Eleven Minutes (3 page)

tions before, in which a man promises everything and
gives nothing, so she knew that all this talk of acting was just a way of getting her interested.

However, convinced that the Virgin had presented her with this chance, convinced that she must enjoy every second of
her week's holiday, and because a visit to a good restaurant would provide her with something to talk about when she went home, she decided to accept the invitation, as long as the interpreter came too, for she was already getting tired of smiling and pretending that she could understand what the foreigner was saying.

The only problem was also the gravest one: she did not
have anything suitable to wear. A woman never admits to such things (she would find it easier to admit that her husband
had betrayed her than to reveal the state of her wardrobe), but since she did not know these people and might well never see them again, she felt that she had nothing to lose.

'I've just arrived from the northeast and I haven't got the right clothes to wear to a restaurant.'

Through the interpreter, the man told her not to worry and asked for the address of her hotel. That evening, she
received a dress the like of which she had never seen in her entire life, accompanied by a pair of shoes that must have cost as much as she earned in a year.

She felt that this was the beginning of the road she had
so longed for during her childhood and adolescence in the sertao, the Brazilian backlands, putting up with
the
constant droughts, the boys with no future, the poor but
honest town, the dull, repetitive way of life: she was ready to be transformed into the princess of the universe! A man
had offered her work, dollars, a pair of exorbitantly
expensive shoes and a dress straight out of a fairy tale! All she lacked was some make-up, but the receptionist at her
hotel took pity on her and helped her out, first warning her not to assume that every foreigner was trustworthy or that every man in Rio was a mugger.

Maria ignored the warning, put on her gifts from heaven, spent hours in front of the mirror, regretting not having
brought a camera with her in order to record the moment, only to realise that she was late for her date. She raced off, just like Cinderella, to the hotel where the Swiss gentleman
was staying.

To her surprise, the interpreter told her that he would not be accompanying them.

'Don't worry about the language, what matters is whether or not he feels comfortable with you.'

'But how can he if he doesn't understand what I'm saying?'

'Precisely. You don't need to talk, it's all a question of vibes.'

Maria didn't know what 'vibes' were; where she came from, people needed to exchange words, phrases, questions and answers whenever they met. But Malison - the name of the
interpreter-cum-security officer - assured her that in Rio de
Janeiro and the rest of the world, things were different.

'He doesn't need to understand, just make him feel at
ease. He's a widower with no children; he owns a nightclub
and is looking for Brazilian women who want to work
abroad. I said you weren't the type, but he insisted, saying that he had fallen in love with you when he saw you coming
out of the water. He thought your bikini was lovely too.' He paused.

'But, frankly, if you want to find a boyfriend here, you'll have to get a different bikini; no one, apart from this Swiss guy, will go for it; it's really old-fashioned.' Maria pretended that she hadn't heard. Mailson went on:

'I don't think he's interested in just having a bit of a
fling; he reckons you've got what it takes to become the main attraction at his club. Of course, he hasn't seen you sing or dance, but you could learn all that, whereas beauty is
something you're born with. These Europeans are all the same; they come over here and imagine that all Brazilian women are really sensual and know how to samba. If he's serious, I'd advise you to get a signed contract and have the signature verified at the Swiss consulate before leaving the country.

I'll be on the beach tomorrow, opposite the hotel, if you want to talk to me about anything.'

The Swiss man, all smiles, took her arm and indicated the taxi awaiting them.

'If he has other intentions, and you have too, then the normal price is three hundred dollars a night. Don't accept any less.'

Before she could say anything, she was on her way to the restaurant, with the man rehearsing the words he wanted to
say. The conversation was very simple:

'Work? Dollars? Brazilian star?'

Maria, meanwhile, was still thinking about what the interpreter-cum-security officer had said: three hundred dollars a night! That was a fortune! She didn't need to suffer for love, she could play this man along just as she
had her boss at the shop, get married, have children and give her parents a comfortable life. What did she have to lose? He was old and he might die before too long, and then she would
be rich - these Swiss men obviously had too much money and not enough women back home.

They said little over the meal - just the usual exchange of smiles - and Maria gradually began to understand what
Maflson had meant by 'vibes'. The man showed her an album containing writing in a language that she did not know;

photos of women in bikinis (doubtless better and more daring than the one she had worn that afternoon), newspaper
cuttings, garish leaflets in which the only word she
recognised was 'Brazil', wrongly spelled (hadn't they taught him at school that it was written with an V?). She drank a lot, afraid that the man would proposition her (after all, even though she had never done this in her life before, no
one could turn their nose up at three hundred dollars, and things always seem simpler with a bit of alcohol inside you, especially if you're among strangers). But the man behaved
like a perfect gentleman, even holding her chair for her when she sat down and got up. In the end, she said that she was tired and arranged to meet him on
the beach the following day (pointing to her watch, showing
him the time, making the movement of the waves with her hands and saying 'a-ma-nha' - 'tomorrow' - very slowly).

He seemed pleased and looked at his own watch (possibly
Swiss), and agreed on the time.

She did not go to sleep straight away. She dreamed that it was all a dream. Then she woke up and saw that it wasn't:

there was the dress draped over the chair in her modest room, the beautiful shoes and that rendezvous on the beach.

From Maria's diary, on the day that she met the Swiss man: Everything tells me that I am about to make a wrong
decision, but making mistakes is just part of life. What does the world want of me? Does it want me to take no risks, to go back where I came from because I didn't have the courage to
say 'yes' to life?

