Eleven Minutes

  He picked up the remote control and changed channels several times until he found the TV news and a report on refugees trying to escape a war.

  "Do you see that? Have you ever seen those programs in which people discuss their personal problems in front of everyone? Have you been to a newspaper kiosk and seen the headlines? The world enjoys suffering and pain. There's sadism in the way we look at these things, and masochism in our conclusion that we don't need to know all this in order to be happy, and yet we watch other people's tragedies and sometimes suffer along with them."

  He poured out two glasses of champagne, turned off the television and continued lighting candles, in contravention of the superstition Maria had mentioned.

  "As I say, it's the human condition. Ever since we were expelled from paradise, we have either been suffering, making other people suffer or watching the suffering of others. It's beyond our control."

  From outside came the sound of thunder and lightning; a huge storm was approaching.

  "But I can't do it," Maria said. "It seems ridiculous to me pretending that you're my master and I'm your slave. We don't need 'theater' to find suffering; life offers us more than enough opportunities."

  Terence had just finished lighting the candles. He picked one up and placed it in the middle of the table, then served more champagne, and caviar. Maria was drinking quickly, thinking about the one thousand francs in her bag, about this stranger who both fascinated and frightened her, and about how she could control her fear. She knew that, with this man, no night would ever be the same as another; she could not intimidate him in any way.

  "Sit down."

  His voice alternated between being gentle and authoritarian. Maria obeyed, and a wave of heat swept up her body; that order was familiar, she felt more secure.

  "It's theater. I've got to get involved in the play."

  It was nice being ordered around. She didn't have to think, just obey. She asked for more champagne, and he brought vodka; it went to one's head more quickly, loosened one up, and went better with the caviar.

  He opened the bottle; Maria was more or less drinking alone, while she listened to the thunder and lightning outside. Everything was conspiring to make the moment perfect, as if the energies of the skies and the earth were also showing their violent side.

  After a while, Terence took a small suitcase out of the wardrobe and placed it on the bed.

  "Don't move."

  Maria sat motionless. He opened the suitcase and took out two pairs of chrome metal handcuffs.

  "Sit with your legs apart."

  She obeyed--impotent out of choice, submissive because she wanted to be. She saw him looking between her legs, he could see her black panties, her long stockings, her thighs, he could imagine her pubic hair, her sex.

  "Stand up!"

  She leaped up from her chair. She found it hard to stand straight and realized that she was drunker than she thought.

  "Don't look at me. Lower your head, respect your master!"

  Before she could lower her head, she saw a slender whip being removed from the suitcase, then cracking through the air, as if it had a life of its own.

  "Drink. Keep your head down, but drink."

  She drank another one, two, three glasses of vodka. This wasn't just theater now, it was reality: control was out of her hands. She felt like an object, a mere instrument, and incredible though it may seem, that feeling of submission gave her a sense of complete freedom. She was no longer the teacher, the one who instructs, consoles, listens to confessions, the one who excites; before the awesome power of this man, she was just a girl from the interior of Brazil.

  "Take off your clothes."

  The order was delivered abruptly, without a flicker of desire, and yet, nothing could have been more erotic. Keeping her head down as a sign of reverence, Maria unbuttoned her dress and let it slip to the floor.

  "You're not behaving yourself, you know."

  Again the whip cracked through the air.

  "You need to be punished. How dare a girl your age contradict me? You should be on your knees before me!"

  Maria made as if to kneel down, but the whip brought her up short; for the first time it touched her flesh--her buttocks. It stung, but seemed to leave no mark.

  "Did I tell you to kneel down?"

  "No."

  The whip again flicked across her buttocks.

  "Say, 'No, sir!'"

  Another stinging whiplash. For a fraction of a second, it occurred to her that she could either stop this right now or else choose to go through with it, not for the money, but because of what he had said the first time--that you only know yourself when you go beyond your limits.

  And this was new, it was an Adventure, and she could decide later on if she wanted to continue, but at that moment, she had ceased to be the girl with just three aims in life, who earned her living with her body, who had met a man who had an open fire and interesting stories to tell. Here, she was no one, and being no one meant that she could be everything she had ever dreamed of.

  "Take the rest of your clothes off. And walk up and down so that I can see you."

  Once more she obeyed, keeping her head down, saying not a word. The man who was watching her, still fully dressed and utterly impassive, was not the same person who had chatted to her on their way here from the club--he was a Ulysses who had travelled from London, a Theseus come down from the heavens, a kidnapper invading the safest city in the world, and who had the coldest heart on earth. She removed her panties and her bra, feeling at once defenseless and protected. The whip cracked again, this time without touching her body.

  "Keep your head down! You're here to be humiliated, to submit to my every desire, do you understand?"

  "Yes, sir."

  He grabbed her arms and put the first pair of handcuffs on her wrists.

  "You're going to get a good beating. Until you learn to behave yourself."

  He slapped her bottom with the flat of his hand. Maria cried out; this time it had hurt.

  "Oh, so you're complaining, are you? Well, I haven't even started yet."

