Childhood promises

When I was about to arrive in Nice via Ventimiglia in Genoa, I did not notice that in the grass on the slope next to the railway there was a gray-haired woman and a child wiped with tears, looking up at the sky with such concentration. A smile of happiness appeared on the woman's lips, innocent and full of confidence, and her eyes seemed to have penetrated the fog of the future, and she suddenly saw her adult son in a dress, full of glorious achievements and honors, slowly ascending the steps of the Pantheon. The child's name was Roman, and the woman was his mother.

Nor did I notice that Mr. Zalangba's train rendezvous passed, and he left Nice in a daze for Ventimiglia, presumably to complain to his parents, who were buried in Menton Cemetery. He used generous gifts to buy Roman to propose to his mother, and his heart wanted to get the maternal love that he had lacked since childhood. But she already had Roman, lived for him from birth, placed all her hopes in him, and was never willing to accept a fifty-year-old son again, nor did she believe that he was a talented painter. Roman had to return all the gifts he had "knocked" on.

I wandered from the Briton Walkway to the American Embankment and ascended castle park overlooking the azure Bay of Angels. I don't know that Roman once competed in swimming in the Bay of Angels and only finished eleventh, thus giving up his dream of being a world junior swimming champion (but he later won the silver medal at the Nice Table Tennis Championships). Nor did I know that the Romans and ladies had sat in the pay chairs of the English promenade, chewing on black bread and pickling cucumbers to listen to the Rideau band or the Cassino band.

I wandered around Nice in the sun, the beach, and the sea breeze, not knowing that there was a seamount hotel on Rue Grosso, and that The Rue Dante in front of me led all the way to the Rue Buffa market. The lady manager of the hotel marched with great spirits, bragging to everyone about her great Roman, predicting his ironclad great future: he would become an air force hero, a French ambassador, a master of literature, a Byron, Goethe, Tolstoy, Balzac, Hugo, Zola, Ibsen, Garibaldi, Dnanza, receiving medals of honor, winning Nobel Prizes, being a great love saint, marrying a female star, buying clothes in London... From the time Roman was eight years old, she began to prophesy, regardless of the timing and occasion, not to look at the object, and always make him eager to find a seam to drill into.

I've been to Aix-en-Provence, wandering the famous Via Mirabeau, looking for the remains of Zola and Cézanne. But I don't know that Roman came here to go to college, used Proust to seduce the butcher clerk, and even made her recite "What Zarathustra Says." "He told me to read Proust... Now, what do I do? Later, she had a happy marriage and became a mother of nine children, with only one copy of "The Story of the Lazy Worm" on the bookshelf, but instead thanked Roman for his chaos.

I wanted to visit the Russian Orthodox Church in Nice, but I was closed because it was already closed. I didn't know that the Romans were actually inside, happily enjoying the benefits of being empty. The University of Aix Temple is too small, and Roman is of course going to college in Paris in order to enter the social world. Because she knew the Orthodox priest, her mother took him to the Orthodox Church to pray, regardless of whether she was Jewish. She believes in personal relationships. She asked Roman to promise to pay attention to his body, to be careful everywhere, not to get sick, not to learn from Baudelaire, Maupassant, and Heine. Even in the most difficult years of war, Roman always faced danger with invincible faith, believing that he would not encounter anything, and at most he would suffer a slight leg injury, because his mother had already signed an agreement with fate, and he would be her victory and happy ending.

Roman began writing at the age of twelve, and apart from winning the Nobel Prize (replaced by the two Goncourt Prizes), he did everything his mother asked for and fulfilled the promises he had made as a child. "I am going to meet the arduous battle, to fulfill the promise I made as a child for her, that is, to fight with the powerful and cruel enemy I knew in my toddler days for world sovereignty, to return to my hometown gloriously after winning the victory, so that my mother can get the evaluation she deserves, and the sacrifices she has made will be duly rewarded." 」 He wrote a book for her, The Promise of Childhood, which gave her eternal life in literature.

However, how can there be no shadow in life, Roman swallowed himself at the end of his life, and no one knows the exact reason why he did it. But I seem to know. I went through "The Promise of Childhood" and saw that his mother considered and eliminated all dangers for him, but she was full of worries and mistakes, and forgot to take care of him alone: "Don't commit suicide!" ”

……

Nice has too many legends related to Roman, and there have been endless motherly love, but unfortunately I didn't know it when I visited. For the promise of Roman's childhood, maybe I should go to Nice again, look at the Dante and Buffa Street, which are two blocks apart from the Englishmen's promenade, see if Roman's wife is still waiting for her son to return from the Seamount Hotel, see if the residents of the rue De La Cambi still regard Romain as a little hooligan, and see if the Nice Middle School has engraved Roman's name on the wall in gold... (Shao Yiping)