The Witch of Portobello Read online

  Then she spoke again.

  "You've had plenty of time to doubt me now. One or two of you looked impatient. But now I'm going to ask you just one thing: when I count to three, be different. I don't mean be another person, an animal, or a house. Try to forget everything you've learned in drama courses. I'm not asking you to be actors and to demonstrate your abilities. I'm asking you to cease being human and to transform yourselves into something you don't know."

  We were all still lying on the floor with our eyes closed and so couldn't see how anyone else was reacting. Athena was playing on that uncertainty.

  "I'm going to say a few words and you'll immediately associate certain images with those words. Remember that you're all full of the poison of preconceived ideas and that if I were to say fate, you would probably start imagining your lives in the future. If I were to say red, you would probably make some psychoanalytic interpretation. That isn't what I want. As I said, I want you to be different."

  She couldn't explain what she really wanted. When no one complained, I felt sure they were simply being polite, but that when the "lecture" was over, they would never invite Athena back. They would even tell me that I'd been naive to have sought her out in the first place.

  "The first word is sacred."

  So as not to die of boredom, I decided to join in the game. I imagined my mother, my boyfriend, my future children, a brilliant career.

  "Make a gesture that means sacred."

  I folded my arms over my chest, as if I were embracing all my loved ones. I found out later that most people opened their arms to form a cross, and that one of the women opened her legs, as if she were making love.

  "Relax again, and again forget about everything and keep your eyes closed. I'm not criticizing, but from what I saw, you seem to be giving form to what you consider to be sacred. That isn't what I want. When I give you the next word, don't try to define it as it manifests itself in the world. Open all the channels and allow the poison of reality to drain away. Be abstract, and then you will enter the world I'm guiding you toward."

  That last phrase had real authority, and I felt the energy in the theater change. Now the voice knew where it wanted to take us. She was a teacher now, not a lecturer.

  Earth, she said.

  Suddenly I understood what she meant. It was no longer my imagination that mattered, but my body in contact with the soil. I was the earth.

  "Make a gesture that represents earth."

  I didn't move. I was the soil of that stage.

  "Perfect," she said. "None of you moved. For the first time you all experienced the same feeling. Instead of describing something, you transformed yourself into an idea."

  She fell silent again for what I imagined were five long minutes. The silence made us feel lost, unable to tell whether she simply had no idea how to continue, or if she was merely unfamiliar with our usual intense rhythm of working.

  "I'm going to say a third word."

  She paused.

  "Center."

  I felt--and this was entirely unconscious--that all my vital energy went to my navel, where it glowed yellow. This frightened me. If someone touched it, I could die.

  "Make a gesture for center!"

  Her words sounded like a command. I immediately placed my hands on my belly to protect myself.

  "Perfect," said Athena. "You can sit up now."

  I opened my eyes and saw the extinguished stage lights up above me, distant and dull. I rubbed my face and got to my feet. I noticed that my colleagues looked surprised.

  "Was that the lecture?" asked the director.

  "You can call it a lecture if you like."

  "Well, thank you for coming. Now, if you'll excuse us, we have to start rehearsals for the next play."

  "But I haven't finished yet."

  "Perhaps another time."

  Everyone seemed confused by the director's reaction. After some initial doubts, I think we were enjoying the session--it was different, no pretending to be things or people, no visualizing apples or candles. No sitting in a circle holding hands, as if we were practicing some sacred ritual. It was simply something slightly absurd, and we wanted to know where it would take us.

  Without a flicker of emotion, Athena bent down to pick up her bag. At that moment, we heard a voice from the stalls.

  "Marvelous!"

  Heron had come to join her. The director was afraid of him because Heron knew the theater critics on his newspaper and had close ties with the media generally.

  "You stopped being individuals and turned into ideas. What a shame you're so busy, but don't worry, Athena, we'll find another group to work with and then I can see how your 'lecture' ends. I have contacts."

  I was still thinking about the light traveling through my whole body to my navel. Who was that woman? Had my colleagues experienced the same thing?

  "Just a moment," said the director, aware of the look of surprise on everyone's face. "I suppose we could postpone rehearsals today..."

  "No, you mustn't do that. Besides, I have to get back to the newspaper and write something about this woman. You carry on doing what you always do. I've just found an excellent story."

  If Athena felt lost in that debate between the two men, she didn't show it. She climbed down from the stage and went off with Heron. We turned to the director and asked him why he'd reacted like that.

  "With all due respect, Andrea, I thought the conversation in the bar about sex was far more interesting than the nonsense we've just been engaging in. Did you notice how she kept falling silent? She didn't know what to do next!"

  "But I felt something strange," said one of the older actors. "When she said center, it was as if all my vital energy were suddenly focused in my navel. I've never experienced that before."

  "Did you? Are you sure?" asked an actress, and judging by her words, she'd experienced the same thing.

  "She's a bit of a witch, that woman," said the director, interrupting the conversation. "Let's get back to work."

  We started doing our usual stretching exercises, warm-ups, and meditation, all strictly by the book. Then after a few improvisations, we went straight into a read-through of the new script. Gradually, Athena's presence seemed to be dissolving, and everything was returning to what it was--a theater, a ritual created by the Greeks thousands of years ago, where we were used to pretending to be different people.

