ONZE MINUTOS - How Paulo Coelho would write, if understanding reality
printONZE MINUTOS - How Paulo Coelho would write, if understanding reality
Let's start reading about some daily and common sexual procedures and practices. But I warn you, you might be weeping by the end of the following story. Here it comes, the true report about a matter that happens by millions just now, during the time you read these lines:
Geneva, summer 1993: A big consulting room, many papers on the table. The bank's CEO ordered a report about company's financial planning with the goal to minimize tax charges heavily. All employees are terribly nice with me. Coffee any time the day, confect of best quality on the large table, all important documents, even the secret ones, are fully at my disposal. Not one person would dare to doubt about the respect I was entitled in my position as expert. Such a work is tiresome. So, after a lunch in a five-star-hotel, I am trying to let gently pass one of the evenings in my hotel-suite with marvellous view on the lake of Geneva. In a newspaper of the town, I can see that many Escort-girls offer their erotic services. I take the phone and dial the first number: "Yes, here is Veronique. Can I help you?" whispers a fine female voice at the other end. "Okay, I will be at the door of your hotel room in less than 20 minutes." I am waiting and nibble a bit on my nails. After less than 20 minutes I hear a shy knock on the door. My heart falls in the cellar: How would she look like, what character would she have, how will she try to start her sexy job?
All these thoughts go through my mind when stepping to the door and opening it. There stands a pretty woman, immediately recognizable as whore, but only few people have the gift of "seeing" life with extreme lucidness. Long blond hair, sexy face, perfect female body, long legs, high-heels, her bottom bent in a way that you can see from a mile, what services are offered by her. Not many men can "feel" it but I am able to recognize a prostitute within seconds, by instinct, in any situation or place. That female enters the room with played shyness, stands still in the shadow of a standard lamp near to a window, but in a way, the twilight enlightens her beauty to the maximum. "Thanks for calling just me. Unfortunately we must first talk about cash and afterwards leave that theme forever. You may have sex of any kind, just as you like to do. I belong to you: 400 Francs - plus 50 Francs for the tip given to the guy down at the reception. This is how we prevent the high addition for a double-bed room."
Jesus, this woman has thought of everything! I give her 500 francs, she is enchanted and from this very moment, I got her full sympathy. Her performance is of the finest. No lifting of her short skirt, no immediate undressing or an odd strip. Instead she stays sitting in a chair, slightly straddle-legged, asking for a glass of Champagne out of the refrigerator and talking very gently about my work, asking where I come from, if happy with my life and talking too about herself - and during all these minutes, any gesture of her are pure erotics, her feminine sex fills the luxury hotel room like a oriental perfume. Whatever she does, is a promise for what I soon will get from that beauty. After a while, I can no longer withstand, sink on my knees between her legs and gently kiss her fingertips, lips go down to her nice little bosom and my hand feels how wet that woman is…. but this is a Online paper, and so I go, right away, out of this scenery - to pretend, that after two hours, she left like the best girl-friend ever met, leaves her telephone number on the table. She is living in an outside district of Geneva and invites me to visit her, the week to come.
I can hardly await our new date and, time having passed, I phone the first day of my return to the consulting-job at the bank: "It's you, Rene? Please, come tomorrow at about seven o'clock to my flat." She explains where to be found. She lives in a nice little apartment, a lot of plants in the rooms and plenty of flowers in front of her windows, a marvellous view on a large park and, in the distance, the lake of Geneva. She wants to take the lunch outside - and what marvellous idea she proposes: Surrounded by half naked men and women, we eat, perfectly clothed, in a piscine-restaurant at the border of the lake, have splendid food, the sun sinks slowly down against a silver horizon, and we are chatting together as if we would have been in love for years. I learn a lot about her past, but somehow, everything seems like a fairy-tale.
She speaks with utmost intensity and paints pictures in the air that would make any male dream of a reality, wide away of banal doings, all seems to be playing on another planet. Back in her apartment, she invites me to stay with her for the night and she does everything to make our mutual erotic adventure appear as natural as ever possible. And so she interrupts my heading forward for rapid sex several times and, as a result, always comes out a new feeling of increasing lust and desire. All senses are concentrated just on the one and only thing. A paradise in sexual life, we are longing for through all our lives, becomes true. Later, in the morning, a nice breakfast is served, the atmosphere is light and friendly - and then I have to leave her and go back to work.
