Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [160]
By contrast, the young waiter-anthropology student showed how one could resist such pressures by instead insisting on basic civic rights; clearly it is much riskier than in earlier decades to seek or accept bribes, and the tide of fear can be reversed by anyone who understands the new dispensation well enough. The son of the owner of the same bar simply tells any vigili who come nosing around with suggestive frowns and winks, "Write me a fine! I'll simply contest it! "-the last thing they would want to make happen. These city police officers must always weigh the risks and benefits against each other. I once saw an officer hail a young couple speeding by on a motorbike with an ironic and unimpeachably Roman) cry of "Ahoo!" There was a brief colloquy; then the motorbike turned around and sped on its way. I saw no money change hands; sometimes, apparently, the satisfaction of a civic duty properly performed, but couched in this friendly dialect idiom and carrying no mean intentions, is sufficient. Not all city police are corrupt; and none can afford to be on the take all the time.
Another person who preferred the more modernist response to pressure, an electrician, knew well that crooked policemen's tactics depended on the skilled cultivation of fear. He maintained that they tended to prey on older merchants schooled in an age when bribery was so normal that no one would have dared to refuse. He himself refused to play along, preferring to turn the tables on the importunate officers by making them nervous instead. Once, when a policeman told him to "give these lads a coffee," he mockpretended-this was a double bluff-to understand the request quite literally but, instead of treating them to a real coffee, handed the officer a 50,ooo-lire note and told him, "I don't have time ... [but] I'm treating you to a coffee!" This pointed response, a play on everyone's shared understanding of what "a coffee" really meant, was the perfect defense against future harassment.
One can also simply refuse to give corrupt officials an opening. Another bar proprietor pointed out that whereas one of his neighbors had an illegal collection of flowerpots out on a balcony and was frequently embroiled in threats and arguments as a result, but never got fined by the police, he himself preferred not to engage in such obvious challenges to a venal authority and so, for example, he avoided putting out tables on the sidewalk in what is a common act of defiance against public ordinances. At this point in our conversation, he cast his eye around seeking examples of trivial infractions-some dirt on the floor, his waitress daughter's uncovered hair: these would not get him into trouble because his otherwise detached comportment gave the officials no purchase and the fines could not be large enough to prompt him to become more cooperative.
But the request for "a coffee" is a different matter. The implications of an actual cup of coffee can also be metonymic in a more than verbal sense; they may be the prelude to larger forms of extortion, lampooned with ironic precision in the electrician's contemptuous gesture. He called the crooked cops' bluff; but others are not so canny, usually because they do not know their rights and dread the consequences of a protracted tussle with the bureaucracy. The miscreants initially act with what can only be described as decidedly civil manners, showing both consideration for the proprietor's situation and a pedantic legalism-both fearful weapons of polite, indirect, but unmistakable extortion.
In a classic operation, for example, the officers, having extracted that first cup of coffee or