She thought, “Because the Tradition of the Moon doesn’t require you to spend the night alone in a dark forest.”

“Now listen to me,” said Wicca sternly. “Every day from today, at an hour of your choosing, sit down alone at a table and spread the tarot deck as I did, completely at random. Don’t try to understand anything. Simply study the cards. They will teach you all you need to know for the moment.”

“It’s like the Tradition of the Sun: me teaching myself again,”

thought Brida as she went down the stairs. And only when she was on the bus did she realize that the woman had spoken of a Gift.

But she could talk about that at their next meeting.

For a whole week, Brida devoted half an hour a day to spreading the tarot cards on the table in the living room. She went

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to bed at ten o’clock and set the alarm for one in the morning.

She would get up, make a quick cup of coffee, and sit down to contemplate the cards, trying to decipher their hidden language.

The first night, she was very excited. Brida was convinced that Wicca had taught her some kind of secret ritual, and so she tried to spread the cards in exactly the same way, expecting some occult message to be revealed. After half an hour, apart from a few minor visions, which she felt were merely the fruits of her imagination, nothing of any great note had happened.

She did the same thing on the second night. Wicca had said that the cards would tell their own story, and to judge by the courses Brida had attended, it was a very ancient story indeed, dat-ing back more than three thousand years, to a time when mankind was closer to the original wisdom.

“The pictures seem so simple,” she thought. A woman forcing open the mouth of a lion, a cart pulled by two mysterious animals, a man sitting before a table covered with sundry objects. She had been taught that the deck was a book, a book in which the Divine Wisdom had noted down the main changes that take place during our journey through life. But its author, knowing that humanity learned more easily from vice than from virtue, had arranged for this sacred book to be transmitted across the generations in the form of a game. The deck was an invention of the gods.

“It can’t be that simple,” thought Brida every time she spread the cards on the table. She had been taught complicated methods, elaborate systems, and those cards arranged in no particular order began to have a troubling effect on her reasoning. On the third

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night, she threw the cards down angrily on the floor. For a moment, she thought that this angry reaction might have some magical inspiration behind it, but the results were equally unsatisfac-tory, just a few indefinable intuitions, which, again, she dismissed as mere imaginings.

At the same time, the idea of her Soul Mate didn’t leave her for a moment. At first, she felt as if she were going back to her adolescence, to dreams of an enchanted prince crossing mountains and valleys in search of his lady of the glass slipper or in order to awaken a sleeping beauty with a kiss. “Finding your Soul Mate is something that only happens in fairy tales,” she told herself, half-joking. Fairy tales had been her first experience of the magical universe that she was now so eager to enter, and more than once she had wondered why people ended up distancing themselves from that world, knowing the immense joy that childhood had brought to their lives.

“Perhaps because they weren’t content with feeling joy.” She found the idea slightly absurd but nevertheless recorded it in her diary as a “creative” thought.

After spending a week obsessed with the idea of the Soul Mate, Brida became gripped by a terrifying feeling: what if she chose the wrong man? On the eighth night, when she woke again to carry out her vain contemplation of the tarot cards, she decided to invite her boyfriend out to supper the following night.

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F

She chose a fairly inexpensive restaurant, because he always insisted on paying the bill, despite the fact that he earned far less as a research assistant to a physics professor at the university than she earned as a secretary. It was still summer, and they sat out at one of the tables on the pavement, by the river.

“I want to know when the spirits are going to let me sleep with you again,” said Lorens good-humoredly.

Brida looked at him tenderly. She had asked him not to come to her apartment for two weeks, and he had agreed, protesting just warmly enough for her to know how much he loved her. In his way he, too, was seeking to understand the mysteries of the Universe, and if, one day, he were to ask her to stay away from him for two weeks, she would have to say yes.

They dined unhurriedly and largely in silence, watching the boats crossing the river and the people walking past on the pavement. The bottle of white wine on the table was emptied and replaced by another. Half an hour later, they had pushed their two chairs together and were sitting, arms around each other, gazing up at the starry summer sky.

“Just look at that sky,” said Lorens, stroking her hair. “What we’re looking at now is how the sky would have appeared thousands of years ago.”

He had told her the same thing on the day they first met, but Brida chose not to interrupt him—this was his way of sharing his world with her.

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“Many of those stars have already died, and yet their light still fills the Universe. Other stars were born far away, and their light has not yet reached us.”

“So no one knows what the real sky looks like?” She had asked that same question on their first meeting, too, but it was good to repeat such delicious moments.

“We don’t know. We study what we can see, but what we see is not always what exists.”

“I want to ask you something. What are we made of ? Where did the atoms that make up our bodies come from?”

Lorens looked up at the ancient sky and said:

“They were created along with these stars and this river. In the first second of the Universe’s existence.”

“So after that first moment of Creation, nothing more was added.”

“No, nothing. Everything moved and continues to move. Everything was transformed and continues to be transformed. But all the matter that exists in the Universe now is the same matter from all those billions of years ago, and not so much as a single atom has been added.”

Brida sat studying the movement of both river and stars. It was easy to see the river flowing across the Earth, but it was hard to see the stars moving in the sky. And yet both were moving.

“Lorens,” she said at last, after a long silence during which they both watched a boat passing. “Let me ask what might seem an absurd question: is it physically possible that the atoms that make up my body could have been in the body of someone who lived before me?”

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Lorens stared at her in amazement.

“What do you mean?”

“What I said. Is such a thing possible?”

“They could be in plants or insects or they could have turned into helium molecules and be out there somewhere, millions of miles from Earth.”

“But is it possible that the atoms that made up the body of someone who died could be in my body and in someone else’s body?”

He said nothing for a moment, then said:

“Yes, it is.”