Thursday, April 01, 2010

All it takes is time

Sometimes here in Sicily one simply has to be patient. When we first got here, and before I settled on Lilo and Loredonna as my usual purveyors of fruit and vegetables, occasionally I would go to a small street side ortofruttica at the circle in the Perriera section of Sciacca.

As an American, indeed, as a foreigner here, with very limited language skills, I was always afraid that someone would try to cheat me. I was afraid that someone like the car dealer who did not honor his guarantee on my Fiat Barchetta would do something like not honor the guarantee he gave me on the car. He was the first example I had of someone who wanted to take advantage of me. Thankfully, the salesman did treat me well, and fixed the car for me out of his own pocket. The dealer went bankrupt a year ago, and the former salesman now is manager of a different dealership. Funny how things work out, eh?

Then there was the fruit and vegetable dealer at the traffic circle. One time, when I was only getting one item, I think it was mushrooms, he tried to charge me based on the price in Lira (without three zeros) instead of in Euros. That means he was trying to charge me double. I complained, and he showed me the price in Lira, and I showed him the price in Euros. He told me that euros and Lira were the same without the euros. I pointed to the other examples of where the price in Euros was half the price in Lira (discounting the euros). After five minutes of litigation, and several customers putting their purchases down and walking away, he finally gave me the correct change. It was only a difference of a euro or two, but I did not want to be cheated by him.

A few weeks later, on our way home, Fran said she needed to buy some celery, so we stopped there. When she returned to the car, she said she thought she had been overcharged. She was right. Again it was a matter of only a euro or two. She wanted to go back so we could argue with the guy. I told her that I had gone that route once, and I had a different idea. We started telling everyone we knew that the guy was a cheat, and mistreated people from other countries. When they asked, we told them about our experiences.

A few weeks later, he came up to me on the street, and told me that he had heard that I was saying he was dishonest. I told him it was true, and told him why. He said I should have come back and gotten the correct change, and I told him that I had done that once, and the second time could not have been a mistake. He told me that he did not like me talking about him the way I had been, and I told him that I did not like the way he tried to cheat people. We left it at that.

Today I read in the paper that he had filed for bankruptcy two years ago, and the courts held yesterday that the bankruptcy was fraudulent, that he did indeed have the money to pay some of the bills he was trying to avoid, that he owed creditors and the courts fifty thousand euros (that would be one hundred million lira), as well as a fine of five thousand euros (ten million lira), and court costs. In addition, he was sentenced to four years of reclusion (that usually means two years in jail and two years of house arrest, which may be reduced by one third for good behavior).

Oh my, what goes around comes around. I wonder if I should now ask him for the one or two euros that he cheated Fran out of. After all, that would be two or three thousand lira.

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