Bridges are games: the value of play in the fable

Solomon J. arrives in front of a rainbow water puddle expecting stone, ropes, wooden planks trembling as in films. Instead he finds a ferris wheel rising from the water, hung with the objects that belong to children. It is exactly the shift I wanted.

Pepifante says it in a sentence that works, in the story, as a threshold: “Bridges are games that light children up, not games that children light up.” The distinction is subtle and it changes everything. A game that lights up asks the child to enter a world already built by someone else, with rules, timings and rewards decided elsewhere. A game that lights up something in the child starts from the child, takes the shape of his thoughts and carries him into what I call, in the book, the land of “here I can”.

That land has a name outside the fable too. Donald Winnicott, in Playing and Reality (Tavistock, London, 1971), describes play as an intermediate space between the inner world and the shared world, an area in which the child experiments with his own creative capacity and feels real. Winnicott ties psychic health precisely to this experience: the child is well when he plays, and by playing he becomes someone. Pepilandia is an area of this kind, with fantasy standing in for theory.

In the chapter, in front of the wheel, Solomon J. feels a loneliness he recognises. It is the same loneliness of afternoons at the playground, when the other children stay on the bench finishing a game on their phones and his turn on the swing keeps being pushed later. I chose that image because I meet it often, in classrooms and in playgrounds. Every cabin turns, and nobody looks at the view.

Cucù adds a line that lands hard on adults: children choose ready made wonder because the new generation of adults has less and less time to build safe bridges. Gustavo Pietropolli Charmet, in Il motore del mondo (Solferino, Milan, 2020; the title translates as The Engine of the World), describes a similar affective shift: the educational relationship today passes through emotional sharing and asks for presence, not performance. An adult’s time is the raw material of the bridge.

Right afterwards, Solomon J.’s thoughts return to the LEGO scattered in every corner, to the binoculars made from two bottle necks, to the caves of cushions and to his mother’s jumpers taken from the wardrobe. He calls them his little bridges, and he feels their absence. This is the part of the book closest to my heart, because it restores dignity to humble materials. Two bottle necks become an optical instrument, a blanket becomes architecture, a jumper keeps a scent and therefore a presence.

Lev Vygotsky, in Thought and Language (original Russian title: Мышление и речь, 1934), shows how a child learns within a relationship that offers him symbolic tools and leaves him the space to use them. His zone of proximal development is the distance between what a child can do alone and what he can achieve alongside someone else. In the fable this function belongs to the Pepilena dell’Alba and to Pepifante: they open a possibility and wait. Solomon J. reaches understanding on his own two feet, and that is what makes it his.

The sturdiest bridge in the book belongs to an adult who says little about himself. Uncle Paul appears on a video call with floury hands, and behind him, in the small restaurant in Grand Baie, stands the very same wheel from Pepilandia. Solomon J. recognises it and shouts his discovery: Uncle Paul keeps bridges for Pepilandia. No explanation, no lesson. An adult who has kept his own sense of wonder alive and left it in plain sight, until a child was ready to see it.

Here play reveals its second function: it holds time together. The child rediscovers an emotional bond inside an object, and that bond becomes memory available to him. In the story the wheel does exactly this work: it gathers tears and smiles, battles, victories and defeats, and it smells good.

The story entrusts adults with a precise task: to become sturdy bridges between reality and magic. In practice this means three simple, everyday gestures.

These are gestures that fit inside an ordinary day and produce lasting effects. A child who plays experiences self efficacy, learns to bear frustration within a safe frame, trains his language and his ability to tell his own story. A child whose play is met learns something more: that his imagination matters to someone.

The question running through the whole book is the same one Solomon J. carries with him from the start: how many worlds exist. The answer comes precisely from the Bridges, and it is the sentence I carry with me beyond the page too. There are as many worlds as there are bridges we learn to build.

This is why Pepifante asks for one thing only, and asks it of adults before children: “Children must still be able to say: Mummy, Mummy, I saw a Pepileno!” A child who can say that sentence has access to his own inner world, and has beside him someone who listens to him. Play is the language through which that truth comes out, and the bridge is the road we keep open for it.

Anusha Bhama Gukhool is the author of Solomon J. in the village of the Pepileni.