those two blood crusted corpses were my first encounter with the organization which over time I would gradually come to understand I understood it for example when a few months later Ernesto Bardellino’s son was ejected from the schoolbus because he climbed aboard waving a switchblade and the schoolbus driver who was seventy years old and didn’t give a fuck for the clan smacked him around and ordered him out of the schoolbus but he didn’t toss him off the bus in our town he tossed him off in Aversa and when the kid’s father Ernesto Bardellino went in to say he was sorry and ask him if he would let his son ride the schoolbus again the driver told him no not a chance he was the kind of person that was rare in town he didn’t give a crap about the clan but Bardellino didn’t take revenge though when he was first a rising gang leader it would have meant certain death for the schoolbus driver now however he was trying to bring his children up properly and already the fact that he was sending them to school in Aversa meant that he wanted to give them a certain kind of education he wanted to elevate them socially
and then a short while later when Bardellino’s son was about to flunk out the mother went to Aversa for a meeting with the assistant principal and she insinuated in a threatening manner that she was married to Ernesto Bardellino and that they had better not try to flunk her son the assistant principal basically told her to fuck herself it wasn’t an act of courage it wasn’t a challenge to the organization it was just that the assistant principal took a look at this Signora Bardellino and decided to treat her with contempt because all he could see was a woman of humble origins a peasant a farmer’s wife and one from a small town so he gave her no consideration he had no idea who he was dealing with and so he treated her as if he were swatting away an annoying fly and in fact whenever he enountered her afterward he was well aware of who he was dealing with he never behaved that way again but this time the son was flunked and nothing could be done about it and when the woman told her husband about her meeting Ernesto Bardellino replied that the assistant principal had done the right thing that is to say these people in certain situations appreciate a ruthless response and basically they can’t stand brown nosers
there are cases where I’m not saying that they respect the ideas of others but they might accept them provided those ideas do nothing to threaten their own interests because if instead of his son’s standing at school the issue was that someone was harming the clan or the clan’s economic interests there wouldn’t have been a second thought he would have ordered him killed that’s how it is here if you create a problem it’s not like the first time they beat you up or they murder you first they make it clear that it would be a good idea to cut it out the second time they beat you bloody and the third time well you’d just better get very far away very quickly they refuse to accept acts of disrespect once there was a guy who ran errands he’d drive their children around wherever they needed to go that sort of thing and this guy without ever saying a word about it to the boss he bought thousands of dollars’ worth of stuff he bought a moped for his son he bought clothing for his family and he never paid a cent he just put it on the tab letting the businesses assume it was for the boss and then one day he bought a car supposedly for the boss as well and one day it happened that Bardellino was walking by and the auto dealer asked him so did you like the car and that’s how Bardellino found out all about it and when he ran into this guy in the street he beat him bloody with his fists he destroyed him the guy was covered with blood and that guy still thanks Bardellino for letting him off so lightly
the individuals who lived this story who shaped this piece of history are people who don’t come from normal families that is if we give them the benefit of the doubt they come from poor families but more likely they come from devastated families families that really no longer exist that was the case with Mario Iovine whose father was a contented cuckold as they say in my town cornuto e contento he knew his wife would go to bed with anyone that she went to bed with everyone but he lacked the courage and the will to put a stop to it so his wife who was Mario Iovine’s mother cheated on her husband continuously with countless men and on her deathbed she asked the parish priest to absolve her of her sins saying I am the magdelene the sinner and so Mario Iovine grew up as a figlio di nessuno a son of nobody but for good measure the son of a whore because you are figlio di nessuno when your family is poor or when your parents are dead or else if you’re a foundling an orphan on a doorstep but it’s even worse when you’re the son of a whore the son of a slut when your mother is widely known or notorious as an easy lay or as a slut
his mother was unquestionably one of the reasons for the choices her son made in his life because he never felt that he was part of a family his mother never took care of him his father was basically absent and then he died and they say that his mother was an attractive woman not in the sense of pure physical beauty but rather in the sense of a carefree cheerfulness a beauty that comes out of a lust for life she was a woman who would go with anyone who gave her a little affection a little warmth with anyone who gave her presents or would treat her nicely and be close to her a woman who in any other town might even have been a normal person a woman who did what she wanted and it’s nobody’s business but her own but in a small farming town in southern Italy where the only way a female was allowed to grow up and be considered a normal woman was to be married with her virginity intact a woman like Mario Iovine’s mother was naturally looked down upon as a slut and a whore and so he was the son of whore
Mario Iovine’s father was a hired hand a day laborer who worked in the fields when he could but he was also a drunk and whenever he wasn’t working he was at the bar or to be accurate in the cantina sociale or collective wine cellar at the time in my town there were no bars there were cantine sociali which were genuine cantinas or wine cellars where the owner served wine and people would go there and stay until they were completely drunk my father would always tell about the two drunks who were returning home late at night and one of them walks the other one home but once they get to the second drunk’s house he says to the first now I’ll walk you home and they keep it up until five in the morning back and forth until they sober up and tell each other to go fuck themselves Mario Iovine’s father would always sing in the street on his way home from the cantina he would shout out with a bottle in his hand c’aggia fa chille me piasce what can I do about it I just like it as if to say he knew he had a problem but he was cheerful about it
so until not that long ago the figure of the drunkard wasn’t viewed all that negatively in my town a drunkard was just a person who had a bad habit like any other but not an especially dangerous one there were plenty of people who drank in my town and some of them drank quite a lot but it was a normal thing no one paid much attention to it no one ever drank water at meals my father used to tell me that during the day farmworkers would tie a length of rope to a bottle and lower it into a well to keep it cool usually people would fill the bottle with water but farmworkers would fill it with wine and every so often they would stop working and go get an appizzata di vino a slurp of wine there were people who really had never tasted water who spent their whole lives drinking wine and some of those people lived to be very old some of them lived to be a hundred
