Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [157]
Those who know their rights can protect themselves; officials who take bribes prey on an older generation more accustomed to accepting as normal a situation that the new civic morality emphatically rejects. Today, moreover, the simplification of licensing procedures has greatly reduced the potential for extortion. 14 As a result, bent officers must now seek out those few who still fear consequences that in reality the authorities can no longer impose.
Among merchants and artisans are many who regret the new civic order and the disappearance of a system they have learned to work to their own advantage. That skill, however, still stands them in good stead; they know how to wield the rhetoric of friendship in order to represent increasingly indirect deals in terms that are still-just-acceptable under the tighter ethical scrutiny now in force. A bar proprietor, for example, made a point of always being scrupulously accurate in giving what at the time were the obligatory machine receipts for even the smallest purchase, so that, when the vigili came checking, their report (verbale)-they are required to issue one even when they find no illegalities-was entirely favorable. But the vigili, presumably as a way of exerting a little discreet pressure, hinted that his wife never charged them for their coffee (when a couple runs such a business it is common for the wife to take charge of the cash register); so he ran three of them a tab for two coffees-for reasons, he said, of politeness (cortesia). Another storekeeper, who had told me that he simply keeps smiling when the police come checking on his establishment, hailed a passing policeman with polite irony, "Hail, Caesar!" (Ave, Cesare!) Merchants tread a fine line between self-assertiveness and deference and hope that this ironic balance will deflect any lingering attempt at extortion.
In this sense, the bar proprietor's combination of absolute punctiliousness and a rather pointedly reduced form of generosity sets clear limits to the extent to which he feels he must play along with the pressure to bribe. Another example of such a mixed strategy, when taken in its broader context, is even more obviously strategic in its implications. A shopkeeper who was locally famous for his archaizing Romanesco cleverly exploited the liberalized licensing laws to diversify his business. He also found ways to maintain his earlier arrangements with local police and other officials, with an appropriately refurbished rhetorical wrapping that flaunted his claim to represent traditional culture but did so in the language of the new ethics. Thus, he remarked that the city police no longer expected bribes from him but did expect a discount on the produce they bought; he viewed this as a form of friendship-"which is part of our culture, now gradually disappearing." His neighbors, who often furiously accused him of violating zoning and environmental laws with complete impunity, would hardly have taken this portrayal of friendship as innocent of bribery; but they would also have been forced to acknowledge that he had mastered the new rhetoric to good effect-and their attempts to get the police to intervene in his infractions, denuncia after denuncia, came to naught.
He himself ignores the neighbors' threats and denunciations and attributes the occasional unwelcome attention of the police to suspicion of his leftist political activities-a heroic pose, historically justifiable given the right-wing politics of most police units in Italy, through which he deflects the entire question of possibly illicit activities and their violation, according to his neighbors, of his own political principles. (The irony is that those who are most outraged by his behavior are