Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [161]
Not all such visits are so courteous. An elderly greengrocer, who calculated that he also spent between 7,000 and io,ooo lire a week on beggars who regularly dropped into his shop, would have to put up with the depredations of an officer of the city force who took between 30,000 and 50,000 lire's worth of fruit and vegetables each week without even pretending to offer payment. The greengrocer did not dare to object; had he done so, he claims, the policeman would have sent colleagues from a different section of town, and the newcomers would have been sure to find any number of minor but punishable infractions: a missing price label, a can past the expiry date, a box that was not quite properly sealed. And for each of three or four such infractions there would have been a fine of roughly four or five times the entire value of the original policeman's weekly plunder from the store.
If a storekeeper or bar proprietor fails to get the point, harassment will continue until there is no more room for doubt. Even when the time granted is no more than the moments between the police officers' opening gambit and capitulation, a similar process of persuasion obtains: a ruminative stare gives way to the observation that there are infractions here aplenty, then the officers carefully stage a suggestive pause, to be succeeded by repeated expressions of consternation as more small illegalities emerge under their investigative eye. If even this has no effect, punitive fines are not far behind. Some say that those in the various food trades and goldsmith-jewelers are especially subject to this kind of pressure.
But bribery? What bribery? The vigili were simply, they would shrug, following through on the evidence they had found in the first place. Matters turned out to be even worse than they had expected, so they imposed the full weight of punishment provided by the law. But if the storekeeper shows respect and understanding, it becomes clear that there never was any infraction; everything has been arranged, between friends: the transaction is warmly civil rather than coldly civic. The tempi of citizen and bureaucrat sometimes coalesce in such seductively matched rhythms of common interest, dramatized in the common spectacle of police of various kinds ordering coffee in a local bar and having their patently insincere offers of payment waved away with the careful insouciance that bespeaks intelligent risk management. It is perhaps not coincidental that in music, and perhaps most notably in opera, the stylish delaying of tempo is itself described as a form of theft (rubato).
Some officers are themselves poor players. When the right-wingers in the Piazzetta club appealed to the carabinieri to arrest an immigrant who had struck a child playing ball in front of the church, and to take more generic action against the entire group of immigrants filling the square, they were dubious about getting results. This was not for any lack of political sympathy; the local carabinieri are visibly hostile to the immigrants and convinced that they, along with wandering Gypsies, are responsible for virtually all the petty crime in the area. But in a previous year, during one of the October festivals, a senior officer had supposedly helped himself to twenty sandwiches and then sent his daughter to get more; the club officials told him that he was welcome to eat but that he could not remove the sandwiches by the sackful.