SCHOOL/ Our students travel with Pesce and Bondoux through guilt, freedom, and forgiveness.
Two more reading suggestions, after the one already mentioned in the first episode: the stories of Mariangela Pesce and Anne-Laure Bondoux (2)
We're entering the heart of the summer months, and between a cushion, a deckchair, and an umbrella, there's never enough beautiful stories. Here are two more that, like Silvia Avallone's "Cuore Nero ," take us into a deeply human dimension, one everyone desires: one in which evil isn't the last word and error doesn't define the infinite greatness of our person.
Mariangela Pesce, with Le regole della rabbia (Pelledoca, 2022), offers us a slim, readable volume suitable for ages 15 and up. A book in the so-called young adult genre, but also recommended for adults, because the protagonist is a teenage girl, but the adult world around her is the crucial point that allows for her redemption.
After her mother's death and her father's arrest, Suzi lives in a foster home, intolerant of her classmates and even her teachers. She doesn't see the possibilities life offers her at that moment, but some adults do: Isabella, the new caretaker, who approaches her freely; Mattia, a teacher, who recognizes her right to be angry and isn't frightened by her armor of false indifference; and then there's Guido, Isabella's grandfather, a lover of gardening and horticulture.
Invited by Isa to her grandfather's house, Suzi finds a gun in a drawer and decides to "prove her worth to everyone." The plan is foiled, and Suzi feels enveloped in such a free and total embrace that she never touches the gun of her strange grandfather again. He even welcomes the girl into his home and trusts her freedom so much that he leaves the gun in the same drawer as before.
Since you will devour Pesce's story, here is a third one that follows the same thematic line, namely that of Anne-Laure Bondoux, The Tears of the Assassin (San Paolo 2003; Andersen Prize 2009), highly recommended for our teenagers, but also for all educators.
On a farm in the far south of Chile, Pablo lives with his two cold and distant parents. One day Angel Alegría, a fugitive murderer, arrives and decides to stay there, killing the farm's owners and taking little Pablo with him. Pablo quickly comes to consider the man his father. Not only that, but Pablo calls him "dad" for the first time just as he's about to kill a newcomer, Luis. Angel, whose hand is already near the knife, freezes in his tracks at the undeserved affection he receives from the child.
Not only that: Luis Secunda knows how to read and write, he teaches this art to Pablo and “every evening Angel would stand in front of the window, so that the other two wouldn't see his tears, the tears that wet his murderer's eyes”.
Love and beauty turn the life of this man upside down, and he no longer wants to be the same. Forced by limited resources to abandon the farm, Pablo and Angel accept Luis's offer to go to Valparaiso, where they can use his large bank account to shop at the fair.
In reality, Luis will change his plans, also denouncing Angel and forcing him to flee again, until a long stay with the woodcutter Ricardo offers the killer the third and definitive turning point in his life: in the loyal and expiatory relationship with this old man, one evening, listening to a piece of Bach, "Angel stifled a sob. In a few seconds, he made his decision: he would entrust Pablo to Ricardo (...). If he had to perform a single act of love in the world, then it had to be this one, right there, right now."
Thus, Angel turns herself in to the police and separates from Pablo, who is placed in foster care with a local family. A few years pass, until Pablo, now grown, chooses to return to his farm. Upon entering, he finds countless postcards from around the world, a sign of forgiveness sought by Luis, who had so bitterly betrayed and disappointed them.
Pablo will embrace all those postcards, "as if the crossroads of all paths were there." And yes, right there was the crossroads of everything , the source of reconciliation between pain and atonement, between guilt and forgiveness; through Pablo, loved, but still wounded and full of unanswered questions; through Angel, forgiven and redeemed from his own evil: right there, on that arid and inhospitable land, the Mystery that holds everything together and incessantly resurrects life had taken up residence.
But it doesn't end there.
(2 – continued)
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