and so there was this little boy that was me who in this period was practically alone who was entirely taken up with his condition as the son of a peasant family seen by his parents as the family’s hope the family’s promise for the future their answer to society that is he was to be the one who studied and got a degree and graduated and who would no longer have to toil in the fields and so he was sent to Aversa which on the one hand made him happy because he didn’t fit in back in his home town where normally seven year old boys grew up in the streets where they were required to become cunning and vicious a child can be more vicious than a twenty year old because he does things without awareness and so a child who had been taught to be kind and polite would have easily become a favorite target for the other children so when his parents sent him to study in Aversa when he was eleven it seemed like a good thing and anyway in town he had no friends no relationships since he had spent his childhood shut up in his house with five sisters and a hyper Catholic hyper conservative mother

until middle school he went to a Catholic parochial school run by nuns so it was an environment where a certain kind of message circulated though later when he thought back on it he realized just how false those messages were because while they were trying to teach you love and peace and things like that at the same time those very same people were not oblivious to what was going on around them but they never spoke about it openly in part out of fear and in part because perhaps they too had become accustomed to that climate of violence that atmosphere of bloodshed and so maybe they rationalized it maybe they had already encountered that atmosphere in their personal experience or on a smaller scale with unimportant events but when it became a general and widespread chronic situation then you can’t rationalize it away in the best of cases or they might resign themselves to it in the worst of cases unless they actually tried to turn it to their own advantage to establish relations with those who held power for their own personal benefit

but things were anything but rosy in Aversa because there he found himself up against two types of enemies who tormented him who made his life pure torture on the one hand there were the kids from Aversa who rejected him couldn’t stand him because they thought of him as a peasant a bumpkin an outsider those were the years when anything by Benetton was fashionable and in Aversa everybody wore Benneton everyone in his class at Aversa lived on the same street the Via Ettore Corcione a street filled with lawyers doctors engineers and everyone dressed the same way which is ninety percent of them wore jeans and a Benetton T shirt and the remaining ten percent who tried to imitate them and out of this entire class of thirty kids only one asshole who comes to school wearing pleated trousers button down shirt and light sweater even a winter overcoat and ever since then he has always loathed Benetton