a long time ago in our town there was a noble family authentic nobility of venerable lineage and there were other families with less of a claim to nobility than the first family what mattered more they were not as rich either the noble family Bevilacqua by name were all very wealthy landowners who made many of the people in the town well to do also because when the last descendant of the family died since he had always rented out his lands for example three moggi or three acres to one peasant and three to another and so on when he died he ordered in his will that half of all the land he had rented was to be given to those peasants as a gift free and clear then he left lots of land to the town church he had a villa an amazing villa right in the middle of the town with a huge park that extended practically to the neighboring village with a botanical garden with plants and trees that had gone extinct everywhere else but kept growing inside the walls and he left that to the town government to make a town park but so far they’ve never made it into a town park
it was an aristocratic family of wealthy landowners that managed to win the love of everyone in the town but now the family has completely died out after the death of this one old man only three unmarried sisters survived all the other relatives were scattered across the region some in Naples others in Caserta since the family was wealthy to begin with they all became lawyers engineers judges and they all moved away all over the map aside from this aristocratic family there are a few other families of a certain importance a certain level and then there’s a layer of midlevel families that are mostly farmers not particularly wealthy but who’ve always had enough to eat as we say in my town because the most offensive thing you can say to someone from my town is to tell him your grandfather never tasted meat because it reminds him that during the war or after the war his grandfather was forced to work as a hired hand a day laborer and he had to eat at the table of the landowner because at home there was nothing to eat
the main farm products where I come from are peaches wheat apples especially apples but nobody ever made a lot of money from farming there’s never been a lot of wealth not a lot of money circulating in our town most of the people are small farmers or hired hands and some are bricklayers and day laborers and people keep vegetable gardens tomatoes especially there was the famous tomato boom and there was the wave of immigration people would come en masse from the train station of Villa Literno but it was never really a well developed town it was always really mostly a farm town where the people who had money didn’t live much of their lives in the town they’d send their kids to school somewhere else they did their shopping somewhere else they’d go out to dinner and a show somewhere else and so on but the people who are forced to live in the town don’t do a fucking thing they never leave they do their work and go home or maybe just maybe they walk down the street and if things are going well they might go to the local bar on a Sunday with their friends or their girlfriend who lives next door from the same social class and most important a virgin because if she’s not a virgin even now in the twenty-first century I’m here to tell you that if you’re going to marry a girl she’d better be a virgin and what’s even worse if she’s not a virgin she’ll try to keep that fact from getting out even if she’s one of the girls that attend the university
it’s the families’ fault but the young people too either because their family’s on their backs or they just grew up that way or maybe they believe it themselves and anyway they know that people would ridicule them for the rest of their lives whatever the reason never never repeat never have a girlfriend who’s already gone to bed with someone else because she’s a slut that is to say the usual limited set of ideas if you’re a man and you have sex you’re a real man but if she does it she’s a slut if she did it with just one guy her boyfriend and she did it because she loved him she’s a little less of a slut but she’s still a slut no question but if on the other hand she did it the way you did it because she went out one evening she liked some guy and she felt like taking him to bed then she’s a real slut a whore for real and no one in the town will marry her so here if a girl wants to enjoy some of life’s pleasures she’ll need to do it without being noticed and that’s why girls here don’t go out or they only go out with boys from the same town that they plan to marry
because for a guy it’s one thing to have a girlfriend who might have slept with someone from another town in which case maybe no one knows about it it’s quite another matter to have a girlfriend who’s gone to bed with someone from your own town maybe someone you know someone you see every day and everyone in town of course knows all about it and has already told everybody else seen from outside it might seem ridiculous but if you live this from within it’s more than ridiculous it’s like trying to ram your head through a brick wall and what’s more you have to be a person who at eighteen buys a car and at twenty trades it in for another car with a more powerful engine and at twenty-four or twenty-five you have to get married and you have to buy a big house at thirty you have to provide for your children at forty you have to be a respected member of the community who goes to mass on Sunday no matter what filthy things you do during the rest of the week
