Talking about poetry brought this back to me - I hope you do not mind this response:
Luigi has to help a child who has suffered and is withdrawing into her mind. She has forgotten who she is and that she knows him. He tells her the story of his life….(some of his painful memories are borrowed from my life)
“This story is about a little boy who discovered magic in words. He was born on a farm in Southern Italy. The farm had mostly olive trees and some pigs. From when he could walk he was expected to begin helping in any little way he could. He was a good little boy and he really tried to help, but he would forget. Si, he would see a piece of wood or a leaf drifting on the stream and he would feel it was dancing for him as it swirled and bobbed on its voyage past him. At other times he would see a butterfly and he would be captivated by its beauty and the way it moved, dancing on an invisible breeze. On a farm there are a million things to capture the eyes of such a boy, even the patterns spilt straw make upon the earth.
He was lucky to have a brother who worked twice as hard as he should have, so that he could say they had both done the work. The brother was a farmers’ son also and sometimes would call him back to work because he believed it was not good for his brother to dream so much.
The little boy discovered a new magic. He would take a stick and make marks upon the earth. Not long after that he noticed for the first time that a picture his mother had showed some funny lines at the bottom that resembled his marks upon the dust. He asked his mother and she explained that the picture was from Cairo and the squiggles were Arabic writing. When she explained what writing is, he became very excited.
‘If I could write like that and I think of something and write it, I would never forget it?’
She laughed. “You will learn to write in Italian.’ He begged her to teach him and at first she refused, saying that he would begin school next year and learn there. He pleaded until she taught him the alphabet.
He was not really a clever little boy, but he did have a gift for the written word and by the time school started he was reading and writing. His one drawer was becoming full of scraps of paper, thoughts he wanted to preserve.
At school he did badly. He was thin and hated sports. Geometry, Science, Arithmetic, all those he hated and failed. The only subjects he was good at were Language, Geography and History. His real love though was reading. He preferred stories with action, but he also read love stories and drama. Anything that showed how people think, love and hate. He was fascinated by the human mind and soul.
An uncle of his mother, he worked in a bank and the family thought of him as being very clever, one day was present at a meal when the father of the boy was angry. He told the boy that the school had complained about him, that he is lazy and does not study.
‘They told me that the only lessons you show interest in are those that are totally useless! How do you think history and geography will help you earn a living?’
‘Perhaps you should send him to a boarding school.’
‘What? Do you know how much that would cost?’
His great uncle convinced his father to send him to a school in a nearby town. It was run by the Catholic church and was not expensive. Perhaps the boy will become a priest, he suggested.
Now began the most miserable years of the boy. At least twice a week he would get beaten for not paying attention. The other boys picked on him and he had bruises most of the time. He was one of those children who need a family to love and school had no love in it, not even from the nuns. At first he found love and consolation in only one place. At about eleven years old he became intensely religious. When the nuns or priests talked about God he believed and listened, questions teeming within his mind that he could not ask. Some of the questions he would not have known how to word them.
This change in him made the school like him and they sent reports to his family that he might choose to serve God one day. Perhaps he would have, if not for two events.
One day, after lessons, he returned to his dormitory to get a book to read. Three other boys were there. They were known as bullies and he felt nervous. He tried to hide it, but then they began to tease him. Suddenly one of the boys told the other two to hold him and make him lie down on the floor. He tried to run out but they caught him and forced him to lie on the floor and one of them, the strongest, began to hit him with a thin cane.
The two of them held him down on his stomach while the one boy hit him across his back. The boy did not cry or scream. He waited for it to finish. Then one of the other boys wanted to hit him so they changed places. When they let him go they warned him that if he told anyone they would find him…”
“I don’t like this story.” Candy said.
Sol looked grim, even Elpida forgotten for the moment as she listened in horrified attention. “Let him finish it, Candy.” she asked.
“Don’t worry Candy, the purpose of the story is to show that even out of bad, good can come.” Elpida was sitting with eyes closed as she listened and she opened her eyes now and stared into the eyes of Luigi without saying a word. “The boy, who was not so little anymore, went to a toilet cubicle and locked himself in there and cried from the pain and the humiliation of not being able to stand up against the bullies. When he came out, he took his book and sat in the play area reading. Within minutes he had forgotten his pain as he became engrossed in the story. For him, if the writer was even halfway good, the characters would come alive thanks to his vivid imagination.
