Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [135]
What mutual warmth remained among the membership of the condominium after this meeting came, to a significant degree, from the evident mutual respect that subsisted between the new administrator and one of the old administrator's most passionate defenders, the elderly merchant. Each spoke to me of the other with considerable affection and respect, and their exchanges even at the most passionate points of the meeting were somewhat sorrowful but never overtly angry. The day after the meeting the two of them encountered each other on the street and took careful steps to defuse the situation because, as the new administrator graphically remarked, "we can't walk about with guns on our shoulders." Initially the old man pretended not to see the new administrator, but the latter called to him and soon they began to chat.
The new administrator also immediately spoke with his defeated colleague, with whom, at least for a transitional period, he would need to work in some degree of amity. Meanwhile, he also had a couple of names up his sleeve as replacements for the old administrator. "I could do it myself," he remarked, "but I don't like it-I understand that this reason for the [bad] relations lingers from then on"-and, for the same reason, he was sure that others would not accept the option of letting the old administrator stay on if he showed himself to have adapted to the new rules. It was not that he personally opposed that option, he was careful to note; but again he emphasized the crucial importance of maintaining good relationships among the residents of the condominium.
In addition to the Roman concern with living together (convivere), moreover, the new administrator also evoked another factor that encouraged reconciliation, the nostalgia that Monticiani claim for a vanished past when he spoke about the merchant: "Underneath it all he's a good person. He's a good person [but one] who complains.... Let's say he has the style of old Rome, the Rome of the first years of the twentieth century." And, he hinted, it was this respect for the old ways that made accommodation possible: "We respect him for what he is, even if sometimes he behaves in a rather selfinterested fashion, sometimes even a bit rudely." It is perhaps worth noting, too, that these sage remarks were accompanied by an openly stated awareness, marked by a familiar (if amiably enunciated) disclaimer, that the old man was Jewish, but (pero).... The friendship and nostalgia were no less real, or mutual, for being qualified in such terms; the Jewish community's status in Rome is beset by this curious blend of alienation and centrality, a paradoxical mixture that affects all its members individually as well as collectively.
Indeed, the new administrator's observation encapsulates a virtual history of what has enabled Romans to manage to live for so many centuries under the punitive hand of the papacy, an outlook that now instead renders them more vulnerable to the modalities of a global, civic modernity. Even the delicate hint that perhaps the merchant's Jewish culture introduced a degree of tension was also, in the Roman context, suggestive of a past lived and shared. The rudeness that in other situations might have occasioned only dislike, hostility, and open prejudice here instead served as a reminder that what was being dismantled still belonged to the old traditional ways and thus deserved to be heard. That others might dismiss the merchant as too "folkloric" and thus as an unfit representative of local culture (to