Eleven Minutes (4 page)

'He'd never be able to find me!'

'Exactly. So why worry?'

The Swiss man, on the other hand, having spent five
hundred dollars, as well as paying out for a pair of shoes, a dress, two suppers and various fees for the paperwork at the consulate, was beginning to get worried, and so, since Maria kept insisting on the need to talk to her family, he decided
to buy two plane tickets and go with her to the place where she had been born - as long as it could all be resolved in fortyeight hours and they could still travel to Europe the following week, as agreed. With a smile here and a smile there, she was beginning to understand that this was all in the documents she had signed and that, when it came to seductions, feelings and contracts, one should never play around.

It was a surprise and a source of pride to the small town to see its lovely daughter Maria arrive accompanied by a
foreigner who wanted to make her a big star in Europe. The whole neighbourhood knew, and her old schoolfriends asked:

'How did it happen?'

'I was just lucky.'

They wanted to know if such things were always happening
in Rio de Janeiro, because they had seen similar scenarios in
TV soaps. Maria would not be pinned down, wanting to place a high value on her personal experience and thus convince her friends that she was someone special.

She and the man went to her house where he handed round leaflets, with Brasil spelled with a 'z', and the contract, while Maria explained that she had an agent now and intended following a career as an actress. Her mother, seeing the diminutive bikinis worn by the girls in the photos that the foreigner was showing her, immediately gave them back and preferred to ask no questions; all that mattered was that her daughter should be happy and rich, or unhappy, but at least rich.

'What's his name?'

'Roger.'

'Rogerio! I had a cousin called Rogerio!'

The man smiled and clapped, and they all realised that he hadn't understood a word. Maria's father said:

'He's about the same age as me.'

Her mother told him not to interfere with their daughter's happiness. Since all seamstresses talk a great deal to their customers and acquire a great deal of knowledge about
marriage and love, her advice to Maria was this:

'My dear, it's better to be unhappy with a rich man than happy with a poor man, and over there you'll have far more chance of becoming an unhappy rich woman. Besides, if it
doesn't work out, you can just get on the bus and come home.'

Maria might be a girl from the backlands, but she was more intelligent than her mother or her future husband imagined, and she said, simply to be provocative:

'Mama, there isn't a bus from Europe to Brazil. Besides, I
want a career as a performer, I'm not looking for marriage.' Her mother gave her a look of near despair.

'If you can go there, you can always come back. Being a performer, an actress, is fine for a young woman, but it only lasts as long as your looks, and they start to fade when
you're about thirty. So make the most of things now. Find someone who's honest and loving, and marry him. Love isn't
that important. I didn't love your father at first, but money buys everything, even true love. And look at your father, he's not even rich!'

It was bad advice from a friend, but good advice from a mother. Forty-eight hours later, Maria was back in Rio, though not without first having made a visit, alone, to her
old place of work in order to hand in her resignation and to hear the owner of the shop say:

'Yes, I'd heard that a big French impresario wanted to
take you off to Paris. I can't stop you going in pursuit of
your happiness, but I want you to know something before you leave.'

He took a medal on a chain out of his pocket.

'It's the Miraculous Medal of Our Lady of the Graces. She has a church in Paris, so go there and pray for her
protection. Look, there are some words engraved around the Virgin.'

Maria read: 'Hail Mary conceived without sin, pray for us who turn to you. Amen.'

'Remember to say those words at least once a day. And...' He hesitated, but it was getting late.

'... if one day you come back, I'll be waiting for you. I missed my chance to tell you something very simple: I love you. It may be too late now, but I wanted you to know.' Missed chances. She had learned very early on what that meant. 'I love you', though, were three words she had often
heard during her twenty-two years, and it seemed to her that they were now completely devoid of meaning, because they had never turned into anything serious or deep, never translated into a lasting relationship. Maria thanked him for his words, noted them in her memory (one never knows what life may have
in store for us, and it's always good to know where the emergency exit is), gave him a chaste kiss on the cheek and left without so much as a backward glance.

