The Witch of Portobello

There was, in fact, some truth in this. The pages contained a description of his journey to Siberia during the Communist revolution. There, in the remote village of Diedov, he fell in love with an actress. [Editor's note: It has not been possible to locate this village on the map. The name may have been deliberately changed, or the place itself may have disappeared after Stalin's forced migrations.] According to my grandfather, the actress was part of a sect that believed they had found the remedy for all ills through a particular kind of dance, because the dance brought the dancer into contact with the light from the Vertex.

They feared that the tradition would disappear; the inhabitants of the village were soon to be transported to another place. Both the actress and her friends begged him to write down what they had learned. He did but clearly didn't think it was of much importance, because he left his notes inside a book, and there they remained until the day I found them.

Athena broke in:

"But dance isn't something you write about, you have to do it."

"Exactly. All the notes say is this: Dance to the point of exhaustion, as if you were a mountaineer climbing a hill, a sacred mountain. Dance until you are so out of breath that your organism is forced to obtain oxygen some other way, and it is that, in the end, that will cause you to lose your identity and your relationship with space and time. Dance only to the sound of percussion; repeat the process every day; know that, at a certain moment, your eyes will, quite naturally, close, and you will begin to see a light that comes from within, a light that answers your questions and develops your hidden powers."

"Have you developed some special power?"

Instead of replying, I suggested that she join our group, since her son seemed perfectly at ease in the room with the dancers, even when the noise of the cymbals and the other percussion instruments was at its loudest. The following day, at the usual time, she was there for the start of the session. I introduced her to my friends, explaining that she was my upstairs neighbor. No one said anything about their lives or asked her what she did. When the moment came, I turned on the music, and we began to dance.

She started dancing with the child in her arms, but he soon fell asleep, and she put him down on the sofa. Before I closed my eyes and went into a trance, I saw that she had understood exactly what I meant by the path of the Vertex.

Every day, except Sunday, she was there with the child. We would exchange a few words of welcome, then I would put on the music a friend of mine had brought from the Russian steppes, and we would all dance to the point of exhaustion. After a month of this, she asked me for a copy of the tape.

"I'd like to do the dancing in the morning, before I leave Viorel at my mum's house and go to work."

I tried to dissuade her.

"I don't know, I think a group that's connected by the same energy creates a kind of aura that helps everyone get into the trance state. Besides, doing the dancing before you go to work is just asking to get the sack, because you'll be exhausted all day."

Athena thought for a moment, then said:

"You're absolutely right when you talk about collective energy. In your group, for example, there are four couples and your wife. All of them have found love. That's why they can share such a positive vibration with me. But I'm on my own, or, rather, I'm with my son, but he can't yet manifest his love in a way we can understand. So I'd prefer to accept my loneliness. If I try to run away from it now, I'll never find a partner again. If I accept it, rather than fight against it, things might change. I've noticed that loneliness gets stronger when we try to face it down but gets weaker when we simply ignore it."

"Did you join our group

in search of love?"

"That would be a perfectly good reason, I think, but the answer is no. I came in search of a meaning for my life, because, at present, its only meaning is my son, Viorel, and I'm afraid I might end up destroying him, either by being overprotective or by projecting onto him the dreams I've never managed to realize. Then one night, while I was dancing, I felt that I'd been cured. If we were talking about some physical ailment, we'd probably call it a miracle, but it was a spiritual malaise that was making me unhappy, and suddenly it vanished."

I knew what she meant.

"No one taught me to dance to the sound of that music," Athena went on, "but I have a feeling I know what I'm doing."

"It's not something you have to learn. Remember our walk in the park and what we saw there: nature creating its own rhythms and adapting itself to each moment."

"No one taught me how to love either, but I loved God, I loved my husband, I love my son and my family. And yet still there's something missing. Although I get tired when I'm dancing, when I stop, I seem to be in a state of grace, of profound ecstasy. I want that ecstasy to last throughout the day and for it to help me find what I lack: the love of a man. I can see the heart of that man while I'm dancing, but not his face. I sense that he's close by, which is why I need to remain alert. I need to dance in the morning so that I can spend the rest of the day paying attention to everything that's going on around me."

"Do you know what the word ecstasy means? It comes from the Greek and means 'to stand outside yourself.' Spending the whole day outside yourself is asking too much of body and soul."

"I'd like to try anyway."

I saw that there was no point arguing and so I made her a copy of the tape. And from then on, I woke every morning to the sound of music and dancing upstairs, and I wondered how she could face her work at the bank after almost an hour of being in a trance. When we bumped into each other in the corridor, I suggested she come in for a coffee, and she told me that she'd made more copies of the tape and that many of her colleagues at work were also now looking for the Vertex.

"Did I do wrong? Was it a secret?"

Of course it wasn't. On the contrary, she was helping me preserve a tradition that was almost lost. According to my grandfather's notes, one of the women said that a monk who visited the region had once told them that each of us contains our ancestors and all the generations to come. When we free ourselves, we are freeing all humanity.

"So all the men and women in that village in Siberia must be here now and very happy too. Their work is being reborn in this world, thanks to your grandfather. There's one thing I'd like to ask you: What made you decide to dance after you read those notes? If you'd read something about sports instead, would you have decided to become a footballer?"

This was a question no one had ever asked me.

"Because, at the time, I was ill. I was suffering from a rare form of arthritis, and the doctors told me that I should prepare myself for life in a wheelchair by the age of thirty-five. I saw that I didn't have much time ahead of me and so I decided to devote myself to something I wouldn't be able to do later on. My grandfather had written on one of those small sheets of paper that the inhabitants of Diedov believed in the curative powers of trances."

"And it seems they were right."