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By Root 596 0

his brother-in-law, a policeman, to show up in uniform and represent himself as authorized to evict the tenant, an elderly woman living alone. She did not know enough to challenge the imposing presence of a uniformed representative of the law. Because the primary victims are the elderly, the less well-educated, and more generally those who do not know their rights, there is a pitiless, self-fulfilling quality about the neoliberal speculators' and real estate agents' claims that they are upgrading the neighborhood: the weak do not so much go to the wall as get tossed carelessly outside it.

In all these operations, knowledgeable operators play on the fears of those who lack the necessary information. They also play on a profound reluctance to involve the official authorities in any local matter. Those who feel cheated are able, and indeed are technically supposed, to file a complaint (denuncia) about threatening behavior or other kinds of pressure; indeed, without such a document, the authorities will not act, because the law very clearly places the responsibility on the citizen to initiate proceedings. This, once again, reflects the practical implications of a model of inherited sin; in the days of the Inquisition, those who were caught deliberately failing to file a denuncia against any practitioner of magic or similar heresies were denied the confessional and thus the only available means of relieving their consciences of the burden of even the most trivial of their own sins.7

Filing a denuncia is thus a historically resonant, formal requirement of law; the consequence of failing to do so is a complete refusal by the authorities to take further action. But in practice it is viewed as antisocial and uncivil; older residents in particular speak harshly of those who report any but the most outrageous legal infractions. Even a relatively young and supposedly left-wing resident picked a quarrel with a friend who reported someone else's infractions to the police, ostensibly on the grounds that such acts play into the hands of the law-and-order state bureaucracy, but in reality-so it is alleged-because the critic, too, finds it convenient to maintain a social pact that tolerates his own minor infractions. All citizens share the inheritance of generic wickedness, but ultimately the decision-to denounce or not to denounce-rests with the individual. Conscience, here in the sense of knowing one's civic duty, only manifests itself through the specific act of filing a complaint, much as the "contrition" entailed in reciting prayers before the Virgin's divine image is only knowable from the performance itself; failure to denounce, like all socially acceptable sin, may make everyday life easier, but, at least in theory, it locks the citizen in the purgatory of blockage maintained by the power structure.

On the other hand, it reflects a practical awareness of the limits of official power as well. When a car near our house was vandalized (one of several such incidents, it turned out), a small crowd of local artisans gathered to debate whether they should do anything about what they had seen. A carpenter described it as "an act of disrespect" dun dispetto) of the kind that one might expect from a mafioso. Then a friend of the owner rode up on his motorbike and said that, although a purse had been stolen from the car, he did not think it was intended primarily either as a theft or as an act of underworld reprisal but was simply a commonplace case of vandalism. It struck me as interesting that the owner's friend had arrived so easily and so rapidly at this conclusion, but it would have been impossible to decipher what lay behind his glib response. The carpenter had already insisted that the locals should file a report; otherwise, he said, the authorities lay the blame on those who have failed in their duty as citizens. When a resident fails to report a burglary, he said later, the police may suspect a scam-such silence can be truly damning. But the ironworker who shared a workshop with him demurred: "What's the use?" he grumbled, disdainfully.