VALIA
The Physical Education of the System
Valia was her mother’s little stranger. Although the mother had borne and fondled and bathed and clothed and undressed the pink flesh that held the baby soul, she did not know that flesh. And Valia grew to be three years old, fat and good, but with little bent limbs and a tired-out spine and clumsy, fumbling fingers.
“Sit in your chair, Valia. That is what chairs are made for,” Valia’s mother admonished at home when the baby joyfully pranced across the floor on “all fours” or lay prone at play with her toys.
“Walk in the garden path like a little lady,” she urged, when Valia, taken out for a walk, climbed to the lowest railing of an adjacent fence and walked along it, sideways, or hung from the top, her fat legs swinging in the air.
“Do not jump; to jump is noisy and unbecoming in little girls,” the mother commanded, as Valia, brought to the Trionfale Children’s House in Rome, hopped gayly up and down the wide stone steps.
But the directress of the school had no word of reproof for baby Valia. She looked at the bent legs that could hardly hold the weight of the plump body, she glanced at the powerless baby hands that could not clutch with any force the handles of a toy wheelbarrow which another child offered Valia for her play.
“You have not noticed the baby’s limbs,” the directress suggested.
The mother’s eyes trailed the school yard where Valia struggled to keep up with the other sturdy little men and women who trundled their toy wheelbarrows up and down in long happy lines. She shrugged her shoulders.