here the town lives its life entirely along Corso Umberto which is maybe a kilometer long or a little more in any case you can walk from one end of it to the other without breaking a sweat and on either side of it there are houses stacked on houses stacked on houses here midway up the corso is the city hall and here is the Bar Nazionale there is no piazza to speak of just at a certain point right next to the city hall there is this tiny piazzetta a little wide space on the corso that is really nothing more than the front courtyard of the main church one time the city government built a sort of monument to the war dead it was this tall obelisk with an eagle on top of it with spread wings but it wasn’t there for even a day because the same evening that they unveiled it right after the inaugural ceremonies everybody started doing target practice shooting at this eagle with everything they had rifles handguns regular shotguns sawed off shotguns any weapon they could lay their hands on the whole town fired through the night and the next morning all that was left was the eagle’s claws and in the end they demolished the obelisk because really you had to admit that it was one ugly monument that obelisk

and this helps to give you an idea of just how backward our town is for instance when everyone caught the fever of telenovelas or Mexican soap operas and in September in our town there is a religious holiday the recurrence of our patron saint you know the kind of celebration with a procession bearing the Madonna all through the town and at the time there was a Mexican soap opera that everyone was crazy about called Los Ricos también lloran or in Italian Anche i ricchi piangono or in English The Rich Cry Too or something like that and anyway everybody in town would watch this telenovela men women children even the parish priest and for two hours when it was being broadcast no one would leave their house the town was deserted and on that day in September the festival of our patron saint the Madonna was supposed to leave the church at seven in the evening just as she had every year for centuries to be carried in procession all around the town with the faithful following behind chanting but at the same time they were broadcasting the Mexican soap opera so the parish priest decided to reschedule the procession for later that evening because the Madonna could wait and for the first time in what may have been centuries the Madonna was carried out of the church at ten at night instead of seven

in this piazzetta in front of the church where men gather and talk it might happen that in a group of people jokes are exchanged men poke fun at one another but maybe at a certain point somebody goes too far a stray word triggers a reaction someone slaps someone else in the face but the next time they meet they’re armed there’s a shootout nobody hesitates no one holds back or thinks twice and that’s what it’s like here it’s normal to leave the house packing a pistol there are people who ride a bicycle with a rifle on a strap over one shoulder or a straight razor in their pocket here nobody has trouble procuring weapons because if you need a gun whatever the reason you can always find one a pistol a rifle even a normal family like mine for instance owned two or three rifles until a few years ago until they passed that law that anyone who possessed a rifle even a hunting rifle had to report it to the police so in every house here you can find pistols rifles things like that