Tomato Rhapsody: A Fable of Love, Lust and Forbidden Fruit - By Adam Schell Page 0,25
had been done; the mortar between the stones appeared young, still cream-colored. The barn’s upper two-thirds looked newly painted in reddish ocher. Mature cypress trees, forty feet high, shaded the barn’s western side, with lavender, rosemary and rosebushes planted between the trees. Flanking the barn’s southern wall, a pair of bushy bay laurel trees, whose leaves the Good Padre found delicious for the flavoring of soups and stews, had been planted. All around him life abounded.
The Good Padre turned his vision to the Love Apple plants before him. He left his mule’s side and knelt before a plant to have a closer look. Running his fingers over the stalk and leaves of the knee-high plant, he discovered they had a slight tacky prickle to them—not quite as harsh and cellulose as a zucchini vine, nor as woody and smooth as an eggplant. He moved his hand across the taut skin of a single tomato and then glanced toward the barn to make sure no one approached. He was alone. There was a meaty weightiness to the fruit that seemed to beckon one to eat it. It felt like the cheek skin of a month-old infant, who, though lovely to touch with the fingers, one felt impelled to kiss with the lips. The Good Padre brought the fruit to his nose to breathe it in as deeply as possible. The fragrance was sublime and if he could have inhaled the entire fruit into the circumference of his nostril he assuredly would have. By smell alone, the fruit seemed to belie the dangers of which Bertolli warned: the blisters, boils, blindness, bleeding, retching, reeling horrid death that the old padre foretold for anyone blasphemous enough to even touch a Love Apple.
The Good Padre now heard a commotion coming from the barn; it sounded like children laughing. He thought of all the fear and superstition of which Bertolli had spoken and the old padre had preached, stories that so many in the village construed as fact: the ludicrous idea that Man’s fall from grace was the fault of a fruit of this earth—a fruit now planted and growing just beyond their village walls. If only Bertolli could hear this sound, the sound of children laughing. If only the fearful and superstitious could smell this fruit, the smell of earth and herbs and goodness. “Assurdita,” the Good Padre whispered as he snapped the fruit from its vine and hid the Love Apple inside his frock: “Utter absurdity.”
“A mule?” said Nonno as he emerged from the tub. The grandfather and grandson had just sent the children off to their home, a large converted wine mill at the farm’s other end, where they lived with their parents. “You are sure it was a mule?”
“Well, it certainly wasn’t a horse,” Davido said as he handed Nonno his robe and sandals. Not wanting to seem delusional, Davido decided to omit the fact that the visitor appeared to be the hue of a well-ripened eggplant. “And he most definitely wore a brown garment, I know that.”
“Oy,” groaned Nonno as he laced his arms through his robe and made for the barn’s side door. He and Davido had been through this once before. About a year ago, shortly after moving onto the farm, a nasty old priest and a small contingent of Vatican guards had come to roust them from the land on charges of illegal occupation. However, when Nonno presented the envoy with a Magno Sigillo di Meducci 7, the local priest had no choice but to abandon his plan. “I thought they rested on Sunday,” said Nonno as he exited the barn, a hint of anger in his voice.
The old man walked briskly and let his robe remain open for his first few steps toward the row of tomatoes where he saw the visitor squatting. The afternoon air felt cool and refreshing as it commingled with his overly heated body; but refreshment was hardly Nonno’s motivation for leaving his robe undone. It was a secret expression of hostility, no doubt, one Nonno wouldn’t have admitted even to himself. Nevertheless, somewhere in Nonno’s psyche arose an urge, both spontaneous and rebellious, to give a member of the Catholic clergy a defiant glimpse of his old, haggard and very circumcised Ebreo cazzone.
As many an old wife will attest, few things hang as pendulous as the poached scrotum of a skinny old man recently emerged from a hot tub. Thus, indelicate and hostile as Nonno’s intention may have been, the act