because here in our town the essential point never changes I’ve heard people I admire or I should say people I used to admire respectable people I’ve heard them talk about making profitable investments recommending those investments to their friends and just what were these profitable investments? they were money given to loan sharks letting the loan sharks invest them lending them out at cutthroat rates of interest and when I asked them what about if I’m not even going to say one of your friends winds up owing money to the loan shark let’s just say a neighbor and that neighbor comes to you to tell about the terrible trouble he’s in because he borrowed money because of an emergency and he can’t afford to pay the money back and they might have threatened his life and you’re the one that gave the money to the loan shark to invest well how do you feel in that case and the answer was always oh I don’t meddle in other people’s business it’s not my place it has nothing to do with me and so on and that’s just one more element that explains what a bad environment this is to grow up in and live in down here in this part of the world
once the town government set up a shelter camp for the immigrants because around here in the summer the immigrant presence triples so they decided to set up a temporary camp for just one month the month of August for tomato season it was supposed to be a place for all the immigrants who came to town from outside to work harvesting tomatoes and the clan got busy and mobilized the town in opposition to this immigrant camp and leading the charge in the front row were the so-called respectable citizens who gathered in the main square and started demonstrating against the immigrant camp because they said these immigrants are all a bunch of black Africans a bunch of thieves all dirty all pieces of shit they went door to door to collect signatures against the camp and during that period I remember lots of people even the so called respectable citizens were against the camp and claimed these were good reasons and when that happened I remember I stopped talking to a friend of mine who believed the same things I didn’t speak to him for six months
it was a Saturday evening I walked out into the street and I saw a huge uproar my house was practically at the end of Corso Umberto just before the hill on the walls was a bunch of graffiti attacking the town government there seemed to be a general mutiny against the municipal administration there were three categories of people demonstrating the so called respectable townspeople who were xenophobic racists then there were the members and associates of the clans who didn’t want outsiders meddling and causing trouble and last of all there were right wing fascists because the town administration was a center left coalition so this sort of demonstration was going on with forty or fifty demonstrators they burst into town hall and threw everything that wasn’t nailed down out the windows desks chairs and everything else then they set fire to the pile of furniture and covered the walls of town hall and the church next door with spray painted slogans filled with errors and misspellings they want to write fascist slogans like diehards rule or things like that but they wrote something like dyehards rule they didn’t even know themselves what the fuck they wanted to write
so they held this half assed demonstration against the immigrants that lasted for a whole day they wanted to destroy everything they wanted to burn everything they wanted to beat up everyone who felt differently from them about the immigrants who needed to be expelled chased away bodily for the rest of that day you couldn’t even go out into the street unless you showed signs of agreeing with them because there were always roaming groups of these allegedly respectable townspeople who argued and explained about the dangers of the immigrants and this idea of the shelter camp which they were absolutely opposed to and how it could be prevented then what finally happened is they set up the camp anyway and it remained in operation for twenty days I even went with some friends to help set up the tents and absolutely nothing happened there was no problem at all there were no problems those demonstrators paid lip service to their racism luckily back then that’s still how it was
my father didn’t want me to have anything to do with the town it wasn’t just that he didn’t want me to spend time with those people he didn’t want me to have anything to do with the town at all in fact until I was seventeen I only rarely went out into the street it was as if I was a shut in I only saw my brothers and a sister the little brothers and sisters and children of the neighbors I played with in the courtyard when when we were little one time the son of this Ernesto Bardellino and some other kids came to ask me to come out and play soccer and my father told them that I wasn’t there that I wasn’t at home and sent them away because he didn’t want me spending time with them he is a person who always worked hard a farmer from a decent family who experienced his own personal crisis that ran parallel to the period of the farming crisis and he knew perfectly well that his children especially his first born his only son could not follow the same path that is live a life of hard labor and effort that ultimately doesn’t mean shit
