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By Root 660 0

a larger family network can also be reassuring to a usurer who is willing to demand reasonable terms. One woman, then a baker, had to borrow a considerable amount of money; the bank provided a small loan because her family was sufficiently well established locally to be able guarantee the loan with collateral; an uncle her mother's brothers lent her a further sum, charging only the interest that he himself had to pay his bank; but when she needed more, she did go to a moneylender, for whom the backing of a well-known local family was a sufficient guarantee of her good credit. By mixing the sources of her loans in this way, and despite the fact that the usurer's penalty for late payment was a doubling of the interest, she effectively eliminated the risk that she would end up having to borrow the entire amount all over again in order to pay off the first debt, thereby entering the most destructive cycle of all.

Local Narratives: Swaggering Victims

Occasionally I would hear an older tale of usury in the local setting of Monti. These accounts were usually presented as first-person narratives of a heroic victim's defeat of evil, and allowed the speakers to represent usury as a thing of the past both in their own lives and in the neighborhood at large. One shopkeeper described how, as a young man of 22, he had been lured into a small but, for him, crushing debt; eventually he was able to pay off half the debt and decided to take the risk of facing the usurer down over the remainder: "That's enough, I want to get off the train!"

It was a dangerous move. The real menace behind an underworld operator's oleaginous invitation to do business lies precisely in the nonreversibility of the contract that is thereby created. In this case, the loan shark, whom the victim characteristically described as "someone [known as] a friend" (una persona arnica), tried to bluff his way into maintaining his hold over the victim, angrily claiming that he was still owed a substantial amount. At the crucial moment, as the voices of the two men rose, a police patrol car arrived. The loan shark hastily disappeared, never to torment this particular victim again. The victim's comment was laconic: "How do you get out? You have to have luck!" And he asked me whether I, too, believed in "divine fortune."

In another case, in another part of Rome, some thought that the timely arrival of the police when prompted by the loud ranting of a frustrated usurer may have been the result of a clever plot to entrap the latter. While it is entirely possible that the Monticiano may have similarly arranged something of the kind, he passed it off as an intervention by divine providence and denied that he had made any kind of formal complaint. A heroic tale was socially far preferably to any admission of dealing with the police, and it intimates that he is now uncontaminated by any lingering association with loan sharks; his social and economic credit, in other words, is good.

One Monti shopkeeper recounted a tale of usury in which he appeared as anything but heroic or wise. Unbeknownst to him, his son-in-law, while ostensibly acting as his business partner, was siphoning off funds to buy a boat and other forms of entertainment. The older man had no idea that this was going on, but, in order to fend off the financial disaster that he could already see looming, borrowed 5 million lire at a punitive rate of interest from a local gang of loan sharks. In four or five months the debt had mounted to 20 million, and he was less able than ever to pay it off; in further rising increments-5, then io, then 20, then 30 million-it rose to 85 million, and soon thereafter to nearly half as much again. At this point his daughter, then still married to the swindling son-in-law, figured out what was happening and managed to recover enough money so that her father could pay off the debt. This terrifying scenario played out from somewhere near the beginning of 1989 until the September of that year-a detail that shows, not only that usury was practiced in the neighborhood in very recent memory,