  Before she could do anything, he had placed a leather gag on her mouth. It didn't stop her speaking, she could still say "yellow" or "red," but she felt now that it was her destiny to allow this man to do whatever he wished with her, and there was no way she could escape now. She was naked, gagged and handcuffed, with vodka flowing in her veins rather than blood.

  Another slap on her buttocks.

  "Walk up and down!"

  Maria started to walk, obeying his commands: "stop," "turn to the right," "sit down," "open your legs." He slapped her again and again, whether she deserved it or not, and she felt the pain and felt the humiliation--which was more intense and more potent than the pain--and she felt as if she were in another world, in which nothing existed, and it was an almost religious feeling: self-annihilation, subjection, and a complete loss of any sense of Ego, desire or self-will. She was very wet and very aroused, but unable to understand what was going on.

  "Down on your knees again!"

  Since she always kept her head down, as a sign of obedience and humiliation, Maria could not see exactly what was happening, but she noticed that in that other universe, on that other planet, the man was breathing hard, worn out with wielding the whip and spanking her hard on the buttocks, whilst she felt herself filling up with strength and energy. She had lost all shame now, and wasn't bothered about showing her pleasure; she started to moan, pleading with him to touch her, but, instead, the man grabbed her and threw her onto the bed.

  He violently forced her legs apart--although she knew this violence would not actually harm her--and tied each leg to one corner of the bed. Now that her wrists were handcuffed behind her, her legs splayed, her mouth gagged, when would he penetrate her? Couldn't he see that she was ready, that she wanted to serve him, that she was his slave, his creature, his object, and would do anything he ordered her to do?

  "Would you like me to take you f
urther still?"

  She saw him place the end of the whip handle against her vagina. He rubbed it up and down, and when it touched her clitoris, she lost all control. She had no idea how long they had been there nor how many times she had been spanked, but suddenly she came and had the orgasm which, in all those months, dozens, no, hundreds of men had failed to give her. There was a burst of light, she felt herself entering a kind of black hole in her soul, in which intense pain and fear mingled with total pleasure, pushing her beyond all previously known limits and she moaned and screamed, her voice muffled by the gag, she writhed about on the bed, feeling the handcuffs cutting into her wrists and the leather thongs bruising her ankles, she moved as never before precisely because she could not move, she screamed as never before because she had a gag on her mouth and no one would be able to hear her. This was pain and pleasure, the end of the whip handle pressing ever harder against her clitoris and the orgasm flooding out of her mouth, her vagina, her pores, her eyes, her skin.

  She entered a kind of trance, and slowly, very slowly, she began to come down; there was no whip pressing between her legs now, just sweat-drenched hair, kind hands removing the handcuffs, untying the leather thongs around her ankles.

  She lay there, confused, unable to look at the man because she was ashamed of herself, of her screams, of her orgasm. He was stroking her hair and he too was breathing hard, but the pleasure had been entirely hers; he had not enjoyed a single moment of ecstasy.

  Her naked body embraced that of this fully clothed man, who was exhausted from shouting orders and keeping tight control of the situation. She didn't know what to say, how to continue, but she felt safe and protected, because he had invited her to go to a place inside herself that she had never known before; he was her protector and her master.

  She started to cry, and he waited patiently until she had finished.

  "What did you do to me?" she asked tearfully.

  "What you wanted me to do."

  She looked at him, feeling that she needed him desperately.

  "I didn't force you or oblige you to do anything, nor did I hear you say 'yellow'; I had only the power you gave me. There was no obligation, no blackmail on my part, only your will; you may have been the slave and I the master, but my only power was to push you in the direction of your own freedom."

  Handcuffs. Leather thongs around her ankles. A gag. Humiliation that was more intense and more potent than any pain. And yet--he was quite right--the feeling was one of total freedom. Maria felt full of energy and vigor and was surprised to see that the man beside her was utterly exhausted.

  "Did you come?"

  "No," he said. "The master is here to drive the slave on. The pleasure of the slave is the joy of the master."

  None of this made sense, because it wasn't the way it was in stories, it wasn't the way it was in real life. But here in this fantasy world, she was full of light, while he seemed opaque, drained.

  "You can leave whenever you want," Terence said.

  "I don't want to leave, I want to understand."

  "There's nothing to understand."

  She got up in all the beauty and intensity of her nakedness and poured two glasses of wine. She lit two cigarettes and gave him one of them--the roles were reversed, she was now the mistress serving the slave, rewarding him for the pleasure he had given her.

  "I'll get dressed and then I'll leave, but, first, I'd like to talk a little."

  "There's nothing to talk about. That's all I wanted, and you were marvelous. I'm tired now and I have to go back to London tomorrow."

  He lay down and closed his eyes. Maria didn't know if he was just pretending to sleep and she didn't care; she smoked a leisurely cigarette and slowly sipped her wine, with her face pressed against the window pane, looking out at the lake opposite and wishing that someone, on the other shore, could see her like this--naked, replete, satisfied, confident.

  She got dressed and left without saying goodbye, and was not bothered whether she opened the door or he did, because she wasn't sure that she wanted to come back.

