Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [128]
A condition for their reluctant capitulation was that the merchant and a woman who had ended up agreeing with him would jointly serve as guarantors for the barber's wife's agreement to keep her side of the bargain. The merchant acknowledged that he had taken a significant risk, since he would have had to pay half the rent for any period in which the cleaning was not done satisfactorily; but he felt that he could have "faith" (Jiducia~ in her honesty. In the end, he was supported by the administrator, whose job was in any case not to argue with the partners but to carry out their wishes. This presumably did not endear the administrator to the younger partners in particular; they were already plotting to get rid of him. They argued that he too easily lent his services to such underhand arrangements; in this particular instance, procedure had been observed, but it had been hijacked, or so they felt, by one individual using unethical means and pursuing personal goals. (They may also have been aware that the barber's wife, fulsome with gratitude, now undertook to wash the old man's clothes on a regular basis and was forever bringing him plates of home-cooked pasta). The complaints against the administrator included procedural violations, irregular or illegal contracting of repair work, and a general attitude that was incompatible with the rule of modern law. And so the meeting that I attended was called.
This later meeting was held one wintry evening in the unheated offices of an organization run by one of the members. Many were wearing heavy coats, into which they hunched against the chilly current that crept into the room. Presiding was the administrator himself-a man who, like his protagonist, was more inclined to fix problems through personal contacts and gentle persuasion than by following the letter of the law. He had been able to evade all sorts of official inspections and requirements, and, in the process, had saved the residents a fair amount of money. He had expected to be left alone to do things this way, as he had for as long as the poorer residents and those with a more clientelistic view of how business should be conducted were in the majority.
His strongest supporter, the merchant, could call on several allies. While they had presumably been reluctant to support his championing of the barber's wife, seeing in it only an additional expense, the administrator's usual mode of operation had worked to their financial advantage. Their ironworker, plumber, and carpenter were all the administrator's friends; he would sometimes send his son to inspect the work, or do so himself, but he rarely saw any need to involve any of the partners in these evaluations: "There's tacit consensus. No one speaks, no one goes to law, no one makes a complaint, and all are just fine," as the merchant remarked.
In the eyes of the younger faction, by contrast, the administrator put the entire condominium at risk of both committing fraud and being prosecuted. Worst of all, it had now been four years since he had called a meeting, despite a legal requirement that this be an annual event. Suddenly, he found himself presiding over a meeting, one possible outcome of which was an exemplary exercise in civic procedure ending with his own dismissal and replacement. What was more, the rebels had their own candidate has the old administrator's supporters had guessed), ready and in attendance at the meeting.
The younger residents were not simply being officious; they were defending a new moral order, although their methods were not without echoes of older modalities. Their candidate was well aware of what was at stake, commenting that the two groups "live in two worlds that are also culturally different."