On the Economy
Servicemembers and diplomats have a turn of phrase that they employ to describe the experience of living among the locals of a foreign country: living "on the economy." Essentially, it means that you transact with, rent from, buy from, consult with, and are medically attended to by shopkeepers, landlords, doctors, and dentists, et cetera who are part of the local economy and may or may not speak English. ("Did you buy a car from someone on base?" "No, we had to buy a shitheap on the economy from a thief of a car dealer.") Living on the economy reminds you that being abroad for a long period of time is no vacation: you're living in a different country with different ways of doing things, and tasks that would otherwise be easy, or at least comprehensible, become much more difficult. This manifests in ways both big and small. Small: wanting a cupcake tin and realizing you don't know the names of any home goods stores, or even how to say "cupcake" in Italian. Big: buying a used car from an Italian dealer and having that car break down on the highway.
I've struggled to write about buying our car, because frankly it was very difficult, and just trying to chronicle the experience reignites my RAGE. Per farla breve, or at least kind of breve: We had no car initially, which meant Josh was shlepping to the base using a combination of the metro system (unreliable) and the airport bus (actually kind of fine, but not super cheap), then walking the mile or so from the airport to his office. After a few weeks of this utterly debilitating soul-sucking misery, we rented a snazzy little Renault Clio that we instantly loved and wanted very much to buy. The car rental clerk said the company wouldn’t sell us the car but that we could potentially take out a long-term lease, and that she would ask her colleagues to get in touch with us. For some reason, we weren’t allowed to call them — they had to call us, like some kind of bizarro Broadway audition. Several days passed with zero contact from the rental service, even though I inquired almost daily with the clerk at the base. (This was one of our first introductions to a very irritating and seemingly very Italian phenomenon: why the frickety frack, when someone is ASKING to give you their money, would you not do the work to take it from them? Why was no one calling me to arrange the lease? Why? Why?) Anyway, they never called, and we needed a permanent vehicle.
One common way of purchasing a vehicle here, if you are associated with the military, is to buy it from someone who is selling their car through the Armed Forces Italy (AFI) system. This is a separate car registration system for all vehicles driven by military and related personnel. AFI to AFI sales are pretty easy, insofar as the vehicle is already registered with the system and the paperwork is relatively minimal. However. The supply of cars, particularly automatics, is very dependent on the time of year. If a lot of people are moving out of Naples — PCSing, aka permanent change of station — then typically there are many cars for sale, and people are anxious to offload them before they move. Unfortunately, when we relocated, it was a PCS dry spell and there were very few automatic cars for sale, and the two that we saw were immediately snapped up.
At this point, we were several weeks into our rental, which we could either extend for another month, thereby depriving any future children of their inheritance, or look to buy a car on the economy, which is to say, buying a car from a dealer in Naples. If you buy a car on the economy, you essentially need to "import" the car into the AFI system. There’s a lot of complicated paperwork to do that, so we would be advantaged by working with the small network of Italian dealers who typically sell to base personnel, know about the military system, and also speak English. Also, we needed a small (read: Italian) car because our dedicated parking spot in our building is about the size of a postage stamp. We ended up buying a used Lancia Ypsilon, which, judging from how many we see zipping by on the road here, is very popular in southern Italy. The car is supposedly a 2018 model but the dashboard is more like 2002. It's a manual masquerading as an automatic. When you release the brake the car tends to roll backward a little. And the engine makes a growling noise, like a low stirring from a huge grumpy dog. I call the car Lance Bass.
One morning, I got a phone call from Josh less than 10 minutes after he had left for work, informing me that he was now on the shoulder of the tangenziale because Lance Bass had suddenly stalled out. The car had just enough juice to stutter its way to the shoulder but now Josh was stranded.
Oh my god. NOW WHAT?
I immediately started scouring the military Facebook groups for mechanic recommendations. The posts were basically two categories: 1. Go here, but they either don't speak English, are more than 45 minutes from our neighborhood, or both. 2. Don't go here, which included several warnings about the dealer who sold us our car. The more I read, the more I filled with boiling, incandescent fury. Our car was a 2018 model! It was not that old! It should have just been serviced! What the actual hell had the dealer done to the car! And what kind of rotten lemon had he sold us! RAGE, RAGE AGAINST THE DYING OF THE CAR!
