It was 1978, during a summer camping trip. Among the participants were several young people with handicaps whom we had met a few months earlier at an educational center on the outskirts of Rome. Maurizio was one of them. How did I come to know Maurizio? I had gone to that center shortly before Christmas with some friends to hold a small celebration with the school's residents and their caregivers. In one room we had pushed all the tables to the side and arranged ourselves in a circle. Everyone was there; I asked one of the caregivers: "Is everyone here?" She answered: "Yes, except Maurizio, but he understands nothing. He's in the next room." Then I said: "Can we bring him?" She replied: "But for him, being here or there is the same thing."
"But for us it's not the same thing!" I countered. And we went to get him: he was lying on a mattress, and that was where he spent his days—only to lie down again on his bed at home once we returned. Maurizio could not speak, could not hear, could not see. We celebrated together. That's how I came to know him. Then we invited him to summer camp. One day during camp, we had a picnic in a mountain meadow. Those who could walk had climbed on foot; the others came by car. We were sitting in the shade, waiting for lunch.
Suddenly Maurizio stood up by himself. He took a few hesitant steps. Maurizio had always walked with others holding him up. And now here he was, walking alone; we didn't know he could do it. I think that perhaps for the first time in his life, he understood that he could walk without someone telling him: "Be careful, you'll hurt yourself. You'll crash into something!"
He had understood that there was space before him, that he was free. He walked further. He went on, gradually moving away from us. We let him go.
Among us there was profound silence. No one said a word. We simply watched. It seemed to me that Maurizio's gesture was itself a word—a kind of prophecy, not spoken but shown through a gesture. It was as if he were saying to us:
"Come, follow me. I want to show you a path." He went quite far ahead: I had the real sense that he was showing us the way to the source.
- P. Louis Sankalé, 1989