FR EN. Anyone in long pants seemed adult and awkward. In middle school, the subject of classroom themes was the material studied; they looked for our level of comprehension. We stuck to a government Italian, as rigid as a printed form. This embalmed language was part of a general submissiveness to adult power. In the intervals between classes we broke into dialect, a way of escape. We washed out our mouths with Neapolitan.
One day our assignment was to invent a fableβa free subject. We were reading our first translations of Aesop and Phaedrus. Many of us were anxious, asking for explanations, an outline, fearful of getting lost in that unexpected expanse.
We were to invent a story about animals. The sudden freedom made my head tingle. I wrote in a continuous flow, clutching the pen until my fingers were numb, the only trained part of a body that was still a mollusk.
I wrote on a downhill, the slant of the desk tilting toward me with running herds and clouds of dust. The beasts love to raise dust, to harass the insects that besiege them. With us, the dust is chased out every morning, there it rose up to the sky, driven by the drumbeat of hooves. Dust was the soul of the world. I wrote, and the thoughts pawed the ground, eager to come out and run, too. It was a precipice of writing; I even had time to make a copy to take home.
I was among the first to hand in my paper. Usually I was late getting free of an assignment, in search of ways to extend it, to reach the minimum length required.
