Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [165]
The anger is real, and potentially dangerous; but it still rarely entails serious violence. Indeed, even when an immigrant attacked a child in the main square, the collective response was to call in the authorities, and to declaim at length about the iniquities of drunken immigrants spreading garbage around a place the locals had worked hard to pedestrianize and reclaim for their own social needs, or to accuse the newcomers of dealing in drugs and promoting prostitution. Direct violence is far closer to the surface in the less salubrious suburbs, where official brutality-in the form of the cracked heads and sudden fires that accompany forced evictions-sets a dangerous example; there, too, it sometimes takes the form of exemplary punishments administered by the henchmen of disgruntled loan sharks. But in Monti, where the distant echo of such interventions is usually enough to keep people more or less in line, and where on the other hand the visibility that comes with a central location does act as a brake on the most direct forms of violence, it is easy to imagine that it could never occur.
The fear is no less real for being largely generated by hints and indirect threats, sometimes in vaguely worded nocturnal telephone calls. When local residents complain that they have been offered assistance in moving or subject to less subtle pressure by mysterious people with Sicilian or Neapolitan accents, or when unidentified people without visiting cards and glaring expressions profess only to be interested in coming to a friendly agreement with residents, conspiracy theories invoking southern underworlds easily come to the fore. This is fertile ground for the stereotypes that constitute the basis of internal prejudice in Italy. Some residents insist that they know these people are underworld thugs. They claim, for example, that the arrival of aggressive women loudly describing what they plan to do with the apart ments when they move in is a classic mafia tactic. Others, more mildly, remark that strange men who sport expensive and gaudy cars and clothes and hint at powerful backers are probably mafiosi, but that it would never be possible to prove as much. Others again insist that such claims are nonsense, that they have never heard of serious threats or people with suspicious accents, and that in any case none of the major real estate firms would dare soil their reputations in so obvious a fashion. Was this an accurate representation, wishful thinking, or the defense of local cultural pride? There appears to be no clear answer, and the very idea has little more substance than a smoker's worried puff into which one might perhaps read the form of a question mark.
Lawyers and Illegalities
It is this besetting vagueness itself that creates unsettling fears of revealing too much. An elderly lady whose lawyer, she said, was working on getting her lease extended refused to tell me her current rent, which was presumably very low: "these are secret matters," she remarked, as she now faced eviction to some undesirable suburb. The need to introduce lawyers into the equation suggests a delicate operation in which tenants try to get the best deal they can; secrecy is important since proprietors presumably do not want any concessions they might make to specific tenants to become a precedent for further retreats from their capital accumulation.
Nor are the lawyers always quite what they seem. Two young women with little money who were far from home were living in a Monti apartment when the owner, who was paying