The Witch of Portobello Page 0,60

navel as the centre of anything. In the end, though, I managed to speak to someone who had some interesting information on the subject.

When I got home, Andrea had had a bath, laid the table and was waiting for me to start supper. She opened a bottle of very expensive wine, filled two glasses and offered me one.

'So how was supper last night?'

How long can a man live with a lie? I didn't want to lose the woman standing there before me, who had stuck with me through thick and thin, who was always by my side when I felt my life had lost meaning and direction. I loved her, but in the crazy world into which I was blindly plunging, my heart was far away, trying to adapt to something it possibly knew, but couldn't accept: being large enough for two people.

Since I would never risk letting go of a certainty in favour of a mere possibility, I tried to minimise the significance of what had happened at the restaurant, mainly because nothing had happened, apart from an exchange of lines by a poet who had suffered greatly for love.

'Athena's a difficult person to get to know.'

Andrea laughed.

'That's precisely why men must find her so fascinating. She awakens that rapidly disappearing protective instinct of yours.'

Best to change the subject. I've always been convinced that women have a supernatural ability to know what's going on in a man's soul. They're all witches.

'I've been looking into what happened at the theatre today. You don't know this, but I had my eyes open throughout the exercises.'

'You've always got your eyes open. I assume it's part of being a journalist. And you're going to talk about the moment when we all did exactly the same thing. We talked a lot about that in the bar after rehearsals.'

'A historian told me about a Greek temple where they used to predict the future ( Editor's note: the temple of Apollo at Delphi ) and which housed a marble stone called the navel. Stories from the time describe Delphi as the centre of the planet. I went to the newspaper archives to make a few enquiries: in Petra, in Jordan, there's another conic navel, symbolising not just the centre of the planet, but of the entire universe. Both navels try to show the axis through which the energy of the world travels, marking in a visible way something that is only there on the invisible map. Jerusalem is also called the navel of the world, as is an island in the Pacific Ocean, and another place I've forgotten now, because I had never associated the two things.'

'Like dance!'

'What?'

'Nothing.'

'No, I know what you mean belly dancing, the oldest form of dance recorded, in which everything revolves about the belly. I was trying to avoid the subject because I told you that in Transylvania I saw Athena dance. She was dressed, of course, but '

' all the movement began with her navel, and gradually spread to the rest of the body.'

She was right.

Best to change the subject again and talk about the theatre, about boring journalistic stuff, then drink a little wine and end up in bed making love while, outside, the rain was starting to fall. I noticed that, at the moment of orgasm, Andrea's body was all focused on her belly. I'd seen this many times before, but never thought anything of it.

Antoine Locadour, historian[/h1

Heron started spending a fortune on phone calls to France, asking me to get all the information I could by the weekend, and he kept going on about the navel, which seemed to me the least interesting and least romantic thing in the world. But, then, the English don't see things in the same way as the French, and so, instead of asking questions, I tried to find out what science had to say on the subject.

I soon realised that historical knowledge wasn't enough. I could locate a monument here, a dolmen there, but the odd thing was that the ancient cultures all seemed to agree on the subject and even use the same word to define the places they considered sacred. I'd never noticed this before and I started to get interested. When I saw the number of coincidences, I went in search of something that would complement them human behaviour and beliefs.

I immediately had to reject the first and most logical explanation, that we're nourished through the umbilical cord, which is why the navel is, for us, the centre of