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Chapters 15-19Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 15 Summary
This is a lengthy chapter in which Maria meets Ralf Hart, a 29-year-old painter who is already famous and wealthy. Her reactions to him, marked with repeated expressions that she is determined not to be interested in him, indicate that she is very taken with him from the first instant she hears his voice call out to her.
The stage for their meeting is set when Maria, now only 90 days from fulfilling her plan to quit sex work, fly back to Brazil, and buy a farm for herself and her parents—and await the arrival of the love of her life—checks out some library books on farming. The librarian, whom Maria has gotten to know over the course of nine months in Geneva, tells Maria about her life. Her story is pathetically sad, ordinary, and uninspiring: she gave her heart to her husband, who retired early and died of cancer within the year. The librarian says, “‘I still think it’s best to lead a life without surprises,’ she concluded. ‘If we had, my husband might have died even earlier, who knows’” (93).
Maria walks into a roadside bar to ask the meaning of a sign she sees: “Road to Santiago.” When the waitress has no idea of the sign’s meaning, Maria has some tea, reads for a few minutes, and starts to leave when a stranger’s voice stops her. She has been stopped by Ralf, who is creating a mural of the citizens of Geneva on a large, rolled up canvas. He asks her to wait while he finishes the portrait of a Nobel prize winning chemist who happens to be in the bar. Though doubtful, she waits, and he paints her onto the canvas quickly. Ralf ignores her attempts to leave after he finishes her portrait. Saying she seems familiar to him, he asks if she is a sex worker. Maria decides to confirm his suspicion, discovering that she can even say loudly that she is a sex worker and does not care if he has a negative opinion about her. Ralf ignores her rant and engages Maria so he can learn more about her life, which she ends up sharing with him willingly. They leave the bar and walk through Geneva, eventually sitting at another bar and talking. When he tells her he has simply lost interest in sex, she grows curious about how his sexuality can be recovered.
Chapter 16 Summary
This brief chapter concerns the evening after Ralf and Maria meet. He wants to be with her, thus showing up at the Copacabana. Ralf is willing to follow the proper protocol and pay. However, when he asks, she turns him down, choosing instead three clients in whom she had no personal interest. Milan watches, knowing that the artist has real feelings for Maria and expecting her to return Ralf’s affection. Coelho writes, “Milan, who had been following her life with some interest, saw that she had lost the battle” (115) and fallen in love. Thus, Milan is surprised when she does not accept Ralf’s offer to pay to have sex with her. That night, Maria pours her heart into her diary, imploring Ralf to understand what she has not said to him.
Chapter 17 Summary
This chapter focuses on the three days between Ralf’s visit to the Copacabana and the evening when he inevitably returns. Maria is quite alarmed at her emotional response to Ralf, refusing to allow herself to acknowledge how much she is attracted to him. Coelho describes what is happening within her as “the earthquake, the volcano of her soul was showing signs that it was about to erupt” (117).
She thinks of Ralf constantly, dissecting every element of their time together, trying to minimize the meaning of the attraction between them. She tells herself:
Ralf Hart just wanted to find a woman capable of awakening in him the fire that had almost burned out; he wanted to make her into some kind of a personal sex goddess, with her ‘special light’ (he was being honest about that), who would take him by the hand and show him the road back to life. He couldn’t imagine that Maria felt the same indifference, that she had her own problems […] that she had been making plans that very morning and was organizing a triumphant return to her homeland (117).
Coelho depicts Maria as a woman emotionally obsessed with a man she just met and at the same time intellectually aware that he embodies the antithesis to all her intentions.
Chapter 18 Summary
While she is working late at Copacabana, Ralf Hart walks into the bar. Coelho compares Maria’s seeing him to a resurrection. She knows instantaneously that she has been waiting for him and she discards all the self-cautions she had put in place. Maria works to convince herself that she can remain in control of the situation. Coelho writes:
Tonight she would be the Understanding Mother. Ralf Hart was just another desperate man, like millions of others. If she played her role well, if she managed to follow the rules she laid down for herself since she began working at the Copacabana, there was no reason to worry. It was very dangerous, though, having that man so near, now that she could smell him—and she liked the way he smelled—now that she could feel his touch—and she liked his touch—now that she realized she had been waiting for him— she did not like that (122).
After they drink and dance, Ralf informs Milan that he is purchasing Maria’s time for the rest of the evening and pays three times the usual fee. They travel to his two-story home in the community of Cologny, outside Geneva.