One year has gone by. I call again her number. Faint and distant a shaky voice: "It's you, Jean-Pierre, oh dear! I was waiting on your call for such a long time." I wonder about this opening and have a distant feeling about what's going on: "Here is Rene. Don't you remember, Veronique, last year in the hotel and then in your flat?" After a while I can hear a click in the receiver. In the evening another trial - and this time: "Rene, it's you! Great! I have so often thought of you. Can we see us tonight?" At the given hour, when she opens the door of her flat, I can hardly recognize my whore anymore. It seems that ten years have passed since the last rendez-vous. She immediately reads my thoughts, is a little bit ashamed and asks me in. "We will stay here tonight and eat in the kitchen. I will prepare spaghetti and we shall open an excellent bottle of wine and later have some sweets." Still under shock, I watch all her doings - but after some glasses of wine, I can clearly recognize again how beautiful this woman must have been - some time ago. We watch TV a little bit, then go to bed and make love like a married couple.
But still, at the moment of the climax, she has that open and natural look, without a shadow of shame, a glance of surrender, affection and sincerity in her eyes. In the morning I am late and should already be at work. Veronique seems to be in a coma, no shaking would bring life back. She must have taken heroin or other drugs during the night, was still far away from this Earth and living in dreams of another paradise. Or is it hell? Outside the park, I have all difficulties to find my car again - and when I pass her house, I have a brief look up to her windows with all those flowers ahead. All of a sudden, I recognize the whole misery of a human life. How many people, often women and children, have to pass through existences in total misery, surrounded by frightfulness not experienced by other people, until the late days old age is coming and you realize, finally, that you may have lived in vain, a useless life of sex or worse - and before I can realize what happens, tears flow out of my eyes, I can't see the street in front of the car anymore, have to park the Citroen at the sideway and here, a primeval howling like from a wolf cries out of my body. I am weeping without knowing why, the whole body is shivering.
I stay sitting in my car and for seconds, the curtain tears and I see human existence as it is. Soon we will have come to an end with a terrifying century, full of horror, wars, torture, killing, and by the end of the voyage are guessing about the misery of a dying planet. It takes time, the vision passes away slowly - and at last I restart the car to follow on my way to the bank job, in the midst of Geneva.
Again one year later. I do not wish, in fact, meeting again my Veronique a further time. But by a feeling of gratitude, I phone from the hotel room at night once more. The call is not answered and I feel a little disturbed and sad that our short episode of love would have gone forever. Downstairs, in the expensive restaurant, I read the local newspaper after lunch - and my eyes seem, with a feeling of a fatal presentiment, literally attracted by a given page and, under certain announcements, not far away from those for Escort-girls, a little black square: "Funerals of Veronique, born 1961, died on August 9, 1996: Signed: Jean-Pierre."
Leaning back in my seat, pale like snow, I can hardly prevent an immediate cry and ask my waiter for paying my bill at once. I have to be alone now. On the near "Ile Rousseau", midst in the river Rhone, without any people at this time in the dark, I sit down on one of the benches. Long time, I try to remember and now, at this place far away of busy life, nothing can stop me anymore from understanding what I just read, what happened - and at last I can weep like a little child. Sitting here, time is no longer a fact of any importance, nothing is real around me, I can again realize all the misery of human life, fate that will never be understood, will never fulfil all our dreams. Here they are again, past moments of her appearing, as if coming from ancient times, our first evening in the hotel, her adventurous and epic tales at the piscine-restaurant, the misery of our third night in her flat, when I left that lost whore half dead. But then, as I guess, drugs must have taken over the command in her life, dictating her future destiny. Now - it's all gone.
I feel guilty for not wanting, only three hours ago, meet her again. And all of a sudden, like a thunderstruck, I become aware of my own shaky destiny. We all have to endure uncertainty in our lives, until the distant and unknown point in time when existence would have come to an end for all of us. At once, I realize how fate plays its games of trial-and error with all of us. But during the given time of an existence, we all are only believing in values of money, we all are listening on unreal fairy-tales about useful growth and endless happiness, lust and sex - whereas, during this time, all the non-sense of modern times wipes us away, slowly first, and always accelerating - until the point in time, not very far ahead of our present, when our world may decide to say goodbye to human mankind.
Rene Delavy, Berlin and Bournemouth
Author of "PLADESNIEKANT" // "CHAOS" // "10 Maximen zur Weiterexistenz" // "Mega-Towns in the World - Explosion of Population" // "State of Towns" etc.