Eleven Minutes. Пауло Коэльо

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      So that was how it worked. As easy as that. There she was in a strange city where she knew no one, but what had been a torment to her yesterday, today gave her a tremendous sense of freedom, because she didn’t need to explain herself to anyone.

      She decided that, for the first time in many years, she would devote the entire day to thinking about herself. Up until then, she had always been preoccupied with what other people were thinking: her mother, her schoolfriends, her father, the people at the model agencies, the French teacher, the waiter, the librarian, complete strangers in the street. In fact, no one was thinking anything, certainly not about her, a poor foreigner, who, if she disappeared tomorrow, wouldn’t even be missed by the police.

      Fine. She went out early, had breakfast in her usual cafe, went for a stroll around the lake and saw a demonstration held by refugees. A woman out walking a small dog told her that they were Kurds, and Maria, instead of pretending that she knew the answer in order to prove that she was more cultivated and intelligent than people might think, asked:

      ‘Where do Kurds come from?’

      To her surprise, the woman didn’t know. That’s what the world is like: people talk as if they knew everything, but if you dare to ask a question, they don’t know anything. She went into an Internet cafe and discovered that the Kurds came from Kurdistan, a non-existent country, now divided between Turkey and Iraq. She went back to the lake in search of the woman and her dog, but she had gone, possibly because the dog had got fed up after half an hour of staring at a group of human beings with banners, headscarves, music and strange cries.

      ‘I’m just like that woman really. Or rather, that’s what I used to be like: someone pretending to know everything, hidden away in my own silence, until that Arab guy got on my nerves, and I finally had the courage to say that the only thing I knew was how to tell the difference between two soft drinks. Was he shocked? Did he change his mind about me? Of course not. He must have been amazed at my honesty. Whenever I try to appear more intelligent than I am, I always lose out. Well, enough is enough!’

      She thought of the model agency. Did they know what the Arab guy really wanted – in which case she had, yet again, been taken for a fool – or had they genuinely thought he was going to find work for her in his country?

      Whatever the truth of the matter, Maria felt less alone on that grey morning in Geneva, with the temperature close to zero, the Kurds demonstrating, the trams arriving punctually at each stop, the shops setting out their jewellery in the windows again, the banks opening, the beggars sleeping, the Swiss going to work. She was less alone because by her side was another woman, invisible perhaps to passers-by. She had never noticed her presence before, but there she was.

      She smiled at the invisible woman beside her who looked like the Virgin Mary, Jesus’s mother. The woman smiled back and told her to be careful, things were not as simple as she imagined. Maria ignored the advice and replied that she was a grown-up, responsible for her own decisions, and she couldn’t believe that there was some cosmic conspiracy being hatched against her. She had learned that there were people prepared to pay one thousand Swiss francs for one night, for half an hour between her legs, and all she had to decide over the next few days was whether to take her thousand Swiss francs and buy a plane ticket back to the town where she had been born, or to stay a little longer, and earn enough to be able to buy her parents a house, some lovely clothes for herself and tickets to all the places she had dreamed of visiting one day.

      The invisible woman at her side said again that things weren’t that simple, but Maria, although glad of this unexpected company, asked her not to interrupt her thoughts, because she needed to make some important decisions.

      She began to analyse, more carefully this time, the possibility of going back to Brazil. Her schoolfriends, who had never left the town they were born in, would all say that she had been fired from the job, that she had never had the talent to be an international star. Her mother would be sad never to have received her promised monthly sum of money, although Maria, in her letters, had assured her that the post office must be stealing it. Her father would, forever after, look at her with that ‘I told you so’ expression on his face; she would go back to working in the shop, selling fabrics, and she would marry the owner – she who had travelled in a plane, eaten Swiss cheese, learned French and walked in the snow.

      On the other hand, there were those drinks that had earned her one thousand Swiss francs. It might not last very long – after all, beauty changes as swiftly as the wind – but in a year, she could earn enough money to get back on her feet and return to the world, this time on her own terms. The only real problem was that she didn’t know what to do, how to start. She remembered from her days at the ‘family nightclub’ where she had first worked that a girl had mentioned somewhere called Rue de Berne – in fact, it had been one of the first things she had said, even before she had shown her where to put her suitcases.

      She went over to one of the large panels that can be found everywhere in Geneva, that most tourist-friendly of cities, which cannot bear to see tourists getting lost. For this reason the panels have advertisements on one side and maps on the other.

      A man was standing there, and she asked him if he knew where Rue de Berne was. He looked at her, intrigued, and asked if it was the street she was looking for or the road that went to Berne, the capital of Switzerland. No, said Maria, I want the street in Geneva. The man looked her up and down, then walked off without a word, convinced that he was being filmed by one of those TV programmes that delight in making fools of people. Maria studied the map for fifteen minutes – it’s not a very big city – and finally found the place she was looking for.

      Her invisible friend, who had remained silent while she was studying the map, was now trying to reason with her; it wasn’t a question of morality, but of setting off down a road of no return.

      Maria said that if she could earn enough money to go back home, then she could earn enough to get out of any situation. Besides, none of the people she passed had actually chosen what they wanted to do. That was just a fact of life.

      ‘We live in a vale of tears,’ she said to her invisible friend. ‘We can have all the dreams we like, but life is hard, implacable, sad. What are you trying to say: that people will condemn me? No one will ever know – this is just one phase of my life.’

      With a sad, sweet smile, the invisible friend disappeared.