Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [103]
A Family Friend?
In another non-Monti case, a usurer virtually imprisoned his debtor, my student's father, in his home. The entire transaction was framed as protection for his family. Although it took place in one of the more peripheral and "popular" areas of Rome, it illustrates the problems that people confront all over the city. The family-the debtor, a gambler who managed a bar in association with a friend, with his wife, mother, and two daughters-had been evicted from an apartment, apparently quite illegally,'7 to make way for the proprietor's son; in their new surroundings, they paid a rent that was seven times the previous rent for a much smaller space. Funds were therefore already tight. The elder daughter began to notice that something was wrong, because even though her father was working night and day, there never seemed to be any money for the family. Then the father and his partner dissolved their business relationship. Her father then acquired the management of another bar, a larger and more elegant establishment that he ran together with his wife. To do this, he paid with long-term promissory notes, as he had no ready cash. The younger daughter worked in the bar after school; the elder, who told me the story, took a part-time job elsewhere. After a while, she began to notice that something was very wrong, particularly because the father was putting pressure on the younger girl to leave school altogether, even though she enjoyed it and was doing well in her studies, and to work only for him. Even more suspiciously, he kept complaining that the bar was in bad shape although the daughters could see that it was always full of people. But then it slowly emerged that the father was losing money at cards and on the horses. The mother had not entertained the slightest suspicion of these habits, and was taken completely and horrifically by surprise.
He had tried to conceal the extent of the disaster from his family. At first he succeeded, in part because his wife, a woman of peasant stock from Umbria, was not in the habit of questioning her husband's statements. The elder daughter, however, had never hesitated to do so, especially as she was discontented over the way her mother was treated, and she began to argue with her father. Then the truth finally began to emerge. She in fact recalled that as a little girl she would sometimes take coffee to her father in a little tavern where he would be playing cards with local merchants. She thought that at first he asked these same playing partners for loans to pay off his gambling debts to them; a few of them, as it turned out, were full-time moneylenders. Eventually he borrowed a huge sum and, when the lenders ended up in jail (for an unrelated matter) he breathed an equally huge sigh of relief and thought he could now pay off his remaining debts and rest easily. Eventually, however, the lenders, released from jail, sold the debt to an accountant (commercialista) whose office was close to the father's bar. At this point the father shut himself up in his house and refused to face reality, sending his elder daughter to deal with the situation instead. The accountant, a white-haired and courteous gentleman whose secretary seemed (my source implied) to be his sexual slave, forced the father to sign a document transferring ownership of the bar to the accountant as compensation for the unpaid debt. The elder daughter, still a schoolgirl, talked matters over with "this damned fellow," who in manner was "very kind, very well-spoken," hoping to find a way out of the situation-until one day another gentleman, "very calm, very kind" and accompanied by a woman, called on her at school and asked her to arrange a meeting