Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [92]
Such occurrences are in any case very rare. In this instance, the woman was soon out of jail and returned to live in the district, fully at ease with her nasty reputation and with the neighbors' resentment; indeed, she needed that reputation in order to enforce payment by her customers. She nevertheless also represented a necessary evil, she was local, and she evidently continued to provide her dangerous services for those desperate enough to accept them. In this sense she exemplified the fundamental paradox of usury: it is particularly heinous to profit from the miseries of those who are socially closest, be they kin or neighbors, but it is precisely over these same people that usurers can exercise the greatest degree of social and moral pressure even as they present themselves as friends who have come to the rescue in a moment of dire need.'
Usurers are nothing if not practical. If they know that their debtors are unable to pay but scent the possibility of a reasonably profitable compromise, they can sometimes be induced to accept such an arrangement; this usually entails renegotiating the deadline for repayment. A couple who ran a bar expanded their business and opened a restaurant; lacking both experience and financial knowledge, however, they immediately plunged into debt. As their situation worsened and they approached more and more usurers in order to pay off existing debts, it seemed as though they would never be able to reverse the spiraling collapse of their fortunes. One of the usurers, a Gypsy from a family of well-known criminals with alleged connections to Sicilian mafiosi,' had a ferocious reputation that he enhanced with threats of kidnapping children and setting fire to homes; another, a drug addict with mincing steps and heavy gold jewelry, simply told stories of his crimes without directly threatening his debtors at all. The couple became desperate, fearing for their lives as well as for their economic survival. But a brother-in-law intervened, with the help of a lawyer who profited by getting the entire clan of Gypsy moneylenders as clients, a very lucrative arrangement); they brought all the moneylenders to the table with the distraught couple, and the brother-in-law agreed to help settle the debt-but on his terms, which meant the return of the original loan plus the compound interest to date, but without any further interest payments. The creditors agreed because they saw that this was the only way they would be able to make any money at all out of the situation hand they gained an adroit lawyer in the process). The couple eventually went into partnership with the brother-in-law; he also borrowed money to advance their now-joint business, but on far better terms-from several friends, including a prostitute who-like many of her older colleagues in Monti-saw financial generosity as a way of buying friendship and compensating for her fallen status; and a cousin mother's sister's son), who was willing to help for reasons of kinship and affection. The brother-in-law's hard-nosed approach had saved the entire family from ruin, while his affluent local contacts allowed them to improve their fortunes dramatically from then on.
The Cultivation of Fear
Usurers generally keep a low profile. They rely on their victims to be complicit in maintaining their relative invisibility, as they, too, have too much to lose through the exposure of their indebtedness. The very difficulty I experienced in trying to elicit information about usury in the district signified, not the absence of such practices has some residents rather defensively claimed), but the presence of fear-fear of social ostracism, fear of a loss of social as well as financial credibility, fear of violent responses to any kind of exposure. An official of an artisans' union said that the victims of usury experienced it as shameful, much