Tell me a story: only when you are older

We all know them They have been part of our childhood and we have grown alongside these light versions, which generally used to have a happy ending, but whose true meaning we innocently ignored, lost in form but ignorant of the real background of the drama they hid. Who does not remember the tender image of his father, or of his mother, sitting on the bed, resigned and patient, reading us a story so we could fall asleep? Even the image of grandfather, or grandmother, sitting peacefully at the kitchen table, next to the pleasant fire of the stove, telling us, with all kinds of details, gestures and gestures the story of Snow White, or Cinderella or that unfortunate lead soldier who had lost a leg in the war and ended up being consumed in the fire along with the love of his life; a love that, paradoxically, was a dancer. Here, in fact, the key word of the stories: its perverse paradox.

It could be said that story and folklore go hand in hand and in the deepest synthesis of their genesis, they hide myths and taboos, which have been subtly and conveniently put on make-up to fulfill a supposedly educating function, without for that reason continuing to maintain, little by little. we immerse ourselves in the facts that narrate and describe, a dark and perverse side, the study of whose factors, situations and circumstances would delight any psychoanalyst, as in fact this has happened and there are many studies dedicated to the subject. It could be said, based on this, that the stories, comparatively and metaphorically speaking, were 'the diaries of events' that were transmitted orally from generation to generation, until the invention of the printing press by Gütemberg, put them into circulation as small epics epics, where heroes and heroines went through various traumas, both physical and psychological, which did not always go well, or did not do it originally, constituting, however, a real gold mine for publishers of all times.

It is not difficult, therefore, making a review of them, especially those considered as main among the classics - the most famous, in that sense, and well known even by current generations of infants, would be the compilations of the brothers Grimm , of Hans Christian Andersen or of Perrault-, to find in his background accused defects of machismo-it was never the princess who rescued with his kiss the sleeping prince, as in the case of Snow White and the Sleeping Beauty-; of misunderstood competitiveness, murder, perfidy, egotism - attitudes that characterized, for example, the stepmother of the aforementioned Snow White; of cruelty-remember the story of Bambi and how an unscrupulous hunter kills his mother-; of racial segregation -the ugly duckling, separated from the group by the color of its skin-; the story of Bluebeard, murderer and abuser of women or, without going any further, the story of Peter Pan and Captain Hook, an implacable persecutor of children, who could haunt something as detestable as pedophilia, like the wolf-predator - who did it fiercely with the figure of a girl: Little Red Riding Hood; that imitation of an erection, represented by the nose of Pinocchio and a long etcetera, whose details, however little we pay attention to in history, would make our hair stand on end. They are stories as old as the world, where oppressors and oppressed suffer this endemic evil that characterizes, regardless of the time, the violence latent in a society, which after the millennia continues to maintain that statutory pyramid, defined by the same bases of inequality , so characteristic of primitive societies, and marked by vices, baseness and passions inherent in the darkest of the human soul. Of course, it could also be said that they had a precedent in one of the most read books in the world: the Bible. But that, is part of another story.