Witch of Portobello Read online

  “Yes.”

  “Nevertheless, you know you cannot stop. You struggle, but you can’t control your doubts. Look hard at the candle. At the moment, the candle is your universe. It fixes your attention; it lights up the room around you a little. Breathe deeply, hold the air in your lungs as long as possible, and then breathe out. Repeat this five times.”

  She obeyed.

  “This exercise should have calmed your soul. Now remember what I said: believe. Believe in your abilities; believe that you have already arrived where you wanted to arrive. At a particular moment in your life, as you told me over tea this afternoon, you said that you’d changed the behavior of the people in the bank where you worked because you’d taught them to dance. That isn’t true. You changed everything because, through dance, you changed their reality. You believed in the story of the Vertex, which, although I’ve never heard of it before, seems to me an interesting one. You like dancing and you believed in what you were doing. You can’t believe in something you don’t like, can you?”

  Athena shook her head, keeping her eyes fixed on the candle flame.

  “Faith is not Desire. Faith is Will. Desires are things that need to be satisfied, whereas Will is a force. Will changes the space around us, as you did with your work at the bank. But for that you also need Desire. Please, concentrate on the candle!

  “Your son left the room and went to watch TV because he’s afraid of the dark. But why? We can project anything onto the darkness, and we usually project our own ghosts. That’s true for children and for adults. Slowly raise your right arm.”

  She raised her arm. I asked her to do the same with her left arm. I looked at her breasts, far prettier than mine.

  “Now slowly lower them again. Close your eyes and breathe deeply. I’m going to turn on the light. Right, that’s the end of the ritual. Let’s go into the living room.”

  She got up with some difficulty. Her legs had gone numb because of the position I’d told her to adopt.

  Viorel had fallen asleep. I turned off the TV, and we went into the kitchen.

  “What was the point of all that?” she asked.

  “Merely to remove you from everyday reality. I could have asked you to concentrate on anything, but I like the darkness and the candle flame. But you want to know what I’m up to, isn’t that right?”

  Athena remarked that she’d traveled for nearly five hours on the train with her son on her lap, when she should have been packing her bags to go back to work. She could have sat looking at a candle in her own room without any need to come to Scotland at all.

  “Yes, there was a need,” I replied. “You needed to know that you’re not alone, that other people are in contact with the same thing as you. Just knowing that allows you to believe.”

  “To believe what?”

  “That you’re on the right path. And as I said before, arriving with each step you take.”

  “What path? I thought that by going to find my mother in Romania, I would, at last, find the peace of mind I so need, but I haven’t. What path are you talking about?”

  “I haven’t the slightest idea. You’ll only discover that when you start to teach. When you go back to Dubai, find a student.”

  “Do you mean teach dance or calligraphy?”

  “Those are things you know about already. You need to teach what you don’t know, what the Mother wants to reveal through you.”

  She looked at me as if I had gone mad.

  “It’s true,” I said. “Why else do you think I asked you to breathe deeply and to raise your arms? So that you’d believe that I knew more than you. But it isn’t true. It was just a way of taking you out of the world you’re accustomed to. I didn’t ask you to thank the Mother, to say how wonderful she is or that you saw her face shining in the flames of a fire. I asked only that absurd and pointless gesture of raising your arms and focusing your attention on a candle. That’s enough—trying, whenever possible, to do something that is out of kilter with the reality around us.

  “When you start creating rituals for your student to carry out, you’ll be receiving guidance. That’s where the apprenticeship begins, or so my protector told me. If you want to heed my words, fine, but if you don’t and you carry on with your life as it is at the moment, you’ll end up bumping up against a wall called ‘dissatisfaction.’”

  I rang for a taxi, and we talked a little about fashion and men, and then Athena left. I was sure she would listen to me, mainly because she was the kind of person who never refuses a challenge.

  “Teach people to be different. That’s all!” I shouted after her as the taxi moved off.

  That is joy. Happiness would be feeling satisfied with everything she already had—a lover, a son, a job. And Athena, like me, wasn’t born for that kind of life.

  HERON RYAN, JOURNALIST

  I couldn’t admit I was in love, of course; I already had a girlfriend who loved me and shared with me both my troubles and my joys.

  The various encounters and events that had taken place in Sibiu were part of a journey, and it wasn’t the first time this kind of thing had happened while I was away from home. When we step out of our normal world and leave behind us all the usual barriers and prejudices, we tend to become more adventurous.

  When I returned to England, the first thing I did was to tell the producers that making a documentary about the historical figure of Dracula was nonsense, and that one book by a mad Irishman had created a truly terrible image of Transylvania, which was, in fact, one of the loveliest places on the planet. Obviously the producers were none too pleased, but at that point, I didn’t care what they thought. I left television and went to work for one of the world’s most prestigious newspapers.

  That was when I began to realize that I wanted to meet Athena again.

  I phoned her and we arranged to go for a walk together before she went back to Dubai. She suggested showing me around London.

