Eleven Minutes

"He's a very well-known artist."

Her intuition had been right. Maria tried not to show her feelings and to remain calm.

"He comes here now and again, and he always brings an important client with him. He says he likes the atmosphere, that it inspires him; he's doing a painting of people who represent the city. It was commissioned by the town hall."

Maria looked at the subject of the portrait. Again the waitress read her thoughts.

"He's a chemist who apparently made some really revolutionary discovery. He won the Nobel Prize."

"Don't go," said the painter again. "I'll be finished in five minutes. Order what you like and put it on my bill."

As if hypnotized, she sat down at the bar, ordered an anisette (she wasn't used to drinking, and the only thing that occurred to her was to order the same as the Nobel prizewinner), and watched the man working. "I don't represent the city, so he must be interested in something else. But he's not really my type," she thought automatically, repeating what she always said to herself, ever since she had been working at the Copacabana; it was her salvation, her voluntary denial of the traps set by the heart. Having cleared that up, she didn't mind waiting awhile--perhaps the waitress was right, perhaps this man could open doors to a world of which she knew nothing.

She watched how quickly and adroitly he put the finishing touches to his work; it was apparently a very large canvas, but it was all rolled up, and so she couldn't see what other faces he had painted. What if this was a new opportunity? The man (she had decided that he was a "man" and not a "boy," because otherwise she would start to feel old before her time) didn't seem the sort likely to make that kind of proposal just in order to spend the night with her. Five minutes later, as promised, he had finished his work, while Maria concentrated hard on thinking about Brazil, about her brilliant future there, and her complete lack of interest in meeting new people who might jeopardize all her plans.

"Thanks, you can move now," said the painter to the chemist, who seemed to awaken from a dream.

And turning to Maria, he said simply:

"Sit in that corner and make yourself comfortable. The light is wonderful."

As if everything had been ordained by fate, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, as if she had known this man all her life or had already lived this moment in dreams and now knew what to do in reality, Maria picked up her glass of anisette, her bag, and the books on farm management, and went over to the place indicated by the man--a table near the window. He brought his brushes, the large canvas, a series of small glass bottles full of various colors and a packet of cigarettes, and knelt at her feet.

"Now don't move."

"That's asking a lot; my life is in constant motion."

Maria thought she was being terribly witty, but the man ignored her remark. Trying to appear natural, because she found the way the man looked at her most discomfiting, she pointed across the road at the plaque:

"What is the 'Road to Santiago'?"

"It's a pilgrimage route. In the Middle Ages, people from all over Europe would come along this street, heading for a city in Spain, Santiago de Compostela."

He folded over one part of the canvas and prepared his brushes. Maria still didn't know quite what to do.

"Do you mean that if I followed that street, I'd eventually get to Spain?"

"Yes, in two or three months' time. But can I just ask you a favor? Stop talking; it will only take about ten minutes. And take that package off the table."

"They're books," she said, slightly irritated by his authoritarian tone. She wanted him to know that he was kneeling before a cultivated woman, who spent her time in libraries not shops. But he himself picked up the package and placed it unceremoniously on the floor.

She had failed to impress him. Not, of course, that she was remotely interested in impressing him; she was off-duty now and would save her seductive powers for later, for men who would pay handsomely for her efforts. Why bother striking up a relationship with a painter who might not even have enough money to buy her a coffee? A man of thirty shouldn't wear his hair so long, it looked ridiculous. Why did she assume he had no money? The waitress had said he was well-known, or was it just the chemist who was famous? She studied his clothes, but that didn't help; life had taught her that the men who took least care of their appearance--as with this painter--always seemed to have more money than the men in suits and ties.

"What am I doing thinking about this man? What interests me is the painting."

Ten minutes of her time was not such a high price to pay for the chance of being immortalized in a painting. She saw that he was painting her alongside the prizewinning chemist and she began to wonder if, after all, he would want some kind of payment.

"Turn towards the window."

Again she obeyed unquestioningly, which was not at all like her. She sat looking at the people passing by, at the plaque with the name of that road on it, thinking about how that road had been there for centuries, how it had survived progress and all the changes that had taken place in the world and in mankind. Perhaps it was a good omen, perhaps that painting would share the same fate and still be on display in a museum in the city in five hundred years' time...

The man started drawing, and, as the work progressed, she lost that initial sense of excitement and, instead, began to feel utterly insignificant. When she had gone into the cafe, she had been a very confident woman, capable of making an extremely difficult decision--leaving a job that earned her lots of money--and taking up a still more difficult challenge--running a farm back in her own country. Now, all her feelings of insecurity about the world seemed to have resurfaced, a luxury no prostitute can allow herself.

She finally worked out why she was feeling so uncomfortable: for the first time in many months, someone was looking at her not as an object, not even as a woman, but as something she could not even comprehend; the closest she could come to putting it into words was: "he's seeing my soul, my fears, my fragility, my inability to deal with a world which I pretend to master, but about which I know nothing."

Ridiculous, pure fantasy.

"I'd like..."