Eleven Minutes by Paulo Coelho

himself to literature, the girl who would have loved to be a TV star, but who found herself instead working at the checkout in a supermarket.
    I don't feel in the least bit sorry for myself. I am still
     not a victim, because I could have left that restaurant with
     my dignity intact and my purse empty. I could have given that man sitting opposite me a lesson in morality or tried to make him see that before him sat a princess who should be wooed
     not bought. I could have responded in all kinds of ways, but
     - like most people - I let fate choose which route I should take.
    I'm not the only one, even though my fate may put me outside the law and outside society. In the search for
     happiness, however, we are all equal: none of us is happy - not the banker/musician, the dentist/writer, the checkout girl/actress, or the housewife/model.
    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