Eleven Minutes

by Paulo Coelho

  "Would you like to borrow this book about the clitoris?"

  "No, thanks. I've got other things to think about at the moment."

  "And you don't want to borrow anything else?"

  "No. I'm going back to my own country, but I just wanted to thank you for always having treated me with such respect and understanding. Perhaps we'll meet again some time."

  They shook hands and wished each other much happiness.

  Heidi waited until the girl had left, then thumped the desk. Why hadn't she seized the opportunity to share something which, the way things were going, would probably go to the grave with her? Since the girl had had the courage to ask if she had ever betrayed her husband, why had she not answered, now that she was discovering a new world in which women were finally acknowledging how difficult it was to achieve a vaginal orgasm?

  "Oh well, it doesn't matter. The world isn't just about sex."

  No, it wasn't the most important thing in the world, but it was still important. She looked around her; most of the thousands of books surrounding her were love stories. It was always the same: someone meets someone, falls in love, loses them and finds them again. There are souls speaking unto souls, there are distant places, adventures, sufferings, anxieties, but very rarely anyone saying: "Excuse me, sir, but why don't you try acquiring a better understanding of the female body?" Why didn't books talk openly about that?

  Perhaps people weren't really interested. Men would always go looking for novelty; they were still the troglodyte hunter, obeying the reproductive instinct of the human race. And what about women? In her personal experience, the desire to have a good orgasm with one's partner lasted only for the first few years; then the frequency of orgasms diminished, but no one talked about it, because every woman thought it was her problem alone. And so they lied, pretending that they found their husband's desire to make love every night oppressive. And by lying, they left other women feeling worried.

  They turned their thoughts to other things: children, cooking, timetables, housework, bills to pay, their husband's affairs--which they tolerated--holidays abroad during which they were more concerned with their children than with themselves, their complicity, or even love, but no sex.

  She should have been more open with that young Brazilian woman, who seemed to her an innocent creature, old enough to be her daughter, and still incapable of understanding what the world was like. An immigrant, far from home, working hard at a boring job, waiting for a man she could marry, and with whom she could fake a few orgasms, find security, reproduce this mysterious human race, and then forget all about such things as orgasms, the clitoris or the G-spot (which was only discovered in the twentieth century!!). Being a good wife, a good mother, making sure there was nothing lacking in the home, masturbating occasionally in secret, thinking about some man who had passed her in the street and looked at her longingly. Keeping up appearances--why was the world so concerned with appearances?

  That is why she had not replied to the question: "Have you ever had an affair?"

  These things go with you to the grave, she thought. Her husband had been the only man in her life, although sex was now a thing of the remote past. He had been an excellent companion, honest, generous and good-humoured, and had struggled to bring up the family and to keep all those who worked with him happy. He was the ideal man that all women dream of, and that is precisely why she felt so bad when she thought of how she had one day desired and been with another man.

  She remembered how they had met. She was coming back from the small mountain town of Davos, when all the train services were interrupted for some hours by an avalanche. She phoned home so that no one would be worried, bought a few magazines and prepared for a long wait at the station.

  That was when she noticed the man sitting next to her, along with his rucksack and sleeping bag. He had graying hair and sunburned skin, and was the only person in the station who didn't seem concerned about the absence of any trains; on the contrary, he was smiling and looking around him for someone to talk to. Heidi opened one of the magazines, but--ah, sweet mystery of life!--her eyes happened to catch his and she didn't manage to look away quickly enough to avoid him coming over to her.

  Before she could--politely--say that she really needed to finish reading an important article, he began to talk. He told her that he was a writer and was returning from a meeting in Davos and that the delay would mean him missing his flight home. When they got to Geneva, would she mind helping him find a hotel?

  Heidi was watching him: how could anyone be so cheerful about missing a plane and having to wait in an uncomfortable train station until things were sorted out?

  The man began talking to her as if they were old friends. He told her about his travels, about the mystique of literary creation and, to her horror, about all the women he had known and loved in his lifetime. Heidi merely nodded and let him talk. Occasionally he would apologize for talking so much and ask her to tell him something about herself, but all she could say was: "Oh, I'm just an ordinary person, nothing very special."

  Suddenly, she found herself hoping that the train would never arrive; the conversation was so enthralling; she was discovering things that she had only encountered before in fiction. And since she would never see him again, she got up her nerve and (quite why she could never say) began asking him about subjects of particular interest to her. Her marriage was going through a rough patch, her husband was very demanding of her time, and Heidi wanted to know what she could do to make him happy. The man offered her some interesting explanations, told her a story, but didn't seem very comfortable talking about her husband.

  "You're a very interesting woman," he said, something that no one had said to her for years.

  Heidi didn't know how to react; he saw her embarrassment and immediately started talking about deserts, mountains, lost cities, women with veiled faces or bare midriffs, about warriors, pirates and wise men.

