Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [85]
For the church acknowledges as a microcosm of the divinely ordained universe the sacred geography of a parish, of which Rome as a whole is exemplary and of which individual parishes then serve as further refractions. That reproduction of the presence of the divine is further cemented by the devotion of each priest to the physical spaces of his parish. But those spaces are themselves both scarred and ornamented by the less devotionally motivated imperfections of all who dwell therein-and who rebuild as they dwell.
The principle of the indulgence is literally written in stone in Monti. Not only does the late-eighteenth-century inscription on Via Baccina still promise a reduced passage through Purgatory in exchange for penitential prayers, but the accumulated effects of the condono policy are visible at every turn: a bathroom stuck out on a balcony, windows that break the rhythm of a facade, pipes and cisterns on the outside of much older walls, the ubiquitous sproutings of umbrellas gaily marking the start of new abuses and disguising an enormously complicated calculus of risk and opportunity.
Calculations are precise; once, when I met an upholsterer dragging a heavy mattress along the street, he explained that using his car would have cost him too much in fines for illegal entry. But many fines are simply never paid. Unpaid fines are initially added to one's tax bill. If a citizen stalls too long, the authorities may show up and try to sequester the offender's more expensive goods, such as a television set, at which point the citizen pays up and the bailiffs go away again. But the citizen may also be in luck; the clerks who must transfer the information about unpaid fines to the tax office may dawdle too long, at which point the citizen is relieved of further worry by a generous statute of limitations.
This is a guessing game in which timing-the rhythm of response and action-is both crucial and unpredictable. The law is notoriously slow, and this fact creates some space for creative management. Bureaucrats, too, have their characteristic tempi, say the locals; indeed, a city policeman admitted that delaying procedures could be an effective way of extracting a present ~regalo~-that is, a bribe. A performance of choreographically staged footdragging and sudden alacrity also allows the bureaucrats' superiors to stay above the fray by "looking good, looking calm."
The concept of tempo as elaborated by Pierre Bourdieu is as relevant to the practical management of taxation and the administration of fines as it is to the study of flamboyant masculine performances.27 It is not by chance that Romans also use the term tempo, with its implications of musical style. While the city administration tried to convince its public that time was a matter of punctuality and efficiency, both necessary appurtenances of the new economic and civic order that these administrators envisioned, most Romans experienced-and connived in producing-delays, prevarications, and creative ways of buying time in the hope of fending off legal consequences indefinitely.28
Legal process bristles with examples of creative time management, both through the constant media reports of long delays in judicial process and in the minutiae of court practices.29 In a system in which some actors may be both legislators and suspected malefactors who create laws in anticipation of the possible future need to be able to use convenient loopholes, the legal culture would seem