Heaven's Harlots: My Fifteen Years in a Sex Cult (39 page)

“I only want my children to be happy and healthy,” I cried. “Maybe I should join this commune with Paolo. They aren’t doing anything bad. I don’t think they abuse the children. But I just can’t see myself submitting to Paolo, and I don’t want to raise my girls to do that. But maybe that is the answer. Maybe I have never found the answer because I have not submitted to a man.”

“You have submitted to many men, from what I understand,” said the missionary wife, who was somewhat liberal and very pragmatic.

“Oh, that was only in the flesh. I have never submitted my will, my spirit”—I was searching for the right word—“I have never given up my soul to a man—that’s what they are asking me to do.” The husband of this woman was a very open, sensitive man. At one point he put his arm around me while I cried, but he had nothing to say that could comfort me. After all, even in their Protestant religion, the wife was ultimately obedient to the husband. However, they did meet with Paolo and convince him not to join that group, but to attend their church instead. Their support seemed to be enough for Paolo.

After the episode, I took a walk with my children along the beautiful mountainside trails, with all sorts of wildflowers blooming in the spring breeze. Sitting under the cherry blossoms, with a view of the Mediterranean Sea below us, and the blue sky that reached across Europe like a secure blanket covering a divided bed, I felt more lonely and lost than ever before in my life. Here I was living in the most charming place on earth, with the most adorable children I could ever hope for, with a husband who said he loved me and wanted to work on our marriage, and I felt utterly hopeless, as if my soul was desperately struggling to keep from dying. Why did I feel this way? Tears rolled down my cheeks as I clenched my teeth and tried to keep the sobs noiseless.

I walked back to where my children were playing joyfully under the trees. They couldn’t wait till the cherries would be ripe and they could pick them, but then I would have to explain to them that these cherries belonged to someone else. We could only pick and eat the cherries that belonged in our family, or to some nice person who would allow us to pick their cherries. This is life. This is not the Garden of Eden that I read about to you at bedtime. From some memory storage in my mind came the words,“There is no truth outside the gates of Eden.” Fine, I thought. I’ll ponder that. But what if there is no Garden of Eden either?

The next few months passed as if I were stuck in glue. The days went by, the calendar pages were flipped over, but I did not feel that I was getting anywhere. I thought I had already emptied myself with the writing. What else was there to empty? Where did one find answers?

Why did some look, while others did not? Was I doomed to eternal seekership?

How could I be a good mother and a truth seeker at the same time?

Truth seekers are always rejected and criticized by the contemporary majority who don’t want to rock the boat. They have had the truth for two thousand years, and if I couldn’t recognize it, then there was something wrong with me. Just be a good mother, I told myself. But how could I be a good mother when I felt like a hypocrite and a fake, when I felt like I was teaching my children to live a life that did not make me happy or fulfilled, when I really thought the purpose of life is to seek truth, love, and happiness, but I had given up? The paradox of my two most urgent, emotional needs—the search for brotherhood and the pull of motherhood—was tearing me apart.

Paolo was unconcerned with my dilemma. Either he could not understand it, or he did not want to be bothered by it. When I annoyed him with existential questions, he suggested I might be crazy. My only intellectual support, Charles, who had remained a friend to us throughout the years, offered me hope that I was not crazy but instead, just beginning to explore another level of understanding. Through conversations with him, I was able to recognize a ray of light inside myself. Perhaps I was not without resources, but during that dark time I felt utterly helpless. Against my will, I cried out for empathy to the person who was supposed to be closest to me. Maybe I was a hopeless romantic after all, but I believed that my husband— the one to whom I gave my body, but who also wanted my soul— would, should, could understand me!

Instead, Paolo avoided my questions about why I was so unhappy. We began to argue over every decision involved in living together, from the big ones to the small ones.

“Help me! Help me! For God’s sake, help me!” I screamed one evening, as I lay completely prostrate on the cold floor at Paolo’s feet.

