Witch of Portobello Page 13

  That was exactly how I felt. Or is it the same for everyone?

  “Do you have a boyfriend?”

  I remembered that in one of the places where I’d gone to learn about the Gaia tradition, a “druid” had asked me to make love in front of him. Ridiculous and frightening—how dare these people use the spiritual search to advance their own more sinister ends?

  “Do you have a boyfriend?” she asked again.

  “I do.”

  Athena said nothing else. She merely put her finger to her lips, indicating that I should remain silent.

  And suddenly I realized that it was extremely difficult for me to remain silent in the presence of someone I’d only just met. The norm is to talk about something, anything—the weather, the traffic, the best restaurants to go to. We were sitting on the sofa in her completely white sitting room, with a CD player and a small shelf of CDs. There were no books anywhere, and no paintings on the walls. Given that she’d traveled to the Middle East, I’d expected to find objects and souvenirs from that part of the world.

  But it was empty, and now there was this silence.

  Her gray eyes were fixed on mine, but I held firm and didn’t look away. Instinct perhaps. A way of saying that I’m not frightened, but facing the challenge head-on. Except that everything—the silence and the white room, the noise of the traffic outside in the street—began to seem unreal. How long were we going to stay there, saying nothing?

  I started to track my own thoughts. Had I come there in search of material for my play or did I really want knowledge, wisdom, power? I couldn’t put my finger on what it was that had led me to come and see…what? A witch?

  My adolescent dreams surfaced. Who wouldn’t like to meet a real witch, learn how to perform magic, and gain the respect and fear of her friends? Who, as a young woman, hasn’t been outraged by the centuries of repression suffered by women and felt that becoming a witch would be the best way of recovering her lost identity? I’d been through that phase myself; I was independent and did what I liked in the highly competitive world of the theater, but then why was I never content, why was I always testing out my curiosity?

  We must have been about the same age…or was I older? Did she too have a boyfriend?

  Athena moved closer. We were now less than an arm’s length from each other, and I started to feel afraid. Was she a lesbian?

  I didn’t look away, but I made a mental note of where the door was so that I could leave whenever I wished. No one had made me go to that house to meet someone I’d never seen before in my life and sit there wasting time, not saying anything and not learning anything either. What did she want?

  That silence perhaps. My muscles began to grow tense. I was alone and helpless. I desperately needed to talk or to make my mind stop telling me that I was being threatened. How could she possibly know who I was? We are what we say!

  Had she asked me anything about my life? She’d wanted to know if I had a boyfriend. I tried to say more about the theater, but couldn’t. And what about the stories I’d heard about her gypsy ancestry, her stay in Transylvania, the land of vampires?

  My thoughts wouldn’t stop: How much would that consultation cost? I was terrified. I should have asked before. A fortune? And if I didn’t pay, would she put a spell on me that would eventually destroy me?

  I felt an impulse to get to my feet, thank her, and say that I hadn’t come there just to sit in silence. If you go to a psychiatrist, you have to talk. If you go to a church, you listen to a sermon. If you go in search of magic, you find a teacher who wants to explain the world to you and who gives you a series of rituals to follow. But silence? Why did it make me feel so uncomfortable?

  One question after another kept forming in my mind, and I couldn’t stop thinking or trying to find a reason for the two of us to be sitting there, saying nothing. Suddenly, perhaps after five or ten long minutes of total immobility, she smiled.

  I smiled too and relaxed.

  “Try to be different. That’s all.”

  “That’s all? Is sitting in silence being different? I imagine that, at this very moment, there are thousands of people in London who are desperate for someone to talk to, and all you can say to me is that silence makes a difference?”

  “Now that you’re talking and reorganizing the universe, you’ll end up convincing yourself that you’re right and I’m wrong. But as you experienced for yourself—being silent is different.”

  “It’s unpleasant. It doesn’t teach you anything.”

  She seemed indifferent to my reaction.

  “What theater are you working at?”

  Finally, she was taking an interest in my life! I was being restored to my human condition, with a profession and everything! I invited her to come and see the play we were putting on—it was the only way I could find to avenge myself, by showing that I was capable of things that Athena was not. That silence had left a humiliating aftertaste.

  She asked if she could bring her son, and I said no, it was for adults only.

  “Well, I could always leave him with my mother. I haven’t been to the theater in ages.”

  She didn’t charge for the consultation. When I met up with the other members of the cast, I told them about my encounter with this mysterious creature. They were all mad keen to meet someone who, when she first met you, asked only that you sit in silence.

  Athena arrived on the appointed day. She saw the play, came to my dressing room afterward to say hello, but didn’t say whether she’d enjoyed herself or not. My colleagues suggested that I invite her to the bar where we usually went after the performance. There, instead of keeping quiet, she started answering a question that had been left unanswered at our first meeting.

  “No one, not even the Mother, would ever want sex to take place purely as a celebration. Love must always be present. Didn’t you say that you’d met people like that? Well, be careful.”

