Tomato Rhapsody: A Fable of Love, Lust and Forbidden Fruit - By Adam Schell Page 0,121

from their soon-to-come victory. Davido slid his hands down Mari’s back and once again was overcome by that sublime feeling that his fingertips were each a living and breathing entity. Her skin, how could he describe such a feeling? He let his fingers luxuriate in the detail and nuance of her flesh; the rise of her muscles that ran along her spine; the upward roll from her lower back to the mounds of her backside—mounds of heaven! The two most wonderful, ripe and luscious things he had ever touched. He would compare them to tomatoes, but no tomato could withstand the wondrous kneading and pulling like Mari’s ripe fruit.

Davido began to swell to life. A swell that pressed and parted the second lips of Mari’s love. She was still warm and wet. Mari moved her hips from side to side and then slowly slid down upon him, swallowing him fully inside of her and exhaling the slightest of moans into his ear. This thrilled Davido, the fact that she slid onto him: that a woman so beautiful and wonderful desired him.

Dear God, Davido took a deep breath and squeezed her tightly against his chest—his will suddenly set like iron, his heart like a lion! For the chance to love a woman so wonderful, he thought, there is not a thing in the world that I wouldn’t risk, no battle I would not fight! For her, thought Davido, as he felt the weight upon his chest lighten and the elixir of victory proliferate his heart with courage. For her, how can I not?

How Pizza Came to Be, Part II

At the river, during the crumb-tossing procession, when the enormous priest put his hand upon his head and dunked him under the water, Luigi Campoverde, chef for the Duke of Tuscany, felt a sublime light shatter his body, blinding him from the inside out. He felt, for the briefest instant, that he was not separate from anything, that the river water, the hand of the Good Padre, the stones beneath his feet, everything and anything that existed was intricately a part of him and he a part of it. The feeling was so extreme that Luigi lay for hours upon the bank of the river, crying and laughing and mumbling to himself: “E cosi bello, it’s so beautiful, so beautiful.”

It was true that Luigi had not known much love in his life, given his parents’ deaths when he was so young and the harshness of the orphanage where he was subsequently raised. Nonetheless, what he felt as he lay there upon the riverbank transcended even the vague remembrances of love that he’d received from his own mother. A spontaneous revelation, an all-encompassing feeling, that not only was he loved, but he was made of love. That God was love and all life sprung from this love.

When Luigi awoke on Wednesday morning he was so grateful to the Good Padre and the altar boys who’d fed and sheltered him for the night that he spontaneously gave all his bodily possessions to the Church. These included the mule and cart he had arrived upon, a bag full of coins and the dozen or so items carried off from the Meducci villa that he had planned to barter at market. All Luigi asked in return was for the Good Padre to make a breakfast of the same meal he’d consumed for supper the previous night: a thin wheel of dough laid with sliced tomatoes, a few olives and some shavings of pecorino that were quickly baked in a hot oven, “until,” as the Good Padre said out loud, “the dough begins to pizea” 21.

Once removed from the oven, the pane pizea (Bertolli’s name for it) was drizzled with olive oil, sprinkled with salt, laid with some freshly torn pieces of basil and then immediately eaten. True, by Tuesday evening Luigi had gone a full day without a morsel of food and his senses were both tender and heightened. Nevertheless, the pane pizea was the single most delicious thing that Luigi had ever eaten and he would have gladly given all the gold in the world for the chance to eat such a thing again.

To say that Luigi awoke on Wednesday morning a changed man was something of an understatement. He was so transformed, so in doubt of his previous life that he may never have returned to the Meducci villa had it not been for the viciousness of the beating he witnessed a bit later that