Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [131]
In consequence of his adherence to procedure, however, he also found himself presiding over his own defeat. The complex public precision of counting shares in proportion to the square footage owned by each voting partner had the result that the old administrator had to accept the new man-who, as a further complication, was a resident, an active but discreet participant in the discussion, and also on good terms with the old merchant on account of their daughters' friendship-as his partner. In fact, however, he then took himself off, rather miserably, with the result, said the merchant, that various repair jobs that he simply arranged on the side were no longer being done. The merchant no longer greets the woman whose proxy vote he was supposed to cast, and is furious with the leader of the other group for having doubted his word.
During the meeting, one of the older men spoke up to say that for those who voted against the old administrator, "there must have been a reason." What, he wanted to know, if one were simply to say directly to the administrator whom he indicated with some rather wild gesticulation, "You are a thief!"-and so to avoid all the elaborate circumlocutions? To this the administrator's critics could hardly object, but they did not like the corollary-that they should enumerate the administrator's alleged derelictions before they went any further in the discussion. They feared losing the force of their argument in a welter of detail.
The political operator intervened with a measured tone and a solemn expression, every inch the elder statesman assuring his audience of his impartiality which fooled no one) and admitting with deceptive transparency that the reason for the current situation was indeed that there had not been a meeting for a long time: "The reasons, I think, were dealt with, and a certain rancor was created." He also pointed out that one could change one's mind; by raising the hypothetical possibility of his abandoning his friend the old administrator, he evoked an image of democratic argument and decisionmaking that he certainly had no intention of following in practice. The leader of the younger bloc did not in any case seem to fall for this diversionary tactic. The other older man, who had a rather obviously working-class manner and spoke in Romanesco-inflected Italian, defended his desire for explanation, but his plea-"Excuse me, be patient"-got short shrift.
A shouting match ensued. Both this man and the young rebel spoke with a taut mixture of placatory smiles and evident anger, the younger man in a light and even tenor that dominated the room, the older in a deep bass growl. The younger man persisted: "At last we're all here, we can decide well. We were always few in number, there was little participation [by the members], you never came, you never came to the meeting-well, you didn't want to; so now we're all, we're all decided that this is what we have to do." In fact, the elder man was the one for whom the merchant had signed the proxy; he was notoriously uninterested in coming to meetings and perfectly happy to let the administrator take care of things in his own way-as the young rebel well knew. In the democratic calculus of political advantage, failure to take part in meetings, like the failure to place bids in public bidding for spaces in the local market, is tantamount to surrendering to new economic and political modalities.
The administrator, meanwhile, realizing that his best tactic would be to entrap the entire discussion in arguments over matters of detail, politely demanded to know what "these so-serious derelictions" had been. When another of the other younger members answered this appeal for specific information by starting to complain of the administrator's failure to respond to any of his attempts to make contact, a by now more obviously agitated administrator began to rebut him on details. The leader of the younger bloc, alarmed that the argument would be completely