  But that was pure playacting. Athena wasn't like that, and I was determined to see her again, especially after what the director had said about her.

  HERON RYAN, JOURNALIST

  Unbeknownst to Athena, I'd followed exactly the same steps as the actors, obeying everything she told us to do, except that I kept my eyes open so that I could follow what was happening onstage. The moment she said, "Make a gesture for center," I'd placed my hand on my navel, and to my surprise, I saw that everyone, including the director, had done the same. What was going on?

  That afternoon, I had to write a dreary article about a visiting head of state--a real drag. In order to amuse myself between phone calls, I decided to ask colleagues in the office what gesture they would make if I said the word center. Most of them made jokey comments about political parties. One pointed to the center of the Earth. Another put his hand on his heart. But no one, absolutely no one, thought of their navel as the center of anything. In the end, though, I managed to speak to someone who had some interesting information on the subject.

  When I got home, Andrea had had a bath, laid the table, and was waiting for me to start supper. She opened a bottle of very expensive wine, filled two glasses, and offered me one.

  "So how was supper last night?"

  How long can a man live with a lie? I didn't want to lose the woman standing there before me, who had stuck with me through thick and thin, who was always by my side when I felt my life had lost meaning and direction. I loved her, but in the crazy world into which I was blindly plunging, my heart was far away, trying to adapt to something it possibly knew but could
n't accept: being large enough for two people.

  Since I would never risk letting go of a certainty in favor of a mere possibility, I tried to minimize the significance of what had happened at the restaurant, mainly because nothing had happened, apart from an exchange of lines by a poet who had suffered greatly for love.

  "Athena's a difficult person to get to know."

  Andrea laughed.

  "That's precisely why men must find her so fascinating. She awakens that rapidly disappearing protective instinct of yours."

  Best to change the subject. I've always been convinced that women have a supernatural ability to know what's going on in a man's soul. They're all witches.

  "I've been looking into what happened at the theater today. You don't know this, but I had my eyes open throughout the exercises."

  "You've always got your eyes open. I assume it's part of being a journalist. And you're going to talk about the moment when we all did exactly the same thing. We talked a lot about that in the bar after rehearsals."

  "A historian told me about a Greek temple where they used to predict the future [Editor's note: the temple of Apollo at Delphi] and which housed a marble stone called 'the navel.' Stories from the time describe Delphi as the center of the planet. I went to the newspaper archives to make a few enquiries: in Petra, in Jordan, there's another 'conic navel,' symbolizing not just the center of the planet, but also of the entire universe. Both 'navels' try to show the axis through which the energy of the world travels, marking in a visible way something that is only there on the 'invisible' map. Jerusalem is also called the navel of the world, as is an island in the Pacific Ocean, and another place I've forgotten now, because I had never associated the two things."

  "Like dance!"

  "What?"

  "Nothing."

  "No, I know what you mean--belly dancing, the oldest form of dance recorded, in which everything revolves about the belly. I was trying to avoid the subject because I told you that in Transylvania I saw Athena dance. She was dressed, of course, but--"

  "All the movement began with her navel and gradually spread to the rest of the body."

  She was right.

  Best to change the subject again and talk about the theater, about boring journalistic stuff, then drink a little wine and end up in bed making love while, outside, the rain was starting to fall. I noticed that, at the moment of orgasm, Andrea's body was all focused on her belly. I'd seen this many times before, but had never thought anything of it.

  ANTOINE LOCADOUR, HISTORIAN

  Heron started spending a fortune on phone calls to France, asking me to get all the information I could by the weekend, and he kept going on about the navel, which seemed to me the least interesting and least romantic thing in the world. But, then, the English don't see things in the same way as the French, and so, instead of asking questions, I tried to find out what science had to say on the subject.

  I soon realized that historical knowledge wasn't enough. I could locate a monument here, a dolmen there, but the odd thing was that the ancient cultures all seemed to agree on the subject and even use the same word to define the places they considered sacred. I'd never noticed this before and I started to get interested. When I saw the number of coincidences, I went in search of something that would complement them--human behavior and beliefs.

  I immediately had to reject the first and most logical explanation, that we're nourished through the umbilical cord, which is why the navel is, for us, the center of life. A psychologist immediately pointed out that the theory made no sense at all: man's central idea is always to "cut" the umbilical cord and, from then on, the brain or the heart become the more important symbols.

  When we're interested in something, everything around us appears to refer to it (the mystics call these phenonema "signs," the sceptics "coincidence," and psychologists "concentrated focus," although I've yet to find out what term historians should use). One night, my adolescent daughter came home with a navel piercing.

  "Why did you do that?"

  "Because I felt like it."

  A perfectly natural and honest explanation, even for a historian who needs to find a reason for everything. When I went into her room, I saw a poster of her favorite female pop star. She had a bare midriff, and in that photo on the wall, her navel did look like the center of the world.

