Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [90]
CHAPTER SIX
Scandals of Sociability
sury represents one source of the hidden viciousness that occasionally disrupts the social pleasures of Monti life. Once the territory of minor underworld clans, Monti began to open up to much more powerful sources of crime, notably the global drug trade, from the i95os on. The massive anti-corruption drives of the early 199os weakened the remaining areas of local reciprocity without necessarily defeating the protection rackets that continued to thrive. Throughout these changes the presence and exploitation of fear have persisted. And it is this fear that partly explains the relative invisibility, amid the sun-drenched monuments and shaded alleys of Monti, of the considerable suffering that organized crime has brought in its train.
Usury, for example, is a hidden presence in Monti; some residents might be surprised at the prominence I give it here. But the surreptitiousness of its local presence and the way in which it feeds on idioms of social relationship and temporal control illuminate the production of fear in the most intimate spaces of social life. Usurers represent both an evil and a need; as such, they emblematize, in an extreme and sometimes terrifying guise, the dilemmas and paradoxes that all Monticiani face.
Friends Who Strangle
Usurers have an extraordinarily ugly reputation. They are known as strozzini stranglers) and cravattari from cravatta, necktie, apparently because they can draw a debtor's pocket tightly just as one ties a necktie around one's neck), and they are ubiquitous in Rome, where, as an electrician said, "there's an ocean of them!" They are feared, but they are also known. Most people go to moneylenders who operate at an extremely local level; it is hard to track down usurers except through word of mouth among trusted friends, and the usurers themselves prefer to find clients whose reputations for economic solvency they can hold hostage to local public opinion. To be known as a chronic debtor is socially calamitous. It also initiates an ineluctable, endless downward spiral as each new failure of solvency forecloses other sources of loans and even of moral support; the usurers themselves, among whom there is what one commentator called "an iron pact," will conspire to discredit a chronic defaulter socially, punishing the hapless artisan or small merchant in exemplary fashion as a warning to others.
Suicide is often the only escape from such crushing debt. Such was the fate of one bar proprietor and manager of a football fan club. This entrepreneur ran a rotating credit association and accepted as pawn articles of value that belonged to members who were unable to pay their regular quotas; he then sold off these objects at prices considerably below their market value,' finding local customers with ease. He was able to do this under the very noses of the tax police, the Guardia di Finanza. Its agents would come to check on his cash register-ironically, they did once discover that it was issuing receipts without recording the amounts and fined him 5,5oo,ooo lire for an infraction of which he had probably been completely unaware!-and reportedly overlooked, or did not care to understand, the evidence before them that he was simultaneously running an illegal abut frequently tolerated~ type of operation; his members would be brazenly writing up the association's accounts while the tax inspectors were still checking on the cash register. Even this operation, however, did not rescue him from his own growing debts, so he in turn, having exploited the economic distress of some weaker