The Witch of Portobello Page 0,48

the right path. You, like me, are a dissatisfied person. Your reality does not coincide with the reality of other people. And you're afraid that your son will follow the same path as you, is that correct?'

'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 behaviour 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 travelled for nearly five hours in 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