Eleven Minutes by Paulo Coelho Page 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. Maria went to the funfair and bought a ticket for the
     roller coaster; she screamed along with everyone else, knowing that there was no real danger and that it was all just a game. She ate in a Japanese restaurant, even though
     she didn't