  My friends had no idea what she was talking about, but they warmed to the subject and started bombarding her with questions. Something troubled me. Her answers were very academic, as if she didn’t have much experience of what she was talking about. She spoke about the game of seduction, about fertility rites, and concluded with a Greek myth, probably because I’d mentioned during our first meeting that the theater had begun in Greece. She must have spent the whole week reading up on the subject.

  “After millennia of male domination, we are returning to the cult of the Great Mother. The Greeks called her Gaia, and according to the myth, she was born out of Chaos, the void that existed before the universe. With her came Eros, the god of love, and then she gave birth to the Sea and the Sky.”

  “Who was the father?” asked one of my friends.

  “No one. There’s a technical term, parthenogenesis, which is a process of reproduction that does not require fertilization of the egg by a male. There’s a mystical term too, one to which we’re more accustomed: Immaculate Conception.

  “From Gaia sprang all the gods who would later people the Elysian Fields of Greece, including our own dear Dionysus, your idol. But as man became established as the principal political power in the cities, Gaia was forgotten, and was replaced by Zeus, Ares, Apollo and company, all of whom were competent enough, but didn’t have the same allure as the Mother who originated everything.”

  Then she questioned us about our work. The director asked if she’d like to give us some lessons.

  “On what?”

  “On what you know.”

  “To be perfectly honest, I learned all about the origins of theater this week. I learn everything as I need to learn it, that’s what Edda told me to do.”

  So I was right!

  “But I can share other things that life has taught me.”

  They all agreed. And no one asked who Edda was.

  DEIDRE O’NEILL, KNOWN AS EDDA

  I said to Athena: You don’t have to keep coming here all the time just to ask silly questions. If a group has decided to take you on as a teac
her, why not use that opportunity to turn yourself into a teacher?

  Do what I always did.

  Try to feel good about yourself even when you feel like the least worthy of creatures. Reject all those negative thoughts and let the Mother take possession of your body and soul; surrender yourself to dance or to silence or to ordinary, everyday activities—like taking your son to school, preparing supper, making sure the house is tidy. Everything is worship if your mind is focused on the present moment.

  Don’t try to convince anyone of anything. When you don’t know something, ask or go away and find out. But when you do act, be like the silent, flowing river and open yourself to a greater energy. Believe—that’s what I said at our first meeting—simply believe that you can.

  At first, you’ll be confused and insecure. Then you’ll start to believe that everyone thinks they’re being conned. It’s not true. You have the knowledge, it’s simply a matter of being aware. All the minds on the planet are so easily cast down—they fear illness, invasion, attack, death. Try to restore their lost joy to them.

  Be clear.

  Reprogram yourself every minute of each day with thoughts that make you grow. When you’re feeling irritated or confused, try to laugh at yourself. Laugh out loud at this woman tormented by doubts and anxieties, convinced that her problems are the most important thing in the world. Laugh at the sheer absurdity of the situation, at the fact that despite being a manifestation of the Mother, you still believe God is a man who lays down the rules. Most of our problems stem from just that—from following rules.

  Concentrate.

  If you can find nothing on which to focus your mind, concentrate on your breathing. The Mother’s river of light is flowing in through your nose. Listen to your heart beating, follow the thoughts you can’t control, control your desire to get up at once and to do something “useful.” Sit for a few minutes each day doing nothing, getting as much as you can out of that time.

  When you’re washing up, pray. Be thankful that there are plates to be washed; that means there was food, that you fed someone, that you’ve lavished care on one or more people, that you cooked and laid the table. Imagine the millions of people at this moment who have absolutely nothing to wash up and no one for whom to lay the table.

  There are women who say: I’m not going to do the washing up, let the men do it. Fine, let the men do it if they want to, but that has nothing to do with equality. There’s nothing wrong with doing simple things, although if I were to publish an article tomorrow saying everything I think, I’d be accused of working against the feminist cause. Nonsense! As if washing up or wearing a bra or having someone open or close a door could be humiliating to me as a woman. The fact is, I love it when a man opens the door for me. According to etiquette this means, “She needs me to do this because she’s fragile,” but in my soul is written: “I’m being treated like a goddess. I’m a queen.” I’m not here to work for the feminist cause, because both men and women are a manifestation of the Mother, the Divine Unity. No one can be greater than that.

  I’d love to see you giving classes on what you’re learning. That’s the main aim of life—revelation! You make yourself into a channel, you listen to yourself and are surprised at how capable you are. Remember your job at the bank? Perhaps you never properly understood that what happened there was a result of the energy flowing out of your body, your eyes, your hands.

  You’ll say: “No, it was the dance.”

  The dance was simply a ritual. What is a ritual? It means transforming something monotonous into something different, rhythmic, capable of channeling the Unity. That’s why I say again: be different even when you’re washing up. Move your hands so that they never repeat the same gesture twice, even though they maintain the rhythm.

  If you find it helpful, try to visualize images—flowers, birds, trees in a forest. Don’t imagine single objects, like the candle you focused on when you came here for the first time. Try to think of something collective. And do you know what you’ll find? That you didn’t choose your thought.

