Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [127]
The city authorities' categorical mistake was to confuse neighborliness with affability. In fact, such affability as they are able to promote may signal the collapse, rather than the resurgence, of older forms of social engagement. It is initiatives like those of the Monti Social Network that, by recognizing conflict as a necessary part of social engagement, stand a better chance of regenerating social interaction, given the disaggregation of the old population and its replacement by people sharing little more than some generic ideas about taste and style. The changes now sweeping Rome are reproduced on a small scale within each palazzo, with the older inhabitants moving away and the newly wealthy (and usually recently arrived residents demanding new services, new standards of maintenance, and new ways of dealing with the bureaucracy and with each other.
Condominial meetings are thus an ideal context in which to observe such changes. These meetings are often true battles, with dramatic shouting, accusations and counteraccusations, all both promoting and intensifying strong intergenerational and interclass tensions. At the one such meeting that I was allowed to attend and film, I observed a microcosm of the larger conflicts over civic and civil values and the complex relationships among them. Conflict between older and younger partners had been brewing for several years. Of the older group, one elderly man-a fairly prosperous merchant of famously irascible disposition and salty language-was an especially vocal member.
Like others in this group, he valued social reciprocities over procedural niceties, although he was willing to give the latter a try if he thought they could be deployed to useful effect. His barber was evicted from another palazzo without warning, the barber's and his wife's belongings unceremoniously dumped in the streets, and they were at their wits' end as they had nowhere else to go. The merchant suggested that they could be given a small living space in the condominium at no rent if the wife would be willing to clean the common floors and stairways. They accepted the idea with alacrity, but the merchant warned them that the condominial partners would first have to agree; he knew that he faced a lonely fight to achieve this, but relished his role as a moral standard-bearer even when, as now, he had been deserted by most of those who more usually were on his side. In its extreme polarization, one man holding out against fourteen partners, the debate illustrates both the tenacity and the increasing isolation of those aging Monticiani who still uphold the old civilities and are prepared to defend them with, so to speak, marked incivility.
That earlier meeting, which I did not attend, was a stormy one that went on until 4 a.m.-unusual even in this city of compulsive debaters. The majority-all the partners except for the merchant-were against the proposal, on the grounds that they had just succeeded in getting rid of another cleaning woman who had stayed in the building rent-free and did not want to repeat the experience. But the merchant kept haranguing them: "Here's the point, here's the way I blackmailed them!" ~Ecch'er punto, er ricatto je 1'ho fatto io!~ Or, as he put it, if they did not give in he was "prepared to kill them" and "strangle them one by one"-by which he meant that he had enough information about all of them to create serious trouble. One was raising pedigree dogs in the building without a license: "You'll be out of here!" Another, a fortune-teller whom he accused of fraud-"'You'll win at the lottery'-it's not true! 'You'll find a husband'-it's not true! You'll be out of here! "-because she had not paid any taxes on these dubious earnings. Another,