and so he decided that this son of his should continue his studies in part because he was always pretty bitter about the fact that he himself quit school when he was in fifth grade because grandpa that is his father decided that he needed to go to work and he was always sorry about that he wanted to continue his studies because he liked school and so he decided that at least his one son at least his oldest child shouldn’t have to follow in his footsteps his son should study because that piece of paper meant comfort it meant not having to do hard labor and everything else then at the same time considering the environment his son was growing up in he didn’t want him to become like so many other kids in the town and so he decided to send him to school in a nearby town only ten kilometers away but it might as well have been light years because it was more like Naples than the town he was born in it is the biggest town in the area
and so the town has always been more developed there have always been better services more people attending school fewer peasants and farmers more children of factory workers who then may have gone on to become professionals and things of that sort and therefore it was a much more advanced town than ours and especially fifteen years ago it was like another planet and so he decided to send his son who was eleven years old to study on this other planet because he thinks that where he lives is disgusting he finds him a seat on the bus run by a retired gentleman who every morning picks up all the boys and girls from the district who go to school in Aversa because other fathers and mothers have had the same idea so that this bus or large panel van that ought to carry maybe ten people picks up thirty little kids and takes them to Aversa every day back and forth but fate would have it that on the bus there were twenty-three or twenty-four girls and four or five boys plus him including two sons of Ernesto Bardellino who at the time was the mayor of our town and who wanted to run for the Italian parliament
and so even if the little boy doesn’t want to know about it and even if he doesn’t really understand the things he hears others talking about because after all at eleven the only violence he sees is in the cartoons all the same he hears first hand accounts from his fellow students and he’s brushing shoulders with the sons of a boss and he sees how they live that is he sees them age eleven with a hundred dollars in their pockets and a gold watch and designer clothes he sees them at age fifteen driving cars having cars of their own and being accompanied on their trips to the city by young men nineteen and twenty years old the muschilli who for a hundred dollars they agree to be the kids’ drivers except that instead of driving the car themselves they let these little kids without licenses drive the car and if there’s a checkpoint or a roadblock they quickly slide behind the wheel then they go with the sons of made men to clothing stores and take whatever they want without paying because later the father will stop by or else maybe nobody will stop by and in any case the shopkeeper would never dare to say you owe this much or that much and so the same way that the sons of the boss didn’t neither did the muschilli
and so you could see kids and young men who might be born into peasant families walking around in designer clothing there was this one store in particular that made millions off the clans because the owners were pretty perceptive and they understood that these people not only wanted designer clothing but they wanted it flashy and garish the shop was called Eldorado and they started ordering all this somewhat strange clothing because in the eighties there was a penchant for the exaggerated and absurd there were shirts that had instead of a normal collar nineteenth century collars for example a monstrosity but even so a shirt might wind up costing you three hundred and fifty dollars that is to say you’d walk into this store and you’d leave dressed like a clown after paying a thousand dollars for a pair of pants a shirt and a sweater so who could afford to shop there no one but the bosses and their made men and in fact the muschilli would accompany the sons of the boss to this store and they’d be given presents clothing money cigarettes cocaine and girls the so-called sluts or zoccole that I was talking about before and maybe they’d get a free car and like that
in our town the clan of the Bardellinos sort of created their own special neighborhood in an outlying area known as the zona infetta the infected zone that was given that name because it used to be marshy there they built enormous million dollar houses in every style imaginable and possible there was a house in the style of Mario Botta shaped like a brick with lots of little red bricks and another house was a white imitation Victorian with side wings and pillars these were all houses built by made men in the clan or in any case prominent townspeople who had made money with the clan and they all had underground bunkers of various sizes automatic security gates closed circuit television cameras alarms security systems that the CIA only dreams about and armed guards walking the perimeter night and day that part of town is filled with underground bunkers but to defeat these people all you’d really need to do is find the contractor or the bricklayers that built the bunkers because it’s down underneath the houses that the criminal heart of this town beats it’s down there that the decisions are made about who is who and who isn’t here everybody knows that the criminal heart lies beneath down underneath