The Witch of Portobello Page 0,10

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.

Father Giancarlo Fontana, 72

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 Lukus 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 Lukus. 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 sorry, there I am quoting the Bible again, and I promise I'll try to control myself from now on. After talking to the young man, I spent at least two hours with Sherine, or Athena as she preferred to be called.

Athena had always intrigued me. Ever since she first started coming to the church, it seemed to me that she had one clear ambition: to become a saint. She told me although her fiance didn't know this that shortly before civil war broke out in Beirut, she'd had an experience very similar to that of St Therese of Lisieux: she had seen the streets running with blood. One could attribute this to some trauma in childhood or adolescence, but the fact is that, to a greater or lesser extent, all creative human beings have such experiences, which are known as 'possession by the sacred'. Suddenly, for a fraction of a second, we feel that our whole life is justified, our sins forgiven, and that love is still the strongest force, one that can transform us forever.

But, at the same time, we feel afraid. Surrendering completely to love, be it human or divine, means giving up everything, including our own well-being or our ability to make decisions. It means loving in the deepest sense of the word. The truth is that we don't want to be saved in the way God has chosen; we want to keep absolute control over our every step, to be fully conscious of our decisions, to be capable of choosing the object of our devotion.

It isn't like that with love it arrives, moves in and starts directing everything. Only very strong souls allow themselves to be swept along, and Athena was a strong soul. So strong that she spent hours in deep contemplation. She had a special gift for music; they say that she danced very well too, but since