the boy looked around and saw that the house was full of furniture and fine objects and he wondered how Simeone managed with the fifty thousand lire tips that he received every year and it’s not like the peasants and farmers that give him those tips are all that numerous either there is one scene that he still remembers very clearly he and his father and Simeone walked out of the room on the ground floor and they were surrounded by a pack of enormous black Great Danes each of which stood as tall as the boy and the boy practically soiled himself in fear this Simeone resembled the actor Diego Abbatantuono he was tall imposing powerful with fairly long curly hair and a mustache he was an intimidating figure and now the boy was trying to figure out how such a powerful person a person who had so frightened him as he stood there surrounded by all those dogs it had seemed impossible to kill him to destroy him and now instead there he lay dead as if it were the most normal thing in the world he and his eldest son blood crusted corpses and he was especially frightened at the way that Gianni a young boy really knew everything about it because Gianni must have heard his folks talking about it at home he heard them talking about it before the killing took place

so he leaves school with his typical problems of an eleven year old boy problems with fitting in a boy who feels like an outsider in the classroom who doesn’t seem able to make friends who even liked a little girl at the time but she was the daughter of a teacher professoressa minimo a very prim and precise little girl from Aversa who didn’t even know or care that he existed so he has those problems his own little personal existential dramas the issues of a little boy who is still a child emotionally a gentle docile child who wouldn’t hurt a fly and then he has this sudden and tragic encounter with death and not the death of a stranger but a person he had met and then he even finds out who killed him and he has trouble realizing that it’s the family of the two Bardellino boys who ride on the bus with him and sit watching silent and tranquil sitting there the two of them as if nothing had happened

VI THE BET

those two blood crusted corpses were my first encounter with the organization which over time I would gradually come to understand I understood it for example when a few months later Ernesto Bardellino’s son was ejected from the schoolbus because he climbed aboard waving a switchblade and the schoolbus driver who was seventy years old and didn’t give a fuck for the clan smacked him around and ordered him out of the schoolbus but he didn’t toss him off the bus in our town he tossed him off in Aversa and when the kid’s father Ernesto Bardellino went in to say he was sorry and ask him if he would let his son ride the schoolbus again the driver told him no not a chance he was the kind of person that was rare in town he didn’t give a crap about the clan but Bardellino didn’t take revenge though when he was first a rising gang leader it would have meant certain death for the schoolbus driver now however he was trying to bring his children up properly and already the fact that he was sending them to school in Aversa meant that he wanted to give them a certain kind of education he wanted to elevate them socially