  I’ll give you an example: imagine a flock of birds flying. How many birds did you see? Eleven, nineteen, five? You have a vague idea, but you don’t know the exact number. So where did that thought come from? Someone put it there. Someone who knows the exact number of birds, trees, stones, flowers. Someone who, in that fraction of a second, took charge of you and showed you her power.

  You are what you believe yourself to be.

  Don’t be like those people who believe in “positive thinking” and tell themselves that they’re loved and strong and capable. You don’t need to do that, because you know it already. And when you doubt it—which happens, I think, quite often at this stage of evolution—do as I suggested. Instead of trying to prove that you’re better than you think, just laugh. Laugh at your worries and insecurities. View your anxieties with humor. It will be difficult at first, but you’ll gradually get used to it.

  Now go back and meet all those people who think you know everything. Convince yourself that they’re right, because we all know everything, it’s merely a question of believing.

  Believe.

  As I said to you in Bucharest, the very first time we met, groups are very important because they force us to progress. If you’re alone, all you can do is laugh at yourself, but if you’re with others, you’ll laugh and then immediately act. Groups challenge us. Groups allow us to choose our affinities. Groups create a collective energy, and ecstasy comes more easily because everyone infects everyone else.

  Groups can also destroy us, of course, but that’s part of life and the human condition—living with other people. And anyone who’s failed to develop an instinct for survival has understood nothing of what the Mother is saying.

  You’re lucky. A group has just asked you to teach them something, and that will make you a teacher.

  HERON RYAN, JOURNALIST

  Before the first meeting with the actors, Athena came to my house. Ever since I published the article on St. Sarah, she’d been convinced that I understood her world, which wasn’t true at all. I simply wanted to attract her attention. I was trying to come round to the idea that there might be an invisible reality capable of interfering in our lives, but the only reason I did so was because of a love I didn’t want to believe I felt but which was continuing to grow in a subtle, devastating way.

  I was content with my universe and didn’t want to change it at all, even though I was being propelled in that direction.

  “I’m afraid,” she said as soon as she arrived. “But I must go ahead and do what they’re asking of me. I need to believe.”

  “You’ve had a lot of experiences in life. You learned from the gypsies, from the dervishes in the desert, from—”

  “Well, that’s not quite true. Besides, what does learning mean: accumulating knowledge or transforming your life?”

  I suggested we go out that night for supper and to dance a little. She agreed to supper but rejected the dancing.

  “Answer me,” she said, looking around my apartment. “Is learning just putting things on a shelf or is it discarding whatever is no longer useful and then continuing on your way feeling lighter?”

  On the shelves were all the books I’d invested so much money and time in buying, reading, and annotating. There were my personality, my education, my true teachers.

  “How many books have you got? Over a thousand, I’d say. But most of them you’ll probably never open again. You hang on to them because you don’t believe.”

  “I don’t believe?”

  “No, you don’t believe, full stop. Anyone who believes will go and read up about theater as I did when Andrea asked me about it, but after that, it’s a question of letting the Mother speak through you and making discoveries as she speaks. And as you make those discoveries, you’ll manage to fill in the blank spaces that all those writers left there on purpose to provoke the reader’s imagination. And when you fill in the spaces, you’ll start to believe in your ow
n abilities.

  “How many people would love to read those books but don’t have the money to buy them? Meanwhile, you sit here surrounded by all this stagnant energy, purely to impress the friends who visit you. Or is it that you don’t feel you’ve learned anything from them and need to consult them again?”

  I thought she was being rather hard on me, and that intrigued me.

  “So you don’t think I need this library?”

  “I think you need to read, but why hang on to all these books? Would it be asking too much if we were to leave here right now, and before going to the restaurant, distribute most of them to whomever we happened to pass in the street?”

  “They wouldn’t all fit in my car.”

  “We could hire a truck.”

  “But then we wouldn’t get to the restaurant in time for supper. Besides, you came here because you were feeling insecure, not in order to tell me what I should do with my books. Without them I’d feel naked.”

  “Ignorant, you mean.”

  “Uncultivated would be the right word.”

  “So your culture isn’t in your heart, it’s on your bookshelves.”

  Enough was enough. I picked up the phone to reserve a table and told the restaurant that we’d be there in fifteen minutes. Athena was trying to avoid the problem that had brought her here. Her deep insecurity was making her go on the attack, rather than looking at herself. She needed a man by her side and, who knows, was perhaps sounding me out to see how far I’d go, using her feminine wiles to discover just what I’d be prepared to do for her.

  Simply being in her presence seemed to justify my very existence. Was that what she wanted to hear? Fine, I’d tell her over supper. I’d be capable of doing almost anything, even leaving the woman I was living with, but I drew the line, of course, at giving away my books.

  In the taxi, we returned to the subject of the theater group, although I was, at that moment, prepared to discuss something I never normally spoke about—love, a subject I found far more complicated than Marx, Jung, the British Labour Party, or the day-to-day problems at a newspaper office.