  I phoned Heron and asked why he was so interested. For the first time, he told me about what had happened at the theater and how the people there had all responded to a command in the same spontaneous, unexpected manner. It was impossible to get any more information out of my daughter, and so I decided to consult some specialists.

  No one seemed very interested until I found Francois Shepka, an Indian psychologist [Editor's note: the scientist requested that his name and nationality be changed], who was starting to revolutionize the therapies currently in use. According to him, the idea that traumas could be resolved by a return to childhood had never got anyone anywhere. Many problems that had been overcome in adult life resurfaced, and grown-ups started blaming their parents for failures and defeats. Shepka was at war with the various French psychoanalytic associations, and a conversation about absurd subjects, like the navel, seemed to relax him.

  He warmed to the theme but didn't, at first, tackle it directly. He said that according to one of the most respected psychoanalysts in history, the Swiss analyst Carl Gustav Jung, we all drank from the same spring. It's called the "soul of the world." However much we try to be independent individuals, a part of our memory is the same. We all seek the ideal of beauty, dance, divinity, and music.

  Society, meanwhile, tries to define how these ideals should be manifested in reality. Currently, for example, the ideal of beauty is to be thin, and yet thousands of years ago all the images of goddesses were fat. It's the same with happiness: there are a series of rules, and if you fail to follow them, your conscious mind will refuse to accept the idea that you're happy.

  Jung used to divide individual progress into four stages. The first was the Persona--the mask we use every day, pretending to be who we are. We believe that the world depends on us, that we're wonderful parents and that our children don't understand us, that our bosses are unfair, that the dream of every human being is never to work and to travel constantly. Many people realize that there's something wrong with this story, but because they don't want to change anything, they quickly drive the thought from their head. A few do try to understand what is wrong and end up finding the Shadow.

  The Shadow is our dark side, which dictates how we should act and behave. When we try to free ourselves from the Persona, we turn on a light inside us and we see the cobwebs, the cowardice, the meanness. The Shadow is there to stop our progress, and it usually succeeds, and we run back to what we were before we doubted. However, some do survive this encounter with their own cobwebs, saying: "Yes, I have a few faults, but I'm good enough, and I want to go forward."

  At this moment, the Shadow disappears and we come into contact with the Soul.

  By Soul, Jung didn't mean "soul" in the religious sense; he speaks of a return to the Soul of the World, the source of all knowledge. Instincts become sharper, emotions more radical, the interpretation of signs becomes more important than logic, perceptions of reality grow less rigid. We start to struggle with things to which we are unaccustomed and we start to react in ways that we ourselves find unexpected.

  And we discover that if we can channel that continuous flow of energy, we can organize it around a very solid center, what Jung calls the Wise Old Man for men and the Great Mother for women.

  Allowing this to manifest itself is dangerous. Generally speaking, anyone who reaches this stage has a tendency to consider themselves a saint, a tamer of spirits, a prophet. A great deal of maturity is required if someone is to come into contact with the energy of the Wise Old Man or the Great Mother.

  "Jung went mad," said my friend, when he had explained the four stages described by the Swiss psychoanalyst. "When he got in t
ouch with his Wise Old Man, he started saying that he was guided by a spirit called Philemon."

  "And finally..."

  "...we come to the symbol of the navel. Not only people, but societies too fit these four stages. Western civilization has a Persona, the ideas that guide us. In its attempt to adapt to changes, it comes into contact with the Shadow, and we see mass demonstrations, in which the collective energy can be manipulated both for good and ill. Suddenly, for some reason, the Persona or the Shadow are no longer enough for human beings, and then comes the moment to make the leap, the unconscious connection with the Soul. New values begin to emerge."

  "I've noticed that. I've noticed a resurgence in the cult of the female face of God."

  "An excellent example. And at the end of this process, if those new values are to become established, the entire race comes into contact with the symbols, the coded language by which present-day generations communicate with their ancestral knowledge. One of those symbols of rebirth is the navel. In the navel of Vishnu, the Indian divinity responsible for creation and destruction, sits the god who will rule each cycle. Yogis consider the navel one of the chakras, one of the sacred points on the human body. Primitive tribes often used to build monuments in the place that they believed to be the navel of the world. In South America, people who go into trances say that the true form of the human being is a luminous egg that connects with other people through filaments that emerge from the navel. The mandala, a design said to stimulate meditation, is a symbolic representation of this."

  I passed all this information on to Heron in England before the agreed date. I told him that the woman who had succeeded in provoking the same absurd reaction in a group of people must have enormous power, and that I wouldn't be surprised if she wasn't some kind of paranormal. I suggested that he study her more closely.

  I had never thought about the subject before, and I tried to forget it at once. However, my daughter said that I was behaving oddly, thinking only of myself, that I was, in short, navel gazing!

  DEIDRE O'NEILL, KNOWN AS EDDA

  "It was a complete disaster. How could you have put the idea in my head that I could teach? Why humiliate me in front of other people? I should just forget you even exist. When I was taught to dance, I danced. When I was taught calligraphy, I practiced calligraphy. But demanding that I go so far beyond my limits was pure wickedness. That's why I caught the train up to Scotland, that's why I came here, so that you could see how much I hate you!"