My First Seven Years (Plus a Few More) by Dario Fo Page A

collection of houses was as big as a small town: an open space in the centre and on all four sides an enormous porticoed structure housing ten or more families. Women and children emerge from every corner and come charging over to Bristìn’s cart as though they had been waiting for him. He greets them all by name and, in a tone of good-humoured ribaldry, has a complimentary or ironic joke for each one. He teases each in turn about their husbands or lovers, devises clownish bits of nonsense on their relationships, all the while throwing vegetables up in the air and catching them as they fall, like a real juggler. At the time, I did not grasp the storm of sexual, often downright obscene, allusions which my grandfather was firing off as he fiddled about with courgettes, enormous carrots and cucumbers festooned with odd bumps. His comic routine produced shrieks of high-pitched laughter, not to say hysterics in some quarters.
    â€˜Oh stop it, Bristìn, that’s enough,’ begged a large lady, holding her tummy. ‘I’m going to wet myself.’ And with those words, she hoisted up her skirt, swept it back and revealed a long stream of pee on the cobbles.
    The women chose the merchandise, nearly all pre-season fruit which Grandfather obtained by cultivating them in his greenhouse. He weighed all the fruit and vegetables on his scales, always adding something extra – a few carrots, a sprig of rosemary, a big marrow or some flowers, accompanied usually by jaunty declarations of love delivered in mock poetic tones. It was clear that all those customers flocked in such numbers to his cart more than anything else to savour the show given by that merry chatterbox. I have often wondered if they ended up buying things they did not need simply to repay the enjoyment Bristìn offered them.
    The ritual of sales and farce was repeated for the whole of the merchandising round. Every so often, Grandfather would make me get down from the horse’s back and lift me up onto the cart, on top of the baskets of melons and watermelons. When the women asked who the child was, he would go into a rigmarole of being astounded at seeing me there for the first time. ‘I have no idea who this little ruffian is, or where he came from,’ he said. ‘A while back, a girl handed him over to me, telling me he was my own flesh and blood. The father is supposed to be one of my five sons, but the girl couldn’t remember which one. “What do you mean? How did it happen? When did all this take place?” I asked her. And the girl replied: “In the woods near the Po … I was walking along the banks of the river, picking mushrooms, long thin ones and little stubby ones. All of a sudden, what a bit of luck! I saw an erect one, as firm as a rod, protruding from the ground. A big juicy porcino! I love that kind and couldn’t wait to grab hold of it, but I banged my head on the branch of a poplar tree so hard that my knees buckled and I sank to the ground. As I did so, I got skewered by this hard rod of a mushroom. A warm flame shot through my whole body from feet to brain. Ye gods, what a feeling! I stayed where I was, stunned. Then I heard a loud groan, and before my very eyes, in the thick grass, I saw emerge first a face, then shoulders and the rest of a body. Behind my bottom, I espied two thighs and two legs: ‘Holy God,’ I think to myself, ‘a mushroom born of a man!’ The youth with the mushroom, or the skewer-woman equipment, sighed and groaned: ‘Thank you, pretty maiden!’ And I said to him: ‘What are you doing here buried in the shrubbery?’ ‘I was splashing about naked in the water, and had covered myself with leaves to get dry … I fell fast asleep, and when you suddenly plopped yourself down on my pecker, I thought I was going to die.’ ‘And what if you’ve made me pregnant?’ ‘We could always call him Mushroom!’”