Eleven Minutes

 - By Paulo Coelho

“At every moment of our lives, we all have one foot in a fairy tale and the other in the abyss.”

That is how the book kept me hooked. The blatant finality of the statement and the bold truth of it just had me gripping that book tighter, as I lost focus on the words in print and lost myself in a world of thought. Eleven minutes left me astounded. The choice of the theme for the novel and the protagonist’s profession to realize her dreams might be unconvincing (in fact it was unconvincing in the novel), the thoughts that were supposed to convey were aptly conveyed by the author. Paulo Coelho hit all the right chords as he spoke of love and triumph of it through the character Maria and her fairy tale with Ralf Hart, a painter who falls in love with her when he notices the special light she had about her.

The book speaks about the journey set about Maria from a girl of a small town to realize her dreams of earning money for supporting her family. At the age of eleven when she felt her heart throb for the first time and she loses an opportunity to speak to the kid she fancies, she realizes the importance of lost chances. A very subtle incident that shaped her in the long run. There are many cases where one loses the chance of a lifetime because one was afraid to take the chance or the risk required to fulfill that opportunity. Yet, every time upon reflection one regrets that act. Perhaps because opportunities are disguised in inconvenient packages and sometimes only after it is lost do we realize that it was an opportunity. And when Maria realizes that she lost an opportunity that would never return to her, she vows that she would never ever lose an opportunity, ever again.

As she enters adolescence and she became aware of her sensuality and as she endures the heartbreak of noticing her boy friend befriending her best friend who casts her pitiful glances, she realizes the pain of heartache. In the maturity one has at that age, she feels that guys bring pain, suffering and heartache and realizes that there never shall be a prince charming and that her fairy tale ending might not really materialize.

On her first earned break in Rio de Janeiro, she meets a night club owner from Brazil who offers her a chance of being a salsa dancer. The image of a flourishing city and the lust of reaching her dream flashes her eyes where she makes an impromptu decision of accepting an offer. “I can choose either to be a victim of the world or an adventurer in search of treasure.  It’s all a question of how I view my life.”

Though she did not understand the language, with the co-workers who snort at the innocent belief of her, she understands the reality of the situation. “… I would rather throw myself out of the plane as it crosses the ocean. Since I cannot open the windows, I would die here. But before I die, I want to fight for life. If I can walk on my own, I can go wherever I like.”  When she gets her head around the fact that she cannot go back home with shattered dreams, she sets on making herself better at what she does, but she still holds the dream of finding her knight in shining armor very dear. As days passed, she falls in love with an Arab guy and taking a chance against the rule of her work that relation with customers is prohibited, she gives in to her heart and takes a trip with the guy to spend sometime with him, which costs her – her job.

With what little money she had she sets herself up in a small room and decides to make her looks work for her and sets herself a modeling profile and runs around the agencies for a chance. After a long wait of three months, in which time she improves her French and her worldly knowledge through her regular visits to the library, she gets a call from an agency setting up a meeting with a prospective employee which she accepts. Upon reaching the hotel where the meeting was set up, the guy asks her to join him for a drink in the hotel room for a thousand Francs. That is when she realizes the intentions of the guy and as the despair reaches her mind, numbing her, she drops to tears.

“Despite her apparent freedom, her life consisted of endless hours spent waiting for a miracle, for true love, for an adventure with the same romantic ending she had seen in films and read about in books.  A writer once said that it is not time that changes a man, nor knowledge; the only thing that can change someone’s mind is love.  What nonsense!  The person who wrote that clearly knew only one side of the coin.  Love was undoubtedly one of the things capable of changing a person’s whole life, from one moment to the next.  But there was the other side of the coin, the second thing that could make a human being take a totally different course from the one he or she had planned; and that was called despair.  Yes, perhaps love really could transform someone, but despair did the job more quickly.” When she realizes that the life in front of her has not many options, she decides to accept his offer and thus her entry into the world of seduction.

On reaching her room after the ordeal which did not even bring her a satisfying elevation, she makes a decision of earning the money through this line of work and takes a walk to Rue de Burne where she enters a night club and approaches the owner requesting for work. She understands the simple system of how the guy approaches her, asking if she would be interested in a drink with him, where she has to order the fruit juice which was the costliest on the menu and accept his further invitation to take her out for three hundred and fifty Francs for forty five minutes, which every customer at the bar seems to know. As she continues with her life every single night, she tries to make her services better by making an effort to understand the needs of the guys she offers herself. She realizes that the men who come to the club are afraid and are ashamed of they cannot actually satisfy the women they lay themselves in. “Men are very strange: They can beat you up, shout at you, threaten you, and yet, they are scared to death of women really. Perhaps not the woman they married, but there's always one woman who frightens them and forces them to submit to her caprices. Even if it’s their own mother.” But she is befuddled with this realization. If any, she felt she should be the one who should be ashamed that she was unable to satisfy them for a night.

