He continued explaining the ritual: after dancing, they would return to the table, and the customer, as if he were saying something highly original, would invite her to go back to his hotel with him. The normal price was three hundred and fifty francs, of which fifty francs went to Milan, for the hire of the table (a trick to avoid any future legal complications and accusations of exploiting sex for financial gain).
Maria tried to say:
"But I earned a thousand francs for..."
The owner made as if to move off, but the other Brazilian woman, who was listening in to the conversation, said:
"She's just joking."
And turning to Maria, she said in clear, loud Portuguese:
"This is the most expensive place in Geneva. Never do that again. He knows what the going rate is and he knows that no one pays a thousand francs to go to bed with anyone, except, of course, the 'special clients,' but only if you get lucky and you have the right qualifications."
Milan's eyes--later, Maria found out that he was a Yugoslav who had been living there for twenty years--left no room for doubt.
"The price is three hundred and fifty francs."
"Right," said a humbled Maria.
First, he had asked about the color of her underwear, now he was deciding how much her body was worth.
But she had no time to think, the man was still issuing instructions: she must never accept invitations to anyone's house or to a hotel that had less than five stars. If the client had nowhere to take her, she was to go to a hotel located five blocks from there, and should always take a taxi so that the women who worked in the other clubs in Rue de Berne didn't get to know her face. Maria didn't believe this last reason; she thought that the real reason was that she might get an offer of better working conditions in another club. She kept her thoughts to herself, however; arguing about the price was bad enough.
"I'll say this again: just like policemen in the movies, never drink while on duty. I'll leave you now, it'll start getting busy soon."
"Say thank you," said the other Brazilian woman in Portuguese.
Maria thanked him. The man smiled, but he had not yet finished his list of recommendations:
"I forgot something: the time between ordering a drink and leaving the club should never, under any circumstances, exceed forty-five minutes--and in Switzerland, with clocks all over the place, even Yugoslavs and Brazilians must learn to be punctual. Just remember, I'm feeding my children on your commission."
She would remember.
He gave her a glass of sparkling mineral water with a slice of lemon in it--a drink that could easily pass for a gin and tonic--and asked her to wait. Gradually the club began to fill up; men came in, looked around, sat down on their own, and immediately one of the women would go over to them, as if they were at a party where everyone has known each other for ages and as if they were just taking time out to have a little fun after a hard day at work. Every time a man found a partner, Maria gave a sigh of relief, even though she was now feeling much more comfortable. Perhaps it was because it was Switzerland, perhaps it was because, sooner or later, she would find adventure, money or a husband, as she had always dreamed she would. Perhaps--she suddenly realized--it was because it was the first time in many weeks that she had been out at night and to a place where there was music playing and where she could, now and then, hear someone speaking Portuguese. She was having fun with the other girls around her, laughing, drinking fruit juice cocktails, talking brightly.
None of them had come up to her to say hello or to wish her success in her new profession, but that was perfectly normal; after all, she was a rival, a competitor, competing for the same trophy. Instead of feeling depressed, she felt proud--she was fighting for herself, she wasn't some helpless person. She could, if she wanted to, open the door and leave that place for good, but she would always know that she had at least had the courage to come that far, to negotiate and discuss things about which she had never in her life even dared to think. She wasn't a victim of fate, she kept telling herself: she was running her own risks, pushing beyond her own limits, experiencing things which, one day, in the silence of her heart, in the tedium of old age, she would remember almost with nostalgia--however absurd that might seem.
She was sure that no one would approach her, and tomorrow it would all seem like some mad dream that she would never dare to repeat, for she had just realized that being paid a thousand francs for one night only happens once; perhaps she would be better off buying a plane ticket back to Brazil. To make the time pass more quickly, she began to work out how much each of the other girls would earn: if they went out three times a night, they would earn, for every four hours of work, the equivalent of what it would have taken her two months to earn at the shop.
Was that a lot? She had earned a thousand francs for one night, but perhaps that had just been beginner's luck. At any rate, an ordinary prostitute could earn more, much more than she would ever earn teaching French back home. And all they had to do was spend some time in a bar, dance, spread their legs and that was that. They didn't even have to talk.
Money was one motivation, she thought, but was that all? Or did the people there, the customers and the women, also enjoy themselves in some way? Was the world so very different from what she had been taught in school? If you used a condom, there was no risk. Nor was there any risk of being recognized by anyone; the only people who visit Geneva--she had been told once in her French class--were people who liked going to banks. The majority of Brazilians, however, enjoy shopping, preferably in Miami or in Paris.
Three hundred Swiss francs a day, five days a week. A fortune! Why did those women keep working there when they could earn enough in a month to go back home and buy a new house for their mother? Or had they only been working there a short time?
Or--and Maria felt afraid of her own question--did they enjoy it?
Again she wished she could have a proper drink--the champagne had helped a lot the previous night.