As I listened to Dylan’s song “Like a Rolling Stone,” I realized how I used to make fun of the “systemites” and the people who “hung out” at churches. Now I was scrounging for a spiritual meal, and I was on my own.

I didn’t even know where home was anymore. How did it feel? Enough to drive one crazy.

A few weeks later, I woke up in the early morning hours hearing a child cry. It was still dark outside, but because we left a light on in the hallway, I could see out through our open door. Our bedroom was situated next to the children’s room, which was right at the top of the steep stone steps. There, on the platform at the top of the steps, I saw a little girl, covered from head to foot in dripping blood. She was about the age of my youngest daughter, who was five. I couldn’t tell who it was because the blood hid her facial features. It could have been my middle daughter, who was seven. She just stood there in the hallway, crying.

In that split second of realization, I imagined that my daughter had fallen down the stone steps, crawled back up while blood from a head wound splattered her body, and was now at my door crying. I screamed out in terror and pain. I could not move or make an intelligible word.

Paolo rose quickly from a deep sleep.

“What? What is wrong?” he asked, looking at me as if I were a madwoman.

I pointed to the little girl, still standing in the hallway. I could do nothing but scream. He looked to where I pointed and then back at me.

“What is it? What are you pointing at? What do you see?” With a chill of fear running down my spine, I realized that Paolo did not see what I saw. I looked at him for an instant, my eyes wide with disbelief. When I looked back to the hallway, the little girl was gone.

“Go look at the girls,” I cried, as I found my voice again. Maybe Paolo had not seen her since he just woke up and had not focused his eyes yet.

Maybe my bloody daughter had gone back into her bedroom, frightened by my screaming. But I could not move to go look for myself.

Paolo went into the next room. All the girls were now sitting up in their beds, awakened by my screams.

“They are fine,” said Paolo when he came back. “What is the matter with you?” I got out of bed now, and ran into the next room, followed by Paolo.

There were my three girls, all sitting up in their beds, and all without a drop of blood on them.

“What’s happening, Mommy?” I gave them all a hug, as I touched each one to make sure they were fine.

“What was it?” asked Paolo.

“I must have had a nightmare,” I said with fear still in my eyes. “I’m going to stay in here and sleep with the girls. I don’t want to let them alone now,” I said, Lying down and trying to act rational.

“PLease, tuck the girls in. It’s still night. We need to sleep.” As I lay in bed, with my eyes open or closed, I saw demon faces. We had acknowledged the presence of demons in the Family, and although I had never seen one, I prayed and rebuked them while in the COG, like I was told to do. Now, as I lay awake in bed, I had little to go on but what I had learned in the Family.

“I rebuke you in Jesus’ name,” I said silently.

I had no tools to fight with but religion. I repeated the name of Jesus over and over, and quoted all the Bible verses I could remember.

That helped me to make it through the night, but the days were worse.

When Paolo woke me to get the children ready for school in the morning, I knew my experiences of the previous night were not over. My whole consciousness had been altered. I felt as if I were walking in a world that was not real to me. I did all the rituals that were required, washed, dressed, fed the kids, took them to school, came home, cleaned the house, prepared lunch, etc., but all the time, the real me was in another place, looking on at my dissociated self. At night, demons came back and tried to convince me I was crazy. In the day, I walked around as if I were a zombie. Paolo finally grew concerned.

He took me to a doctor who was a homeopath and used natural cures. He diagnosed me as having had a nervous breakdown induced by stress and poor eating habits. Natural doctors seemed to attribute everything to eating meat and processed, chemically enhanced foods. I was put on a strict diet of brown rice and vegetables, and given natural vitamins and other homeopathic remedies.

However, after three nights of demonic visions, as I lay in my children’s bed, desiring to be close to them since they were the purest form of love I knew, I looked the demon in the face and laughed.

