Tomato Rhapsody: A Fable of Love, Lust and Forbidden Fruit - By Adam Schell Page 0,22

“tell anyone to shut his mouth before the Prince of Tuscany.”

There was a pause, heavy and tense, as Prince Gian held his gaze upon the pompous truffle seller. Luigi’s blood froze in his veins. The man did not appear to take kindly to his remonstration. Finally, a forced smile broke the man’s lip-lock and he lowered his eyes. “My apologies, young lord,” he said, though Luigi didn’t believe a word of it.

Satisfied, Prince Gian now turned to address the slovenly truffle seller. “May I,” he asked the man rather sweetly, “see your hands?”

“My what?” the man asked, seemingly more confused than ever.

“May I,” repeated Gian, “see your hands?”

The man nodded nervously as he moved his hands from behind his back to before the prince’s eyes. His hands were thick and calloused; dirt dusted and colored his skin and impacted in black bands under his fingernails.

“I tell you,” said the boy as he simultaneously assessed the man’s hands and fondled the truffle he held, “what seems not proper. It was your hands that dug up the truffles, no?”

Sheepishly, the slovenly truffle seller nodded.

“And from the smell of it,” Gian continued, “it was your hands that wrangled and led the sows?”

Seeming to wilt under the boy’s doe-eyed gaze, the man nodded, again.

“Yet,” the boy let his eyes wander from the slovenly one’s hands to the pompous one’s boots, “from the looks of it, the profits are all his.”

Mio Dio! Luigi could not help but smile, suddenly feeling as if the negotiations had not gone totally awry. Now, thought Luigi, if only the boy would put on a pair of trousers, he’d one day rule all of Italy.

Awkwardly, the pair of rhymers stood there, the wind sapped from their sails by a twelve-year-old prince in a dress, when suddenly—thankfully for the duo of truffle sellers—the air filled with the clanging of a large bell.

Young Gian gasped and his eyes blossomed with excitement. “Papa!” he squealed, sounding very much like a young girl.

“The duke!” a voice echoing from inside the house began to shout out. “The duke approaches.” A pair of guards scrambled and began to push open the enormous entrance gates. The young prince and the pair of truffle dealers momentarily forgot their business and turned their attention to the open gates. In an instant, the great home awoke from its lazy Sunday slumber to a bustle of activity. Butlers, servants, stablemen and a contingent of Guardia Nobile di Meducci began to emerge from the villa’s numerous exits, hurriedly neatening their appearance as they fell into position alongside the arching carriageway that swept before the colossal home’s main entrance.

Unstirred by the commotion, Luigi took the truffle from the distracted prince just as the boy ran off in the direction of his father’s carriage. Luigi brought the truffle to his nose and gave it another sniff. How had this conceited rogue and his rank companion, who dressed and smelled like a barnyard mule, managed to come up with truffles so grand, particularly two months before the start of the truffle season? From the looks of them, Luigi wondered if the fungus hadn’t sprung from the more slovenly one’s navel.

“I’ll be back,” Luigi said to neither one in particular as he left the pair of rimatori waiting outside the kitchen door. With the servants otherwise occupied, it was an opportune moment to have a look about one of the lesser-used rooms of the villa and choose some meaningless trinket of the duke’s or lady duke’s that Luigi could use to barter for the truffles.

Meanwhile, the duke’s horse-drawn carriage coursed through the open gates of his country villa and passed the kitchen entrance. Upon seeing his father’s carriage, Prince Gian Gastone, sole heir to the title, ran eagerly from the kitchen of the chef he adored to greet the father he worshipped. As he ran along the carriageway, Gian tripped over his dress twice and crushed one of the ripe melons against the tender young flesh of his chest. He gathered his feet and made it to his father’s carriage as it came to pause, just before the master butler could position himself at the coach’s door.

Panting and full of expectancy, young Gian opened the carriage door to the greatest sight his young eyes had ever beheld. It was a shocking image, but it filled the remaining sixteen days of young Gian’s life with strokes of bliss. And on the morning of the seventeenth day, when the organs of his body finally succumbed to the virulent