When I first saw Lila and Elena's identical gray, dense neighborhoods, I looked at them from a bird's-eye view from far and near, and I remembered a sentence: in a very short time , these buildings will lose all splendor and become the dens of those who are desperate.
That's right, just by looking at these buildings from a distance, you can feel the despairing aura they exude.
In the small town of Dansville in my son's picture book "Happy Town", there is no tree, all the houses are gray, bare, without a trace of color, and the orangutans there feel helpless, sad and small.
What about the people who live here?
Two of the most talented little girls in the slum, Lila's father is a shoemaker and Elena's father is a government concierge. Lila's mother is sickly and Elena's mother is lame. But even so, Elena's family is better than Lila's.
In elementary school, Lila's clothes were always gray, while Elena always had a white collar and a slightly prettier skirt.
The eyes of the two fathers are also different. Elena's father walks out of the block every morning to go to work in the government, where he sees government officials. And Lila's father has been making shoes and repairing shoes in the block, and doing business for the poor in the block.
So, when it comes to deciding whether or not to go to school, the two fathers have very different choices. Although their teachers are equally clear about the excellence and great future of the two girls. Working as a concierge, I was accustomed to seeing the fathers of dignitaries, and knew that if they wanted to get out of the slums, reading was the only chance for the poor, because only when they went to school would they learn Latin and Greek, which the poor did not know.
Therefore, he asked his daughter Elena: the premise of continuing to school is that it is not enough to do well, you must get the best in the test before you can continue to school.
And how could a shoemaker father, weighed down by life to the point of being grumpy, keep his daughter in school? In his eyes, the wife is sick and the family has a bunch of children. Every day when he opens his eyes, he is a bunch of mouths to eat and drink, and all that he eats and drinks is his blood. But as for him, in addition to his own children, he also has to take care of the elderly on both sides, his two sisters who have never been married. My eldest son has been helping in the shoe store for several years without going to school. Why should my daughter continue to study without doing anything like Miss Kuo?
Even if the teacher, son, and wife all say that their daughter Lila is the smartest child in the whole community, even if the skinny Lila strongly resists and insists on going to school, what will happen? The irritable father threw his daughter directly from the second-floor window.
Yes, you read that right, a ten-year-old, thin girl was thrown out from the second floor.
She didn't make any mistakes, she just wanted to keep going to school.
After elementary school, it was the dividing line between Lila and Elena's life and destiny.
Living in a neighborhood full of violence, danger, chaos and poverty is extremely insecure since childhood. They have witnessed the fathers of their classmates and their neighbors being beaten in public and covered in blood. They have also experienced funerals, sacred In the church, the thugs took the thin people out of the house. All the adults knew what was about to happen, even the children, but no one dared to stop it, just quietly watching everything happen.
This chaotic, dangerous, and dirty environment not only makes children mature prematurely, but also easily numbs them, making them think that this is how life is supposed to be, and that this is how the world works.
Fortunately, they still have books and good teachers.
They read "Little Women" together when they were in elementary school, and set up a lifelong dream: to be like the author of "Little Women", make money by writing and leave this bad place.
If you want to leave the slum, going to school is indeed the safest way.
Elena studied Latin in junior high school and Greek in high school, and since high school, she began to go to school in the city. This also means that she is walking farther and farther away from the block. Although she still has to go home at night, her action radius and vision are no longer just a little bit bigger than the block. The day she reported to high school, I really saw the sea.
Can you imagine? In a seaside city such as Naples, Italy, girls grow up to 15 years old and go to high school before entering the city and seeing the sea for the first time.
And this was the lucky Elena, Lila didn't walk out of the ghetto for the first time until she was 16 years old and went for a walk around the city. When Lila came to the city, she realized that the people here lived a completely different life. The two richest in their block, the Solara brothers and Stefano's car were so different in the block. It's ostentatious, but when you enter the city, it seems so ordinary in so many vehicles in the parking lot.
The farther they go, the more they see, the more they experience and see, so that they can resist the inertial force in the slum that keeps dragging them down. What's even more cruel is that he will fight against this power for most of his life.
Whether it is love, marriage or the education of children, the force of inertia is powerful and terrifying.
Because, in this block, there are only two types of men around them. Rich and powerful men bully others, weak and poor men are bullied and cannot protect their families.
This point, their teachers see very clearly.
