"Immediately after the first glass of wine, she told me, unprompted, that she had a boyfriend who worked for Scotland Yard. It was a lie, of course. She must have read the look in my eyes, and this was her way of keeping me at a distance.
I told her that I had a girlfriend, which made us even.
Ten minutes after the music had started, she stood up. We had said very little-she asked no questions about my research, and we exchanged only generalities: our impressions of the city, complaints about the state of the roads. But what I saw next-or, rather, what everyone in the restaurant saw-was a goddess revealing herself in all her glory, a priestess invoking angels and demons.
Her eyes were closed and she seemed no longer to be conscious of who she was or where she was or why she was there; it was as if she were floating and simultaneously summoning up her past, revealing her present and predicting the future. She mingled eroticism with chastity, pornography with revelation, worship of God and nature, all at the same time.
People stopped eating and started watching what was happening. She was no longer following the music, the musicians were trying to keep up with her steps, and that restaurant in the basement of an old building in the city was transformed into an Egyptian temple, where the worshippers of Isis used to gather for their fertility rites. The smell of roast meat and wine was transmuted into incense that drew us all into the same trans-like state, into the same experience of leaving this world and entering an unknown dimension.
The string and the wind instruments had given up, only the percussion played on. Athena was dancing as if she were no longer there, with sweat running down her face, her bare feet beating on the wooden floor. She was inhibiting other spheres, experiencing the frontiers of worlds that almost touch ours, but never reveal themselves.
The other people in the restaurant started clapping in time to the music, and Athena was dancing ever faster, feeding on that energy and spinning round and round, balancing in the void, snatching up everything that we, poor mortals, wanted to offer to the supreme divinity.
And suddenly she stopped. Everyone stopped, including the percussionists. Her eyes were still closed, but tears were now rolling down her cheeks. She raised her arms in the air and cried: ‘When I die, bury me standing, because I’ve spent all my life on my knees! ’
Later on, I learned that the words she had spoken at the end of her dance were an ancient gypsy saying.”
- From 'The Witch of Portobello'.
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