Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [86]
In some ways, these temporalities are not unlike those of the Roman kitchen, in which a sense of precise but embodied timing, based on experience rather than formal recipes, is valued over abstract calculation and complicated ingredients. What matters is less whether an action is slow or fast than whether the actor is able to bend and shape the timing enough to demonstrate effective control over it.32 Romans take enormous pride in the simplicity of their cuisine, attributing this feature to the deprivations suffered under papal rule; but that simplicity also serves, like a humble or unsophisticated manner of speech, to frame and emphasize the timing that bespeaks dexterity and wit. A simple dish of parboiled chicory, rapidly fried with garlic and chili in an extremely hot, heavy pan (padella), is significantly known to locals as cicoria ripassata-that is, the vegetable has been rapidly "passed through" the hot oil, and mistiming can result in a flaccid mess rather than the crisp and spicy delicacy that this dish should be. Coffee, too, is all about timing; not for the Roman barista the clocks and beepers of the American coffee chain stores, but a public performance of instinctual dexterity amidst a host of other tasks and social graces, the latter including a stream of witty, ironic conversation. These transient but intense pleasures help us understand the embodied and serendipitous opportunism of Roman life more generally and remind us that in legal life, too, a good performance in and out of court may count for far more than a knowledgeable but dull reading of legal prescriptions. All social transactions, legal and illegal, entail the playful but consequential manipulation of tempo.
Usurers exemplify this temporal creativity. Ostensibly intent on holding their clients to precise payment schedules, they actually stretch and pull these schedules when that seems the likeliest way to regain their loans and collect the promised interest. Since time is theologically a divine property, to calculate realistic rhythms of debt repayment marks usury as an offense against religious as well as secular law. But usurers, who are already considered lost to eternal perdition, are unlikely to entertain qualms about such a detail.
When illegal actions meet legal practice, moreover, the play of rhythm and timing can extend over surprisingly long stretches of expiation and self-exculpation. Charged with usury when his associates deserted him and absconded with most of the money, the manager of an informal rotating credit association initially tried to get his trial postponed in the hope of a timely amnesty, although, when it became clear that this was not about to happen, he decided that a couple of million lire would be an acceptable punishment. When I sympathetically observed that the collapse was hardly his own fault, he replied with practical stoicism and striking candor, "I know. But these things are illegal"-that is, in the eyes of the state, which now had no choice but to prosecute, since the collapse had made the original illegality of the rotating credit arrangement too visible to be ignored according to the usual compromise. This man's sense of pragmatic calculation excluded fighting a hopeless battle on indefensible grounds, no matter how supportive the moral judgment of local observers might have been. But then he began to hope again, at least for a measure of relief, thinking that the pope's Jubilee call for clemency might help him. There was even a chance that the left-wing parties would