The Winner Stands Alone

"It can be anywhere they might catch a distant glimpse of some elusive celebrity. For the adoring crowd, a wave from a celebrity is like being scattered with ambrosia dust or manna from heaven.

"It's the same everywhere. Take, for example, those massive pop concerts that seem more like religious meetings, or the way people are willing to wait outside some sell-out performance at a theater just to see the Superclass entering and leaving. Take the crowds who go to football stadiums to watch a bunch of men chasing after a ball. Celebrities are idols, icons if you like, after all, they do resemble the paintings you see in churches and can become cult images in the bedrooms of adolescents or housewives, and even in the offices of industrial magnates, who, despite their own enormous wealth, envy their celebrity.

"There's just one difference: in this case, the public is the supreme judge, and while they may applaud today, tomorrow they'll be equally happy to read some scandalous revelation about their idol in a gossip magazine. Then they can say: 'Poor thing. I'm so glad I'm not like him.' They may adore their idol today, but tomorrow they'll stone and crucify him without a twinge of conscience."

1:37 P.M.

Unlike the other girls who arrived for work this morning and are now using their iPods and mobile phones to while away the five hours that separate having their makeup and hair done from the actual fashion show, Jasmine is reading a book, a poetry book:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

She had chosen the road less traveled, and though it cost her dearly, it has been worth it. Things arrive at the right moment. Love had appeared when she most needed it and was still there with her now. She did her work with, for, and out of love, or, rather, out of love for one particular person.

Jasmine's real name is Cristina. Her CV says she was discovered by Anna Dieter on a trip to Kenya, but there was little detail about this, leaving in the air the possibility of a childhood spent suffering and starving, caught up in the middle of a civil war. In fact, despite her black skin, she was born in the very traditional Belgian city of Antwerp, the daughter of parents fleeing the eternal conflicts between Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda.

One weekend, when she was sixteen, she was helping out her mother on one of the latter's endless cleaning jobs, when a man came up to them and introduced himself, saying he was a photographer.

"Your daughter is extraordinarily beautiful," he said. "I'd like her to work with me as a model."

"You see this bag I'm carrying? It's full of cleaning materials. I work day and night so that she can go to a good school and, one day, get a university degree. She's only sixteen."