The fellow at the table to the left of me is animated, not really loud, his voice, at this moment, to me, filling the space between a restaurant and it’s patrons.
“You’re having trouble making payments on the loan the last government borrowed, your borrowing costs jump to record levels. The financial class pay a fraction of what the masses pay for credit. That’s the genius of these rating agencies!”
At a cafe at a train station in southern Sicily, a beautiful beach town with a Greek temple down the road, it’s 1984, and I’m waiting for my cousins, Lilia and Vito.
I sit and listen to these two people seated to the left of me: a good looking blonde, a well dressed woman, a business type, sexy, and what looks like a bum: She’s shaking her leg back and forth, he’s sitting flat footed, across from me. This guy is dirty, soiled, his dirty face clean shaven, he’s dark like my Pop, tall for a Sicilian, his hair wild, his black eyes darting around the table as he gesticulates and riffs away in a herky jerky dialect, interspersed with musical Italian, and she smokes and nods. I don’t know what he’s talking about very much: words, phrases, no ideas though, I listen anyway.
He says: The rating agencies. Insiders/outsiders, all over the world, it’s the same, an insiders’ game a crap shoot, with other peoples’ money and other peoples’ lives!”
She asks: “So where is this going?”
He says: “The money to be made is in creating debt. Private profit, and public debt.”
She says: “Which you call financial feudalism.”
He says: “Yes. A ruling class that rules through greed.”
She asks: “So where is this going?”
He says: “For me, it’s giving up greed.”
She asks: “Which means?”
He says: “Compassion!”
“As simple as that?”
“Yes, seeing the other.”
“So now you’re Saint Francis?
“A legend come to life?”
“And your purpose?”
“Well, I’ve sort of gone psycho, punishing myself for my greed and the broken lives I’ve left behind with my actions, so that’s the trip for me, how much of what I owe, the spirit of the man I want to be, how much can I achieve through good works?”
Cousin Lilia, draped in a red dress, her black hair tied back, glides in, adding her light touch to this moment. Lilia, in English, to me:” I hope you didn’t eat. ” She looks at her watch, then turns to the bum: “Sal, how are you, you great soul? Come by! I have some things for you. Say hello to your cousin from California!”
“I hate Ronald Reagan,” he says to me in English, and we all laugh.