The Witch of Portobello Page 0,13

he needed a father, that if she'd simply wanted a child, she could have done that on her own, without causing me all these problems. More than once, I slammed out of the house, saying that she didn't understand me, and that I didn't understand either how I'd ever agreed to the 'madness' of having a child at twenty, before we had even a minimum of financial security. Gradually, out of sheer exhaustion and irritation, we stopped making love.

I began to slide into depression, feeling that I'd been used and manipulated by the woman I loved. Athena noticed my increasingly strange state of mind, but, instead of helping me, she focused her energies on Viorel and on music. Work became my escape. I would occasionally talk to my parents, and they would always say, as they had so many times before, that she'd had the baby in order to get me to marry her.

She also became increasingly religious. She insisted on having our son baptised with a name she herself had decided on Viorel, a Romanian name. Apart from a few immigrants, I doubt that anyone else in England is called Viorel, but I thought it showed imagination on her part, and I realised, too, that she was making some strange connection with a past she'd never known her days in the orphanage in Sibiu.

I tried to be adaptable, but I felt I was losing Athena because of the child. Our arguments became more frequent, and she threatened to leave because she feared that Viorel was picking up the 'negative energy' from our quarrels. One night, when she made this threat again, I was the one who left, thinking that I'd go back as soon as I'd calmed down a bit.

I started wandering aimlessly round London, cursing the life I'd chosen, the child I'd agreed to have, and the wife who seemed to have no further interest in me. I went into the first bar I came to, near a Tube station, and downed four glasses of whisky. When the bar closed at eleven, I searched out one of those shops that stay open all night, bought more whisky, sat down on a bench in a square and continued drinking. A group of youths approached me and asked to share the bottle with me. When I refused, they attacked me. The police arrived, and we were all carted off to the police station.

I was released after making a statement. I didn't bring any charges, saying that it had been nothing but a silly disagreement; after all, I didn't want to spend months appearing at various courts, as the victim of an attack. I was still so drunk that, just as I was about to leave, I stumbled and fell sprawling across an inspector's desk. The inspector was angry, but instead of arresting me on the spot for insulting a police officer, he threw me out into the street.

And there was one of my attackers, who thanked me for not taking the case any further. He pointed out that I was covered in mud and blood and suggested I get a change of clothes before returning home. Instead of going on my way, I asked him to do me a favour: to listen to me, because I desperately needed to talk to someone.

For an hour, he listened in silence to my woes. I wasn't really talking to him, but to myself: a young man with his whole life before him, with a possibly brilliant career ahead of him as well as a family with the necessary contacts to open many doors but who now looked like a beggar drunk, tired, depressed and penniless. And all because of a woman who didn't even pay me any attention.

By the end of my story I had a clearer view of my situation: a life which I had chosen in the belief that love conquers all. And it isn't true. Sometimes love carries us into the abyss, taking with us, to make matters worse, the people we love. In my case, I was well on the way to destroying not only my life, but Athena's and Viorel's too.

At that moment, I said to myself once again that I was a man, not the boy who'd been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and that I'd faced with dignity all the challenges that had been placed before me. Athena was already asleep, with the baby in her arms. I took a bath, went outside