Could You Tell Me Your Story Again?

I’ll never grow tired of listening to it

Matilde was the beginning of many beginnings. I was six years old when we first met. It was at home. My mother brought her as a surprise.

Matilde the goat was a fun type. We bonded quickly, sitting on the corner of a blue sofa, in the living room. She knew only one story, and that was all she could tell. She spoke very simply because it was her job to speak to kids. Only a couple of sentences for each scene of the story, followed by images. It was an interesting combination as the way we talk is normally through words, and then the words paint an image in our minds. She was saying the words and painting the image for me at the same time.

When the story was over, I asked her if she could tell it again. Her voice brought me somewhere nobody else had brought me before, and I was not ready to leave that dreamland.

The first thing Matilde told me was that she loved to sing. Her dream was to be a famous singer. So one day she decided to take the admission exam to her city’s conservatory. Oh, how brave she was! Once there, she realized music at the conservatory was a little more formal than she thought — she had never seen a music sheet in her life and the commission stressed her out. The exam turned out to be a disaster, and Matilde could not help but run away. I still remember her, rushing out of that old, fancy building, crying on the red pavement of the old square.

“But I am not the type that gives up,” she told me. She decided to go back to the conservatory to try the exam again, but the guardian recognized her at the entrance. He mocked her and pushed her away.

At that point, I was quite sad. But I knew something more was to come. I could see her story was not over yet.

Singing was what Matilde was born for. She started singing in the streets, just to cheer herself up. People stopped and gathered around her, connecting with the way she sang and her music. And so Matilde — after being rejected by the canonical path — eventually found her way as a singer through her fans.

Every time the story was over, I asked Matilde to tell it again. She was never tired of repeating it. She was a very patient friend.

In the following months, many others from Matilde’s world joined our house. They sat all together on the shelf. Then, a year later, my family had to move to the other side of the country — a long trip, a lot to pack, a lot to sort. Matilde got sorted out. She went to another house, telling her story to another kid.

Twenty years later, I do not recall exactly when or why, I thought about Matilde. And with great surprise, I realized I remembered the beginning of her story very well, but could not remember what happened at the end.

She had told me that so many times! Perhaps this meant it was time to hear it again. I went to the local bookshop, where I thought I could find Matilde. She often sat there, waiting to tell her story.

But this time she wasn’t.

So I looked for her online and I was surprised to find many Matilde, instead of just one. The story was always the same, but through the years Matilde had slightly reinvented the layout, perhaps for fear kids would grow tired of her. I eventually found Matilde in her original form. That was the one I wanted to listen to.

I called her, and she assured me she would come. She was a little surprised when she arrived: there was no kid around, was it that twenty-seven-year-old wanting to listen to her story?

I was quite emotional when I first held her, after all that time. She did not understand. I told her we had met each other a long time ago. She hadn’t changed — in Matilde’s world, ageing does not exist. But I had changed quite a bit — I was taller, speaking with a different accent after all that moving around, and all my features were quite different. It took her some time to remember.

“Could you tell me your story again? I don’t remember the end.”

She said it was her pleasure and restarted all over. As she spoke to me, my mind got full of all the images and feelings I first met on that blue sofa, in a city miles and miles away, twenty years before. Certain things, however, were hitting me differently. The cruelty of the people mocking her at the conservatory had a bitter, more wicked taste than the first time. Matilde’s feelings had a whole new complexity and I could now perceive all her bravery and resilience in a way I couldn’t when I was a kid.

I felt happy. My old friend was back.

I told her I would not let her go again. I was sorry I did the first time. She told me it was how things were supposed to be. She was born to tell her story to all the people she could and even though leaving my place back then was not easy — you were so into my story! — she had the opportunity to travel, meet other kids, and tell them her story.

But now it was fine, she had traveled a long way already and she was happy to stay there on the shelves of my parents’ house, the place that is still kind of home back in my country.

“One day I’ll bring you with me.” I told her, “But for now, I am moving too much. And many of the friends I have up there come from another part of your universe. They speak other languages, and I am afraid you would be bored.”

She agreed. She found her place on the shelf.

“When you want to hear my story again, just tell me. I’ll be here.”

Matilde was the beginning of many beginnings.

She starred in the first book I could read on my own, after learning how to make sense of letters in school.

She was the first one I met when I crossed the dreamland of reading. She took me by the hand and accompanied me inside. She made me understand that I loved sitting on a sofa and disappearing into a story.

Who knows who I would be now without Matilde? How many people I would have not met if it was not for Matilde?

There would have been no Jane Eyre for me, no Andrei Bolkonsky, no Sherlock Holmes, no Hermione Granger, no Elizabeth Bennet if it was not for Matilde. The one who first told me her story and made me feel like there was nothing else in the world I wanted to do than that — listening to stories.

I cannot possibly thank her enough for this.

This story is as a response to the “Reunion” writing prompt from My Fair Lighthouse. Thanks to Editor Willow Schroeder for the beautiful and inspiring idea!