An African (or Italian?) story Today I am going to tell you an African, or Italian story. You decide. It is a true story and could be summed up in one word - adoption.
An English poet, Ted Hughes, widower of the famous poet Silvia Plath, who himself passed away a few years ago, in one of his books of poetry called “Cave birds”, at the letter “bird cave”, says something fantastically significant and verifiable, and he says it in a small essay, written in verse, dedicated to the imagination.
He maintains, outling the concepts with great clarity, while here I am simply summing them up telegraphically, that every story is an imaginative unit that can be reassumed in a word. For instance, if we say “Christ” I think we all know who is being referred to and so we perhaps imagine differently but consequentially. If we say Hitler, the same holds true. If on the other hand we say for instance: “The crucifixion of Hitler”, we detonate inside ourselves/imaginatively two words, meaning two stories juxtaposed in an astonishing way. Now to come back to us, if I write “adoption” whoever reads imagines consequentially, but the story I am about to narrate is, I warn you, rather peculiar; according to the wonderfully talking dictates of Hughes therefore, to give you adequate warning, instead of just “adoption”, I should present you with a juxtaposition like “how to adopt a unit trust”, or something similar.

The story. In a delicate period for a major Italian unit trust, at the time new executive appointments are being made (with effects worth billions), a financier of this trust goes to Africa to spend a holiday, in a holiday village belonging to one of the major circuits. One day during an excursion into the forest, in a boat along a river, he notices children playing in a poor non-holiday village on the banks. Among them, beautiful and slender like her race, a little girl with a bad leg, become gangrenous, horrible to look at. He suddenly decides in favour of a “good deed”. He somehow talks to the child’s father, involving the manager of the holiday village, the Italian ambassador in the country, Alitalia, etc. He thus obtains permission to take the child back to Italy with him for treatment. She does not speak a word naturally of either Italian or French, the language of the former colonisers, but only a little of the local dialect. In other words, she cannot communicate. She is only just under eight years of age. Her leg is suffering from a serious infection. In Italy, the financier takes the black child to a hospital near his home and, with the same emotional-bureaucratic involvement has her operated on. They manage to save her leg. The child is there, alone, mute, in a hospital bed, accompanied only by an emissary of her tribe who speaks a little French and who returns to Africa almost straight away, but her leg has been saved. She will not lose it. Of course, she will have to re-educate it for years, first of all using a terrifying apparatus consisting of irons which, once fitted in the bone, should put her in a position to walk, a “Nuremberg Virgin” type of apparatus given the torture potential it represents to the sense and the eye, and then more humanely through exercise.
The hospital asks the financier who is going to look after the child. The reply is, “not me that’s for sure, I am busy and I have a fierce dog in my villa”. General disbelief. After the initial period, the little patient is “adopted” or better, placed in the therapeutic care of the doctor who operated on her.
After three years, she is still in that doctor’s house. She is almost better now and goes to school, she speaks very good Italian and is still very beautiful and intelligent.
What a pity the financier has never asked about her health, that he got rid of her and never provided her with any economic support. In fact, a quick investigation sufficed to show that both the trip from Africa and the treatment in hospital were offered free of charge (Alitalia, the hospital). Meanwhile, the financier has climbed to the top of that trust, is among Italy’s major taxpayers, has “resold” his “good deed” in all sorts of ways when even the Vatican expressed its opinion on the above-mentioned trust appointments.
This is a buffet-story: everyone can choose the dish he or she likes best (that most concerns or impresses him/her).
From now on however, to recall Hughes, to the word “adoption” or more precisely “assignment”, I shall personally associate other types of stories. African? Italian?