Don't You Have Any Donkeys in Your Country?

I want to express my thoughts about the guilt the man who keeps saying "I'm disgraced," is feeling. Personally, the only thing I think that he did wrong was try to help the rug collector buy the supposedly priceless rug from the donkey's back for a cheap price. Instead, he (for some reason) feels guilty about losing to the peasant when the peasant takes the blanket off the donkey's back before giving the donkey to the two men. The "disgraced" man says, on the first page (before we hear the background story), that he himself made a man buy a mangy donkey for 2,500 liras. However, he was actually fighting on the opposite side and trying to get the rug trader a lower price for the donkey and therefore for the rug. He thought he was doing the right thing at the time when he was bargaining with the donkey seller. Also, he didn't gain any money for himself through the deal and he wasn't urging the rug trader to buy the donkey for a high price so he actually didn't do anything that i would personally consider wrong or immoral. He must be a very, very, scrupulous, selfless, and easily guilted man for such a small part in an unfair trade to cause him to twist the facts and blame himself. In the end, it was the rug trader's greed and sly tactics that caused him to pay 2,500 liras for a donkey that was about to kick the bucket; it was in no way the so-called "disgraced" man's fault that the rug trader wasted such an apparantly large sum of money. And hey-the rug trader did get a valuable stake out of the bargain!