When I think back to my childhood and the characters that inhabited it, after so many years I still remember the weird ones, the freaks. They gave some kind of thrill to the day. An emotion.
I lived in a small town in the Po Valley, with only one traffic light, and used to ride my bicycle around all day. I used to get off the bike only to buy an ice cream, to wear my roller skates or to climb onto the swings in the small park. And, while I was cycling or pausing with a foot on the pedal and the other on the ground, I quietly looked around. Just like all the kids of my age.
I remember the dwarf woman, whose hair had become completely white with time, but were still voluminous on her huge, disproportioned head. She had the short and knock-kneed legs that are typical of dwarfs, but not their features. And she was evil. Very evil. When she sprung up from under the porches or out of the castle’s big entrance, all the children fled away and she screamed and screamed. She was evil and bitter like the worst of cough syrups. When my brother realized he was in her range, which consisted in a few hundred metres area in the town centre, he watched his back and cautiously got closer to my mother’s legs. He just couldn’t calm down, as if a lion might soon spring up and devour him. My mother used to laugh.
And there was the mad woman. A lady that one morning sprung up from nowhere in the park, maybe released by some mental hospital nearby when doors were open to all the harmless. Always alone. Her grey-white hair were long and soft and she used to comb them in a sort of shabby yet pretentious chignon. Her eyelids were always made-up in such an intense light blue that prevented me from seeing the colour of her eyes. She used to wear a long cotton nightgown with blue or light blue flowers and a pink dressing gown that looked like a bathrobe. She was always so quiet and smiling that she was almost invisible, until she stopped exactly where she was and slightly opened her legs… then we all stared at her and waited for her to move again because we wanted to see the pee puddle she left.
The father of my three neighbours was a detainee. He always smiled, when he wasn’t in prison, but in spite of his smiles and polite manners he had a fiendish light in his eyes and smooth and long black hair. He was as thin as a rake. He was dark-skinned and always looked dirty. People used to tell dreadful stories of crimes and said he raped the same daughters I used to play with when he wasn’t at home. They never told me about that. I never asked.
He had a wife. A fat woman with small, grey and mixed-up teeth and smooth, greasy mice-brown hair. She was as ugly as a witch. As fat as a whale. Her mouth was only capable of uttering spiteful, mean, unconceivable words. She was not polite. She used to scream. And while she screamed she spat. Once I saw her smash a brood of new-born mice with her broom.
L. was retarded because he had had a meningitis when he was only two years old. His gums kept on growing out of control and people said that they were regularly cut. I used to spend hours imagining how they would look like if they could grow freely. His hands were covered with warts. Maybe his mother didn’t know that the milk of figs could wipe them off.
There was a dirty old man that always dwelled in the park and whenever he had the chance, he reached out towards the thighs of little girls riding their bikes.
There was the haberdashery’s woman, who was in love with the priest. A lifelong spinster, a love whisper in her throat and a veil of sadness and Catholic conformism in her eyes.
There was the peasant who had called his five sons Primo, Secondo, Terzo, Quarto and Quinto (First, Second, Third, Fourth and Fifth). All boys, all handsome.
One of my neighbours suffered from poliomyelitis and had a minuscule leg. Another one had a plastic hand. And people said that my neighbour’s son was hermaphroditic. Another neighbour used to speak from behind the half-rolled shutter of her window because she suffered from agoraphobia.
There was a little girl with big eyes that every now and then started to wander frantically like flying orbits just as she was talking to you and you didn’t know where to look at. And there was a gym teacher that was called miss and had breasts but also a thick beard and wore male clothes.
All these people were the protagonists of the days we spent playing in the streets, of the stories we shared whilst eating our ice creams on the park bench, when the colour TV and all the cartoons that we have today didn’t exist.
And now that I have no more time to cycle around, during the evening, on the sofa, when I am not absorbed in a book or in a beautiful romantic movie, I watch programmes about aesthetic surgery, fat vs. slim, xxl teens, a home full of waste, how to lose one hundred kilograms in a year, couples of freaks that talk about their sexual life.