Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [16]
And it is a tragedy because, in the Eternal City, the bureaucratic denial of any relevance or dignity to the personal sufferings of decent women and men takes on a global resonance that cannot but have far-reaching effects in time and space. It did not escape my friends' notice that at the very moment when, in the jubilee year of 2000, the pope was calling on Romans to take the poor and needy into their homes, churches and confraternities throughout the city were evicting long-term residents. Secular owners, too, evicted residents to make quick money from the wealthier pilgrims expected to flood in that year, as happened in one stretch of Via del Boschetto right in the heart of Monti. The city authorities wrung their hands but, beyond a few symbolic gestures, failed to intervene.
Perhaps some readers will notice that my words have taken on something of the tone and rhetorical cadences of an Italian political speech. The last few paragraphs could easily be rendered in Italian with the rough lilt of Roman diction. That is not coincidental. I write with all the anger of identification, and it would be disingenuous to deny it. The struggle against eviction is a struggle against vastly stronger economic power, and even those whose ideological leanings might predispose them to sympathize often just shrug their shoulders as if accepting as irresistible the implacable march of the market.
There is, to be sure, resistance at every turn; I well recall the quiet fury of the man who had paid a pittance in rent to an aristocratic proprietor whose heirs, having no interest in the old tenants of their newly acquired property, were now raising the rent to a level callously designed to produce immediate flight: "Now we are at war" (Mo' stamo in guerra ~. And my friend Paolo recalled the moment about a decade before he was himself finally evicted after a long struggle, when he overheard the agents of the real estate company of the Bank of Rome politely reassuring an aristocratic neighbor that the leakage of water from the neglected palazzo where Paolo lived, and which the bank owned, would stop once they had at last kicked him and the other tenants out. He retorted, "You'll have to come with all the armored vehicles of the Warsaw Pact to chase us out!" Evoking an alliance that had so ignominiously fallen apart was an unfortunate choice of metaphor, if, sadly, a prescient one. These struggles rarely end in victory for the tenants.
Failure seeps in everywhere, and helpless anger is never far behind. I have watched elderly Romans, humiliated by the abstruse pontifications of property dealers' lawyers, forced to sign away the stains and cracks of their dilapidated homes-watched them as, with tears in their eyes and pain in their trembling voices and hands, yielding to the harsh indifference of bureaucratic formality and having exhausted every last possibility of appeal, they surrendered their consent to that to which they could never in their hearts agree: the rupture of lives they had expected to conclude with some tranquility amidst the familiar places and people. I looked around at the glass and plastic ornaments and the carefully placed photographs and souvenirs of someone's visit to the Holy Land, testimonies to a bourgeois sentimentality that symbolized the residents' reaching for respectability. Where would those objects go in the predictable confusion of the distraught retreat from their homes? As I recall the tenants' slumping shoulders and the heavy tread of their feet on those once casually familiar floorboards now about to be abandoned to the wreckers' blows, I feel again the incandescent fury of helplessness shared.
But tragedies are rarely one-sided; and while some of the people whom I saw signing their homes away are my friends, I can also understand that there are other individuals enlisted among