There are places which have the power to free  conscience, magical locations where soul can open itself to the world, where people feel  finally free to be themselves.
I faced several times long travels by train and I drew the conclusion that this is a space where it spring the necessary condition to free our conscience, even from heavy burdens.
The train starts again from the station where we get off and takes away all the words told, leaving on the platform only a  luggage: we hope never to meet people whom have shared secrets each other, opening our soul during the journey,  sure to avail ourselves of anonymity.
I’ve kept memory of an episode happened during a singular journey in train, in the car of the I.C. Rome- Genoa, where I’ve been involved in a particular confession, a two voices conversation with its own conscience.
I’ll give a nick name  to my fellow traveller: Sara.
This is the only digression from the original tell, wanting to keep to the truth the most the possible.
Here is what happened:
The country was running at the window and  it was possible with difficulty  to focus life in a  cottage immediately vanishing from sight. In spite of the speed of train, time seemed never passing.
A phrase took attention away:
“My father made of me what I am”
“Why only your father? Aren’t you perhaps also a result of your mother’s experiences?”
A moment of silence wrapped up our compartment just when  crossing a gallery  and light doesn’t lit up leaving for some moments the travellers in suspense in the most complete darkness.
“Causes and concomitant causes of an episode bound to my father have made me what I am today. I am not in a position to judge where can be wrong or right, I can only tell the facts to better comprise them.”
The train was going on its run and words were filling spaces creating the design of a tell.
“When I was three I  had been present, sitting on my little chamber-pot, at a scene that had really upset  me: my mother, at the floor under the stair where I was, was keeping my sister’s curled up body on her knees, and  with a belt was hitting her on her bottom. Her cries had kept my attention to the point to let me perceive the gravity of the event. She was twelve years older than me! Before fainting I remember that, when my mother saw me, she told two words towards the point where I was, turning to me or probably to someone else.
-Take me soon  the paste  Fissan – told”.
Again darkness wound  that revelation: the train went taking back  the secrets of humankind.
“The paste  Fissan had to be used to mitigate the pain on my sister’s  skin, nothing, on the contrary, could extenuate in me the sorrow I felt. When I had the age of reason  I tried to understand what had happened that evening and the answer I obtained was, for me, even more injurious. At first my mother told me as her father used to punish his children  in the same way, but this thing left me unmoved, considering that  an useless  cruelty. I insisted in willing to know the motive of such a punishment and finally, my mother, tired of my pressing questions, told me as my father had  made an attempt to the integrity  of my sister an how she, to escape those particular attentions, had gone away from home. Hearing those words I felt only horror: my soul of  child had been torn in thousand pieces. Should I  believe in my mother and deny my father as a castaway or rather was my mother to tell me an  incredible story and thus was just her  never to be considered? In my little head only one thing was sure: the victim was my sister, he was the only one to have no guilt. Nobody was entitle to  make me think the opposite”.
The coach was clanging on the railway and the noise of the rails was filling in a deafening way the narrow space that we are sharing during that journey.
“How do you think I could have verified truth and save at least one of my parents?”
“Couldn’t you ask to your sister how things really happened?”
“No, if I had done it I have damned her to the memory and this,  whatever could be happened, I couldn’t inflict  to her again. Truth must come out in another way”.
After these revelations we were afraid that someone entered in our compartment and prevented us   to go on with our speech.
The soul was freeing itself and nothing had to prevent  his way!
During that journey had created, between us, a real complicity: everyone of us knew she had to help the other to speak.
“Have you ever had occasion to know how really things had happened”?
At this phrase a long sigh followed.
“Yes, after many years, when I was grown up I had the possibility to know the truth. I was going through a difficult period of my life which vice  I was trying in any way to escape from. I was detoxifying and the medicine I took, so I believed, could have permitted me to have my conscience sheltered to face the trial that I had chosen to undertake on purpose. I wanted to know”.
In that moment we realized  how was difficult to show that last passage: our throaths were serrate, ears  careful, our heart’s beats  were beating with a jerky rhythm.
“Truth, if there was one, would have passed on my body. I thought  to be strong enough, but I was wrong”.
The memory had difficulty to keep an oral form, it need an help.
“What happened?”
“I moved for some days in my father’s home and, after lunch time, my father reached me in my room. I was nearly fully undressed. He caressed me as if I was not her daughter. It was all confirmed, that horror had really taken place! There were still many dark points. My father has behaved with me as it had likely done with my sister, as if we were not both his daughters. My sister was  daughter of the first marriage of my mother, but me? Something behind  had pushed him to those acts opposite to morality,  pressed by  few awareness, madness or had he acted  in name of a disgraceful pretended freedom? Or pushed by which rumours?”
There are questions for which there couldn’t be answers .
After that confession a shiver run along our bones making our flesh creep.
How many lives  had been compromised by that abused freedom, how many by the sense of honour that our civilization imposes, how many by the shame felt to be a party to the case?
The victim was a whole family.
There didn’t exist more words for sympathy.
What a sorrow…
“I’m sorry” I told and we  embrace one another, united by a story that, out of that journey, should have never been told.
We get off at different stations.
“Life go on. Hello and…thank you!”
While I was  coming home stunned by that revelation I was slowly walking calling back to my mind  every particular of that journey.
It was then that I recalled  the words learnt  during my first lesson of taoism:
-Learn to see what there is of good in evil and what there is of evil in  good-.
” What could be of good in that situation?” I asked to me.
The answer was prompt, it was hidden as always in the words told at the beginning of our journey:
“My father made of me what I am “.

» Download Tales of the Train (Powerpoint)