then he meets the Bardellino brothers he meets Sandokan and the others and he understands that they’re all cut from the same cloth that they’re all the same he understands that they want to make easy money the same way he does that they’re young and they’re not afraid of anything on this earth that the only thing that scares them that really scares them is to live a life of shit the kind of lives their parents lived because the spring that’s driving them is right there they have the example of their parents’ lives before them people that always worked honest and really really hard and when I talk about working hard I’m not talking about eight hours a day and a sense of alienation I’m talking about brutal grueling exhausting physical labor that never ends I’m talking about people with calluses at age forty genuine calluses and creased faces people who walk all stooped over and at age forty they’re really no good for anything anymore completely worn out and they rarely even make it to fifty so they have this example before them and above all what they want is to avoid following that path what they don’t want is to grow old the way their parents did

then there’s the difference with wealth that even their parents were aware of but considered something that was rightfully due something permanent that is to say they thought that God had created the world in a certain way where there were rich people and poor people and therefore rich people were just naturally assigned that role to play even though in those years there wasn’t the same ostentatious display of wealth with expensive cars and speedboats and things of that sort but all the same you can see that someone else is rich if only from simple details from their house from their clothing so that for their parents you could see rich people as if they were something vaguely supernatural the only wealth that they hoped to be able to possess was what they could earn with their work but now their children see that everyone has a car a television set and the few times that they leave their small town or even just when they’re watching television they see that everyone has things that don’t exist in their town for example when they go to Naples which is considered a sort of paradise where they spend what little money they have on prostitutes so at some point they stop and wonder why they should get up at six in the morning and work until six at night and then when the weekend rolls around they barely have enough money to buy themselves a pack of cigarettes to buy a new pair of shoes every year

and instead life is having plenty of money to spend because there’s a lot of fine things fine girls fine cars fine houses not ramshackle houses like the ones they grew up in cramped small where they might have lived with a family of ten so they start to look around and do what they can at the time because at first it’s not like they had a clear idea a clear picture of where they wanted to end up so there wasn’t an overarching scheme or the certainty of success but they were sure of one thing they wanted to succeed they wanted money and power they wanted respect because they were figli di nessuno they were gente da niente people worth nothing as we used to say in my town and they still say it nowadays that is you are definitely a persona da niente if you don’t own lots of cars have lots of money and that’s not just how it is in my town this is how it is unfortunately everywhere in the world these days but in my town they really make you feel it it’s especially harsh because down here there’s no normal way to change things