed. Sex. 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, Reald° Columbo, published a book entitled De re anatomica. If was officially ignored for fifteen hundred years or tn
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, Gabrie
Fallopio, said that he had “discovered” it. Imagine tha • Two
men - Italians, of course, who know about such things.

- arguing about who had officially added the clitoris to the history books!'

It was an interesting conversation, but Maria didn't want
to think about these things, mainly because she could already feel the juices flowing and her vagina getting wet just remembering his touch, the blindfolds, his hands moving over
her body. No, she wasn't dead to sex; that man had managed to rescue her. It was good to be alive.

The librarian, however, was warming to her subject.

'Its “discovery” didn't mean it received any more respect, though.' The librarian seemed to have become an expert on clitorology, or whatever that science is called. 'The mutilations we read about now in certain African
tribes, who still insist on removing the woman's right to sexual pleasure, are nothing new. In the nineteenth century, here in Europe, they were still performing operations to
remove it, in the belief that in that small, insignificant part of the female anatomy lay the root of hysteria, epilepsy, adulterous tendencies and sterility.'

Maria held out her hand to say goodbye, but the librarian showed no signs of tiring.

'Worse still, dear Dr Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, said that in a normal woman, the female
orgasm should move from the clitoris to the vagina. His most faithful
Freud went further and said that if a woman's sexuality asure remained concentrated in the clitoris, this was a
infantilism or, worse, bisexuality. and yet, as we all know, it is very difficult to have an organism through penetration. It's good to have sex with
a man, but pleasure lies in that little nub discovered by an Italian!'

Distracted, Maria realised that she had that problem
diagnosed by Freud: she was still in the infantile stage, her orgasm had not moved to the vagina. Or was Freud wrong?

'And what do you think about the G-spot?'

'Do you know where it is?'

The other woman blushed and coughed, but managed to say:

'As you go in, on the first floor, the back window.' Brilliant! She had described the vagina as if it were a
building! Perhaps she had read that explanation in a book for
young girls, to say that if someone knocks on the door and comes in, you'll discover a whole universe inside your own body. Whenever she masturbated, she preferred to concentrate
on her G-spot rather than on the clitoris, since the latter made her feel rather uncomfortable, a pleasure mingled with real pain, rather troubling.

She always went straight to the first floor, to the back window!

Seeing that the librarian was clearly never going to stop talking, perhaps because she had discovered in Maria an accomplice to her own lost sexuality, she gave a wave of hand and left, trying to concentrate on whatever nonsense came
into her head, because this was not a day to think
about farewells, clitorises, restored virginities or
G-spotsfocused on what was going on around her - bells ri
dogs barking, a tram rattling over the tracks, footstep » own breathing, the signs offering everything under
She did not feel like going back to the Copacabana, and
yet she felt an obligation to work until the end, although she had no real idea why - after all, she had saved enough money. She could spend the afternoon doing some shopping, talking to the bank manager, who was a client of hers, but
who had promised to help her manage her savings, having a cup of coffee somewhere, sending off the clothes that wouldn't
fit into her suitcases. It was strange, for some reason, she was feeling rather sad; perhaps because it was still another two weeks before she would leave, and she needed to get
through that time, to look at the city with different eyes and feel glad for what she had experienced there.

She came to a crossroads where she had been hundreds of
time before; you could see the lake from there and the water spout, and, on the far pavement, in the middle of the public gardens, the lovely floral clock, one of the city's symbols
... and that clock would not allow her to lie, because ... Suddenly, time and the world stood still.

What was this story she had been telling herself since the orning, something about her recently restored virginity? The world seemed frozen, that second would never end, as face to face with something very serious and very important in her
life, she could not just forget about it, she could not do as she did with her night-time dreams, which she has promised herself she would write down and whenever did...

she
'Don't think about anything! The world has stopped. What's going on?'

ENOUGH!

The bird, the lovely story about the bird she had just written - was it about Ralf Hart?

