Tomato Rhapsody: A Fable of Love, Lust and Forbidden Fruit - By Adam Schell Page 0,17

indeed, Nonno found this perfect plot to lay his seed. So for our family and fruit, dear cousins, always revere, for it’s been sacrifice and love that brought us here.”

Davido finished his history lesson and allowed the children to bask in the rich, imaginative silence. Let them believe, he thought. Let them believe in a little magic. In time they will come to know all things: of Davido’s sister, of La Sorella di Ester and of her life sacrifice; of their Nonno and of how he stole away from Colombo’s ship with not only a sack of tomato seeds but enough gold and riches to bribe half of Italy.

In Which We Meet

Cosimo di Pucci de’ Meducci III,

Grand Duke of Tuscany, &

Learn of His Decree

It was that moment of the day, the day in which we meet Cosimo the Third, when the sun’s first rays cracked the horizon, sifting through the fine lace curtains of Cosimo’s four-horse-drawn carriage and falling upon his face. Behind closed eyelids, Cosimo’s pupils constricted, rousing him from the enervating state that sadly passed as his nightly sleep. Slowly, Cosimo opened his eyes and his vision came to rest upon a grapevine-combed horizon glistening under Sunday morning’s late August dew. My God, thought Cosimo, with the day’s first workings of his mind, if only I were a farmer.

Cosimo di Pucci de’ Meducci, who governed under the title Cosimo the Third, was descended from, as he often put it, the lesser lineage of a long and dubious line of inbreeds, half-wits, perverts, pedants, scoundrels, tyrants, sodomites and syphilitics, who seemed to have both an extraordinary love of the arts and an uncanny proclivity for getting themselves assassinated. Amongst Cosimo’s direct ancestors and relatives were three popes, two queens of France, nine dukes of Tuscany, plus more cardinals, princes, princesses and foreign royalty by way of arranged marriage than he cared to recollect. Quite frankly, though, he despised almost all of them and harbored a great deal of contempt for his own family name.

For as long as he could remember, Cosimo was envious of the rural peasants who tended the land and populated the small towns and villages throughout his province. Yes, they were an ignorant lot, but from what little he knew they seemed to possess an honest joy and bawdiness for which Cosimo would have traded all his useless power and privilege. Even the lyrical and jubilant peasant dialect, Etruscanato Antiquato 6, rhymed and rolled from belly to tongue. It was a far cry from the reserved and gestureless Nuovo Italiano spoken by the nobility, which Cosimo was the lax, ineffectual and reluctant leader of. He had been educated to speak the New Italian, but he hated the dialect of the gentry whose forked tongues managed to freeze and crack even the warmest of Italian vowels. It was a sound, particularly as spoken by his wife, that would drive icicles into his ears. Great spells of silence were Cosimo’s most common recourse, days on end when he would do little more than grunt and point, all the while dreaming in silence of how he’d gladly forfeit his title and a lifetime of speech if but for a day he could work amongst the rows of grapes and speak with the rapture and rhythm of a peasant.

For Cosimo, royalty and reputation seemed to serve up far more sourness than sweetness. In his first twenty years of life, Cosimo had endured the murder of two uncles, three assassination attempts upon his father (which ended up killing two food tasters, one of whom young Cosimo was especially fond of), two short yet brutal wars against the powerful Milanese clans to the north and, cruelest of all to a thirteen-year-old boy, the disappearance of his favorite cousin and only childhood friend.

Over the next twenty years, Cosimo endured the syphilitic demise of his father; the ravages of two plagues in Florence; a fierce and drawn-out conflict with the Spanish, who forever used Tuscany as their battleground with the French; an unwanted, politically arranged marriage to an aloof Austrian princess who expressed not an inkling of love for him (nor he for her); the usurpation of nearly all his power by his cousin the Queen of France; and, most recently and significantly, the poisoning of his beloved courtesane. She’d been poisoned by arsenic-laced honey she drizzled upon her chestnut polenta as she and Cosimo enjoyed a late-morning breakfast. Murdered a mere two weeks after Cosimo had given a less than enthusiastic recommendation that