Eleven Minutes

This brief chapter records Maria’s ongoing emotional attempts to come to terms with her situation. Though the conditions are depressing, she is determined to be different from the other Brazilian women, who she discovers have the same complaints and relationships as her girlfriends back in Brazil. Determined to overcome the sameness of her life, she writes in her diary, “I will 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” (41).

Maria ventures into the world around her by signing up for French lessons. She begins to explore the area. After three months, she begins an affair with an Arabian national in her French class. When she takes an excursion with him to the mountains outside Geneva, missing a workday in the process, Roger fires her. The Arabian national convinces her that Switzerland has restrictive labor laws, and Maria should explain to Roger she is going to go to the police and claim she was Roger’s slave. Roger responds by unhappily giving her $5000 in severance. Quickly she finds that the Arabian national is also gone, which is actually a relief to her since she feared he would demand she change her religion.

Newly freed from the boarding house where she lived and her demanding job, Maria decides to pursue the career of a model and spends a lot of her severance getting a professional portfolio. She receives no interest from any potential employer. She also draws no attention from strangers regardless of where she goes in the city, which is dismaying until she finds the reasons for it. Coelho writes, “she began to doubt her looks, until an ex-colleague, whom she bumped into by chance in the café, told her that it wasn’t her fault, it was a fault of the Swiss, who hate to bother anyone, and of other foreigners, who were all afraid of being arrested for sexual harassment—a concept that made relations between men and women even more complicated” (46-47).

As she slowly spends her severance money, Maria tries to read celebrity magazines, which she realizes are too expensive. Instead, she goes to the library, befriends a lonely librarian, and begins to read French language books like The Little Prince.

After two months of waiting, someone from one of the modeling agencies calls to ask if she will meet an Arabian client at an exclusive restaurant to plan a photoshoot. When he propositions her, saying, “If you come up and have a drink with me in my hotel room, I’ll give you a thousand francs” (52), Maria instantly understands what has happened. As she wrestles with what to do, she begins to cry, which frightens the client. She steadies him by asking for more wine and eventually suggests they leave for his room, where they have a perfunctory sexual experience.

The next day she reflects on these events in her diary, writing:

Like most people—I let fate choose which route I should take. I’m not the only one, even though my fate may put me outside the law, outside society. In the search for happiness, however, we are all equal: none of us is happy—not the banker/musician, the dentist/writer, the checkout girl/actress, or the housewife/model (55-56).

This chapter is focused on Maria’s self-perception, her decision-making inner monologue, and the “invisible woman,” who dialogues with her to warn her, “be careful, things were not as simple as she imagined” (58). After receiving money to have sex for the first time, Maria has a feeling of freedom beyond what she had known. She toys with the idea of buying a plane ticket back to Brazil, but she decides not to since those close to her will assume she failed at becoming a worldly person and business success. She decides to look up a nightclub in an area called the Rue de Berne that she had heard was less “family friendly” than Roger’s club, a location where men could make contact with sex workers.

Though still uncertain about her decision to become a sex worker, Maria sets out to learn all she can about erotic sexuality, quickly finding there are a few library books about the mechanism of sex but none about the enjoyment of sex. She buys pornographic magazines and, in the morning, locates the street where the adult nightclubs are.

That night she goes into a club with a Brazilian name, Copacabana, and asks the owner, Milan, about work. He checks her work permit and tells her to speak to the other sex workers. Maria goes through a sort of vetting process with the others, one of whom seems impressed with her ignorance and honesty and says, “Look, it’s very simple, you just have to stick to three basic rules. First: never fall in love with anyone you work with or have sex with. Second: don’t believe any promises and always get paid upfront. Third: don’t use drugs” (66). Milan explains to her how her business is to be conducted, how she should dress, and how she will pay him for using the club as her staging area.

Maria decides she must have at least one customer that evening or she will be unable to try again in the future. She ends up having two encounters, netting her 600 francs after paying Milan 100. She walks home afterward in a daze, feeling emotionally empty, though proud that she did not back out of her decision. Writing about it in her diary, she recognizes she has to divorce her dreams of love from the work she is doing, even though she cannot abandon the idea of love. She writes: “I need to write about love. I need to think and think and write and write about love—otherwise, my soul won’t survive” (74).

This brief chapter primarily describes Maria’s philosophical reflections about her new profession. As she is acquiring new skills, she strives to understand what motivated her “colleagues” (75) to become sex workers. Maria hears no new answers to the question and ultimately decides none of the women—including herself—are being completely truthful about why they are choosing this life. Among the answers, Coelho writes, “… the most common one, to earn money for their fare home (Colombians, Thais, Peruvians, Brazilians all love this reason, even though they had earned enough money several times over and then immediately spent it, afraid to realize their dream)” (76).

This chapter summarizes Maria’s work experience over the following six months. She intentionally grows more skilled at pleasing her customers and learning how to get additional tips from them. She builds a faithful clientele, in large measure because she is learning how to comfort and advise these men, most of whom ask her for advice and desperately want to talk to someone whether they want to engage in sexual activity. Thus, Maria schools herself in finance, self-help, and family therapy.

While she is saving 60,000 francs in a bank account, she learns the career arc of the sex worker in which younger women with less experience actually make more money than older, more skilled women. Maria perceives she is fortunate in several respects. Coelho writes, “The Copacabana was a quiet place, and Switzerland was possibly the best country in the world in which to work as a prostitute, as long as you had a resident permit and a work permit, kept all your papers in order and paid your Social Security” (79-80).

Maria continues to keep alive the hope of true love symbolically by refusing to kiss her clients. Coelho writes, “For a prostitute, the kiss was sacred. Nyah had taught her to keep her kisses for the love of her life, just like in the story of Sleeping Beauty; a kiss that would waken her from slumbers and return to the world of fairy tales, in which Switzerland was once more the country of chocolate, cows and clocks” (82).

This chapter is devoted to describing Maria’s clients and her relationships with them. Maria excels at grasping the individual needs of these men, manipulating them to her best advantage, and moving on with a clear mind and heart after being with them. Still, she sympathizes with them. Maria has become a master of creating sexual relief for even the most inhibited and anxious of her clients.

She recognizes that the amount of time actually spent in sexual activity—which is only a small portion of the hour she agrees to be with each man—is about 11 minutes. These few minutes, she understands, are respite for the men. From this, she deduces that something is wrong with humanity. Coelho writes,

Something was very wrong with civilization, and it wasn’t the destruction of the Amazon rainforest or the ozone layer, the death of the panda, cigarettes, carcinogenic foodstuffs or prison conditions, as the newspapers would have it. It was precisely the thing she was working with: sex (86).

While she made it a priority to avoid falling in love with any of her clients, within the first two months of working at the Copacabana she receives several marriage proposals, three being credible. Wisely, her only intimate relationship is with her diary. Maria toys with the idea of writing a book on what she has learned about human beings by being a sex worker. She dreams of calling it 11 Minutes.

She conceives of three distinct groupings of her clients, each labeled with the name of a Hollywood Movie. The “Exterminators,” who are brusque, self-absorbed, and ready for action; the “Pretty Woman” clients, who portray themselves as well-mannered gentlemen; and the “Godfathers,” who mostly objectify the women with whom they have purchased an adventure.