Somebody gasped behind him and then one of the nuns he did not like came before him. ‘Take off your shirt.’ she ordered. He tried to, but the shirt was stuck to his back from the blood. She stopped him and took him to the headmaster. They took him to the school clinic where his shirt was dampened and gently pulled off him.
They were all horrified at what had been done to the boy. His back was torn open from at least twenty lashes. They thought he was terrified and spoke softly, promising that those who did this would be punished, even expelled from school. The boy refused to speak. Then the headmaster became angry and demanded to know the names. Still the boy would not speak. He was locked up in the office of the headmaster for nearly an hour. Then the door opened and the three boys walked in, their faces white with fear, the headmaster behind them.
‘As you see we found them anyway.’ The boy had to stand and watch as the headmaster shouted at them. He told them their parents would be told what they had done and they would be expelled. One of the boys began to cry and pleaded with the headmaster not to. The headmaster turned to the boy.
‘You are the one that suffered so I will let you decide. I can either expel them or else they can be punished by having the same whipping they gave you. What do you want?’
The boy thought about it and asked if he could choose anything he wanted. Whether out of a sense of justice or curiosity, the headmaster agreed.
‘I don’t want you to do anything to them.’
The headmaster became very angry. He sent the three away and continued to tell off our little boy. He called him a coward. Then he asked whether he was afraid the three would hurt him again. He said no. ‘Jesus said we must turn the other cheek.’ This enraged the headmaster, but he was of the church so he let the boy go.
The three boys came to him and said they were sorry for what they did and they warned all the others that if anybody picks on him again they would beat them up. For the first time he was not bullied for nearly the whole week and he decided he had done the right thing and that Jesus was right.
On Saturday his father collected him from school and took him home. During the trip the boy could see his father was furious and could not understand why. When they arrived home his mother made him take off his shirt. His parents stared at his back, the bruises fading already, but the cuts still visibly healing.
‘The headmaster told me he offered to punish them any way you wanted and that he would protect you from them. Why did you make him let them go!?’
‘In the Bible it says that Jesus told us to turn our cheek.’
‘Nonsense! The headmaster was right, you are a coward! I will not have a coward for a son. I’m going to teach you to not be a coward!!’
His father took him to the shed and beat him worse than he had ever beat him before and the boy cried as he had never cried before. He did not only cry because of the pain; he could not bear the thought that his father thought he was a coward. He adored his father and it hurt to think he had disappointed him so much. He was also very confused. Why did both his father and the headmaster think Jesus was wrong? They had taught him that everything in the Bible was correct!
The next Monday he sought his usual refuge. He went to the school library to take out some books. On one of the shelves he picked up a book and saw it was full of poems. From his school work he knew that poems were boring to read and was about to put it back. For no reason at all he opened the book and he began to read. It was a poem about someone who was suffering, reviled by the world because of a misunderstanding. He read through the whole poem and the imagery floated in his mind so brightly and darkly!
I do not remember which poem it was or who wrote it, but fate had decreed that he should find it at just the right moment and he began to read poetry. He also began to write. He found words that danced with a magic that even music could not better and put them to paper. Scenes, ways of looking at things that did not seem to be the same as other peoples’ thoughts, tumbled out in a mad crazy rush, as if they were laughing and happy to be free at last. The more he wrote the more there seemed to be for him to write. Sometimes his poems would be as if he were standing in the sun and his words glowed with a golden light and then it would be as if he were standing, tiny and unnoticeable under a dark leaf, light hidden from him so that he could see the truth the sun had hidden.
Luigi the poet was born and Jesus lost a priest.” He smiled at his memories. “The magic of words is still in me. They dance around in my mind forcing me to put pen to paper. You see, words and ideas, right or wrong, they have a life of their own and they demand to be set free. Even if they are yours, they do not belong to you. Well, they do, but only for those magical first moments when they came to you and showed you a new way of looking at things. After that they want to spread their wings and fly through every other mind, setting free other thoughts and words within their minds. Never be afraid to look at your own words and ideas, they are what make you human.”
He stood up and walked over to Elpida, resting his hands on her shoulders. “Let your thoughts be free Elpida. Right or wrong they are yours. If they made you do something you should not have, bring it all out into the light and examine it. Learn from what you did or else you will make the same mistakes again.”
RE: West Harbour ...Part 72 ...Grieving a Ghost