community is scattered all over the world, and her father soon found a way of re-establishing his business, and life went on. Athena was able to study at good schools, she attended dance classes – because dance was her passion – and when she’d finished at secondary school, she chose to take a degree in engineering.
Once they were living in London, her parents invited her out to supper at one of the most expensive restaurants in the city, and explained, very carefully, that she had been adopted. Athena pretended to be surprised, hugged them both, and said that nothing would change their relationship.
The truth was, though, that a friend of the family, in a moment of malice, had called her ‘an ungrateful orphan’ and put her lack of manners down to the fact that she was ‘not her parents’ “real” daughter’. She had hurled an ashtray at him, cutting his face, and then cried for two whole days, after which she quickly got used to the idea that she was adopted. The malicious family friend was left with an unexplained scar and took to saying that he’d been attacked in the street by muggers.
I asked if she would like to go out with me the next day. She told me that she was a virgin, went to church on Sundays, and had no interest in romantic novels – she was more concerned with reading everything she could about the situation in the Middle East.
She was, in short, busy. Very busy.
‘People think that a woman’s only dream is to get married and have children. And given what I’ve told you, you probably think that I’ve suffered a lot in life. It’s not true, and, besides, I’ve been there already. I’ve known other men who wanted to “protect” me from all those tragedies. What they forget is that, from Ancient Greece on, the people who returned from battle were either dead on their shields or stronger, despite or because of their scars. It’s better that way: I’ve lived on a battlefield since I was born, but I’m still alive and I don’t need anyone to protect me.’
She paused.
‘You see how cultured I am?’
‘Oh, very, but when you attack someone weaker than yourself, you make it look as if you really do need protection. You could have ruined your university career right there and then.’
‘You’re right. OK, I accept the invitation.’
We started seeing each other regularly, and the closer I got to her, the more I discovered my own light, because she always encouraged me to give the best of myself. She had never read any books on magic or esoterics. She said they were things of the Devil, and that salvation was only possible through Jesus – end of story. Sometimes, though, she said things that didn’t seem entirely in keeping with the teachings of the Church.
‘Christ surrounded himself with beggars, prostitutes, tax-collectors and fishermen. I think what he meant by this was that the divine spark is in every soul and is never extinguished. When I sit still, or when I’m feeling very agitated, I feel as if I were vibrating along with the whole Universe. And I know things then that I don’t know, as if God were guiding my steps. There are moments when I feel that everything is being revealed to me.’
Then she would correct herself:
‘But that’s wrong.’
Athena always lived between two worlds: what she felt was true and what she had been taught by her faith.
One day, after almost a semester of equations, calculations and structural studies, she announced that she was going to leave university.
‘But you’ve never said anything to me about it!’ I said.
‘I was even afraid of talking about it to myself, but this morning I went to see my hairdresser. She worked day and night so that her daughter could finish her sociology degree. The daughter finally graduated and, after knocking on many doors, found work as a secretary at a cement works. Yet even today, my hairdresser said very proudly: “My daughter’s got a degree.” Most of my parents’ friends and most of my parents’ friends’ children, also have degrees. This doesn’t mean that they’ve managed to find the kind of work they wanted. Not at all; they went to university because someone, at a time when universities seemed important, said that, in order to rise in the world, you had to have a degree. And thus the world was deprived of some excellent gardeners, bakers, antique dealers, sculptors and writers.’
I asked her to give it some more thought before taking such a radical step, but she quoted these lines by Robert Frost:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
The following day, she didn’t turn up for class. At our following meeting, I asked what she was going to do.
‘I’m going to get married and have a baby.’
This wasn’t an ultimatum. I was twenty, she was nineteen, and I thought it was still too early to take on such a commitment.
But Athena was quite serious. And I needed to choose between losing the one thing that really filled my thoughts – my love for that woman – and losing my freedom and all the choices that the future promised me.
To be honest, the decision was easy.
Of course I was surprised when the couple, both of them much too young, came to the church to arrange the wedding ceremony. I hardly knew Lukás Jessen-Petersen, but that same day I learned that his family – obscure aristocrats from Denmark – were totally opposed to the union. They weren’t just against the marriage, they were against the Church as well.
According to his father – who based himself on frankly unanswerable scientific arguments – the Bible, on which the whole religion is based, wasn’t really a book, but a collage of sixty-six different manuscripts, the real name or identity of whose authors is unknown; he said that almost a thousand years elapsed between the writing of the first book and the last, longer than the time that has elapsed since Columbus discovered America. And no living being on the planet – from monkeys down to parrots – needs ten commandments in order to know how to behave. All that it takes for the world to remain in harmony is for each being to follow the laws of nature.
Naturally, I read the Bible and know a little of its history, but the human beings who wrote it were instruments of Divine Power, and Jesus forged a far stronger bond than the ten commandments: love. Birds and monkeys, or any of God’s creatures, obey their instincts and merely do what they’re programmed to do. In the case of the human being, things are more complicated because we know about love and its traps.
Oh dear, here I am making a sermon, when I should be telling you about my meeting with Athena and Lukás. While I was talking to the young man – and I say talking, because we don’t share the same faith, and I’m not, therefore, bound by the secret of the confessional – I learned that, as well as the household’s general anticlericalism, there was a lot of resistance to Athena because she was a foreigner. I felt like quoting from the Bible, from a part that isn’t a profession of faith, but a call to common sense:
‘Thou shalt not abhor an Edomite, for he is thy brother; thou shalt not abhor an Egyptian, because thou wast a stranger in his land.’
I’m
