and so he decided that this son of his should continue his studies in part because he was always pretty bitter about the fact that he himself quit school when he was in fifth grade because grandpa that is his father decided that he needed to go to work and he was always sorry about that he wanted to continue his studies because he liked school and so he decided that at least his one son at least his oldest child shouldn’t have to follow in his footsteps his son should study because that piece of paper meant comfort it meant not having to do hard labor and everything else then at the same time considering the environment his son was growing up in he didn’t want him to become like so many other kids in the town and so he decided to send him to school in a nearby town only ten kilometers away but it might as well have been light years because it was more like Naples than the town he was born in it is the biggest town in the area

and so the town has always been more developed there have always been better services more people attending school fewer peasants and farmers more children of factory workers who then may have gone on to become professionals and things of that sort and therefore it was a much more advanced town than ours and especially fifteen years ago it was like another planet and so he decided to send his son who was eleven years old to study on this other planet because he thinks that where he lives is disgusting he finds him a seat on the bus run by a retired gentleman who every morning picks up all the boys and girls from the district who go to school in Aversa because other fathers and mothers have had the same idea so that this bus or large panel van that ought to carry maybe ten people picks up thirty little kids and takes them to Aversa every day back and forth but fate would have it that on the bus there were twenty-three or twenty-four girls and four or five boys plus him including two sons of Ernesto Bardellino who at the time was the mayor of our town and who wanted to run for the Italian parliament

and so even if the little boy doesn’t want to know about it and even if he doesn’t really understand the things he hears others talking about because after all at eleven the only violence he sees is in the cartoons all the same he hears first hand accounts from his fellow students and he’s brushing shoulders with the sons of a boss and he sees how they live that is he sees them age eleven with a hundred dollars in their pockets and a gold watch and designer clothes he sees them at age fifteen driving cars having cars of their own and being accompanied on their trips to the city by young men nineteen and twenty years old the muschilli who for a hundred dollars they agree to be the kids’ drivers except that instead of driving the car themselves they let these little kids without licenses drive the car and if there’s a checkpoint or a roadblock they quickly slide behind the wheel then they go with the sons of made men to clothing stores and take whatever they want without paying because later the father will stop by or else maybe nobody will stop by and in any case the shopkeeper would never dare to say you owe this much or that much and so the same way that the sons of the boss didn’t neither did the muschilli