  Terence heard the door close, waited to see if she would come back, saying that she had forgotten something, and only after a few minutes did he get up and light another cigarette.

  The girl had style, he thought. She had withstood the whip well, although this was the oldest, the most common and the least severe of the punishments. For a moment, he sat remembering the first time he had experienced that mysterious relationship between two beings who want to be close, but can only be so by inflicting suffering.

  Millions of couples out there practiced the art of sadomasochism every day, without even realizing it. They went to work, came back, complained about everything, insulted their wife or were insulted by her, felt wretched, but were, nonetheless, tightly bound to their own unhappiness, not realizing that all it would take was a single gesture, a final goodbye, to free them from that oppression. Terence had experienced this with his wife, a well-known English singer; he was tormented by jealousy, he made scenes, and spent whole days dosed up with painkillers, whole nights hopelessly drunk. She loved him and couldn't understand why he behaved like that; he loved her and couldn't understand his own behavior. It was as if the agony that the one inflicted on the other was necessary, fundamental to life.

  One day, a musician--whom he had always thought of as very strange, because he seemed so normal in the midst of all those exotic people--left a book behind in the studio: Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Terence started leafing through it and, as he read, he began to understand himself better.

  "The lovely woman took off her clothes and picked up a long, short-handled whip. 'You asked for it,' she said, 'so I'm going to whip you.' 'Oh, yes,' murmured her lover, 'please, I beg you.'"

  His wife was on the other side of the glass screen, rehearsing. She had asked them to turn off the microphones that allowed the technicians to listen in to everything, and they had done so. Terence was thinking that perhaps she was making a date with the pianist, and he realized that she was driving him mad, but it was as if he was so accustomed to suffering now that he could not live without it.

  "I'm going to whip you," said the naked woman in the book he was reading. "Oh, yes, please, I beg you."

  He was a good-looking man, and a force to be reckoned with in the record company, why did he need to lead such a life?

  Because he wanted to. He deserved to suffer because life had been so good to him, and he wasn't worthy of all these blessings--money, respect, fame. He felt that his career was leading him to a point where he would become dependent on success, and that frightened him, because he had seen a lot of people plummet from the heights.

  He read the book. He started reading everything he could find about the mysterious union between pain and pleasure. His wife found the videos he was renting and the books he was hiding from her, and asked him what it was all about, was he sick? Terence said no, it was just research he was doing for a new cover. Then he said nonchalantly:

  "Perhaps we should try it."

  They did. They began very timidly, using the manuals they found in porn shops. Gradually, they developed new techniques, took their activities to dangerous limits, and yet they felt that their marriage was even stronger. They were accomplices in something hidden, forbidden, proscribed.

  Their joint experience was transformed into art: they created new outfits--leather with metal studs. His wife went on stage wearing boots and a suspender belt and wielding a whip, and the audience went wild. Her new record shot to the top of the charts in England and went on to triumph in the rest of Europe. Terence was surprised how young people accepted his personal fantasies as perfectly natural, and the only explanation he could find was that it provided a means of expressing repressed violence in an intense but inoffensive manner.

  The whip came to be the group's logo and was reproduced on T-shirts, fake tattoos, stickers and postcards. Terence's intellectual bent drove him to track down the origins of all this, so t
hat he could understand himself better.

  These origins did not lie, as he had told Maria, with those penitents trying to drive away the Black Death. Ever since the Dark Ages, man has understood that suffering, if confronted without fear, is his passport to freedom.

  Egypt, Rome and Persia all shared the notion that a man can save his country and his world by sacrificing himself. Whenever there was a great natural disaster in China, the emperor was punished, because he was the divinity's Earthly representative. In ancient Greece, the finest Spartan warriors were whipped once a year, from morning till night, in homage to the goddess Artemis, while the crowd urged them on, calling on them to withstand the pain with dignity, for it was preparing them for the world of war. At the end of the day, the priests would examine the wounds on the warriors' backs and use them to predict the city's future.

  The priests of the desert, in an ancient, fourth-century Christian community that grew up around a monastery in Alexandria, used flagellation as a way of driving out demons or of proving the futility of the body in the spiritual search. The history of saints was full of similar examples--St. Rosa running through the garden, letting the thorns tear her skin, St. Domingos Loricatus whipping himself every night before sleeping, the martyrs who voluntarily offered themselves up to a slow death on the cross or being torn apart by wild animals. They all said that pain, once mastered, could lead to religious ecstasy.

  Recent, unconfirmed studies indicated that a particular kind of fungus with hallucinogenic properties grew in the wounds and caused visions. The pleasure was so intense that the practice soon left the monasteries and convents and spread throughout the world.

  In 1718, A Treatise on Self-flagellation was published, which showed how to achieve pleasure through pain, but without harming the body. At the end of that century, there were dozens of places in Europe where people were prepared to suffer in order to attain joy. There are records of kings and princesses who had their slaves whip them, until they found that another kind of pleasure--albeit more exhausting and less gratifying--was to be found not only in being whipped, but also in inflicting pain.

  While he was smoking his cigarette, Terence took a certain pleasurable pride in knowing that most people would be unable to understand what he was thinking.