so until not that long ago the figure of the drunkard wasn’t viewed all that negatively in my town a drunkard was just a person who had a bad habit like any other but not an especially dangerous one there were plenty of people who drank in my town and some of them drank quite a lot but it was a normal thing no one paid much attention to it no one ever drank water at meals my father used to tell me that during the day farmworkers would tie a length of rope to a bottle and lower it into a well to keep it cool usually people would fill the bottle with water but farmworkers would fill it with wine and every so often they would stop working and go get an appizzata di vino a slurp of wine there were people who really had never tasted water who spent their whole lives drinking wine and some of those people lived to be very old some of them lived to be a hundred

Mario Iovine was a poor kid a little boy who was ridiculed and mocked and beaten up by all the other kids because of the family he’d been born into it was a notorious and disgraced family not because his father was a drunk but because it was a penniless ruined family there’ve always been families like that in towns like ours small towns where everyone knows everyone else and everything about them they mock you for your origins for the family you were born into there’s this vast store of cruelty maybe now it’s not quite as bad as it used to be because nobody knows anymore who’s an aristocrat and who’s working class and who’s a landowner and nowadays people who are rich today might be poor tomorrow or vice versa but back then there was a powerful social stagnation a form of sedimentation it was unthinkable at the time for a son in a family of day laborers and farmworkers to marry a daughter in a family that owned even a small patch of land there was a rigid system and they’d never let you forget it they’d throw it in your face every day

then this boy grows up and finds he has nothing his mother is dead and when he’s fifteen or so he goes to work for his uncle who has some land he works for a week driving a tractor hard grueling work and he expects to get decent pay at the end of the week but instead when the weekend comes his uncle pays him less than the other day laborers he refuses to accept this treatment he rips the money up and throws it in his uncle’s face then he climbs back onto the tractor and destroys all the work he has done he plows across all the furrows in the fields that he plowed he turns everything upside down and from that day forward an immense hatred begins to ferment and grow in him a hatred for everything and everyone and in fact when he goes to murder his mother’s lover after his mother’s death he does it not because he wants to cleanse his mother’s honor or anything like that he does it because he hates the man he hates his mother’s lover just as he certainly hated his mother and he hated his father and he hated this town where everyone constantly reminded him of who he was and how little he was worth so this feeling of hatred grows and hardens inside him and so he murders his mother’s lover without blinking without a second thought in any case he’s inured to violence he’s taken plenty of beatings from his alcoholic father and he shoots him he murders the guy who was his mother’s lover a married guy from San Bartolomeo a neighboring town at least that’s the story people tell