  We got on the first bus that stopped, without asking where it was going, then we chose a female passenger at random and decided that we would get off wherever she did. She got off at Temple and so did we. We passed a beggar who asked us for money, but we didn’t give him any and walked on, listening to the insults he hurled after us, accepting that this was merely his way of communicating with us.

  We saw someone vandalizing a telephone booth, and I wanted to call the police, but Athena stopped me; perhaps that person had just broken up with the love of his life and needed to vent his feelings. Or, who knows, perhaps he had no one to talk to and couldn’t stand to see others humiliating him by using that phone to discuss business deals or love.

  She told me to close my eyes and to describe exactly the clothes we were both wearing; to my surprise, I got nearly every detail wrong.

  She asked me what was on my desk at work and said that some of the papers were only there because I was too lazy to deal with them.

  “Have you ever considered that those bits of paper have a life and feelings, have requests to make and stories to tell? I don’t think you’re giving life the attention it deserves.”

  I promised that I’d go through them one by one when I returned to work the following day.

  A foreign couple with a map asked Athena how to get to a particular tourist spot. She gave them very precise, but totally inaccurate, directions.

  “Everything you told them was completely wrong!”

  “It doesn’t matter. They’ll get lost, and that’s the best way to discover interesting places. Try to fill your life again with a little fantasy; above our heads is a sky about which the whole of humanity—after thousands of years spent observing it—has given various apparently reasonable explanations. Forget everything you’ve ever learned about the stars and they’ll once more be transformed into angels, or into children, or into whatever you want to believe at that moment. It won’t make you more stupid—after all, it’s only a game—but it could enrich your life.”

  The following day, when I went back to work, I tre
ated each sheet of paper as if it were a message addressed to me personally and not to the organization I represent. At midday, I went to talk to the deputy editor and suggested writing an article about the Goddess worshipped by the gypsies. He thought it an excellent idea and I was commissioned to go to the celebrations in the gypsy Mecca, Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer.

  Incredible though it may seem, Athena showed no desire to go with me. She said that her boyfriend—that fictitious policeman, whom she was using to keep me at a distance—wouldn’t be very happy if she went off traveling with another man.

  “Didn’t you promise your mother to take the saint a new shawl?”

  “Yes, I did, but only if the town happened to be on my path, which it isn’t. If I do ever pass by there, then I’ll keep my promise.”

  She was returning to Dubai the following Sunday, but first she traveled up to Scotland with her son to see the woman we’d both met in Bucharest. I didn’t remember anyone, but perhaps the “phantom woman in Scotland,” like the “phantom boyfriend,” was another excuse, and I decided not to insist. But I nevertheless felt jealous, as if she were telling me that she preferred being with other people.

  I found my jealousy odd. And I decided that if I was asked to go to the Middle East to write an article about the property boom that someone on the business pages had mentioned, I would read everything I could on real estate, economics, politics, and oil, simply as a way of getting closer to Athena.

  My visit to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer produced an excellent article. According to tradition, Sarah was a gypsy who happened to be living in the small seaside town when Jesus’s aunt, Mary Salome, along with other refugees, arrived there, fleeing persecution by the Romans. Sarah helped them and, in the end, converted to Christianity.

  During the celebrations, bones from the skeletons of the two women who are buried beneath the altar are taken out of a reliquary and raised up on high to bless the multitude of gypsies who arrive in their caravans from all over Europe with their bright clothes and their music. Then the image of Sarah, decked out in splendid robes, is brought from the place near the church where it’s kept—for Sarah has never been canonized by the Vatican—and carried in procession to the sea through narrow streets strewn with rose petals. Four gypsies in traditional costume place the relics in a boat full of flowers and wade into the water, reenacting the arrival of the fugitives and their meeting with Sarah. From then on, it’s all music, celebration, songs, and bull running.

  A historian, Antoine Locadour, helped me flesh out the article with interesting facts about the Female Divinity. I sent Athena the two pages I’d written for the newspaper’s travel section. All I received in return was a friendly reply, thanking me for sending her the article, but with no other comment.

  At least I’d confirmed that her address in Dubai existed.

  ANTOINE LOCADOUR, SEVENTY-FOUR, HISTORIAN, ICP, FRANCE

  It’s easy to label Sarah as just one of the many black Virgins in the world. According to tradition, Sarah-la-Kali was of noble lineage and knew the secrets of the world. She is, I believe, one more manifestation of what people call the Great Mother, the Goddess of Creation.

  And it doesn’t surprise me in the least that more and more people are becoming interested in pagan traditions. Why? Because God the Father is associated with the rigor and discipline of worship, whereas the Mother Goddess shows the importance of love above and beyond all the usual prohibitions and taboos.

  The phenomenon is hardly a new one. Whenever a religion tightens its rules, a significant number of people break away and go in search of more freedom in their search for spiritual contact. This happened during the Middle Ages when the Catholic Church did little more than impose taxes and build splendid monasteries and convents; the phenomenon known as “witchcraft” was a reaction to this, and even though it was suppressed because of its revolutionary nature, it left behind it roots and traditions that have managed to survive over the centuries.