Ralf opens his heart to Maria, acknowledging they have only known one another briefly, but he needs her because she possesses “a light” (127). Beginning to feel she is on more solid ground, Maria convinces him to provide a bottle of wine rather than the whisky he had been drinking and to start a fire. They sit in the dark before the fire. Maria asks him for a gift, one that is especially significant to him. She demonstrates by giving him a pen with which she had been writing down her important dreams and plans. Ralf gives her a train car, a carriage, from an electric train kit he had as a child. Each explains the significance of their gift to the other.
Maria rises and asks Ralf to open the front door, explaining the Brazilian custom of never opening a door yourself if you are planning to go through the door again. She walks away in the darkness. As she walks, she contemplates the profound closeness that existed between them, recognizing she had essentially become a different, remarkable woman during her time with Ralf.
Chapter 19 Summary
In the days following her trip to Ralf’s house, after telling him not to return to the Copacabana for a week, Maria works to decide how she will reawaken his interest in sexual activity. She checks out pornographic movies and tries to find books on the subject of profound sexual relationships. The one book she does purchase and read, titled Sacred Sex, does not live up to her expectations:
The person who had written the book clearly understood nothing, absolutely nothing about the subject. It was just a lot of empty theory, New Age mumbo-jumbo, pointless rituals and idiotic suggestions. Sex wasn’t theories, incense, erogenous zones, bows and salaams. How did that person (a woman) have the nerve to write on a subject which not even Maria, who worked in the field, knew in depth (137).
The ineptness of the book tempts Maria to think again about writing an explanatory book on the real power and purpose of sexual relationships, which she says would simply be her own memoir.
In her diary she writes poetically of the inevitability of her first meeting with Ralf, a spiritual collision that was planned by their souls before they were ever physically born. Though what they are experiencing is a rare connection, she states that all souls must go through such experiences before learning “the language of the soul, known as sex” (139).
Chapters 15-19 Analysis
The absolutely mundane, tepid advice on how to live given by the librarian at the beginning of Chapter 15 sets the stage for the totally unique encounter Maria is about to have with Ralf. The way he presents himself and refuses to retreat when Maria tries to brush him off catches her off guard, which is exactly the sort of thing the librarian warns against.
Throughout the book, when Coelho uses Ralf’s name, he uses both his first and last name. None of the other characters in the book are identified by last names, only first names. Coelho uses this as a literary device to set Ralf apart from other characters. Immediately, he becomes Maria’s pursuer, teacher, and student.
Coelho’s description of Maria’s shift in emotions as Ralf sketches her is only one of many occasions in which he describes the changing feelings that grip Maria during pivotal moments: “The man started drawing, and, as the work progressed, she lost that initial sense of excitement and, instead began to feel utter insignificance” (99). The author consistently portrays Maria as being quite emotional and yet so resilient that she always finds the strength to overcome her whelming emotions.
Ralf’s use of the term “sex worker” (102) in Chapter 15 is the only expression of the term in the book. Coelho is implying Ralf has a different, more acceptable impression of Maria’s profession than the average person has.
Ralf explains that the road beside the bar was an ancient highway traveled by Christian pilgrims during the Middle Ages on their way to Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Coelho’s implication is that Maria and Ralf are spiritual pilgrims. Spiritual journeys are a common feature of Coelho’s novels, though this is the first of his books to elevate sexuality to a spiritual pursuit. Throughout all their private times together, Maria and Ralf engage in activities with a heavy meditative element: sitting by the fire, walking on a pilgrimage road, meeting in church, sitting in the dark and touching one another without having intercourse. Whenever they are on the move, conversely, walking through Geneva to different locations, Coelho intentionally implies they are pilgrims on an uncertain quest. These are characteristics of the main characters in his novels.
Chapter 16 contains an ironic replay of her first experience with a boy: she is tremendously attracted to Ralf, who, like the boy who asked for a pencil, comes to her with a simple request that she will fulfill for three other men that night while turning Ralf down. When she writes in her diary that, while he is a man, she is a woman and therefore fragile, the irony of their exchange was that he was the one who was open to having his heart broken and she was the powerful, authoritative one who set the boundaries of their relationship.
Coelho’s description of Maria in Chapter 18 while she is guiding Ralf and then leaving him without having physical relations makes it sound as if she is almost like an athlete or a musician, someone who is “in the zone.” The author writes, “Now, though, she was walking in order to find herself, to find that woman who sat with a man by the fire for 40 minutes and who was full of light, wisdom, experience and charm” (132).
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