“You have no power over me, so why don’t you just go away. I am protected by angels,” I said, using the only references I knew. “I have Jesus in my heart. I have light, and you are darkness. You cannot exist inside me. You can only bother me from the outside. I am not crazy. If I were, you would be inside me, and you’re not. You are out there!” The demon faded away. Others came, but they all faded away. I never saw them again after that night. Sometimes, years later, whenever I started to lose faith in myself, this fear of demons would come again. But it only took remembrance of the light within me to make it vanish.

Breaking the Shell

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.

—KAHLIL GIBRAN

Charles gave me a book when I first left the Family. It was M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled. As I read through it, the desire to know my purpose grew in intensity. Charles gave me other books as well, mostly written by recent Nobel Prize winners, and I reread the classics, which I found in a local English library. I soaked in these books as if I were dying of thirst, which I was. My husband, who never understood my interests, had given me only one book in our fourteen years together. It was written by a beautiful Italian television actress and was about how to keep your breasts firm. I had nursed five babies now, and he thought I was worried about what shape my breasts were in. I wasn’t until he gave me the book.

I knew the direction for my new life was to go back to school. I had worked as an English teacher for the British School in San Remo, Italy, for a while, and when I asked the director why I received half the pay that other teachers got, he told me,“You don’t have a degree.” At first I wanted a degree in order to make more money, but the more I read and realized how little I knew, having lived in an intellectual vacuum, the more I wanted to go to school just to learn. Early in 1991, I tried to go back to college, but everyone laughed at me, my friends, Paolo’s Italian relatives, the college administration. They all told me, in one way or another, that at thirty-eight years of age, with four children at home, higher education was not an option. At least not in Italy. But if I could not go to school there, I would have to go somewhere else. As if others were conspiring to help me, my sister Karen called from the States, offering me her house if I wanted to come to America. I had been thinking that I could go back to school if I lived in America, but I had not told anyone. I had kept in touch with my family through infrequent letters and small Christmas gifts, but the last time I had talked to Karen was when she came to visit us in Italy three years before. She had no idea that I was thinking of returning to America. But here she was on the phone telling me that her husband had taken a job out of the States, and I could use their house in the southeastern part of the United States. She thought it was time I come home.

The last time I had been in the States was when Athena, who was now ten years old, was born, and even then, I was there for only a few months.

All together, I had been away from America for eighteen years.

Discussing the possibility of going back with Paolo, I suggested that we try our luck in America for a few years, and if it didn’t work out, we could always come back. Paolo finally agreed, after he lost his fifth job. It took us months to sell everything for the money to buy tickets, and by that time Paolo had found another job, which was going well for him. He now wanted to stay in Italy. We were back in the trailer again, and with the tickets already in my hand, I said that I and the children were going. Paolo stayed in Italy another five months before joining us in America.

The hardest part of going back to America was being separated from Thor, who was now eighteen and ready to graduate from high school.

Ironically, his father also wanted to return to America, and Thor had already been thinking about it himself. He would attend college in France, since his grades were good enough for him to make use of France’s academically vigorous, but free, universities. However, he would visit in the summer, and he was already thinking of going to graduate school in the States. My four younger children were excited about going to the country where almost everything came from—the movies, the music, the latest fads, their mother! I told them I would kiss the ground when I arrived, and I did.

Returning to America, however, was more of a cultural shock than I expected. My sister no longer lived in the city where I landed, but she sent a friend to meet me, for which I was extremely thankful. I had only recently learned to drive, and the seven-lane highways looked terrifying. My mother came down from Lancaster right away to stay with me and help with the children, but I still felt estranged from her, having been emotionally absent for twenty years. I was busy learning how to live in America, in this hot, humid city where no one walked anywhere, grocery stores were open twenty-four hours a day, children did not play outside but in the play areas of fast food restaurants, and people did not visit without calling you to make an appointment. I didn’t have anyone to visit me anyway! Often, I went to sleep crying silently, so the children would not hear, wondering how I would make it in this harsh environment. There was nothing to do but persevere.