They returned to Rio, and within a day she had her
passport (Brazil had really changed, Roger said, using a few words in Portuguese and a lot of gestures, which Maria took
to mean 'before it used to take ages'). With the help of Maflson, the security offlcer-cum-interpreter-cum-agent, any other important purchases were made (clothes, shoes, make-up, everything that a woman like her could want).

On the eve of their departure for Europe, they went to a nightclub, and when Roger saw her dance, he felt pleased with his choice; he was clearly in the presence of a future great star of Cabaret Cologny, this lovely dark girl with her pale eyes and hair as black as the wing of the grauna (the
Brazilian bird often evoked by local authors to describe black hair). The work permit from the Swiss consulate was
ready, so they packed their bags and, the following day, they were flying to the land of chocolate, clocks and cheese, with Maria secretly planning to make this man fall in love with
her - after all, he wasn't old, ugly or poor. What more could
she want?

She arrived feeling exhausted and, while still in the airport, her heart contracted with fear: she realised that she was
completely dependent on the man at her side - she had no knowledge of the country, the language or the cold. Roger's behaviour changed as the hours passed; he no longer made any attempt to be pleasant, and although he had never tried to
kiss her or to fondle her breasts, the look in his eyes grew more and more distant. He installed her in a small hotel, introducing her to another young Brazilian woman, a sad creature called Vivian, who would be in charge of preparing her for the work.

Vivian looked her coolly up and down, without the least show of sympathy for someone who had clearly never been
abroad before. Instead of asking her how she was feeling, she got straight down to business.

'Don't delude yourself. He flies off to Brazil whenever
one of his dancers gets married, something which seems to be happening more and more frequently. He knows what you want, and I assume you do too: you're probably looking for one of three things - adventure, money or a husband.'

How did she know? Was everyone looking for the same thing? Or could Vivian read other people's thoughts?

I
'All the girls here are looking for one of those three things,' Vivian went on, and Maria was convinced that she really could read her thoughts. 'As for adventure, it's too
cold to do anything and, besides, you won't earn enough to go off travelling. And as for money, once the cost of room and board has been deducted, you'll have to work for nearly a
whole year just to pay for your flight back home.'

'But...'

'I know, that isn't what you agreed. But the truth is
that, like everyone else, you forgot to ask. If you had been more careful, if you had read the contract you signed, you would know exactly what you were getting yourself into, because the Swiss don't lie, they just rely on silence to
help them.'

Maria felt the ground shifting beneath her.

'And as for a husband, every time a girl gets married, that represents a great financial loss for Roger, so we're
forbidden to talk to the customers. If your interests lie in that direction, you'll have to run great risks. This isn't a pick-up place, like in Rue de Berne.'

Rue de Berne?

'Men come here with their wives, and the few tourists who
turn up get one whiff of the family atmosphere and go looking for women elsewhere. I presume you know how to dance; well, if you can sing as well, your salary will increase, but so will the other girls' envy, so I'd suggest that, even if you're the best singer in Brazil, forget all about it and
don't even try. Above all, don't use the phone. You'll spend everything you earn on it, and that won't be much.'

'He promised me five hundred dollars a week!'

'Oh yeah.'

From Maria's diary, during her second week in Switzerland:

/ went to the nightclub and met the dance director who
comes from somewhere called Morocco, and I had to learn every step of what he - who has never set foot in Brazil - thinks
is the samba. I didn't even have time to recover from the long flight, I had to start smiling and dancing on the very
first night. There are six of us, and not one of us is happy and none of us knows what we're doing here. The customers drink and applaud, blow kisses and privately make obscene gestures, but that's as far as it goes.

I got paid yesterday, barely a tenth of what we agreed, the rest, according to the contract, will be used to pay for my flight and my stay here. According to Vivian's
calculations, that will take a year, which means that during that time there's no escape.

And what's the point of escaping anyway? I've only just arrived. I haven't seen anything yet. What's so awful about having to dance seven nights a week? I used to do that for
pleasure, now I do it for money and fame; my legs don't ache, the only difficult thing is maintaining that fixed smile.

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.

