My dad used to say that I lived making up stories. “This kid has a lot of imagination,” he told his friends. “H e creates stories at once.” Let’s face it, I told many lies as a child. I mean, I was not a liar, I was a dreamer. My brother went to play with neighborhood children in the park in front of the building and I was left in the apartment, reading or watching cartoons. When my brother returned, extremely dirty, he told me: “You must be bored up here alone .” And there I began: “Absolutely not, while you were playing downstairs, a lady with a feathered hat knocked on the door. She was neither young nor old, and it was difficult to know because she wore a face veil. She asked if I was alone and I said yes. She told me she was looking for a child that was lost one day and I answered he was not here. In the end I was a little scared, but she asked me not to be worried that she believed in me. And she gave me a good red apple when she was leaving ” . My brother looked at me incredulously. “That is uncertain”- my mother forbade us to say “lie”, the correct word was “uncertain”. My brother did not want to believe me, not because the story seemed to be outlandish, but because he did not want to admit that I had been given an apple and had not shared it with him. But I gave him so many details and overwhelmed him with many descriptions that he ended up staying with doubts. When my mother came, he complained at her: “Yuris opened the door to a strange woman today.” My mom already knew where the thing came: “Those are lies by Yuris, I do not know how you still believe in what he says.” (My mom, obviously, could say “lie”). My brother bothered me until I invented another story, funnier, and we were making up laughing. I have not to say that I was a very clever boy.
Well, in fourth grade I began making compositions at the school. “Write a composition on your vacations,” the teacher said. Almost all children wrote something like this: “During holidays I went with my family to the beach. The water was cold. I bathed with my cousins until afternoon . We ate chicken and came back at night on a bus . Our trip to the beach was very fun “. I could not be satisfied with such a simple story. I wrote things like this: “In my holidays my brother and I went to the palace of our grandmother in the countryside. At midnight we escaped from our rooms and went to the basement. It was very dark; we could not even see each other’s hands. Suddenly a light came on and an old woman of over a hundred years appeared. Sh e said she was the ghost of the house, and that she was long dead. My brother and I were very scared and tried to run away but all the doors and windows got closed by themselves …” So, you can imagine what my composition were about. Nobody in the classroom believed those stories , but they loved me to read them aloud. The teacher gave me full marks: Excellent with a little star! I tell you all this so you can see more or less from where emerges this desire to tell stories. Some readers have told me they like my chronicles, but they do not just believe them. Well, I have nothing to say. Over the years I realized that extraordinary things also happened around me, it happens to us all, but often we do not have the curiosity to go beyond apparent things. I go through life with eyes wide open, looking and listening, completing the shreds of stories that come to me. I’m going to make a confession that will seem a sin to many colleagues: sometimes I “embellish” the story. But basically all is true. That’s what this column will deal with, let us to see if you follow me.