  According to pagan tradition, nature worship is more important than reverence for sacred books. The Goddess is in everything and everything is part of the Goddess. The world is merely an expression of her goodness. There are many philosophical systems—such as Taoism and Buddhism—that make no distinction between creator and creature. People no longer try to decipher the mystery of life but choose instead to be a part of it. There is no female figure in Taoism or Buddhism, but there too the central idea is that “everything is one.”

  In the worship of the Great Mother, what we call “sin,” usually a transgression of certain arbitrary moral codes, ceases to exist. Sex and customs in general are freer because they are part of nature and cannot be considered to be the fruits of evil.

  The new paganism shows that man is capable of living without an institutionalized religion, while still continuing the spiritual search in order to justify his existence. If God is Mother, then we need only gather together with other people and adore her through rituals intended to satisfy the female soul, rituals involving dance, fire, water, air, earth, songs, music, flowers, and beauty.

  This has been a growing trend over the last few years. We may be witnessing a very important moment in the history of the world, when the Spirit finally merges with the Material, and the two are united and transformed. At the same time, I imagine that there will be a very violent reaction from organized religious institutions, which are beginning to lose their followers. There will be a rise in fundamentalism.

  As a historian, I’m content to collate all the data and analyze this confrontation between the freedom to worship and the duty to obey, between the God who controls the world and the Goddess who is part of the world, between people who join together in groups where celebration is a spontaneous affair and those who close ranks and learn only what they should and should not do.

  I’d like to be optimistic and believe that human beings have at last found their path to the spiritual world, but the signs are not very positive. As so often in the past, a new conservative backlash could once more stifle the cult of the Mother.

  ANDREA MC CAIN, THEATER ACTRESS

  It’s very difficult to be impartial and to tell a story that began in admiration and ended in rancor, but I’m going to try, yes, I’m really going to try and describe the Athena I met for the first time in an apartment in Victoria Street.

  She’d just got back from Dubai with plenty of money and a desire to share everything she knew about the mysteries of magic. This time, she’d spent only four months in the Middle East: she sold some land for the construction of two supermarkets, earned a huge commission, and decided that she’d earned enough money to support herself and her son for the next three years, and that she could always resume work later on if she wanted. Now was the time to make the most of the present, to live what remained of her youth, and to teach others everything she had learned.

  She received me somewhat unenthusiastically.

  “What do you want?”

  “I work in the theater and we’re putting on a play about the female face of God. I heard from a journalist friend that you spent time in the Balkan mountains with some gypsies and would be prepared to tell me about your experiences there.”

  “You mean you only came here to learn about the Mother because of a play?”

  “Why did you learn about her?”

  Athena stopped, looked me up and down, and smiled.

  “You’re right. That’s my first lesson as a teacher: teach those who want to learn. The reason doesn’t matter.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Nothing.”

  “The origins of the theater are sacred,” I went on. “It began in Greece with hymns to Dionysus, the god of wine, rebirth, and fertility. But it’s believed that even from very remote times, people performed a ritual in which they would pretend to be someone else as a way of communing with the sacred.”

  “Second lesson, thank you.”

  “I don’t understand. I came here to learn, not to teach.”

 
; This woman was beginning to iritate me. Perhaps she was being ironic.

  “My protector—”

  “Your protector?”

  “I’ll explain another time. My protector said that I would only learn what I need to learn if I were provoked into it. And since my return from Dubai, you’re the first person to demonstrate that to me. What she said makes sense.”

  I explained that, in researching the play, I’d gone from one teacher to the next but had never found their teachings to be in any way exceptional; despite this, however, I grew more and more interested in the matter as I went on. I also mentioned that these people had seemed confused and uncertain about what they wanted.

  “For example.”

  Sex, for example. In some of the places I went to, sex was a complete no-no. In others, they not only advocated complete freedom, but even encouraged orgies. She asked for more details, and I couldn’t tell if she was doing this in order to test me or because she had no idea what other people got up to.

  Athena spoke before I could answer her question.

  “When you dance, do you feel desire? Do you feel as if you were summoning up a greater energy? When you dance, are there moments when you cease to be yourself?”

  I didn’t know what to say. In nightclubs or at parties in friends’ houses, sensuality was definitely part of how I felt when I danced. I would start by flirting and enjoying the desire in men’s eyes, but as the night wore on, I seemed to get more in touch with myself, and it was no longer important to me whether I was or wasn’t seducing someone.

  Athena continued.

  “If theater is ritual, then dance is too. Moreover, it’s a very ancient way of getting close to a partner. It’s as if the threads connecting us to the rest of the world were washed clean of preconceptions and fears. When you dance, you can enjoy the luxury of being you.”

  I started listening to her with more respect.

  “Afterward, we go back to being who we were before—frightened people trying to be more important than we actually believe we are.”