Mario Iovine was a poor kid a little boy who was ridiculed and mocked and beaten up by all the other kids because of the family he’d been born into it was a notorious and disgraced family not because his father was a drunk but because it was a penniless ruined family there’ve always been families like that in towns like ours small towns where everyone knows everyone else and everything about them they mock you for your origins for the family you were born into there’s this vast store of cruelty maybe now it’s not quite as bad as it used to be because nobody knows anymore who’s an aristocrat and who’s working class and who’s a landowner and nowadays people who are rich today might be poor tomorrow or vice versa but back then there was a powerful social stagnation a form of sedimentation it was unthinkable at the time for a son in a family of day laborers and farmworkers to marry a daughter in a family that owned even a small patch of land there was a rigid system and they’d never let you forget it they’d throw it in your face every day
then this boy grows up and finds he has nothing his mother is dead and when he’s fifteen or so he goes to work for his uncle who has some land he works for a week driving a tractor hard grueling work and he expects to get decent pay at the end of the week but instead when the weekend comes his uncle pays him less than the other day laborers he refuses to accept this treatment he rips the money up and throws it in his uncle’s face then he climbs back onto the tractor and destroys all the work he has done he plows across all the furrows in the fields that he plowed he turns everything upside down and from that day forward an immense hatred begins to ferment and grow in him a hatred for everything and everyone and in fact when he goes to murder his mother’s lover after his mother’s death he does it not because he wants to cleanse his mother’s honor or anything like that he does it because he hates the man he hates his mother’s lover just as he certainly hated his mother and he hated his father and he hated this town where everyone constantly reminded him of who he was and how little he was worth so this feeling of hatred grows and hardens inside him and so he murders his mother’s lover without blinking without a second thought in any case he’s inured to violence he’s taken plenty of beatings from his alcoholic father and he shoots him he murders the guy who was his mother’s lover a married guy from San Bartolomeo a neighboring town at least that’s the story people tell
then he meets the Bardellino brothers he meets Sandokan and the others and he understands that they’re all cut from the same cloth that they’re all the same he understands that they want to make easy money the same way he does that they’re young and they’re not afraid of anything on this earth that the only thing that scares them that really scares them is to live a life of shit the kind of lives their parents lived because the spring that’s driving them is right there they have the example of their parents’ lives before them people that always worked honest and really really hard and when I talk about working hard I’m not talking about eight hours a day and a sense of alienation I’m talking about brutal grueling exhausting physical labor that never ends I’m talking about people with calluses at age forty genuine calluses and creased faces people who walk all stooped over and at age forty they’re really no good for anything anymore completely worn out and they rarely even make it to fifty so they have this example before them and above all what they want is to avoid following that path what they don’t want is to grow old the way their parents did
then there’s the difference with wealth that even their parents were aware of but considered something that was rightfully due something permanent that is to say they thought that God had created the world in a certain way where there were rich people and poor people and therefore rich people were just naturally assigned that role to play even though in those years there wasn’t the same ostentatious display of wealth with expensive cars and speedboats and things of that sort but all the same you can see that someone else is rich if only from simple details from their house from their clothing so that for their parents you could see rich people as if they were something vaguely supernatural the only wealth that they hoped to be able to possess was what they could earn with their work but now their children see that everyone has a car a television set and the few times that they leave their small town or even just when they’re watching television they see that everyone has things that don’t exist in their town for example when they go to Naples which is considered a sort of paradise where they spend what little money they have on prostitutes so at some point they stop and wonder why they should get up at six in the morning and work until six at night and then when the weekend rolls around they barely have enough money to buy themselves a pack of cigarettes to buy a new pair of shoes every year
and instead life is having plenty of money to spend because there’s a lot of fine things fine girls fine cars fine houses not ramshackle houses like the ones they grew up in cramped small where they might have lived with a family of ten so they start to look around and do what they can at the time because at first it’s not like they had a clear idea a clear picture of where they wanted to end up so there wasn’t an overarching scheme or the certainty of success but they were sure of one thing they wanted to succeed they wanted money and power they wanted respect because they were figli di nessuno they were gente da niente people worth nothing as we used to say in my town and they still say it nowadays that is you are definitely a persona da niente if you don’t own lots of cars have lots of money and that’s not just how it is in my town this is how it is unfortunately everywhere in the world these days but in my town they really make you feel it it’s especially harsh because down here there’s no normal way to change things
and so they see that this is how things are and they start to scratch around and do what seems smart they start to recognize one another notice other people who are following the same path who have the same problems the same anxieties the same aching desires powerful decisive desires and so they start to band together they unite their forces and once they get started they’re never going to stop they’re not going to be stopped by any obstacle for them becoming the boss of the entire region isn’t much they want more that is to say that Antonio Bardellino didn’t just happen to wind up in Santo Domingo by chance he wanted it he planned it he understood that that’s where the money is so that’s where the power is there’s money everywhere but he wants the real money the money with ten zeros after it so he starts to find his way in little by little but he understands that this is where he needs to go he’s not just interested in gaining respect he’s not only interested in living a better life like the people that he can see around him now he wants more than that he wants power he wants everything he can get he wants it all that’s how it is