"Would you like a drink?"
Before her stood a man in his thirties, wearing the uniform of some airline.
The world went into slow motion, and Maria had a sense of stepping out of her own body and observing herself from the outside. Deeply embarrassed, but struggling to control her blushes, she nodded and smiled, knowing that from that moment on her life had changed forever.
A fruit juice cocktail, a bit of talk, what are you doing here, it's cold, isn't it? I like this music, oh, I prefer Abba myself, the Swiss are a chilly lot, are you from Brazil? Tell me about your country. Well, there's Carnival. You Brazilian women are really pretty, you know.
Smile and accept the compliment, perhaps with a slightly shy look. Back to the dance floor, but all the time keeping an eye on Milan, who sometimes scratches his head and taps his wristwatch. The smell of the man's cologne; she realizes quickly that she will have to get used to all kinds of smells. At least this is perfume. They dance very close. Another fruit juice cocktail, time is passing, didn't Milan say forty-five minutes maximum? She looks at her watch, he asks if she's expecting someone, she says a few friends of hers will be arriving in about an hour, he invites her back to his hotel. Hotel room, three hundred and fifty francs, a shower after sex (intrigued, the man remarked that no one had ever done that before). It's not Maria, it's some other person who's inside her body, who feels nothing, who mechanically goes through the motions of a ritual. She's an actress. Milan has taught her everything, even how to say goodbye to the client, she thanks him, he too feels awkward and sleepy.
She doesn't want to go back to the club, she wants to go home, but she has to go back to hand over the fifty francs, and then there's another man, another cocktail, more questions about Brazil, a hotel, another shower (this time, no comment), back to the bar where the owner takes his commission and tells her she can go, there aren't many customers tonight. She doesn't get a taxi, she walks the length of Rue de Berne, looking at the other clubs, at the shop windows full of clocks and
watches, at the church on the corner (closed, always closed...) As usual, no one looks at her.
She walks through the cold. She isn't aware of the freezing temperatures, she doesn't cry, she doesn't think about the money she has earned, she is in a kind of trance. Some people were born to face life alone, and this is neither good nor bad, it is simply life. Maria is one of those people.
She begins to try and think about what has happened: she only started work today and yet she already considers herself a professional; it's as if she started ages ago, as if she had done this all her life. She experiences a strange sense of pride; she is glad she didn't run away. Now she just has to decide whether or not to carry on. If she does carry on, then she will make sure she is the best, something she has never been before.
But life was teaching her--very fast--that only the strong survive. To be strong, she must be the best, there's no alternative.
From Maria's diary a week later:
I'm not a body with a soul, I'm a soul that has a visible part called the body. All this week, contrary to what one might expect, I have been more conscious of the presence of this soul than usual. It didn't say anything to me, didn't criticize me or feel sorry for me: it merely watched me.
Today, I realized why this was happening: it's been such a long time since I thought about love or anything called love. It seems to be running away from me, as if it wasn't important any more and didn't feel welcome. But if I don't think about love, I will be nothing.
When I went back to the Copacabana the second night, I was treated with much more respect--apparently, a lot of girls do it for one night, but can't bear to go on. Anyone who does, becomes a kind of ally, a colleague, because she can understand the difficulties and the reasons or, rather, the absence of reasons for having chosen this kind of life.
They all dream of someone who will come along and see in them a real woman--companion, lover, friend. But they all know, from the very first moment of each new encounter, that this simply isn't going to happen.
I need to write about love. I need to think and think and write and write about love--otherwise, my soul won't survive.
However important Maria thought love was, she did not forget the advice she was given on her first night and did her best to confine love to the pages of her diary. Apart from that, she tried desperately to be the best, to earn a lot of money in as short a time as possible, to think very little and to find a good reason for doing what she was doing.
That was the most difficult part: what was the real reason?
She was doing it because she needed to. This wasn't quite true--everyone needs to earn money, but not everyone chooses to live on the margins of society. She was doing it because she wanted to experience something new. No, that wasn't true either; the world was full of new experiences--like skiing or going sailing on Lake Geneva, for example--but she had never been interested. She was doing it because she had nothing to lose, because her life was one of constant, day-to-day frustration.
No, none of these answers was true, so it was best to forget all about it and simply deal with whatever lay along her particular path. She had a lot in common with the other prostitutes, and with all the other women she had known in her life, whose greatest dream was to get married and have a secure life. Those who didn't think like this either had a husband (almost a third of her colleagues were married) or were recently divorced. Because of that, and in order to understand herself, she tried--as tactfully as possible--to understand why her colleagues had chosen this profession.
