Eleven Minutes by Paulo Coelho

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 favour? 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 wellknown, 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 immortalised 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. Tdlike...'
    'Please, don't talk,' said the man. 'I can see your light now.'
    No one had ever said anything like that to her before. 'I
     can see your firm breasts', 'I can see your nicely rounded thighs', 'I can see in you the exotic beauty of the tropics', or, at most, 'I can see that you want to leave this life -
    let me set you up in an apartment'. She was used to comments like that, but her light? Did he mean the