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By Root 662 0

to any financial relationship and may even, on occasion, outweigh the demands of neighborliness; a major restaurateur bought his meat from his prospective son-in-law out in one of the suburbs rather than going to the nearest hand much more expensive butcher, and could justify doing so on the grounds that "we have this kinsman." Kinship is also a way of getting things done; our landlady wanted to get our electricity meter read immediately, as otherwise the utility company would make its own estimate, and getting reimbursed for any excess payment could become a nightmare. But that was a simple matter; the son of her sister-in-law's sister worked for the company-and so any problems would easily be resolved.

Neither friendship nor kinship, however, is a guarantee of honesty in financial loans. One man, of rural origins, gave his brother a large loan so that the latter could buy some land in the Roman hinterland. The brother offered to pay him back with interest, claiming to have found some profitable work; when the Monti resident refused, his brother sent him at least twenty bottles of preserved tomatoes as a way of showing his appreciation. That is the ideal pattern. But the same Monti resident's wife's brother cheated him over a promissory note (cambiale) for which the former had put down the original capital, repaying only i percent out of the io percent interest; my friend said that he would never again lend his brother-in-law any money but that, if asked to do so, would simply say that all his financial resources were tied up ~avvincolati).

This man was relatively forthcoming about the presence of loan sharks in the district. On the whole, all those who felt free to speak at least generally about the subject were people whose own financial security had long allowed them to steer clear of such risky adventures. One man, who had left a rotating credit association because he never saw any return on the money he contributed, conceded that a few desperate debtors, unable to find solace in these associations, were forced to resort to the loan sharks. What few would admit was that usury was as common in Monti as elsewhere in Rome. The usual line of defense was a response that may have been truthful in a literal and personal sense: that they had never heard of such a case. But those who said this probably took care to mind their own business in general; outsiders, by contrast, scoffed at the idea that Monti might be uniquely immune to usury.

The neighbors' taciturnity on the subject-so striking in a city where talk is a treasured recreation-had a curious effect on my fieldwork. Locally, had one or two people not fearfully pointed out a single individual as a known usurer, a man who was detested for other brutalities, I could have imagined that usury no longer existed in Monti. Yet when I went outside the district, and in particular when I engaged in conversations with people who had already decided to throw their lot in with official campaigns against these practices, I encountered great willingness to speak out. Moreover, one student at the university, after hearing me lecture on usury one day, came immediately to my office, closed the door firmly, and proceeded to recount the story of her family's humiliation by a loan shark. She had finally found a safe way to exact at least a symbolic revenge.

It was thus not difficult to find such information outside Monti. Strangers could speak more freely-either because they had already gone public, so that my knowledge of their situations could not aggravate the danger to them, or because they felt that they could bare their feelings and worries to someone they would not meet frequently in the daily round. One such acquaintance was a woman whose husband, a fishmonger, had been murdered at his market stall in broad daylight for denouncing a usurer; the authorities then refused to help her, or so she felt, in her quest for justice. When I met her through a television feature on usury that I was allowed to attend and film, her story had already made a spectacular splash in several newspapers.