IT’S NOT A MEMOIR. IT’S THE ANSWER

15.06.04


Today I will talk to you about something related to the entry I posted yesterday. This text, its first part at least, should be written by my mother and not by me. Some people tell me that I am very hard when I speak of my mother. That’s true. Those who think like that don’t know what true love means. They think that what children can feel about their parents, this kind of gratitude, is something that has to be outspoken. As if it’s not something deep, something that is brought to the surface of everything that you share with your parents anyway, let alone those things that you used to share in the past.

If all those people knew how many things I have experienced with my parents, they wouldn’t dare to teach me the slightest lesson about gratitude. So there you go, I say it clearly to all of you who might have thought that I am ungrateful: I owe almost everything to my parents. The rest of it is owed to my sister, who helped me become a normal person and not a guerilla. She taught me to listen to music and to dance (indeed, she was the only one who believed that there is meaning in bouncing off the walls as much you can, provided that someone holds you in order not to lose your balance). She was the one who waited for me to come back after every trip, in the way that only brothers and sisters know how to wait. I wondered many times how my sister might have felt when I caught all the attention of my parents suddenly. I don’t know what to say about my brother (other than the fact that I love him as well). We never stayed in the same house with him.

If you want to know more about my parents, I will talk to you about my mother. I used to spend most of my day with her. I enjoyed the company of my father at family trips mostly. I remember him stuck on his papers most of the time (civil engineer). Therefore, my mother was never left to her fate. She always had the persistence and the guts that made her want to offer me something more than what she could really give me. This is why she decided not to send me to a special school. She went around all the private schools and she never even thought of backing down, thus accepting the denial and the rejection of stupid people. They didn’t accept me to regular schools. They said that I would create problems in the class, that the kids would cease making progress because of me.

Little Mary sent a written denunciation to the newspaper. Only the Hill School admitted me without objections. If you had a disability and you wanted to study at a regular school, you were the one to become the joke of the season. From that point of view, many things have changed ever since to this day. Nowadays the fact that you will speak of rights and equal opportunities is considered self-evident. In the beginning of the 80’s something like that sounded extravagant for the Greek reality. You would need to demonstrate super-human powers in order to defend your visions, at the moment when most fellow citizens of yours (with or without a disability) could not see beyond their times.Without my mother’s persistence I would now have no reason to be in the place where I am, neither would I have special ambitions. Today I think of the satisfaction I would feel if I decided one day to cram my degrees down the throat of all those who refused to give me the chance to prove them who I really am. Some times I am surprised with my mother who managed to remain a good person after all that she heard or saw. I would have hated the whole world in her place.

Even this almost happened to me once. When I finished the primary school and left the Hill School, I decided to sit examinations for the Italian School of Athens. I left the Paradise and found myself in Hell. I was excited at first for having the chance to learn Italian so quickly. I was crazy about Italy. I was also a bit carried away. I thought that a school like that would give prestige to my education. I was used to private schools and I was kind of sarcastic about the mentality of the public schools. I couldn’t be more wrong!I got there right after my first trip to America. Freshly operated, with casts on my legs, I went straightforward into the lion’s den. Among directors and professors with various complexes, antisocial fellow students; like a little poodle surrounded by dozens of Rottweilers, I used to attract the deadly stares of schoolmates who could not accept that I was equally capable, or even better than them, of making progress at school. They didn’t answer to my good mornings, they didn’t invite me to the parties. They handed out the invitations in front of me and I was the only one who never got one.

Zacharias, the boy next to me in the classroom, went really mad every time that the teacher of Italian, mrs. Pirattoni, praised me. He used to move the desk with his leg until I couldn’t write any more. He provoked me. He wanted me to inform them against him so that he could call me ‘grass’ informer’ in front of the whole class. He was so stupid that he couldn’t understand that I was complaining about him in Italian.

My teachers weren’t better than my schoolmates. They knew that during the breaks I was the only one who stayed in the classroom. If someone happened to do a bad thing during the break, I had to tell on him, in case I was present. They stood against me and said: ‘Nicholas, you were in there. You have to tell us who did it.’. I never said anything of course, although I would really love to crush those brats. They weren’t all so grouchy. There were also some who accepted me as I was but those were not enough to talk me out of wanting to leave that place. My nerves were turned into a bundle. I used to come back home and talk to nobody. Whenever I decided to talk, I exploded from anger like a madman. It was then when I decided to confess to my parents everything that I experienced.

They wrote a letter to the direction of the school and they denounced the fascist behaviour of the teachers who always remained silent despite everything that they observed in the classroom. Only the arts teacher liked me. She saw that I had talent in painting and she encouraged me. Of course, this provoked even more intense reactions from my schoolmates. When the director found out that this specific teacher maintained contact with my mother and me she criticized her and forbade her from having any further contact with us.

After the denunciation, the teachers tried to persuade me to stay. Luckily I didn’t listen to them. As soon as I finished high school, I changed school. We left the neighbourhood of Kypseli and switched to that of Vrilissia. My new school welcomed me with joy. They knew I would go there thanks to my friend Dimitris (do you remember him from our trip to America?) who studied there for all the classes of high school and had a great time while I was a toy soldier in the hands of my tyrants, both the teachers and the students.

I will never forget the three years that I spent at the Italian School. There has been a long time since then and I wonder what would be my own part of responsibility for all this. What could I have done if I wanted to have the kids on my side? As for my teachers, there is nothing to say. Something was definitely wrong with their brains. But it was not my schoolmates’ fault. I have already forgiven them. Their parents were to blame; solely. They never taught those kids to respect the difference of people; neither did they explain them that they could be in my place from one day to the other very easily, precisely because disability is an accidental condition. As for me, I could have been more social and at the same time try not to take the others and myself so seriously. Nonetheless, I am sure that everything I went through until now was for my own good.