Eleven Minutes

Milan, Maria’s boss, recognizes that Maria has attained a new place in her profession. He tells her that Ralf is a “special client” (141), and she is ready now to meet more special clients. That evening he introduces her to Terence, an executive who works with a record company. He takes her back to his hotel and goes into a highly symbolic sado-masochistic fetish ritual in which talking about her obedience and suffering take the place of actual sexual activities. Terence tells her, after paying her 1000 francs, that he will be coming back to see her.

In discussing sadism and why he engages in it with Maria, Terence says, “Only those who know those frontiers know life; everything else is just passing the time, repeating the same tasks, growing old and dying without ever having discovered what we are doing here” (149).

That night in her diary, Maria discusses the reality that she is two women, one mundane and one completely adventurous. Rectifying these two parts of herself, she says, is like a collision of two universes where one might be destroyed.