This little scene took place in the city market. A husky, outlandishly dressed and heavily moustached migrant, obviously a recent arrival, stopped beside me in front of a delicatessen stall, — a bulky portfolio, stocked with goods, hanging from his hand.

"Yes?" the saleswoman asked him,

"A cockroach, pliss," said the migrant.

The woman lifted her eyebrows.

"A cockroach?! Why on earth do you need a cockroach?!"

"For dinner," said he gravely. "On Sunday me always has a cockroach for dinner."

"Good heavens! Cockroaches for dinner? Nobody eats cockroaches!"

"Me eats," uttered he unperturbedly, "and all Italy eats. Even Mussolini himself did. Them very good."

"What? Do you really mean a cockroach?! A little thing like this? Black, with moustaches? Saying khr-khr-khr?!!

"Not mustaches, not black, not little!" lie protested energetically. "Big, like that, see? And never khr-khr-khr! Never! Always koo-koo-reekoo, koo-koo-ree-koo! Understand?"

"I see!" she burst out laughing. "You want a rooster, a cock!"

"That him!" he confirmed happily.

And he got his cockroach alias a cock.

A few years passed. I was again at the market and, as I stood in front of a delicatessen stall, a man stopped beside me. I recognized him at once. He was the cockroach-man. Yet he now looked very different: he was dressed like everybody else around us and, as a firm symbol of assimilation, an open kitbag, instead of a portfolio, was hanging from his hand.

"Would he again ask for a cockroach?" flashed through my head.

But no!

"A rooster, please," he said casually.

And it seemed to me that since the day of creation nobody has ever uttered "rooster, please" as well as he did.

David Marquis

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