I was small but I still have memories like an echo for instance I remember when I saw the dead man first real dead man I’d ever seen up close and then the time that my friend Gianni explained to me why they killed him and all the details this Gianni was eleven just like me but he already knew everything because he had always heard his folks talking about it at home and when I got home I heard my mother and my father talking about these Bardellinos and the fact that their father was a son of nobody which meant somebody who didn’t even own a square yard of land a pertica di terra but who was a hard worker who had even worked with my grandfather in the countryside but the children look how the sons turned out my father said that family produced children who are the exact opposite of their father who was a respected citizen and a hard worker

as for the organization my father understood it he grasped the nature of it but he didn’t accept it so he wanted nothing to do with it even at a distance he wanted to live in peace without trouble he only wanted to make sure that his children studied and finished school and became respectable citizens in other words he wanted to see his children make a qualitative leap into a higher social class he didn’t want them to remain peasants farmers for the rest of their lives though hardworking peasants who weren’t doing that badly for themselves that’s how it had been for my father though I think that my grandfather must have been a bricklayer because my father often told me about parcels of land that are zoned for construction nowadays and that my grandfather refused to take in payment from the owners of those plots of land my father used to say that he wished he’d taken them because if he had now we’d own land and we could build on it

and so here is this little boy that was me crammed into a bus driving home after another miserable day in Aversa and he feels like a loser because all his schoolmates are wearing jeans and basketball shoes but not him because his father and his mother think that he’s going to a better place so he needs to dress decently and so at age eleven he’s going to school with a pair of old-fashioned trousers a neatly ironed shirt and I’m not saying a tie but practically a winter overcoat instead of a nice casual jacket and so he feels like an outsider a loser because in his class at school there are only boys and girls from Aversa who speak proper Italian while he was accustomed to speaking dialect at home and so he has problems not in speaking Italian but in reconciling the two forms of speech he feels the abyss when he comes home he feels miserable because in any case he likes this new world where everyone speaks Italian where people stand in orderly lines where boys and girls talk to one another and go out together in the evenings and maybe they even kiss a world with some decency he thinks to himself