Maria chose to be an adventurer in search of treasure - she
put aside her feelings, she stopped crying every night, and she forgot all about the person she used to be; she
discovered that she had enough willpower to pretend that she
had just been born and so had no reason to miss anyone. Feelings could wait, now what she needed to do was to earn some money, get to know the country and return home victorious. Besides, everything around her was very like Brazil in general and her own small town in particular: the
women spoke Portuguese, complained about men, talked loudly, moaned about their working hours, turned up late at the club, defied the boss, thought themselves the most beautiful women
in the world, and told stories about their Prince Charmings, who were usually living miles away or were married or had no money and so sponged off them. Contrary to what she had imagined from the leaflets Roger had brought with him, the
club was exactly as Vivian had said it was: it had a family atmosphere. The girls described on their work permits as
'samba dancers' - were not allowed to accept invitations or
to go out with the customers. If they were caught receiving a note with someone's telephone number on it, they were
suspended from work for two whole weeks. Maria, who had expected
something livelier and more exciting, gradually allowed herself to succumb to sadness and boredom.

During the first two weeks, she barely left the boarding house where she was living, especially when she discovered that no one spoke her language, even if she said everything
VERY SLOWLY. She was also surprised to learn that, unlike in her own country, the city in which she was living had two different names - it was Geneve to those who lived
there and Genebra to Brazilians.

Finally, in the long, tedious hours spent in her small, TVless room, she concluded:

(a) she would never find what she was looking for if she couldn't express herself. In order to do that, she needed to learn the local language.

(b) since all her colleagues were looking for the same thing, she needed to be different. For that particular problem, she as yet lacked both a solution or a method. From Maria's diary, four weeks after arriving in Geneve/Gene bra:

I've already been here an eternity, I don't speak the language, I spend all day listening to music on the radio, looking round my room, thinking about Brazil, longing for work to begin and, when I'm working, longing to get back to
the boarding house. In other words, I'm living the future not
the present.

One day, at some distant future date, I'll get my ticket home, and I can go back to Brazil, marry the owner of the draper's shop and listen to the malicious comments of those friends who, never having taken any risks themselves, can only see other people's failures. No, I can't go back like that. I'd rather throw myself out of the plane as it's crossing the ocean.

Since you can't open the windows in the plane (I had never expected that. What a shame not to be able to breathe in the pure air!), 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.

The following day, she enrolled in a French course that was run in the mornings, and there she met people of all creeds, beliefs and ages, men wearing brightly coloured
clothes and lots of gold bracelets, women who always wore a headscarf, children who learned more quickly than the
grown-ups, when it should have been the other way round, since grown-ups have more experience. She felt proud when she found out that everyone knew about her country Carnival, the samba, football, and the most famous person in the world, Pele. At first, she wanted to be nice and so tried to correct their pronunciation (it's Pele! Pel£!), but after a while, she gave up, since they also insisted on calling her Maritf, with that mania foreigners have for changing all foreign
names and believing that they are always right.

In the afternoons, so as to practise the language, she took her first steps around this city of two names. She
discovered some delicious chocolate, a cheese she had never eaten before, a huge fountain in the middle of the lake, snow
(which no one back home had ever touched), storks, and restaurants with fireplaces (although she never went inside, just seeing the fire blazing away gave her a pleasant feeling
of wellbeing). She was also surprised to find that not all the shop signs advertised clocks; there were banks too, although she couldn't quite understand why there were so many for so few inhabitants, and why she rarely saw anyone
inside them. She decided, however, not to ask any questions. After three months of keeping a tight rein on herself at
work, her Brazilian blood - as sensual and sexual as everyone thinks - made its voice heard; she fell in love with an Arab
who was studying French with her on the same course. The affair lasted three weeks until, one night, she decided to
take time off and go and visit a mountain on the outskirts of
Geneva; this provoked a summons to Roger's office as soon as she arrived at work the following day.

No sooner had she opened the door than she was summarily dismissed for setting a bad example to the other girls working there. A hysterical Roger said that, yet again, he had been let down, that Brazilian women couldn't be trusted
(oh dear, this mania for making generalisations about everything). She tried telling him that she had had a very high fever brought on by the sudden change in climate, but
the man would not be persuaded and even claimed that he would have to go straight back to Brazil in order to find a replacement, and that he would have been far better off
putting on a show using Yugoslav music and Yugoslav dancers who were far prettier and far more reliable.

