middle school comes to an end and we all get ready for the next step high school and that’s when I decide or really find out that I’ll be going to an istituto tecnico or vocational school for surveyors and civil engineers I’m going to be a surveyor because when the third year of middle school came to an end on the last day of school Professoressa Minimo handed out recommendations on what high school to enter after the summer and this is how she did it all the kids from Aversa whose fathers were lawyers or architects or engineers and so on she recommended that they go to the classical or the scientific lyceum while all the kids from other small towns or even the kids from Aversa who families weren’t well to do but who insisted on continuing their education she very reluctantly recommended that they attend a vo-tech school or a technical institute and in fact she told me that I was much improved in Italian because my first grade was a three back in October and my last grade was a six and a half out of ten in June but still she recommended that I study to be a land surveyor she said to me you’ll be an excellent land surveyor that is she didn’t say you could choose between this and that she told me you have to go to land surveyor school because that’s what people like you are suited for

I understood this because I noticed that she recommended that my former friend Tony go to the scientific lyceum or high school and certainly not because he was a better student than me in fact he’s pretty dumb he doesn’t understand shit and is lazy as hell but Tony lives in the Via Gaetano Pesce and his father has a travel agency one of the very first agencies founded in the eighties and so he belongs to a class of people who can dare to go to the scientific lyceum and then in our class there are some small town and village girls who are not as sophisticated as the big city kids and when their turn comes around Professoressa Minimo uses tough methods on them she practically threatens them that is she tells them that they can only have their middle school diploma if they promise to stop studying because school is wasted on them what they need to focus on is helping out their families and then get married and serve their husbands she says this to them in class in front of everyone else that is she decided for everybody in advance what career paths they could and couldn’t follow because according to her you could do certain things and you couldn’t do certain others

when I finished middle school and started high school in our town the Bardellino clan had become even more powerful than before because if their first show of strength that is the murder of Simeone was designed to free their territory of outside influences the second show of strength that is the slaughter of the Cutolo clan members sent a clear message that they intended to take absolute power over the organization as a whole which meant beginning by creating alliances with other Neapolitan clans such as the Alfieri clan and the Nuvoletta clan groups that were opposed to Cutolo and at the same time they started rubbing out the members of the Cutolo clan entirely in the surrounding towns this unleashed a ferocious and relentless gang war a steady drip drip drip of murders they killed one clan member in Casale two in Villa Literno another couple in Frignano they burned two in Aversa and then they burned another one in another town they hanged this one and shot that one and so little by little they physically eliminated all the cutoliani in our area while Cutolo himself was stuck in prison serving his life sentence without parole his clan members were on the losing side everywhere his clan was defeated and in the meantime the Bardellinos were becoming increasingly powerful