le Sete 3

The Brainiac goes to school.

In Tavernola, at preschool age, I used to run around the town peacefully, alone and happy. I wasn't afraid of anything. I remember that once I slipped brutally on the ice, in front of Ottavio's shop, I got up, escaping the adults who wanted to help me, and I continued to mind my own business.

Every afternoon (at 4.00 p.m. it was already dark), so at dusk, I went to visit my paralyzed aunt Ninì, who lived near the cemetery. The other children, even the boys, maybe the older ones, were afraid to go there. I wasn't. For me it was a joy to go to visit my aunt Ninì: she was a happy person and sometimes she gave me sweets and she said that I was the only one who went to visit her. I would jump from the bed to the ottoman (that's what the sofa was called there), and back and forth, and she would laugh. A very sleek old lady, with a thin, white face and a white bun with some flying hair: I remember her dressed in lilac, and light gray.

In short, I was minding my own business. And I would frighten the other children from the door of Aunt Margherita's hall by brandishing a nutcracker made like the head of an old lady. I would open it slowly and it would show its two teeth: I was there, positioned just behind that enormous door, made of old wood, in the dark, and I was having a lot of fun. The others ran away screaming. My teacher Rosa's son said that the giggling old lady's head reminded him of the head of his father, a truck driver who had died in an accident many years before.... oh, really!?

But all this fun had to end. I had to go to school, absolutely, to Loano: because I had grown up (I asked my mother why now?). The magic was really over: NO MORE FREEDOM. I had to carve out a niche for myself in that hell of brothers, already settled from the beginning. It wasn't easy. Nor painless.

Once we were around my father, who was chopping wood from a big log, and we kids were jumping from one log to another and I asked him for a gift, I don't remember what. When he said no again, I said: of course if it was Gianni, your favourite, who was asking ...? I got a slap on the back of the head that made me fall off the log with my legs in the air, in front of my brothers... And that ended my possibility of better diplomatic relations with my father.

I was used to Grandpa Giosep, very sweet and at the same time strict, but in my opinion "fair". It was the end of an era. It was the end of when I could be myself without protocol: here it was, a protocol... I wasn't used to it. My grandmother was an absolute despot. But she loved me and anyway, it ended there. When I did what I wanted, she punished me, even ferociously, and then everything started over from the beginning. And then there was my grandfather who was a sweet love. Here things were different. Mom never defended us. Not even Pino, the only desired child. I am the first child (of four) of the Ogino and Knauss method.