She heard nothing new, but she made a list of their responses. They said they had to help out their husband (Wasn't he jealous? What if one of her husband's friends came to the club one night? But Maria didn't dare to ask these questions), that they wanted to buy a house for their mother (her own excuse, apparently so noble, and the most common one), to earn enough money for their fare home (Colombians, Thais, Peruvians, Brazilians all loved this reason, even though they had earned enough money several times over and had immediately spent it, afraid to realize their dream), to have fun (this didn't really tally with the atmosphere in the club, and always rang false), they couldn't find any other kind of work (this wasn't a good reason either, Switzerland was full of jobs for cleaners, drivers and cooks).
None of them came up with any valid reason, and so she stopped trying to explain her particular Universe.
She saw that the owner, Milan, was quite right: no one ever again offered her a thousand Swiss francs for the privilege of spending a few hours with her. On the other hand, no one ever complained when she asked for three hundred and fifty francs, as if they already knew or only asked in order to humiliate her, or wanted to avoid any unpleasant surprises.
One of the girls said:
"Prostitution isn't like other businesses: beginners earn more and the more experienced earn less. Always pretend you're a beginner."
Maria still didn't know who the "special clients" were; they had only been mentioned on the first night and no one ever spoke of them. Gradually, she picked up the most important tricks of the trade, like never asking personal questions, smiling a lot and talking as little as possible, never arranging to meet anyone outside the club. The most important piece of advice, however, came from a Filipino woman called Nyah:
"When your client comes, you must always groan as if you were having an orgasm too. That guarantees customer loyalty."
"But why? They're just paying for their own satisfaction."
"No, that's where you're wrong. A man doesn't prove he's a man by getting an erection. He's only a real man if he can pleasure a woman. And if he can pleasure a prostitute, he'll think he's the best lover on the block."
And so six months passed: Maria learned all the necessary lessons, for example, how the Copacabana worked. Since it was one of the most expensive places on Rue de Berne, the clientele was largely made up of executives, who had permission to get home late because they were out "having supper with clients," but these "suppers" could never last longer than eleven o'clock at night. Most of the prostitutes who worked there were aged between eighteen and twenty-two and they stayed, on average, for two years, when they would be replaced by newer recruits. They then moved to the Neon, then to the Xenium, and the price went down as the woman's age went up, and the hours of work grew fewer and fewer. They almost all ended up in the Tropical Extasy, who accepted women over thirty; but once they were there, they could only just earn enough to pay for their lunch and their rent by going with one or two students a day (the average fee per client was just about enough to buy a bottle of cheap wine).
She went to bed with many men. She didn't care how old they were or how they were dressed, but whether she said yes or no depended on how they smelled. She had nothing against cigarettes, but she hated cheap aftershave or those who didn't wash or whose clothes stank of booze. The Copacabana was a quiet place, and Switzerland was possibly the best country in the world in which to work as a prostitute, as long as you had a residence permit and a work permit, kept all your papers in order and paid your social security; Milan was always saying that he didn't want his children to see his name in the tabloid newspapers, and so he was as strict as a policeman when it came to keeping an eye on his "employees."
Once you had got past the barrier of the first or second night, it was a profession much like any other, in which you worked hard, fought off the competition, tried to maintain standards, put in the necessary hours, got a bit stressed out, complained about your workload, and rested on Sundays. Most of the prostitutes had some kind of religious faith, and attended their respective churches and masses, said their prayers and had their encounters with God.
Maria, however, was struggling in the pages of her diary not to lose her soul. She discovered, to her surprise, that one in every five clients didn't want her in order to have sex, but simply to talk a little. They paid for the bar tab and the hotel room, and when the moment came for them both to take off their clothes, the man would say, no, that won't be ne
cessary. They wanted to talk about the pressures of work, about their unfaithful wife, about how lonely they felt, how they had no one to talk to (something she knew about all too well).
At first, she found this very odd. Then, one night, she went to the hotel with an arrogant Frenchman, a headhunter for top executive jobs (he told her this as if he were telling her the most fascinating thing in the world), and this is what he said:
"Do you know who the loneliest person in the world is? The executive with a successful career, earning an enormous salary, trusted by those above and below him, with a family to go on holiday with and children whom he helps out with their homework, but who is then approached by someone like me and asked the following question: 'How would you like to change your job and earn twice as much?'"
"The executive, who has every reason to feel wanted and happy, becomes the most miserable creature on the planet. Why? Because he has no one to talk to. He is tempted to accept my offer, but he can't talk about it to his work colleagues because they would do everything they could to persuade him to stay. He can't talk about it to his wife, who has been his companion in his rise up the ladder of success and understands a great deal about security, but nothing about taking risks. He can't talk to anyone about it and there he is confronted by the biggest decision of his life. Can you imagine how that man feels?"
No, that man wasn't the loneliest person in the world. Maria knew the loneliest person on the face of this Earth: herself. Nevertheless, she agreed with her client, hoping to get a big tip, which she did. But his words made her realize that she needed to find some way of freeing her clients from the enormous pressure they all seemed to be under; this meant both improving the quality of her services and the chance of earning some extra money.