I made my first mistake when I was eleven years old, when that boy asked me if I could lend him a pencil; since then, I've realised that sometimes you get no second chance and that it's best to accept the gifts the world offers you. Of course it's risky, but is the risk any greater than the chance of the bus that took forty-eight hours to bring me
here having an accident? If I must be faithful to someone or something, then I have, first of all, to be faithful to
myself. If I'm looking for true love, I first have to get
the mediocre loves out of my system. The little experience of life I've had has taught me that no one owns anything, that everything is an illusion - and that applies to material as
well as spiritual things. Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever (as has happened often enough to
me already) finally comes to realise that nothing really belongs to them.

And if nothing belongs to me, then there's no point
wasting my time looking after things that aren't mine; it's best to live as if today were the first (or last) day of my life.

The next day, together with Mailson, the
interpreter-cumsecurity officer and now, according to him, her agent, she said that she would accept the Swiss man's offer, as long as she had a document provided by the Swiss consulate. The foreigner, who seemed accustomed to such demands, said that this was something he wanted too, since, if she was to work in his country, she needed a piece of paper proving that no one there could do the job she was proposing to do
- and this was not particularly difficult, given that
Swiss women had no particular talent for the samba. Together they went to the city centre, and the security
officer-cuminterpreter-cum-agent demanded a cash advance as soon as the contract was signed, thirty per cent of the five hundred dollars she received.

'That's a week's payment in advance. One week, you understand? You'll be earning five hundred dollars a week from now on, but with no deductions, because I only get a commission on the first payment.'

Up until then, travel and the idea of going far away had
just been a dream, and dreaming is very pleasant as long as you are not forced to put your dreams into practice. That way, we avoid all the risks, frustrations and difficulties, and when we are old, we can always blame other people -

preferably our parents, our spouses or our children - for our failure to realise our dreams.

Suddenly, there was the opportunity she had been so
eagerly awaiting, but which she had hoped would never come! How could she possibly deal with the challenges and the dangers of a life she did not know? How could she leave
behind everything she was used to? Why had the Virgin decided to go this far?

Maria consoled herself with the thought that she could
change her mind at any moment; it was all just a silly game, something different to tell her friends about when she went back home. After all, she lived more than a thousand
kilometres from there and she now had three hundred and fifty dollars in her purse, so if, tomorrow, she decided to pack
her bags and run away, there was no way they would ever be able to track her down again.

In the afternoon following their visit to the consulate, she decided to go for a walk on her own by the sea, where she looked at the children, the volleyball players, the beggars, the drunks, the sellers of traditional Brazilian artifacts
(made in China), the people jogging and exercising as a way of fending off old age, the foreign tourists, the mothers
with their children, and the pensioners playing cards at the
far end of the promenade. She had come to Rio de Janeiro, she had been to a five-star restaurant and to a consulate, she
had met a foreigner, she had an agent, she had been given a present of a dress and a pair of shoes that no one, absolutely no one, back home could ever have afforded.

And now what?

She looked out to sea: her geography lessons told her that if she set off in a straight line, she would reach Africa, with its lions and jungles full of gorillas. However, if she headed in a slightly more northerly direction, she would end
up in the enchanted kingdom known as Europe, with its Eiffel Tower, EuroDisney and Leaning Tower of Pizza. What did she have to lose? Like every Brazilian girl, she had learned to
samba even before she could say 'Mama'; she could always come back if she didn't like it, and she had already learned that
opportunities are made to be seized.

She had spent a lot of her life saying 'no' to things to which she would have liked to say 'yes', determined to try only those experiences she could control - certain affairs she had had with men, for example. Now she was facing the unknown, as unknown as this sea had once been to the
navigators who crossed it, or so she had been told in history classes. She could always say 'no', but would she then spend
the rest of her life brooding over it, as she still did over the memory of the little boy who had once asked to borrow a pencil and had then disappeared - her first love? She could always say 'no', but why not try saying 'yes' this time?

For one very simple reason: she was a girl from the
backlands of Brazil, with no experience of life apart from a good school, a vast knowledge of TV soaps and the certainty
that she was beautiful. That wasn't enough with which to face the world.

She saw a group of people laughing and looking at the sea, afraid to go in. Two days ago, she had felt the same
thing, but now she was no longer afraid; she went into
the water whenever she wanted, as if she had been born there. Wouldn't it be the same in Europe?

She made a silent prayer and again asked the Virgin Mary's advice, and seconds later, she seemed perfectly at ease with her decision to go ahead, because she felt protected. She
could always come back, but she would not necessarily get another chance of a trip like this. It was worth taking the risk, as long as the dream survived the forty-eight-hour journey back home in a bus with no air conditioning, and as long as the Swiss man didn't change his mind.

She was in such good spirits that when he invited her out
to supper again, she wanted to appear alluring and took his hand in hers, but he immediately pulled away, and Maria realised - with a mixture of fear and relief - that he
was serious about what he said.

'Samba star!' said the man. 'Lovely Brazilian samba star! Travel next week!'

This was all well and good, but 'travel next week' was out of the question. Maria explained that she couldn't take a
decision without first consulting her family. The Swiss man
was furious and showed her a copy of the signed contract, and for the first time she felt afraid.

'Contract!' he said.

Even though she was determined to go home, she decided to consult her agent Mailson first; after all, he was being paid
to advise her.

Mailson, however, seemed more concerned with seducing a
German tourist who had just arrived at the hotel and
who was sunbathing topless on the beach, convinced that Brazil was the most liberal country in the world (having failed to notice that she was the only woman on the beach with her breasts exposed and that everyone was eyeing her rather uneasily). It was very hard to get him to pay attention to what she was saying.

'But what if I change my mind?' insisted Maria.

'I don't know what's in the contract, but I suppose he might have you arrested.'