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By Root 508 0

no taxes and was violating their right of first refusal (as required by law), informed them that she was raising the rent and that they would therefore have to leave. Since they had no contractthe proprietress had preferred to remain officially in residence there, which also meant that they had been forced to retain their official domicile as their place of origin-they had only the weakest of cases. They could, said sympathetic friends, have filed an official complaint, either because the lease was made without a contract (and therefore constituted a form of tax evasion) or because they had in fact been threatened with violence. But the lawyer told them, "You are poor, for which reason you have no rights." The inference was clear: only through some further illegality such as bribery could the situation be resolved in their favor. Meanwhile, the friend thought, it seemed as though the lawyer was actually working in partnership with the proprietress. And socially, as the friend's partner observed, to make an official complaint would have been disastrous; with a single gesture or a glance among their neighbors, he added, they would have been completely isolated, marked as people who did not understand the tacit local interdiction against appealing to the authorities. Between the lawyer's cynicism about their poverty and the local avoidance of legal action, they were caught in a web of complicity that lends reality and urgency to the fears of many others who are similarly facing eviction.

The threats may also come in quite an official guise. One resident received a letter ordering him to remove his goods and his person from the apartment where he had lived for decades. The language was peremptory, cold, and final. He was initially keen to show me the letter. When I asked if I might copy the text, however, he was suddenly anxious, asking me not to use any identifying data that might betray his identity as the source-not, he assured me, because he was actually afraid of reprisals, but because, during his court appeal against eviction, he simply did not want to risk appearing to have gratuitously acted in any way the proprietors could use to win sympathy for their own actions. The letter itself appeared to cause him more indignation than fear. But the fact that he worried about what was ultimately a question of impression management shows that fear hovers around those areas in which people are uncertain about their rights.

This man was not afraid to serve, as I did, on a Monti Social Network committee whose task was to draw up a full list of eviction cases in the district and to explore both the possibilities for collective action and connections with activist groups working elsewhere in the city. In a context in which those tenants who consent to sign termination agreements often accept a gag order, however, he was clearly uneasy about the risks involved in speaking too specifically about his own case. Silence breeds further silence, enhancing proprietors' freedom to act with impunity; the committee was forced to recognize that its lists would always be incomplete because some residents, beset by fears as corrosive as they were inchoate, did not want to lend their names to any initiative at all. While their fear was certainly lesser than that of the victims of usury, its collective effect was somewhat similar: it sapped the will to collective, civic action, already weakened by those who had quickly accepted exit sweeteners (buonuscite)-arrangements with no legal status or contractual basis, which could therefore remain untaxed as long as the recipients were prepared to maintain their silence.

One resident who was prepared to hold out as long as necessary in order to get the best possible price herself worked for a real estate firm and probably knew how much traffic the system would bear. She eagerly provoked the representative of the company that now owned her building and was trying to evict her, mockingly challenging his claims about the huge sums he purportedly had paid others to leave. To his hectoring boasts-"Here people