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The father was now heavily in debt. Once it became clear that he had lied to his family about the extent of his problems, which were increasingly dire, his wife's close kin stepped in with financial assistance, in some cases through loans for which they in turn assumed substantial debts. Although he reported his debts to the authorities, he avoided naming the primary lender out of fear of reprisals. The partial reporting of his debts relieved him of some financial burdens, but at the price of surrendering his civil rights (mostly to vote in elections for five years, a penalty he was glad to assume in order to end the nightmare. He also transferred the bar to new management to pay off some of the legal creditors (including the original proprietors of the bar, who had ceased to receive the payments on the promissory notes). But the less forgiving usurers now began to threaten him with serious physical violence; some threats were well veiled, others less so. Although he was clearly afraid to walk about in certain parts of the city, he also continued to lie to his family about the depths to which he had sunk. Because they had to work long hours to meet the remaining creditors' demands, however, his wife and children were quickly disabused of their remaining hopes and illusions.

The threats continued. At this point one usurer appeared as a self-serving source of salvation. He was a classic underworld type, said the elder daughter, with a hard face and a brusque manner; "at a certain point, he was a creditor of my father, but in practice he put us on our guard against certain other creditors with worse intentions at, let's say, the level of physical [violence]." The father attached himself to this man, who had every interest in keeping him alive so he could recuperate his own loans and was convinced that those the father had denounced to the authorities would be looking for an opportunity to make an example of him. And so, one night, with all their possessions packed into suitcases, the entire family surreptitiously moved into the usurer's home, where, for a fearful three weeks, they remained. "Luckily it all went well. But we had put ourselves right in the wolf's mouth!"

The father was now confined where he could not lose any more money at cards; with the rest of the family working, and with some help in further loans from their close relatives, their grim host was evidently able to persuade the other usurers that sharing the proceeds would be more profitableand perhaps less dangerous to them-than eliminating the debtor or his family. They then returned to their own home, whence they soon departed-in order to avoid the rent-to the house of an acquaintance in the provincial town of Pomezia, where the father was unable to find work but where at least the daughters could keep a close eye on him and make sure he did not gamble again. The elder daughter worked part-time when she was not at school and the younger daughter was employed full-time by a local merchant, while their mother took on a daily grind of twelve hours of mostly domestic work. Eventually, after the father had slowly extricated himself by working in various menial jobs such as dishwashing, they managed to settle the remaining debts, and the elder daughter ended up at the university.

While these events did not occur in Monti, children and other family members can become hostages to fortune anywhere in the city. Usurers protect themselves from being reported to the authorities through insinuating threats: "Remember that you still have your daughter.... " One resident of the historic center had gone to a usurer because, ironically, her appeal to a bank for a loan of a type specifically guaranteed by the state as protection against the need to resort to usury would have been too small. The state's inability to provide adequate protection springs primarily from the fact that people resort to loan sharks when they are already entrapped by successive debts. On the other hand, the presence of