boys, were not so easily undone. The parchment of the letter was so fine, the wax seal so intricate. He felt himself growing intoxicated on the faint scent of rotten eggs. His thumbnail flaked away a small fleck of wax. It was too much, all the unsettled questions spinning about his brain. Might the letter hold some insight about the Good Padre? Might it?

Meanwhile, in the church’s garden, kneeling on the slim strip of upturned earth between the rows of zucchini on his left and eggplants on his right, the Good Padre contemplated which of several splendidly ripe eggplants he should pluck for the evening’s supper. The other day a new idea for eggplant preparation had come to him and he was eager to try it out. The recipe, as he imagined it, would begin with eggplant, cut width-wise into finger-thick slices. Next, the Good Padre planned to dip the slices into egg batter and then dredge them in chestnut flour with coarsely crushed walnuts, pignoli, sea salt and red pepper flakes. Filling a skillet half-knuckle deep with olive oil, he would then fry the slices until their outsides were golden and their innards soft. Next, the Good Padre planned to lay slices of a particularly pungent, semi-firm cow’s-milk cheese upon the fried eggplant pieces. Finally, he would set the skillet in an oven to soften the cheese and bake the eggplant.

To dress the eggplant slices, the Good Padre conceived of a new version of pesto. He would still use olive oil, salt, pepper, pignoli and a little squeeze of lemon, but diverging from the recipe made popular in Genoa, he would complement basil with an equal amount of fresh mint and even a few sage leaves. Overall, he imagined the fried eggplant meat, nutty coating and ripe cheese would blossom nicely under the sage and mint pesto’s zest.

The Good Padre was fortunate in that his arrival in the village had coincided with the spring planting season and he was now reaping the verdant benefits of late August in Tuscany. He viewed the success of his small plot as an affirmation of his faith and a harbinger of good things to come. At the center of the church’s garden stood a lovely, five-foot-high replica of the same Virgin Mary statue located above the church entrance. In designing his garden, the Good Padre had intentionally created a nimbus-like shape, with all twelve planting rows angling outward from the feet of the Virgin.

Reaching his decision as to which eggplant to try his recipe upon, the Good Padre set his grip around a fine specimen. It was a slight, gentle action that lent a keen perspective to the Good Padre’s size and complexion, as the bulbous deep-purple eggplant nearly blended with the color of the Good Padre’s skin and disappeared beneath the girth of his palm and width of his fingers. The Good Padre was a huge man, but it was not so much the Good Padre’s height that was overwhelming, as he was only a few fingers’ width taller than the average man; it was his thickness.

The Good Padre’s chest was like an old walnut tree trunk and his arms were like the thick lower branches that had first matured and born fruit three centuries ago. If, in passing, one happened to gently lay a hand upon the Good Padre’s knee or shoulder, he would find it to be the size and oblong roundness of the largest late-summer honeydew melon he had ever touched. The Good Padre’s fingers shared both their size and slightly bulbous shape with a soon-to-be giant squash halfway through its growing season. His nose had the width and slope of a small pear from Piedmont. His nostrils, each the circumference of a colossal green olive from Sicily, and his head, the girth and glabrous sheen of a Mantuan pumpkin in late November. His teeth were like the large acorns that dropped from white oak trees in November, and when he smiled, which he often did, his mouth curved and broadened to the size of an August carob bean hanging from a tree in Lucca. His wide eyes emanated both the wholesome allure and the glint of playfulness that can only be understood if one has sliced a ripe Umbrian fig through the belly of its width and gazed upon its starry innards. Indeed, the Good Padre was a man of startling and perplexing complexion, but as part of his curse (more of a magical enchantment, really), certain physical