The Witch of Portobello

That afternoon, I had to write a dreary article about a visiting head of state--a real drag. In order to amuse myself between phone calls, I decided to ask colleagues in the office what gesture they would make if I said the word center. Most of them made jokey comments about political parties. One pointed to the center of the Earth. Another put his hand on his heart. But no one, absolutely no one, thought of their navel as the center 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 could

n't accept: being large enough for two people.

Since I would never risk letting go of a certainty in favor of a mere possibility, I tried to minimize 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 theater 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 center of the planet. I went to the newspaper archives to make a few enquiries: in Petra, in Jordan, there's another 'conic navel,' symbolizing not just the center of the planet, but also 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 theater, 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 had never thought anything of it.

ANTOINE LOCADOUR, HISTORIAN

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 realized 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 behavior 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 center of life. A psychologist immediately pointed out that the theory made no sense at all: man's central idea is always to "cut" the umbilical cord and, from then on, the brain or the heart become the more important symbols.

When we're interested in something, everything around us appears to refer to it (the mystics call these phenonema "signs," the sceptics "coincidence," and psychologists "concentrated focus," although I've yet to find out what term historians should use). One night, my adolescent daughter came home with a navel piercing.

"Why did you do that?"

"Because I felt like it."

A perfectly natural and honest explanation, even for a historian who needs to find a reason for everything. When I went into her room, I saw a poster of her favorite female pop star. She had a bare midriff, and in that photo on the wall, her navel did look like the center of the world.

I phoned Heron and asked why he was so interested. For the first time, he told me about what had happened at the theater and how the people there had all responded to a command in the same spontaneous, unexpected manner. It was impossible to get any more information out of my daughter, and so I decided to consult some specialists.

No one seemed very interested until I found Francois Shepka, an Indian psychologist [Editor's note: the scientist requested that his name and nationality be changed], who was starting to revolutionize the therapies currently in use. According to him, the idea that traumas could be resolved by a return to childhood had never got anyone anywhere. Many problems that had been overcome in adult life resurfaced, and grown-ups started blaming their parents for failures and defeats. Shepka was at war with the various French psychoanalytic associations, and a conversation about absurd subjects, like the navel, seemed to relax him.