For a night? Now come on, you're exaggerating. It's really only 45 minutes, and if you allow time for taking off clothes, making some phoney gestures of affection, having a bit of banal conversation and getting dressed again, the amount of time spent actually having sex is about Eleven Minutes. Eleven Minutes! The world revolved around something that only took Eleven Minutes.

And because of these eleven minutes in one twenty four hour day, they got married, supported their family, put up with screaming kids…. Something is very wrong with the civilization and it wasn’t the destruction of Amazon rain forest or the ozone layer… it was precisely the thing she was working on: sex.

And that is the title of the novel, the importance of the physical gratification in everyone’s life and the approach one has towards it. As the days pass, she sends postcards to her home from the places she visited. She decides that she would get out of this profession when she earns enough money to buy herself a small land and set up farming, away from the city humdrum. With that thought, she sets about understanding farming and writes to her dad about her idea of purchasing land.

On a day when she was off, she picks a couple of books on farming and takes a stroll down the upper part of a city where she notices a yellow plaque with the name “Road to Santiago”. The name stood out and she decided that she needs to know the meaning of the word. She enters that place and asks the girl at the bar for its meaning and she was disappointed that the girl could not answer. She decided she might as well take a break and asks for a cup of coffee noting that they are highly priced than the usual. As she sips the coffee and flips through the pages of the farming books, she could not hold her interest and closes the book, pays for her coffee and sets to go out, when she hears the words “Hang on a moment” from behind her. She turns to notice that a painter was talking to her. Not realizing what those words shall mean after today, she just stares at the person. The painter wishes to paint her and requests her to pose for his painting. Noticing her apprehension the girl at the bar ensures that the painter is renowned and asks her to wait. Maria accepts the offer and stares out of the window as the painter gets to work.

After the painting was done, he introduces himself as Ralf Hart mentioning that he saw her before. She snaps on him that she is a prostitute from head to toe, while he calmly retorts that what she did held little meaning to him and that there is a special light about her that made her different. As she sits dumbfounded by his declaration and as he speaks more about his life and his disinterest in intimacy, she decides that she has something to offer to this guy after all, for this chance meeting with him is holding a significant meeting for her and she was enjoying herself and feeling genuinely happy. So she invites him for a stroll. As they keep walking on a route traveled by thousands, she realized that this was the loveliest afternoons she spent in her stay there. As they ended up in a bar on the other side of the town, he said that he would meet her in her club as her client. The anxiousness in her is evident as she opens the door towards an unknown while he insists that he will see her, if only to save himself. She reflects on the lost opportunity at the age of eleven and decides to be silent, allowing him to interpret that silence. “If he was the man she wanted him to be, he would not be intimidated by her silence.” 

And thus begins her journey into a chance that fate brought upon her. She realizes, as the alarm bells ring in her heart, that the carefully constructed wall of self control was about to ebb away and that she is falling in love with the painter!

Ahhh… the rest of the book is simply superb. As she establishes herself a loyal clientele, the owner of her night club approaches her with an offer from a special client. She accepts the offer and when she walks with that special client into the hotel, she realizes she enters into an unknown world, where pain and pleasure go hand in hand, into the world of masochism and sadism. She, to her amazement realizes that she enjoys that pain.

When she meets Ralf Hart later on, though she covers herself well with additional accessories, he notices the marks left by the handcuffs and tells her to not enter into that world. While she glares at him saying that he had no idea what he was talking about, he surprises her by saying that he had his share of experience about the dark side and that it was not worth it. He invites her for a walk and as they reach the lake shore, he asks her to remove her shoes and coat. She was hesitant arguing that the stones would hurt her and that it was cold. He asks her to trust him, as he trusted her. As she begins her walk along the shore, bare foot alongside him, she finds that her feet were throbbing as the stones prick her skin and she is enduring a form of suffering. The pain heightens after a certain point where she merely puts one foot before the other, before she recedes herself into a moment of peace after reaching the limit of pain she could endure, collapsing into his hands.
“‘I felt that pain is a woman’s friend.’ 
‘That is the danger.’ 
‘I also felt that pain has it’s limits.’ 
‘That is the salvation.  Don’t forget that.’”

