TE17 Mysterious Montenegro

Three Texts

an older girl who was with her on the balcony had told her that there was a rainbow and, while she was looking for it in the blue sky without spotting it, the older girl had shown her the precise place where she had to stand, the line not to be crossed, so that the colors would remain suspended. An evening then came to her mind, when she was younger and, before falling asleep, was waiting for her mother to come and say goodnight to her. It was September and she had settled on the bedspread like a butterfly, with her knees open. When her mother saw her, she told her that she was already too big a girl to stay like that, that she no longer went even to the beach without wearing a swimming suit and that even when she was playing she had to stay calm and collected. To her “why,” the little girl’s mother replied that panties must not be shown and that babies do not come out of a belly button. Silently she enclosed herself in sleep, inside the summer’s golden silkworm. Her words might have concealed slight traces of a butterfly grave. When she returned to nursery school, she immersed herself in the swarmof other children, in that disorder where no one feels alone. But one day, they showed her a boy who was eating in the kitchenwhile all the otherswere in the cafeteria, banging in unison forks and glasses on the colored tables. They showed him to her as a model because, with an adult’s calm and composure, he would bite into a piece of biscuit and then take a sip of his milk, continuing like this until the end of breakfast. Monthswent bywith the yellow, pink and blue smockswhich, like bright petals, would spin in a merry-go-round; a refrain would bring one of the children, in turn, to the center of the circle: for a few minutes all the attention would gravitate around him then, from the stamen, he would return to the corolla of the flower. Soon came the last year, when much was said about grade school, 129