  The train arrived. They sat down next to each other, and she was no longer a married woman who lived in a chalet looking out over the lake and had three children to bring up, she was an adventurer arriving in Geneva for the first time. She looked at the mountains and the river and felt glad to be sitting beside a man who wanted to go to bed with her (because that's all men think about) and who was doing his best to impress her. She wondered how many other men had felt the same, but to whom she had never given the slightest encouragement; that morning, however, the world had changed, and she was suddenly a thirty-eight-year-old adolescent, dazzled by this man's attempts to seduce her; it was the best feeling in the world.

  In the premature autumn of her life, when she thought she had everything she could possibly want, this man appeared at the train station and walked straight into her life without first asking permission. They got off at Geneva and she showed him a hotel (a cheap one, he said, because he should have left that morning and didn't have much money on him for another night in exorbitantly expensive Switzerland); he asked her to go up to the room with him, to see if everything was in order. Heidi knew what to expect, and nevertheless, she accepted his proposal. They shut the door, they kissed each other with wild abandon, he tore off her clothes and--dear God!--he knew all about the female body, because he had known the sufferings and frustrations of so many women.

  They made love all afternoon and only when evening fell did the charm dissipate, and she said the words she would have preferred not to have said:

  "I must go home, my husband's expecting me."

  He lit a cigarette and they lay in silence for a few moments, and neither of them said "goodbye." Heidi got up and left without looking back, knowing that, whatever either of them might say, no word or phrase would make any sense.

  She would never see him again, but, for a few hours, in the autumn of her despair, she had ceased to be a faithful wife, housewife, loving mother, exemplary public servant and constant friend, and reverted to being simply a woman.

  For a few days, her husband kept saying th
at she seemed different, either happier or sadder, he couldn't quite put his finger on it. A week later, everything was back to normal.

  "What a shame I didn't tell that young woman," she thought. "Not that she would have understood, she still lives in a world in which people are faithful and vows of love are forever."

  From Maria's diary:

  I don't know what he must have thought when he opened the door that night and saw me standing there, carrying two suitcases.

  "Don't worry," I said. "I'm not moving in. Shall we go to supper?"

  He didn't say anything, just helped me in with my luggage. Then, without saying "what's going on?" or "how lovely to see you," he simply put his arms around me and started kissing me and touching my body, my breasts, my crotch, as if he had been waiting for this a long time and was now afraid that the moment would never come.

  He pulled off my jacket and my dress, leaving me naked, and there in the hall, without any ritual or preparation, without even time to say what would be good and what bad, with the cold wind blowing in under the front door, we made love for the first time. I thought perhaps I should tell him to stop, so that we could find somewhere more comfortable, so that we could have time to explore the immense world of our sensuality, but, at the same time, I wanted him inside me, because he was the man I had never possessed and would never possess again. That is why I could love him with all my energy, and have, at least for one night, what I'd never had before and what I would possibly never have again.

  He lay me down on the floor and entered me before I was aroused and ready, but the pain didn't bother me; on the contrary, I liked it like that, because he obviously understood that I was his and that he didn't need to ask permission. I wasn't there in order to teach him anything or to prove that I was more sensitive or more passionate than other women, I was there to say yes, you're welcome, that I too had been waiting for this, that I was pleased about his total disregard for the rules we had created between us and that he was now demanding that we should be guided solely by our instincts, male and female.

  We were in the most conventional of positions--me underneath him, with my legs spread, and him on top of me, moving in and out, while I looked at him, with no desire to pretend or to moan or to do anything, just wanting to keep my eyes open so that I could remember every second, watch his face changing, his hands grabbing my hair, his mouth biting me, kissing me. No preliminaries, no caresses, no preparations, no sophistication, just him inside me and me inside his soul.

  He came and went, quickening and slowing the rhythm, stopping sometimes to look at me too, but he didn't ask if I was enjoying it, because he knew that this was the only way our souls could communicate at that moment. The rhythm increased, and I knew that the eleven minutes were coming to an end, and I wanted them to last forever, because it was so good--ah, dear God, it was good--to be possessed and not to possess! And we had our eyes wide open all the time, until I noticed that at one point we were no longer seeing clearly anymore and we seemed to move into a dimension in which I was the great mother, the universe, the beloved, the sacred prostitute of the ancient rituals that he had told me about over wine and beside an open fire. I saw that he was about to come, and his arms gripped mine, his movements increased in intensity, and it was then that he shouted--he didn't moan, he didn't grind his teeth, he shouted. He yelled. He roared like an animal! A thought flashed through my mind that the neighbors might call the police, but it didn't matter, and I felt immense pleasure, because this was how it had been since the beginning of time, when the first man met the first woman and they made love for the first time: they shouted.

  Then his body collapsed onto mine, and I don't know how long we stayed there, our arms around each other; I stroked his hair as I had done only once before, on the night when we locked ourselves up in the darkness of the hotel room; I felt his racing heart gradually slow to its normal rate; his hands began delicately to move up and down my arms, making all the hairs on my body prickle.

  He must have had a practical thought--the weight of his body on mine--because he rolled over, took my hand, and we lay there staring up at the ceiling and the chandelier with its three light bulbs lit.