Maria might be young but she was no fool, especially once
her Arab lover had told her that Swiss employment laws were very strict and, since the nightclub kept back a large part of her salary, she could easily allege that she was being used for slave labour.

She went back to Roger's office, this time speaking
reasonable French, which now included the word 'lawyer'. She left with a few insults and five thousand dollars in compensation - a sum of money beyond her wildest dreams
- and all because of that magic word 'lawyer'. Now she was free to spend time with her Arab lover, buy a few presents, take some photos of the snow, and go back home in triumph. The first thing she did was telephone her mother's
neighbour to say that she was happy, had a brilliant career ahead of her and that there was no need for her family to worry. Then, since she had to leave the room in the boarding
house that Roger had arranged for her, she had no alternative but to go to her Arab boyfriend, swear undying love, convert
to his religion and marry him, even if she had to wear one of those strange headscarves; after all, as everyone knew, all Arabs were extremely wealthy and that was enough.

The Arab, however, was already far away, possibly in
Arabia, a country Maria had never even heard of, and, deep down, she gave thanks to the Virgin Mary because she had not
been obliged to betray her religion. She now had a reasonable grasp of spoken French, enough money for her return ticket, a work permit as a 'samba dancer' and a current visa; so, knowing that she could always go back and marry her former boss, she decided to try to earn money with her looks.

In Brazil she had read a book about a shepherd who, in searching for his treasure, encounters various difficulties, and these difficulties help him to get what he wants; she
was in exactly the same position. She was aware now that the reason she had been dismissed was so that she could find her true destiny, as a model.

She rented a small room (with no television, but she had
to live frugally until she began earning lots of money), and the following day, started doing the rounds of the agencies. They all told her that she needed to get some professional photos taken, but this, after all, was an investment in her career - dreams don't come cheap. She spent a large part of
her money on an excellent photographer, who spoke little, but was extremely demanding: he had a vast selection of clothes
in his studio and she posed for him in various outfits, sober and extravagant, and even in a bikini of which the only
person she knew in Rio de Janeiro, the security
officer-cum-interpreter-cum-former agent, Mailson, would have been proud. She asked for several extra copies and sent them
off to her family with a letter saying how happy she was in
Switzerland. They would all think she was rich and the owner of an enviable wardrobe, and that she had been transformed into her town's most illustrious
daughter. If all went to plan (and she had read enough
books on 'positive thinking' to be convinced that victory was assured), she would be greeted by a brass band on her return home and would try to persuade the mayor to have a square
named after her.

Since she had no permanent address, she bought a mobile phone, the sort that use pre-paid phone cards, and in the days that followed, she waited for job offers. She ate
in Chinese restaurants (which were the cheapest) and, to pass the time, she studied furiously.

But time dragged, and the telephone didn't ring. To her surprise, no one bothered her when she went for walks by the
lake, apart from a few drug-pushers who always hung around in the same place, underneath one of the bridges that connect
the lovely old public gardens to the newer part of the city. She began to doubt her looks, until an excolleague, whom she bumped into by chance in a cafe, told her that it wasn't her fault, it was the 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 invented to make women everywhere feel worse about themselves.

From Maria's diary, one night when she lacked the courage
to go out, to live or to continue waiting for the phone call that never came:

spend today outside a funfair. Since I can't afford to
fritter my money away, I thought it best just to watch other people. I stood for a long time by the roller coaster, and I noticed that most people get on it in search of excitement, but that once it starts, they are terrified and want the cars to stop.

What do they expect? Having chosen adventure, shouldn't
they be prepared to go the whole way? Or do they think that the intelligent thing to do would be to avoid the ups and downs and spend all their
time on a carousel, going round and round on the spot?

At the moment, I'm far too lonely to think about love, but
I have to believe that it will happen, that I will find a job and that I am here because I chose this fate. The roller
coaster is my life; life is a fast, dizzying game; life is a parachute jump; it's taking chances, falling over and getting
up again; it's mountaineering; it's wanting to get to the
very top of yourself and to feel angry and dissatisfied when you don't manage it.