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