No, it was about her! FULL STOP!

It was two o'clock in the morning, and she was frozen in
that moment. She was a foreigner inside her own body, she was rediscovering her recently restored virginity, but its
rebirth was so fragile that if she stayed there, it would be lost forever. She had experienced Heaven perhaps, certainly Hell, but the Adventure was coming to an end. She couldn't
wait two weeks, ten days, one week - she needed to leave now, because, as she stood looking at the floral clock, with tourists taking pictures of it and children playing all
around, she had just found out why she was sad.

And the reason was this: she didn't want to go back. And the reason she didn't want to go back wasn't Ralf
Hart, Switzerland or Adventure. The real reason couldn't have been simpler: money.

Money! A special piece of paper, decorated in sombre
colours, which everyone agreed was worth something - and she believed it, everyone believed it - until you took a piece of that paper to a bank, a respectable, traditional, highly confidential Swiss bank and asked: 'Could I buy back a few
hours of my life?' 'No, madam, we don't sell, we only buyMaria was woken from her delirium by the sound ° screeching brakes, a motorist shouting, and a smiling °

gentleman, speaking English, telling her to step back onto the pavement - the pedestrian light was red.

'But this can't be exactly an earth-shattering discovery. Everyone must feel what I feel. They must know.'

But they didn't. She looked around her. People were
walking along, heads down, hurrying off to work, to school, to the employment agency, to Rue de Berne, telling
themselves: 'I can wait a little longer. I have a dream, but there's no need to realise it today, besides, I need to earn some money.' Of course, everyone spoke ill of her profession, but, basically, it was all a question of selling her time, like everyone else. Doing things she didn't want to do, like everyone else. Putting up with horrible people, like everyone else. Handing over her precious body and her precious soul in the name of a future that never arrived, like everyone else. Saying that she still didn't have enough, like everyone else. Waiting just a little bit longer, like everyone else. Waiting
so that she could earn just a little bit more, postponing the realisation of her dreams; she was too busy right now, she
had a great opportunity ahead of her, loyal clients who were waiting for her, who could pay between three hundred and
fifty and one thousand francs a session.

And for the first time in her life, despite all the good things she could buy with the money she might earn - who knows, she might only have to work another year - she decided consciously, lucidly and deliberately to let
an
opportunity pass her by.

Maria waited for the light to change, she crossed the
street and paused in front of the floral clock; she thought of
Ralf, saw again the look of desire in his eyes on the
night when she had slipped off the top half of her dress, felt his hands touching her breasts, her sex, her face, and
she became wet; and as she looked at the vast column of water
in the distance, without even having to touch any part of her own body, she had an orgasm right there, in front of
everyone.

Not that anyone noticed; they were all far too busy.

J
Nyah, the only one of her work colleagues with whom she
had a relationship that could be described as friendship, called her over as soon as she came in. She was sitting with
an oriental gentleman, and they were both laughing.

'Look at this,' she said to Maria. 'Look what he wants me to do with him!'

The oriental gentleman gave a knowing look and, still smiling, opened the lid of what looked like a cigar box. Milan was watching from a distance in case it contained
syringes or drugs. It did not, it was something that even he didn't know quite what to do with, but it wasn't anything
very special.

'It looks like something from the last century!' said
Maria.

'It is,' said the oriental gentleman indignantly. 'It's over a hundred years old and it cost a fortune.'

What Maria saw was a series of valves, a handle, electric lrcuits, small metal contacts and batteries. It looked like
the inside of an ancient radio, with two wires sticking out, at the ends of which were small glass rods, about the thickness o°f a finger. It certainly didn't look like something that had cost a fortune. How does it work?'

had
L
Nyah didn't like Maria's question. Although she trusted Maria, people could change from one moment to the next and she might have her eye on her client.

'He's already explained. It's the Violet Rod.'

And turning to the oriental man, she suggested that they leave, because she had decided to accept his invitation. However, the man seemed pleased that his toy should have aroused such interest.