The Witch of Portobello

But it was empty, and now there was this silence.

Her gray eyes were fixed on mine, but I held firm and didn't look away. Instinct perhaps. A way of saying that I'm not frightened, but facing the challenge head-on. Except that everything--the silence and the white room, the noise of the traffic outside in the street--began to seem unreal. How long were we going to stay there, saying nothing?

I started to track my own thoughts. Had I come there in search of material for my play or did I really want knowledge, wisdom, power? I couldn't put my finger on what it was that had led me to come and see...what? A witch?

My adolescent dreams surfaced. Who wouldn't like to meet a real witch, learn how to perform magic, and gain the respect and fear of her friends? Who, as a young woman, hasn't been outraged by the centuries of repression suffered by women and felt that becoming a witch would be the best way of recovering her lost identity? I'd been through that phase myself; I was independent and did what I liked in the highly competitive world of the theater, but then why was I never content, why was I always testing out my curiosity?

We must have been about the same age...or was I older? Did she too have a boyfriend?

Athena moved closer. We were now less than an arm's length from each other, and I started to feel afraid. Was she a lesbian?

I didn't look away, but I made a mental note of where the door was so that I could leave whenever I wished. No one had made me go to that house to meet someone I'd never seen before in my life and sit there wasting time, not saying anything and not learning anything either. What did she want?

That silence perhaps. My muscles began to grow tense. I was alone and helpless. I desperately needed to talk or to make my mind stop telling me that I was being threatened. How could she possibly know who I was? We are what we say!

Had she asked me anything about my life? She'd wanted to know if I had a boyfriend. I tried to say more about the theater, but couldn't. And what about the stories I'd heard about her gypsy ancestry, her stay in Transylvania, the land of vampires?

My thoughts wouldn't stop: How much would that consultation cost? I was terrified. I should have asked before. A fortune? And if I didn't pay, would she put a spell on me that would eventually destroy me?

I felt an impulse to get to my feet, thank her, and say that I hadn't come there just to sit in silence. If you go to a psychiatrist, you have to talk. If you go to a church, you listen to a sermon. If you go in search of magic, you find a teacher who wants to explain the world to you and who gives you a series of rituals to follow. But silence? Why did it make me feel so uncomfortable?

One question after another kept forming in my mind, and I couldn't stop thinking or trying to find a reason for the two of us to be sitting there, saying nothing. Suddenly, perhaps after five or ten long minutes of total immobility, she smiled.

I smiled too and relaxed.

"Try to be different. That's all."

"That's all? Is sitting in silence being different? I imagine that, at this very moment, there are thousands of people i

n London who are desperate for someone to talk to, and all you can say to me is that silence makes a difference?"

"Now that you're talking and reorganizing the universe, you'll end up convincing yourself that you're right and I'm wrong. But as you experienced for yourself--being silent is different."

"It's unpleasant. It doesn't teach you anything."

She seemed indifferent to my reaction.

"What theater are you working at?"

Finally, she was taking an interest in my life! I was being restored to my human condition, with a profession and everything! I invited her to come and see the play we were putting on--it was the only way I could find to avenge myself, by showing that I was capable of things that Athena was not. That silence had left a humiliating aftertaste.

She asked if she could bring her son, and I said no, it was for adults only.

"Well, I could always leave him with my mother. I haven't been to the theater in ages."

She didn't charge for the consultation. When I met up with the other members of the cast, I told them about my encounter with this mysterious creature. They were all mad keen to meet someone who, when she first met you, asked only that you sit in silence.

Athena arrived on the appointed day. She saw the play, came to my dressing room afterward to say hello, but didn't say whether she'd enjoyed herself or not. My colleagues suggested that I invite her to the bar where we usually went after the performance. There, instead of keeping quiet, she started answering a question that had been left unanswered at our first meeting.

"No one, not even the Mother, would ever want sex to take place purely as a celebration. Love must always be present. Didn't you say that you'd met people like that? Well, be careful."

My friends had no idea what she was talking about, but they warmed to the subject and started bombarding her with questions. Something troubled me. Her answers were very academic, as if she didn't have much experience of what she was talking about. She spoke about the game of seduction, about fertility rites, and concluded with a Greek myth, probably because I'd mentioned during our first meeting that the theater had begun in Greece. She must have spent the whole week reading up on the subject.

"After millennia of male domination, we are returning to the cult of the Great Mother. The Greeks called her Gaia, and according to the myth, she was born out of Chaos, the void that existed before the universe. With her came Eros, the god of love, and then she gave birth to the Sea and the Sky."

"Who was the father?" asked one of my friends.

"No one. There's a technical term, parthenogenesis, which is a process of reproduction that does not require fertilization of the egg by a male. There's a mystical term too, one to which we're more accustomed: Immaculate Conception.