By Salvatore Difalco
Under the pergola, wooden planks
between two buckets served as
a table. The Mussolini lookalike
sat on a stool, bald head in hands.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
He shrugged, said nothing,
but a sigh and shoulder drop
dramatized his resignation
to something undisclosed.
I wanted to dig deeper
into the whys and wherefores
but knew it was a danger.
The man was kind and generous
to a tee until he was not
and then he could turn into
a cat from the Assassin’s Creed.
Still, he had married my
mother and I owed a debt
of thanks to him for saving her
from terminal loneliness.
“Eat this fig,” he said of a sudden,
producing the plump green fruit
shed from the towering fig tree
my late father had planted.
Every winter he would bury it
and dig it up in late spring. But this
guy didn’t know a fig from
Adam and claimed they were mealy.
In honour of my father,
I took the fig and bit.
Far from mealy, it was juicy
and sweet and made me smile.
“They taste funny,” the man said.
Don’t you think they taste funny?”
The only thing funny to me was
the absolute roundness of his head.
My Sicilian father would have thought
these figs were as good as any
he had every grown. But who was I
to balk at his Milanese replacement?
I closed my eyes and finished the fig.
I thought I heard my mother call me,
Bello! Bello! and opened my eyes.
But alas, she was calling Mussolini.
—
Salvatore Difalco is a Sicilian Canadian poet and storyteller. His work appears in a number of print and online journals.