Perhaps in her coaching career, she has seen too many gifted and bright girls who end up wasting and consuming their talents and youth in this impoverished, violent neighborhood, ending up in the same bad and repetitive pattern as their parents. Life.
Therefore, she will remind Elena that the boy is from the bottom and has a violent personality, so don't waste your time on him.
Will go to Elena's house in person, convince her parents to let Elena travel to Ischia Island, and even arrange her food and housing, and live in Teacher Oliviero's cousin. Naira's home. Naira runs a homestay. The island has beautiful scenery and is surrounded by the sea on three sides. Many foreign guests come here for vacation.
Teacher Oliviero was very painstaking. She used all her strength to push Elena to a higher place. She wanted her to see a bigger world so that she would not be confused by those adolescent hormones. eye.
While Elena is loved and cared for, Lila has been alone.
Lila, who only went to elementary school, has been silently learning Latin and Greek. Her Latin was even better than Elena, who was in middle school. Lila is undoubtedly a very talented girl. Her observation skills are innate. When Elena is still ignorant of the things around her, Lila has prepared a knife for self-defense. She will never let herself be like that. Like Ada, she was humiliated by being pulled into the car by the Solara brothers.
She's so powerful and alive, she doesn't want to live in ignorance and animal terror like the people on this block at all, she's the shoemaker's daughter, she designs such beautiful and stylish shoes, she I want to make money with my own abilities, live with dignity, and realize my sense of worth.
However, it is often her family who drag her down.
This is also the greatest pain and fate of the first-generation Awakened. When the first awakened people in many families want to change the fate of poverty, they are often the first to oppose, suppress and drag them down, their families.
Lila took her entire family on her shoulders. If she was a little selfish and left the block on her own to go to the city, she would have more opportunities for a girl as smart, dazzling and self-controlled as she is. She made the right decision to leave the ghetto alone instead of staying there forever.
If you live well, you can rely on your own strength to help your family, instead of exchanging yourself for the benefit of your family.
In the end, in order to get rid of the Solara family boy's entanglement on her, she had to choose to marry Stefano to fight against the Solara family.
Under the circumstances at the time, Lila, who was only sixteen years old, seemed to have made her choice to be one of the best in chess, but her father, her brother, and her fiancé had never really respected her. While they greedily absorbed Lila's inspiration, talent, and benefits and future benefits, they all hated and disliked her for being so stubborn and disobedient.
The night before the wedding, Lila had regretted it. She was smart and felt that something was wrong. She already knew that she had made a wrong choice by entering marriage too early. However, the object of her confession is Elena, who has no life experience.
Lila didn't have a wise man around who could teach her and give her long-term, practical advice.
Teacher Oliviero may have been, but since Lila failed to go to middle school, the teacher basically gave up on her.
There is a saying that goes well: never be the smartest among your friends, when you find yourself the smartest in the circle, you are in danger.
Growing up, Lila was the smartest of the bunch, and she enjoyed it. But if Lilacen asks the teachers in the library, the elementary school teachers, all the thoughtful people she can get in touch with, and keeps communicating and building a friendship that lasts forever, I think the teacher will still be at the most important time in her life. The crucial steps gave Lila some advice.
After all, the teacher's eyes were still wet when she knew that Lila had borrowed so many books from the library.
But when she learned that Lila was married to Stefano, the teacher refused to be a witness and said that she did not know the person in front of her. The teacher doesn't want to see another smart girl get stuck in the quagmire of her life. In fact, Mr. Oliviero has been single all the time, and then his health is not good. If Lila can visit the teacher more and help him more in life, she will have a friend and a wise man in this neighborhood, and she will also get more teaching. Because in her home, she could not get really useful guidance.
Maybe the truth is not pleasant, but it can avoid detours.
However, after Lila, who had a strong sense of self-esteem, felt that the teacher had abandoned her, she never went to the library or contacted the teacher again. Her self-esteem and wounds made her automatically stay away from her teacher. She lacked such a communication channel in her life and lacked a life mentor.
Her marriage was built on profit, conquest, lies, betrayal and deception. Lila, who only understood this at the wedding, how could she, who is arrogant and strong, swallow this breath?
She was only sixteen years old, and this marriage did not let her leave this bad place, nor did it bring the sweetness of love, nor did it bring emotional comfort and mental growth, only the exchange of interests.
In order to escape the man she hates, she relies on another man who is essentially the same.
Using one man to run away from another is the cause of so many women's tragedies.
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