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Scrittore Traditore
When I was seven years old I fell in love with a classmate. I could have fallen in love with a girl, but in my school the boys and girls were separated, so I fell in love with the only girl within reach, and she was Massimo P., a timid boy of extremely delicate features who spoke with no one. It was the first day of school, we were at recess, and Massimo came up to me and asked if I could tie his shoelaces. He looked defenseless in the midst of so many shouting boys running around the playground, and I fell in love with his fragile beauty. “You look like a girl,” I told him, and he, perhaps accustomed to hearing such a thing, only smiled. Recess ended and we returned to the classroom. His seat was two rows away from mine; not once did he turn his head to look back at me, and I thought he had forgotten about me. Then it was time for our reading lesson. Each of us had to read a few fragments of a story from our book, out loud. A few boys read before the teacher pointed at Massimo. He pressed his finger down at the beginning the paragraph and uttered the first word; more specifically, he stuttered it; he stumbled over the second word, and then over the next. He read so badly that he couldn’t finish the sentence; the teacher lost patience and told another student to continue reading. I accepted the sad truth: Massimo P., despite his angelic appearance, was a numbskull. Then it was my turn. I made a sudden decision: to read worse than Massimo. I think, if I had done it, today I would be a better man than I am. If there are crucial experiences in our childhood, this was one of them because after intentionally making mistakes across the first line, I realized I couldn’t continue to destroy one more word and I began to read with such fluency that the teacher praised me with a nod of admiration. This is what good reading is, he said, and I think it was then that I understood that my vocation would be to write books, and at almost the same time I had my first taste of betrayal. I have always thought that these two vocations are inextricably linked.