Eleven Minutes. Пауло Коэльо

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      The agency phoned the next day and asked about the photos and when the fashion show was being held, since they got a percentage of every job. Maria, realising that they knew nothing about what had happened, told them that the Arab gentleman would be in touch with them.

      She went to the library and asked for some books about sex. If she was seriously considering the possibility of working – just for a year, she had told herself – in an area about which she knew nothing, the first thing she needed to know was how to behave, how to give pleasure and receive money in return.

      She was most disappointed when the librarian told her that, since the library was a government-funded institution, they only had a few technical works. Maria read the index of one of these books and immediately returned it: they said nothing about happiness, they talked only about dull things such as erection, penetration, impotence, precautions…She did for a moment consider borrowing The Psychology of Frigidity in Women, since, in her own case, although she very much enjoyed being possessed and penetrated by a man, she only ever reached orgasm through masturbation.

      She wasn’t there in search of pleasure, however, but work. She thanked the librarian, and went to a shop where she made her first investment in that possible career looming on the horizon – clothes which she considered to be sexy enough to arouse men’s desire. Then she went straight to the place she had found on the map. Rue de Berne. At the top of the street was a church (oddly enough, very near the Japanese restaurant where she had had supper the night before), then some shops selling cheap watches and clocks, and, at the far end, were the clubs she had heard about, all of them closed at that hour of the day. She went for another walk around the lake, then – without a tremor of embarrassment – bought five pornographic magazines in order to study the kind of thing she would have to do, waited for darkness to fall and then went back to Rue de Berne. There she chose at random a bar with the alluringly Brazilian name of ‘Copacabana’.

      She hadn’t decided anything, she told herself. It was just an experiment. She hadn’t felt so well or so free in all the time she had been in Switzerland.