Rose Today, for reasons that would take too long to explain, I spent most of the afternoon, instead of working, talking to a girl of twenty years came here a couple of years ago from Waziristan.
This girl, called for convenience S., in Waziristan had a significant problem: slowly growing, she discovered that she liked the other girls, and one day she met another girl with the same tastes and are given a little kiss. The mother of his girlfriend - because by then it was again - saw them, he spoke to her husband, and a few days after his friend was dead, and S. was in a Red Cross hospital under siege by his relatives who were clamoring to give it back to finish to stone her. Accomplice
a Western doctor, colonialist, S. was smuggled onto a plane that the ambulance was filed, not yet eighteen years old, at the Royal Free Hospital in London here.
S. spoke no English, was illiterate, he considered a metropolis every urban area with more than 1000 people and had both legs fractured in three or four points. In the first wheelchair, then crutches, and finally on his feet without help, he attended an introductory course in English as soon as his request for asylum was (miraculously) accepted, she enrolled in a school for adults and in the meantime has had time and luck to fall in love with his physiotherapist F. - She, too, ironically, a refugee, but Uganda, much more civilized country of Pakistan as homosexuals are not lynched at the instigation of the Koran but the Bible.
S. has a voice thin and sharp and never stops talking, perhaps to make up for eighteen years when he was beaten when he spoke without permission. He talks about all the things you and F. do together, is not it true to be able to hold hands while talking to me, tells me how I went to a cafe in Islington and a lady who "oozed middle class," as F. with a half smile that exuded the bourgeoisie, he smiled and told them they were beautiful. S. always carries with him, as if it were the most precious trophy, the use the notebook at school, where marks with extreme care and all the uncertain spelling English words he hears for the first time, including a grammar exercise and a dictation. It tells me about the food, cinema, television, the flowers got to F. with the money of small subsidy it receives as a refugee.
I have in mind a step
that my friend Claudio reported , a wonderful piece of a comic book and a movie that I liked recently (do not lose to the Alan Moore's attempt to describe Guy Fawkes, who wanted to bring the Inquisition in England, in a positive light, and the film contain Natalie Portman, the stick insect less sexy in the history of entomology), the sweetest sentence and poignant, "I Had roses" - and I realized that what St. kept saying was simply this:
I Did not Know There Was a place where I Could Have roses.
And I thought if I could choose an exemplary punishment to the imams who would like stoning to S., for the priests and preachers here in the U.S. and supporting the Ugandan law provides for the execution for the crime
of homosexuality, for those who cried foul when S. and F. marry in a church
another religion - that is, I think that just condemns them to receive, and read a letter every few months from S. with a description of the small everyday joys of life after all decent dignitosa, degna di essere vissuta, che sta avendo grazie al fatto che la loro velenosa influenza non riesce a raggiungerla. Una lettera ogni pochi mesi con la descrizione delle sue rose.
E mi riservo la piccola gioia sadica dell'immaginare quei momenti, alle tre del mattino, quando il dubbio si insinua nella loro mente - il dubbio che non ci sia nulla, che le regole universali che invocano per mandare in merda la vita di tanta gente siano solo un'invenzione, che si siano bruciati l'esistenza nell'odio e nel rancore per
nulla , che fosse solo tutta una scusa per potersi sentire superiori a qualcuno, per mascherare il proprio fallimento umano e morale, la propria abietta miseria spirituale. La consapevolezza che per loro non ci saranno roses, and roses are all that they might have.