“You experienced pain yesterday and you discovered that it led to pleasure. You experienced pain today and found peace. That’s why I’m telling you: don’t get used to it, because it’s very easy to become habituated; it’s a very powerful drug.  It’s in our daily lives, in our hidden suffering, in the sacrifices we make, blaming love for the destruction of our dreams.  Pain is frightening when it shows its real face, but it’s seductive when it comes disguised as sacrifice or self-denial.  Or cowardice.  However much we may reject it, we human beings always find a way of being with pain, of flirting with it and making it part of our lives………………
Does the soldier go to war in order to kill the enemy? No, he goes in order to die for the country. Does the wife want to show her husband how happy she is? No, she wants to show him how devoted she is, how she suffers to make him happy. Does the husband go to work thinking he will find personal fulfillment there? No, he is giving his sweat and tears for the good of the family. And so it goes on: sons give up their dreams to please their parents, parents give up their lives in order to please their children. Pain and suffering are used to justify the one thing that should bring only joy: love”

How does one endure a life time of suffering or pain, every day, basking it in a holy word called love, when love should have been a form of freedom, an ecstasy? Are we all seeking some form of pleasure in the pain we endure? Is sadism and masochism so much a part of our lives that the forbidden ecstasies are not really forbidden after all? The above passage of the novel had me grinding midnight oil as I realized, under the disguise of sacrifice or lies, one deceives oneself and that there is beauty in pain. And just as pain has a threshold, after enduring a certain amount of pain, what would happen next? The physical exercise exhausted her as she collapsed, but perhaps, the agony one puts oneself through the irrelevant sacrifices one makes in life gives one a heart attack! But the sheer thoughtlessness of the after cause of the suffering one puts oneself and the people they love, is it worth the time?

And that evening, Maria writes in her diary for the first time, that she detests what she is doing with her life. “Life is too short or too long for me to allow myself the luxury of living it so badly!”

Ralf has saved her from a world of pain and she realizes that she fell in love with the person. She has never been able to consummate herself to a guy, despite her profession, she only fakes her satisfaction to not make her clientele ashamed of themselves, but on that day, when she realizes that she actually loves Ralf, right in the middle of the road, she attains a physical gratification just by thinking about him touching her.

The way the novel speaks of the love that passed between Maria and Ralf is simply superb. The little unconventional things they do together, like sitting in front of fire and just staring at each other, as the shadows of time drool over them and the beads of perspiration burst on their skin, a moment more intimate than the physical contact passes between them which had nothing to do with sex. As they explore each other, simply by touching each other, through their eyes – the passion that passes through them is simply superb.

“Anyone who is in love is making love the whole time, even when they’re not.  When two bodies meet, it is just the cup overflowing.  They can stay together for hours, even days.  They begin the dance one day and finish it the next, or–such is the pleasure they experience–they may never finish it.  No eleven minutes for them.”

Such high passion requires an ethereal experience and I was in awe with the way Paulo wrote about it. Maria, after she reaches the target date, decides that it was the right moment to stop what she was doing and informs the same to the night club owner. She takes every penny she owns and packs her bags and walks out. On her way, however she decides to stop at Ralf’s place. The shared moments of intimacy, where Ralf not only owns her body but also mind is awesome. Where Maria not just satisfies the guy but is satisfied in turn as she embraces the beauty of sex for the first time with a guy, where Ralf not only shows her the beauty in loving but also the beauty in understanding a female body, where the passion heightens to leave them both in a state of dance that is sensual, is mind blowing.

“In all the languages in the world, there is the same proverb: ‘What the eyes don’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over.’  Well, I say that there isn’t an ounce of truth in it.  The further off they are, the closer to the heart are all those feelings that we try to repress and forget.  If we’re in exile, we want to store away every tiny memory of our roots.  If we’re far from the person we love, everyone we pass in the street reminds us of them.”
The next morning however, she walks out of the door, without looking back.

As she reaches Paris, she hears a quiet voice behind her “We still have Paris” and she turns to find Ralf Hart behind her, holding a bunch of roses…

“…. And to be utterly sure that this was what you wanted, that you were expecting me that all the determination and will power in the world would not be enough to prevent the love from changing the riles of the game from one moment to the next. It’s really easy being as romantic as the people in the movies, don’t you think?”

And thus the journey of a girl who turns prostitute, yet holds her dream of prince charming dear, gets her fairy tale and that is fruition of Ralf Hart’s search for himself.

A fantastic book, that left me astounded at the amount of thoughts it stirred in me. If I did not interlace those thoughts with the excerpts from the book, I would take another ten posts to just speak about the topics covered by this book. Worth every second spent on it. And this will remain as one of the most precious books I laid my hands on...