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