Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [109]
The stench of suspicion haunts every recollection of these organizations, only partially deflected by a generic rhetoric about the relief they offered the truly poor in times past. Like the protection the capi none offered the poor, these associations represented a systematic violation of both religious and legal ethics; justified by those involved in terms of the harsh necessities of economic deprivation, they trembled on the edge of discovery at all times, and as modernity encroached they became less and less viable. Embezzlement was always a persistent problem; even the "little old ladies" ~vecchi ette) who ran some of the minor associations-one, the members of which were all women over 5o, was apparently still going strong at the end of the twentieth century-were suspected of profiteering at the expense of their even poorer associates. Managers were almost always people with "the halo of the honest person" (l'aureola dell'onesto), local figures of some authority and economic substance, and their relations with the weaker artisans were clearly not egalitarian: "they turn the small-scale artisans into their subjects." But such unequal relations are always disguised as friendship-a friendship less violently extortionate than the usurers' and less structured than the mutualism of the church, but oppressive nonetheless. Fear, once again, bred a pragmatic resignation. If they thought they had been cheated, weaker members would generally let matters rest with the classic phrase lascia perde' (let it go).
That suspicion was nevertheless highly corrosive of social relations, which were also poisoned by the lingering smell of members' more specific guilty secrets-for example, the importuning of a child needing money to satisfy a drug addiction, or the fact that any transaction involving the payment of interest outside an officially recognized bank or loan agency was illegal. A butcher who had been active in one association told me that people would be reluctant to talk about these bodies; "they're a little afraid," even if the consequences were not likely to be as dire as those associated with the more sinister loan sharks. Even long-term residents of non-Roman origin have difficulty joining these associations, many of whose members have known each other since childhood and still do not feel that they can trust each other absolutely.
These attitudes show how insidiously the toxic experience of usury in Rome has leached into people's feelings about any kind of financial indebtedness. Creating a new organization, even a very visible and formally organized one with relatively transparent management and explicit links to respectable institutions, has to overcome the same persistent venom; this was a major obstacle in the way of the new artisans' union and its attempt to organize a reasonable system of loans for artisans.
Nor was this the only historical burden that the organizer of the new association had to face. Another-and formidable-obstacle to his plans took the form of his well-advertised links with the discredited leadership of the Socialist Party; the party leader, Bettino Craxi, had gone into self-imposed exile in Tunisia in order to avoid trial on corruption charges and had then died there. For many Italians, his name was virtually synonymous with Tan- gentopoli, the rule of corruption, against which there was a popular revolt in the early i 99os. During his ascendancy, some of his presumed political allies acquired substantial properties in Monti, a circumstance that kept their involvement in various corruption scandals before the censorious eye of