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