Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [101]
Friends Best Avoided
A common framework of friendship is central to all transactions. Even usury is still almost always represented as an arrangement between friends ~amici) and, as such, is bedecked with unctuous courtesies-courtesies that conveyed a controlled, lurking menace. Usurers control their victims through a cynical manipulation of the very laws that they themselves are violating: often they demand an affidavit affirming that if the debtor fails to pay the full debt with interest within a specified period the usurer will become the owner of all the debtor's worldly goods. Many usurers are local merchants; they only have recourse to underworld thugs as enforcers, and then only when other measures fail. The moneylenders often locate these enforcers just as the latter have been released from jail and are without work or funds, so that these seemingly tough characters, too, are easily entrapped in the usurers' snares. In their turn, the enforcers are themselves brutal and unforgiving in their dealings with defaulters: "They are terrifying mafiosi," said an upholsterer.
Fear is effective only when both parties are engaged in the same social networks. Local victims have every reason to keep quiet; they fear the usurers' revenge, but they are perhaps even more afraid of the damage their reputations would suffer if the indebtedness became widely known. No honest person would ever again lend them money, fearing their inability to extricate themselves from the downward spiral of debt. Usurers have always depended on local knowledge to identify potential victims and to play on these corrosive fears, and this, too, has circumscribed the geography of their actions.
As a result, I found it very difficult to find out about local cases; people feared the consequences of recounting their difficulties to even a temporary neighbor, while they also evinced great embarrassment at the very thought that outsiders might discover Monti to be riddled with illicit money lending. Some denied its prevalence outright; but the most vociferous of these also said that he thought that small loans-the only kind most of the humbler artisans are likely to need-were not really usury at all. Indeed, on another occasion he commented that small-scale loans of the order of ioo,ooo lire were more like prostitution; this, he said, was the work of the strozzino, a profession that he categorically contrasted with the true usuraio. The strozzino, in short, is not guilty of a mortal sin in the everyday sense of the word, but engages in an ordinary misdeed that may also be of assistance to those to whom he offers his services.
This rhetoric clearly allowed the speaker both to define small-scale usury out of existence and to justify the practice as part of everyday social life. Whether those who follow this strategy do so because they want to disguise their own willingness to loan money at interest (as a local union official hinted to me) was unclear, but he evidently did regard the more massive forms of usury as something fundamentally immoral. There were also those who recognized small-scale money lending as a lifeline for struggling artisans, an unfortunate necessity of life, while yet others preferred to accentuate the talk about the disinterested (and interest-free) loans that are still relatively common among middle-class friends, especially women. In all these representations, Monti emerges as decent but, such being the human condition, flawed by temptations minor, inevitable, and recurrent. The most forthright admission of the frequency of usury in Monti came from a relatively recent and wealthy arrival who thus had little reason to be coy on the subject. But most residents do in fact recognize, with varying degrees of embarrassment, that such practices are commonplace.
Kinship is important