which is to say sometimes in the evening or at night when you’re hanging around on Corso Umberto you have to be careful there’s the danger that if the older guys see you acting even just a little bit softer than the others and by soft I mean to say a little more considerate a little more courteous a little less of an animal than the others I mean unless you’re cursing and talking dirty every three seconds unless you’re clearing your throat and spitting in the street every five seconds they might assume you’re a fag and even if you’re not they might decide to put you to the test and there are even a few guys who’ve been raped but nobody talks about it because and this is another thing about my town because in my town they do and they have always done lots of things things of all kinds of all types but no one can mention them absolutely nobody can talk about them nobody can know because the important thing is not to keep people from doing things it’s to keep people from knowing things even though in my town everybody knows everything about everybody and so you just imagine for yourself a town like that what could ever come out of a town like that it couldn’t produce a Mahatma Gandhi or a Che Guevara it could only produce a Sandokan only Sandokan could come out of a town like this

IV THE ORIGINS

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