While I was angry-crying on the couch, Josh had called our insurance representative, who activated the towing service and recommended a mechanic he trusted, someone about a 10 minutes' drive from our apartment. Since we had no other practical options, Josh rode along with the tow guys — who were actually faster than AAA — to the mechanic. The insurance rep provided translation over the phone and the mechanic indicated that Lance Bass (okay, he didn't actually say "Lance Bass") would be ready in a few days.
I won't even get into how we never ended up getting the temporary car rental that the insurance was supposed to cover, mainly due to extreme difficulty of communication.
Over the next 72 hours I gradually disintegrated into a blob with nothing left but panda eyes and a racing pulse, trapped in a spiral of stress-induced insomnia:
1. How were we supposed to get an update on the car and when it would be ready for pickup? I have a really hard time understanding Italian over the phone, especially if someone has a Napoletano accent. The insurance guy had moved on from our case.
2. What was the problem with the car? Was it the engine? The engine oil? The carburetor? (Did it even have a carburetor? Also, how do you pronounce "carburetor"?) And why the hell did the car growl? Was that because of some other undiagnosed problem with this utter poop heap of a car? Could we trust the mechanic? What if he lied to us and said it was fixed when it wasn't?
3. Why hadn't I done more research about car dealers in the area? Why didn't I ask more people for dealer ideas? Why didn't I push the car rental people more so we could take out a long-term lease?
4. [unprintable rage thoughts about the car dealer]
5. Was the car going to just break down again? What if it broke down when we were really far from home or somewhere remote?
6. Why had we moved to Naples?
Every so often the voice of reason would pipe up faintly from under the stress blob that was slowly suffocating all rational thought to remind me that everything would eventually be solved, we would get the car back, car trouble is normal, this would be good material for the blog. But the truth was — this was hard. Living abroad, on the economy, can be hard. Does living in Italy seem romantic? Yes. Is traveling around Europe an incredible perk? Also yes. Won't it be fun to be that annoying person who will talk for decades about the 24 months they lived overseas? Probably yes! But it also means that trouble is exponentially more troublesome and the feeling of isolation deepens when you can't solve problems in your own language.
Josh asked a helpful Italian neighbor to pretend to be our cousin and call the mechanic for an update and to find out how much everything would cost. The car would be ready the next day (which raises the query, would they have called us with this news? Answer: don't think about it), so we arranged to pick it up as soon as possible. When we arrived at the garage, the mechanic gave us the repair quote and said something about the "fattura" and did we want it?
Me ::totally blank face::
Mechanic: something something fattura something
Me ::still blank::
The mechanic called the insurance guy to translate.
Insurance rep: He is asking if you want an invoice or not.
Me: Huh? Why wouldn't we want the invoice?
Insurance guy: Because then it costs more.
Me: Costs more than...the receipt? What he quoted us? What?
Insurance guy: You know. More official. Costs more.
Finally the penny dropped and I realized "more official" meant "if he issues an invoice, he has to actually declare the transaction to the tax authorities, so if you don't ask for the invoice, he won't charge the 22% VAT."
Ah, Italy! Land of Tomatoes and Tax Evasion. Living on the economy indeed.
The mechanic explained that the problem was the engine oil, which was apparently the wrong kind, and that he had also replaced what we took to be the spark plugs. To my disappointment, Lance Bass still growled when we turned it on, but the mechanic assured us that the sound was totally normal (OR WAS IT) and we drove off.
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This all occurred over two months ago, and it's taken me almost that entire time to get past the writer's block and start documenting our life here again. Some other difficult things occurred that were also lonely and isolating (everything is fine now) — stark reminders that living abroad, however romantic and ideal and aspirational, doesn't mean that you suddenly shed all your previous anxieties and insecurities. Josh likes to remind me that "wherever you go, there you are," and it's true. But it also means that there is infinite potential for resiliency, and silver linings, and being able to say, "remember that time our car broke down on the highway in Italy?"