Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [62]
Power, like sin, is a burden of the human condition, its corrupting presence rooted in the city's streets and buildings. In Monti, the old printing press, one street away from the spray-painted attack on the Christian Democrats, produced the paper money of the Bank of Italy until scandal abruptly ended operations. Despite its ignominious end, the press holds an honored place in residents' affections. One friend, who moved away from the district but was constantly seeking to return, proudly showed me a chair with the faint mark of the factory still on it, sold off when the firm collapsed and kept as a relic of Monti's past. Today the old printing works again bears the mark of Cain. It was put up for sale; but then, suspended in mid-transaction, it languished for a few months under official seal, because its ownership was under investigation by the Anti-Mafia Commission. No one knows exactly how this came about; no one seems to know when the seal was removed. The official notice of suspension of the sale disappeared long before work on the building resumed. Evidently nothing-of course, the neighbors nod, what did you expect?-was found against the owners, and the sale eventually went ahead. The old factory thus serves as an ominous reminder of the irrepressible and familiar undertow of evil, leaching perpetually into the operations of ecclesiastical, state, and civic management.
Most suspect that the impending sale of the building was intended to launder-or "recycle," as the process is locally called-dirty money. Nobody in the locality actually knows that this is the case. Nor, more generally, can anyone be sure that any of those flashily dressed real estate speculators operating in the area are true underworld figures, as all suspect. Suspicion is nevertheless informed-if not by facts, then by the recognition of mafia-style politeness whenever and wherever it appears, whether as elaborate manners and ostentatious dress or as the aggressive acquisition and restructuring of once working-class apartments or industrial property as elegant homes for the wealthy and privileged. The assumption of underworld involvement is a self-fulfilling conspiracy theory.
But residents still reserve their greatest anger for the churches and confraternities. An elderly gentleman, facing eviction from his house by a religious order, spluttered with fury at the priests' "terrible commerce" (commercio terribile): "For mortality they want money, for marriages they want money, for baptisms they want money!" And the supposedly secular state colludes: "And the state doesn't care in the least because those guys are priests and they are the ones who give the orders." Angry graffiti proclaim that "[the] Vatican evicts." The city authorities, in particular, play a double game, deflecting and even amplifying anger against the ecclesiastical powers and occasionally sending letters of solidarity and protests while, through inaction, protecting their own cordial relationship with the Vatican. This in turn enables the church to protect its interests and its ability to operate without constraint and enhances a sense of fear and helplessness that further deflects all but the most courageous critics. As in the terrestrial world, so too in the spiritual: the same local entities that are responsible for administering the material dimensions of Rome's sacred geography also control the sites of possible contact between the mundane and the divine, its holiness refracted into multiple hues and intensities like light through the shimmering patina of a twisted piece of old glass through the multiplicity of holy relics, body parts emblematic