Tomato Rhapsody: A Fable of Love, Lust and Forbidden Fruit - By Adam Schell Page 0,122

morning. He had seen people beaten before—indeed, many of the monks in his childhood orphanage had seemed to take great delight in beating the young Luigi—but he had never seen anyone beaten for the crime of love. And as the blows landed upon the poor boy’s head and the smacks across the girl’s face, they impacted Luigi far more than any wallop he’d personally received. How, pondered Luigi’s fragile mind, could mankind be so cruel? The couple seemed to be deeply in love and the tomato sauce they’d made possessed a flavor so exquisite that Luigi felt a just and caring God would send an army of angels to guarantee their protection.

But the miracle never transpired. The sight and sounds of slaps and punches and screams horrified Luigi, and as he saw the crock of tomato sauce upon the stand begin to sway and tumble from the tumult, Luigi took action. He stretched forth his hands and lunged with his body, his deluded mind convinced that the souls of the two lovers and everything that was good and beautiful about life was somehow held inside that crock and that it must be saved. But Luigi’s coordination was not as keen as his intent, and as his hands reached for the crock, his face passed right before Giuseppe’s flying fist. There was pain and an instant of blackness as the blow struck his cheek and pitched him to the ground, but not so much that he did not hear the crack of the crock upon the cobblestones. He felt the warm splatter of tomato sauce upon his neck and then he, in turn, felt himself crack too.

Luigi did not move; he couldn’t. The sound of the lovers’ wailing paralyzed him. He could do nothing but lie there, partially under the tomato stand, being kicked and stepped upon as the crowd swayed violently above him. He felt his right eye begin to swell, his chest constrict, his breath shorten and a great, ungodly ache emerge from his heart. He was certain this was the death of him. “E cosi orribile,” Luigi mumbled as he began to sob with the exact converse of the energy that he’d experienced at the riverbank. “It’s so horrible.”

Luigi lay there sobbing as the screams of the girl grew distant and the wails of the boy ended with a clatter of hooves and the roll of a wagon wheel. As the piazza went quiet with shame, Luigi did not get up. He laid there awaiting his death, until he felt something bump against his face. There, in front of his nose, was a tomato. Suddenly, a thought entered Luigi’s mind—a thought worth living for. He sat up, untucked his tunic and gathered up as many fallen tomatoes as he could manage to hold between his longish shirt and belly. Then he stood up and began to walk. He walked from the piazza and he walked from the village. He walked past farm and forest, walking through the night, arriving back at the villa just before dawn, thinking the entire time the one thought that had saved his life: that young Prince Gian Gastone would very much enjoy a pane pizea for breakfast.

But there would be no breakfast. “E cosi orribile!” Luigi cried out as he let go his shirt-end and the tomatoes fell to the floor. He ran to the prince and cradled the convulsing and near-ruined boy in his arms. There was vomit, blood and diarrhea covering the child’s sheets. The left side of the boy’s face had fallen, wilting with paralysis. Blood ran from his nose and his eyes. It stained his thin linen pants as it leaked a trail down his legs. It was as if his very organs were being cooked to soup inside his body; but it was the retching and the reeling fits of pain that made Luigi feel as if his heart would shatter into a thousand pieces.

Poor Prince Gian had been alone in his quarters, abandoned by his mother and staff for fear that it was the plague, but Luigi knew the effects of poison when he saw it. He had been trained at the monastery to keep an eye out for such things. “Dear God,” lamented Luigi as he eyed suspiciously an empty jar of fig jam sitting on the boy’s nightstand. Poison was a slow and awful death and Luigi knew the prince’s worst hours still lay ahead.

The prince looked up at Luigi; his eyes were opaque and