Evicted From Eternity: The Restructuring of Modern Rome by Michael Herzfeld

Author:Michael Herzfeld
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: History
ISBN: 9780226329123
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2009-03-30T07:26:18+00:00

Uncivil Pleasantries, Unpleasant Civilities

A decidedly left-wing bar proprietor loved to bait police officers who, he thought, were harassing Ukrainians and other immigrants. His establishment thus became a gathering place for some of these victims of police intolerance-a source of profit that did not go unnoticed by detractors wishing to impugn the purity of his motives. He and his wife did also recognize some individual Albanians as known troublemakers, and would preemptively put "reserved" signs on all the tables-which at least discriminated against them as individuals rather than as immigrants-in-general.

This man was often extremely belligerent, especially toward figures of official authority. He attributed his stance both to his past as a left-wing street fighter and to his masculine and working-class identity. Yet the practical compromises that he made in excluding certain suspect customers, as well as the general assumption that his kindness to immigrants was actually good for his business, were examples of an operating modality that was perfectly comprehensible to his neighbors, perhaps more so than his sometimes flamboyant displays of aggression. Those, in fact, occasionally put the business at risk, much to his wife's visible annoyance. He got into a serious fight with an unknown man for insulting my wife during the New Year's festivities in 2000. He had told the man, rather politely, to "take his hands off" my wife and "let the matter go" and had received a powerful punch in the nose in response. Our two wives and I had to hang on to him with all our strength; he roared that he would kill the aggressor and afterward, when his wife tried to clean up his bloodied face, told her to go home on her own and that she should not have prevented him from going after the other man: "I can't stand you any more! Get out of here!" When I remonstrated that I too had helped to restrain him, with ironic courtesy he pointed out that I, after all, was not his wife-who, a convenient scapegoat for his failure to exact immediate and condign vengeance, could now be excoriated for saving him from humiliating himself further. "She comes from a working-class district" just as he did, he argued, so she should have understood how he was feeling.

The Pugliese bar proprietor muted his masculinity more carefully and tempered it with a more deliberate display of tolerance, perhaps because he had a much smaller establishment and thus much narrower economic margins. He was also more provincial in speech and manner, and thus had less cultural capital to squander. The performance of compromise and conformism is crucial to both economic and social survival, although the exact balance will depend on social status and other circumstances. Italian notions of civility exclude nonconformist actions, including even justifiable violence when the consensus opts for accommodation. In the past, behavior deemed to be antisocial led to isolation in a mental hospital and rejection by one's own family; it is still the subject of considerable anguish and social disruption.' The pressure

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