  "Good evening," I said.

  He drew me over so that my head was resting on his chest. For a long time, he just stroked me, and then he said "Good evening" too.

  "The neighbors must have heard everything," I said, not knowing quite what to say next, because saying "I love you" at that juncture didn't make much sense; he knew that already, and so did I.

  "There's a terrific draft from under the door," he said, when he could have said: "Good!"

  "Let's go into the kitchen."

  We got up and I saw that he hadn't even taken off his trousers, he was dressed just as I had found him, only with his penis exposed. I put my jacket over my bare shoulders. We went into the kitchen; he made some coffee; he smoked two cigarettes and I smoked one. Sitting at the table, he said "thank you" with his eyes, and I replied "thank you too," but our mouths remained shut.

  He eventually got up the courage to ask about the suitcases.

  "I'm flying back to Brazil tomorrow at midday."

  A woman knows when a man is important to her. Are men capable of that kind of realization? Or would I have to say: "I love you," "I'd like to stay here with you," "Ask me to stay."

  "Don't go." Yes, he had understood that he could say that to me.

  "I have to. I made a promise."

  Because, if I hadn't, he might think that this was all going to last forever. And it wasn't; it was part of the dream of a young woman from the interior of a far-off country, who goes to the big city (well, not that big really), encounters all kinds of difficulties, but finds the man who loves her. So this was the happy ending to all the difficult times I had been through, and whenever I remembered my life in Europe, I would end with the story of a man passionately in love with me, and who would always be mine, because I had visited his soul.

  Ah, Ralf, you have no idea how much I love you. I think that perhaps we always fall in love the very first instant we see the man of our dreams, even though, at the time, reason may be telling us otherwise, and we may fight against that instinct, hoping against hope that we won't win, until there comes a point when we allow ourselves to be vanquished by our feelings. That happened on the night when I walked barefoot in the park, cold and in pain, but knowing how much you loved me.

  Yes, I love you very much, as I have never loved another man, and that is precisely why I am leaving, because, if I stayed, the dream would become reality, the desire to possess, to want your life to be mine...in short, all the things that transform love into slavery. It's best left like this--a dream. We have to be careful what we take from a country, or from life.

  "You didn't have an orgasm," he said, trying to change the subject, to be careful and not to force the situation. He was afraid of losing me, and was thinking that he still had all night to make me change my mind.

  "No, I didn't, but I had an enormous amount of pleasure."

  "But it would have been better if you'd had an orgasm too."

  "I could have pretended, just to please you, but you don't deserve that. Ralf Hart, you are a man in the most beautiful, intense sense of the word. You've supported me and helped me, you've let me support and help you, without there being any humiliation on either side. Yes, it would have been good to have an orgasm, but I didn't. But I loved the cold floor, your warm body, the force with which you entered me.

  "I went to take back my library books today, and the librarian asked if I talked to my partner about sex. I felt like saying: Which partner? What sort of sex do you mean? But she didn't deserve that; she's always been so sweet to me.

  "I've really only had two partners since I came to Geneva: one who awoke the worst in me, because I let him and even begged him to. The other one, you, who made me feel part of the world again. I would like to be able to teach you where to touch my body, how much pressure to apply, for how long, a
nd I know you would take this not as a criticism, but as another way to improve communication between our souls. The art of love is like your painting, it requires technique, patience, and, above all, practice by the couple. It requires boldness, the courage to go beyond what people conventionally call 'making love.'"

  The teacher in me was back, and I didn't want that, but Ralf knew how to take control of the situation. Instead of agreeing with me, he lit his third cigarette in less than half an hour and said:

  "Firstly, you're staying here tonight."

  It wasn't a request, it was an order.

  "Secondly, we're going to make love again, but with less anxiety this time and more desire. And finally, I'd like you to understand men better too."

  Understand men better? I spent every night with them, whites, blacks, Asians, Jews, Muslims, Catholics, Buddhists. Didn't Ralf know that?

  I felt lighter; I was so pleased that the conversation had shifted into being a discussion. At one point, I even considered asking God's forgiveness and breaking my promise. But reality returned, telling me to remember to preserve my dream intact and not to fall into destiny's traps.

  "Yes, to understand men better," said Ralf again, seeing the doubtful look on my face. "You talk about your female sexuality, about helping me to find my way around your body, to be patient, to take time. I agree, but has it occurred to you that we're different, at least in matters of time? You should complain to God about that.

  "When we met, I asked you to teach me about sex, because I had lost all my sexual desire. Do you know why? Because after a certain age, every sexual relationship I had ended in tedium and frustration, because I realized how difficult it was to give the women I loved the same amount of pleasure they gave me."

  I didn't like the sound of "the women I loved," but I feigned indifference and lit a cigarette.

  "I didn't have the courage to ask: show me your body. But when I met you, I saw your light, and I loved you at once, and I thought that, at this stage in my life, I had nothing to lose by being honest with myself and with the woman I wanted to have by my side."