Tomato Rhapsody: A Fable of Love, Lust and Forbidden Fruit - By Adam Schell Page 0,24
should be able to do whatever he likes. Knowingly, Signore Meducci returned Nonno’s gaze, as if the donkey also had no desire to see his Sunday respite disturbed. As the children’s voices grew closer, Nonno inhaled deeply and grinned at the donkey, and then submerged himself entirely underwater.
It should be noted that Nonno’s tub was not a traditional bathtub. It was an enormous cast-iron cauldron left by the Meducci winemakers that could easily hold a hundred buckets of water as well as a grown man. The cauldron had most likely been used in the production of jams and vinegar, where vast amounts of wine and/or grapes were boiled down; but with some repair and a good cleaning, Davido had managed to convert it into a fine bathtub. A gift to Nonno, who, after growing up frequenting the Ebreo bath houses of Toledo, enjoyed a weekly hot soak above all else.
What made the tub extraordinary was not so much its size or proximity to a waterspout, but its maneuverability. The cauldron was attached to a weighted cantilever, allowing it to be easily swung from an iron fire ring to an iron cooling ring, making the process of heating entirely less arduous. This was a well-known idea in blacksmith shops used for cooking and cooling ore, but for bathing, as far as Davido knew, it was a first.
On Sunday afternoons, much like this one, after the family meal Davido would fill the cauldron with water, stoke the fire to heat it and then swing the cauldron atop the cooling rack so Nonno could take a long hot bath. The only problem in adapting the device had been that the cauldron, shaped like an enormous soup crock, could get a little too hot on the feet. Davido remedied the problem by placing two large hempen sacks, filled with the dried and shredded bark, leaves and needles of pine, cypress and bay laurel trees, as well as significant bunches of dried rosemary, lavender and peppermint, on the cauldron’s bottom. The pillow-sized sacks cushioned the cauldron’s sloping base and took the heat off Nonno’s feet. They also acted like two enormous tea pouches, scenting the water and releasing their rejuvenating properties.
Nonno’s Sunday ritual was as well established as any ritual on the newly reclaimed farm, and the children were certain they would find Nonno in the midst of his Sunday soak. They entered the barn shouting his name and headed directly to the tub. But something seemed wrong and the children quieted. The embers under the cauldron glowed, Signore Meducci stood nearby, steam wafted off the water as usual and the air had its familiar moist, herbaceous scent. But Nonno’s bearded, wrinkled face was not resting above the bathwater.
Underwater, Nonno still had several seconds’ worth of air inside his lungs, but he knew time flew quickly to expectant children, and at just the instant Davido entered the barn to find his cousins held in nervous silence and felt his own heart drop, Nonno burst up from the water howling like a loon. “Who dare disturb Poseidon while he bathe,” Nonno splashed the giggling children with warm bathwater, “shall bear the fury of water and wave!”
Outside, the Good Padre brought his mule to a halt at roughly the spot where the young man who had been scrutinizing him just a moment ago had been standing. He dismounted, reached into the fold of his frock, removed a carrot and fed it to his sturdy mule. As the mule ate from his hand, the Good Padre let his vision wander. “Bless’d Virgin,” the Good Padre uttered, “how glorious.”
The land was fecund. At a glance, the Good Padre estimated at least thirty rows of green-leafed, semi-vine-like plants, ripe with clusters of large red berries. Speckled about the farm, from distant horizon to barnside proximity were decades-old olive, fig, peach and plum trees. Behind him lay three sizable vegetable patches. In a glance he could tell they were bursting with life. He saw the green shoots of garlic and onion tops; the yellow, green and purple bellies of fat late-summer squash, zucchini and eggplant; slender fingers of green beans hanging from a trestle; the bushy tops of fennel and carrots; the marbled purple and white of radicchio; and the crinkled emerald-black of loose-leafed cabbage, his favorite sautéing green in all the world.
The barn, some fifty paces from where the Good Padre paused, appeared recently rehabilitated and was of a goodly size, forty feet square by twenty feet high. Masonry work