Читать книгу Colours - Patrizia Barrera, Patrizia Barrera - Страница 8

MOTHER

White

That's not true, Mother, what you used to tell me about life: that every day is the same and that in vain the sun illuminates a world blinded by hatred. If regret is legitimate, I can tell you that even then I loved what was not given to me, and that I bitterly longed for the existence that you denied me. From the first moment I realised that I was there, still lost in the eternity of my infinity, so confused at the inviolable limit between life and death, I felt the weight of your remorse on my shoulders and a voice without sound pushing me away from the world. I had just been born and a spark of rejection lit up in my heart and burned me. Then a thick and indomitable pain dug into me anguish without tears, while in my heart I already caressed the idea of being your son.

I didn't know that you didn't like me, nor that you looked at your image in the mirror with terror, or that you trembled at the mere sound of the word "mother". I didn't understand why I existed if you didn't love me, and never spoke a friendly word to me. I only know that I was hoping and suffering and falling asleep crying among the horrible ghosts of my dreaded destiny. Wrapped in a soft fog I did not know the injustices and humiliations of your world, yet your cry was already known to me, and in it, like a sweet lullaby, I found my rest. I had learned to recognize your voice, and from the darkness I consumed my strength in an attempt to understand you and to find a fixed point in my uncertain universe.

Outside of you, of your sweet body, the noises came softly to me. But it was the beating of your heart that I loved to hear, so mysterious and absorbed, and of its only sound I fed waiting for my whole body to form. And as the blood began to flow in my veins and my eyes closed, waiting to re-open before you later, I spent the eternity of my time imagining your face and fantasizing about the life I was going to have, wondering if it would have been beautiful or not. It was so sweet to sleep on your breast and perceive from your belly the good smell of flowers, and listen to the rain dripping thickly on the windows, and watch the hours passing by even though you were always sad and your only words spoke to me about death. What did I know about life? Nothing. Yet I loved it and longed only to enter it and measure myself as a man in my actions before God.

But you attacked me with your speeches: that even a chicken eats its eggs, that all animals kill children they cannot feed. That the big fish eats the small fish, and that there is no place for a sheep in a world of wolves. That a child is a child only when it is born and that there is nothing before.

Nothing? But then what was I? I was there. And I knew I existed from the first moment, since an indescribable force shaken me from my torpor, and divided my first cell, and ordered to my heart "Beat! "The same force that prevents the planets from colliding, which forces the sea to remain confined to its cradle and summer to grow wheat and finally directs the course of the rivers. That force that separated the world from chaos and forced the whole universe to be born.

Mother, do you really believe that it is man's will that moves creation? I know instead that everything that exists in this world is ruled by Love, and that only in its name do the stars shine in the sky.

Then you spoke to me of the wars that upset the world, of hunger and pestilence, and of all those evils for which there is no remedy. Yet, Mother, every man is a breath of fresh air, a question mark in the innumerable probabilities of creation. And those little cubs that the chicken devours are not the germ of the next life that will one day be reincarnated? And if I had been born, could I not have loved you?