I remember that, as adolescents, many of my friends eagerly anticipated the time when they would become mothers it seemed that they had no other vocation in life, and their little shrieks of joy, their expressions and contortions whenever they saw a baby, used to irritate me profoundly. I never had a strong yearning for motherhood. What never occurred to me while I was listening to my mother’s stories was that one day, I would feel the lack of wings so immediately and so intimately, and that the story about those handicapped people would end up being a part of my life. And that other hero who invented a contraption out of wood and canvas so that, by launching himself from the tops of mountains, he could glide over the valleys of his country, taking advantage of the warm air currents-something that all of us do instinctively nowadays, but which, when told as a story, struck me as new and unusual, as if I myself had just discovered a phenomenon which nowadays seems so ordinary that it attracts no attention whatsoever. There was the one about the eager hero who, lacking wings of his own, made some out of wax and bird feathers but when he flew too close to the sun, the wax melted and he fell into the sea and drowned. I used to love listening to those stories, and I would ask her to tell them over and over again, even though I already knew them by heart. “Once upon a time, many moons ago, people didn’t have wings.”Īll the stories my mother used to tell me when I was a child started like that: harking back to an ancient and perhaps mythical time when people had not yet acquired the ability to fly.
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