Tomato Rhapsody: A Fable of Love, Lust and Forbidden Fruit - By Adam Schell Page 0,13

clan in particular, were especially worthy of suspicion and contempt. They had planted their fields with a strange red fruit that the old padre derisively referred to as Love Apples straight from the Garden of Eden. Benito had no idea what a Pomo di Amore was, nor did he fully recall what transpired in Il Giardino di Eden, but he knew it wasn’t good and the little voice inside his head told him to let the dead rest in peace.

Benito turned to his boss for a cue. He had known Giuseppe since the very first day he arrived at the olive orchard, and the decades of familiarity had bred their share of contempt. Like many other itinerants looking for a few weeks’ work harvesting olives and pressing oil, Giuseppe and a then thirteen-year-old Benito were randomly assigned as harvesting partners and given the none-too-pleasant task of denuding the fecund olive trees of their fruits. Six years Benito’s senior, Giuseppe was from day one something of an older brother figure to Benito, albeit an often sadistic and corruptive one.

Despite his arrogance and wicked temper, Giuseppe possessed a trait that Benito had never seen in any of the villagers: ambition. Within a few weeks of their first meeting, Giuseppe quietly and seductively shared with Benito how he planned to one day own orchards, and that maybe, maybe, he would bring Benito along as foreman. Such talk captivated Benito. He had never been considered in anyone’s plans, not even his parents’, who, until the day they died (an earthquake caused their hovel to collapse on them as they slept), had scarcely set a place for him at the dinner table. Hence, his inclusion in Giuseppe’s schemes and dreams was enough to secure Benito’s desperate adolescent devotion.

Giuseppe demanded this devotion, and throughout much of Benito’s youth, he doled out severe punishment upon Benito for even the slightest show of disloyalty. La Punizione, Giuseppe called it, as his uncle had called it before him, and he used this disciplinary tactic to such effect that by the time he finally did come into possession of his own vineyard and olive orchard, he had molded Benito into an entirely devout and dependent underling—or so he thought. In actuality, their relationship was bound by odious abuse and a villainous secret, and as unions of guilt are often marked by contempt, rancor and bizarre dependency, so too was the relationship between Giuseppe and Benito.

Benito swallowed hard as the little voice inside his head shouted, You coward! You servant to a murderer! Don’t do it! But as the heel of Giuseppe’s finely crafted brown boot came crashing down upon the rickety wood fence, Benito did indeed do it. He squelched the little voice, trampled the fence and gave in to the sows’ euphoria as they charged at the truffle-scented spot of earth. Oh, how a part of him, a part that he’d come to hate, still loved to make Giuseppe happy!

Six inches under the soil Benito’s fingertips grazed the bulbous heads of two extraordinarily large truffles. He wriggled his digits deeper to snap the truffles from the root they grew upon. It was a strange-feeling root: smooth, straight, ivory-like, unlike any he had ever touched. In the midst of his delight Benito was able to suppress his suspicion, but for days afterward the root’s imprint upon his fingertips proved indelible. No matter how often he grated the tips of his fingers across his rough wool trousers, Benito could not scrub away the unnerving thought that he had unearthed the two most splendid truffles he had ever seen from the thigh bone of a recently dead Ebreo.

4 A crossbow arrow.

5 Ebreo courtesans, sometimes referred to as La Sorella di Ester, the Sisters of Esther, a secret association of exquisitely trained courtesans who operated in many of Europe’s leading cities and were rumored to have infiltrated the highest reaches of society.

In Which We Learn the

Shared History

of the Tomato & the Ebreo

Sunday was a special day on the farm, a year-old family ritual in which Nonno, Davido, his six aunts and uncles, their five children and any guests would gather around the table for a relaxing afternoon feast. Considering that in two Sundays Davido would be married and living in Florence for the next twelve months, the moment he and Nonno returned from Florence Davido went straight to the kitchen, doing his best to cook away all the anxiety that simmered inside him.

Waiting for him there, Davido found a surprise—the best thing he’d