The maccheronis with ragout

The changes during the existence of a person are often gradual, spread over time, they can be catched only at distance. But sometimes there exist topical moments, that mark the passage between a before and an after, at a more or less symbolic or substantial level. Sometimes like the ball that rolls down a slide from a side instead of another, a little push would have been enough and you would have been attracted to a different aggregative relational universe. Sometimes more like the exasperation and frustration drop that allows a critical threshold to be reached and the glass to overflow, sometimes an image where just the exceeding water comes out is not enough, rather it is that acid drop more that transforms a solid magnificent mountain into flooding mush.
Lately, ten years after, one of these moments is obsessively emerging from the fogs of my memory; maybe just because I have only now the cultural tools to deal with it. It has been the apex of a context that now I would define repressive, not to say aborting, that marked me a long time notwithstanding a stubborn removal operation: for years I would limit myself in saying that in a few months I abandoned the first level secondary school the soccer team the oratory and nearly all the related connections, that continuity elements in my life mum dad and 2 friends, or I would mention a platonic love. Clearly those were environments that I did not perceive stimulating, and that were not going along to my inclinations; instead they partly managed to instill in me the shame of my sensibility (and I would say intelligence if it did not sound arrogant), the ambition to mediocrity, maybe also the fear of the culture, that I spent the teen years in removing. I am going to describe this event for a sort of removal of the removal, like to compensate all the times that looking back to it I would have liked to disappear, like a sort of reversed exorcism, like in its being a particular affair it had something universal, avoiding to be influenced by the remote possibility that someone who was present could actually read this.
The ambientation is a big room at the first floor of the oratory kindergarten, huge glass walls window into the courtyard, where on strictly estabilished timetables one could play with the ball, unless the priest felt offended for some noise out of order, a lot of uncomfortable chairs and a penetrating smell of pear pulp rising up from the stairs, around thirthy guys around 13-14 years old, some entertainer and some nun; it is a preparatory meeting for the confirmation, with which a few days after we would have confirmed our belonging to the catholic christian faith. The question is: if the confirmation was a dish? and if it was a color? The game was tested, I knew what it was expected, and the answer should not differ too much, and pleasing the nuns was easy, sometimes if I wanted to make some effort I tried to come out with something not completely trivial. That day I was not disposed to compromises, and after hearing a set of disciplined and orthodox answers, I said something like: the color is transparent because it must be a choice made with transparency, awareness, in front of everyone, and the dish is maccheroni with ragout because life is made out of paths, represented by the maccheronis, and you pass from path to path like you were inside the plate and you passed inside the maccheronis and then from one to another, and they are full of obstacles which are represented by the ragout. Now I would not try to defend such allegory as smart. But I was very serious. Non only externally. I mean, the ethical and cosmological construction that they were trying to teach me was already seeming shaky to me, but at the time I did not yet extradolate explicitely the idea that one could live without (that) religion, simply I was not believing to all they were saying to me; hence in the framework of the reasoning we were making it must have seemed to me a sensible metaphor, compatible with the imposed schemes of reasoning. All the guys exploded into laughts, maybe I did it also after a while, infected by the collective euphoria. The nuns not really, in particular one, the "bad one". (maybe I also touched some open question that made her felt singled out?) Of what she babbled I just remember that I was an idiot, that I spoke like an handicapped [and most of all that "transparent" was not a colour], probably she said other stuff aligned with her injured authoritarian pride but not with her supposed educative function. I came out crying (but that was not so strange since I uses to cry for the demerits at school), humiliated in front of my companions; at the confession imposed to the confirmers a few days after I was not of the mood to say I don't go to mass and I don't obey mum, I went to the priest coming from outside just for the purpose, I told him my father has been in the hospital all the summer long, we suffered a flood, my cat is dead, and I have problems in the relations with other people, let's see what he says, nothing memorable; and after the confirmation, yes because saving the appearance never costs too much, they did not see me anymore.
It often happens to me to think that I cold have been a church guy, after all there were good persons, better than any other aggregate I have met within 2 km from home, and I have dear friends authentically christian, and interesting I have met much more; but what I narrated was not just a little push that sent me away, my intellectual and spiritual wit could not be confined within a reign of prepackaged compatibility; I live side by side with doubts, that feed a continuous research; the collapse of the mountain was unavoidable.