The Witch of Portobello Page 0,12
I hide my sadness so as not to worry those who love me and care about me. Recently, I've even considered suicide. At night, before I go to sleep, I have long conversations with myself, praying for this idea to go away; it would be such an act of ingratitude, an escape, a way of spreading tragedy and misery over the Earth. In the mornings, I come here to talk to St Therese and to ask her to free me from the demons I speak to at night. It's worked so far, but I'm beginning to weaken. I know I have a mission which I've long rejected, and now I must accept it. That mission is to be a mother. I must carry out that mission or go mad. If I don't feel life growing inside me, I'll never be able to accept life outside me.'
Lukus Jessen-Petersen, ex-husband
When Viorel was born, I had just turned twenty-two. I was no longer the student who had married a fellow student, but a man responsible for supporting his family, and with an enormous burden on my shoulders. My parents, who didn't even come to the wedding, made any financial help conditional on my leaving Athena and gaining custody of the child (or, rather, that's what my father said, because my mother used to phone me up, weeping, saying I must be mad, but saying, too, how much she'd like to hold her grandson in her arms). I hoped that, as they came to understand my love for Athena and my determination to stay with her, their resistance would gradually break down.
It didn't. And now I had to provide for my wife and child. I abandoned my studies at the Engineering Faculty. I got a phone-call from my father, a mixture of stick and carrot: he said that if I continued as I was, I'd end up being disinherited, but that if I went back to university, he'd consider helping me, in his words, 'provisionally'. I refused. The romanticism of youth demands that we always take very radical stances. I could, I said, solve my problems alone.
During the time before Viorel was born, Athena began helping me to understand myself better. This didn't happen through sex our sexual relationship was, I must confess, very tentative but through music.
As I later learned, music is as old as human beings. Our ancestors, who travelled from cave to cave, couldn't carry many things, but modern archaeology shows that, as well as the little they might have with them in the way of food, there was always a musical instrument in their baggage, usually a drum. Music isn't just something that comforts or distracts us, it goes beyond that it's an ideology. You can judge people by the kind of music they listen to.
As I watched Athena dance during her pregnancy and listened to her play the guitar to calm the baby and make him feel that he was loved, I began to allow her way of seeing the world to affect my life too. When Viorel was born, the first thing we did when we brought him home was to play Albinoni's Adagio. When we quarrelled, it was the force of music although I can't make any logical connection between the two things, except in some kind of hippyish way that helped us get through difficult times.
But all this romanticism didn't bring in the money. Since I played no instrument and couldn't even offer my services as background music in a bar, I finally got a job as a trainee with a firm of architects, doing structural calculations. They paid me a very low hourly rate, and so I would leave the house very early each morning and come home late. I hardly saw my son, who would be sleeping by then, and I was almost too exhausted to talk or make love to my wife. Every night, I asked myself: when will we be able to improve our financial situation and live in the style we deserve? Although I largely agreed with Athena when she talked about the pointlessness of having a degree, in engineering (and law and medicine, for example), there are certain basic technical facts that are essential if we're not to put people's lives at risk. And I'd been forced to interrupt my training in my chosen profession, which meant abandoning a dream that was very important to me.
The rows began. Athena complained that I didn't pay enough attention to the baby, that