Tale

We were only a few weeks into our mourning period. At my age a mistake is an ordinary thing, but the fact that I did it for monstrous reasons changed everything. I had broken Mom's favorite bowl. It was a gift, she explained to me one day. A very precious gift. The last present from a long dead friend. When Uncle Didier was buried, I was only a foreign observer. Mom went back to her usual preoccupations, Fiona went back to high school and her many loves, and I went back to my nonsense. I was back to my friends, my teachers. The homework followed one another day after day. Everything was like our daily lives, but it's all gone. I feel as if every step I took on the path of my life was marked with black, indelible ink, and that Mom felt it even more than I did.

She only started writing at that time. For years she taught to keep us alive, but when the situation improved greatly she left teaching and returned to her childhood passion, writing. First she started writing children's stories, she always read me first. I still remember her first work: the tales of the birds of Ferinelle. That night, I went to bed. I turned my back on the light that was burning my eyes and smiled as I watched Mother enter the room and settle down beside me. Then Fiona joined us. We made ourselves comfortable on my bed, and Mom pulled out a picture book, a children's book.

- Look, my darlings, it's another children's book that Mommy wrote by herself. It's about a fairly realistic story but it's centered around birds.

We were leaning tenderly against it.

- The Nightingale's Song, I read as the title.

- Yes, that's it. Forgive me if the story reading is a little late for you two.

Fiona shrugged, acting jaded because of her age.

- Don't worry, Mother. We're fine with it.

- Besides, as everyone says," I added, amused, "better late than never.

It was a beautiful work, on the cover, a nightingale perched on a tree, looking at us, with its veiled gaze, sharing with us so many secrets whose meaning however escaped us like this contrast between the green of its plumage and the green of the trees. It was so strange to feel the difference between their shades; the same tone, the same color but so different that it was disturbing. Was it just accidental? Or was it...

- What is the book about Mama ?

- A fabulous tale, the main role belongs to a bird, a bird that has realized the true importance of friendship... Let's read it together then my princesses...

And with one voice:

- "Once upon a time there was a wonderful world, a world covered by a huge jungle, and which contained all the beings of the earth..."

The more I read, the more I was moved. The story? It could be interpreted in various ways, according to the spirit of those who will read it. Everyone will have his or her own way of understanding the wishes of the story.

If a child were to tell it, he would only say that it was a wonderful story, a nightingale who lived in a green world, who had friends and who met an animal as ugly as he was beautiful. At first he hated it, he rejected it, but time would change his heart as his affection was born and grew, and in the end he loved it, completely. His friends asked him to choose between them and this animal, and like any wonderful knight in a tale, he let his heart speak and chose the ugly one, and afterwards he and his friend lived happily ever after and helped many others to be happy. At the end of his reading, this child would be happy in turn with what he had read, he would tell it to his friends in turn, to his parents, and would live for a time in an illusory world where everyone, no... The world itself would appear as a world of perfection, he would try to relive in this very world the story, but despite all this, despite this wonder the nightingale will never remain for him that this, a story.

But for me, what I saw was quite different. What I understood was quite different. I wondered if it was because for the first time I knew fatality. That my consciousness of the value of life had awakened. It didn't matter, and I believe that the answer would never be accurate anyway. If you look just deep enough into this story of a thousand feathers, you will find in every word the beauty of friendship, the courage of friends, the greatness of the soul, as well as the ineradicable faults such as cowardice and discrimination, which so disfigured people. In short, everything that shaped the world.

It was not a child who was going to tell this story, it was me.

Where to start? First, I had to close my eyes and remember every detail of the story, every emotion I felt, and the profound moral that the book was trying so valiantly to convey. So that was the story...