Tomato Rhapsody: A Fable of Love, Lust and Forbidden Fruit - By Adam Schell Page 0,44

laden with nostalgic fruit or his filching chef prowling about. It had been a difficult evening for Cosimo. The indelicacy of being caught in flagrante delicto by his child had been most awkward. The embarrassment was greatly compounded by the fact that his wife and entire staff had all been present, standing at attention to receive their returning duke when young Gian pulled open the carriage door, exposing, quite literally, his father.

The family meal that evening proved unbearable. The cavernous dining hall, sparsely filled with three Meduccis and three attending servants, crackled with tension. Cosimo and his wife sat at opposite ends of the table, twenty-six feet apart. Splitting the distance sat young Gian, merrily cooing over a bowl of wild mushroom ancini di pepe, copiously infused with the wafer-thin shavings of fresh truffle.

The boy sounded happier than Cosimo could remember, as if a great secret had been revealed to him, and he ate with a demonstrative relish, his feet dancing and tapping upon the floor. God bless you, thought Cosimo, I only pray the aristocracy shall fall before you inherit such a burdensome heartache. Cosimo wanted to look up. To smile at his boy and tell him how much he loved him. To laugh with his wife at the farce that fate had made of their lives. But he could not bring himself to do so. He knew his wife would never share in such a joke. The sad reality for Cosimo was that he had no one with whom to share anything of feeling or meaning, no true friend—no trusted confidant. The one person he did have, the one who would have laughed with him, his beloved courtesan, had been stolen away.

Oh, dear God, thought Cosimo, as he rose up from the table in a fit of melancholy and without a word slid out the kitchen entrance, if only I were a farmer. Yes, he repeated to himself, if only I were a farmer. And then he strode over to the stables, awoke the snoozing stable-master and demanded not only the most decrepit mule of the lot, but that his servant disrobe and lend him his well-worn and far less regal boots, trousers, tunic, vest and long stableman’s jacket. If only I were a farmer, mused Cosimo as he left the villa behind, rode through the night, past his old vineyard, and loped into a small hilltop village at dawn, I could have led the life I was meant to lead and she, she would still be alive.

That’s what Cosimo had been thinking until he noticed a blur of red hurl through the market and explode across the face of his chef. “Mio Dio,” Cosimo sighed, it was a pomodoro! The same precious fruit his courtesan used to feed him.

In Which We Learn

How Davido & Nonno Came to Be

Invited to La Festa del Santo ubriaco

The scream was horrendous, a bloodcurdling yelp, the desperate cry of a man in his death throes.

The acid-scorch of Benito’s fingers was unbearable and he could only bring himself to throw one more tomato, despite his nearly equal superstitious fear of displeasing Giuseppe. Nevertheless, his second throw had found its mark. He’d blasted that blubbery pork-selling piglet good, and despite the arsenic pain ravaging his throwing hand, the scream now playing before his ears made it all worthwhile.

Certainly, the hurled projectile exploding solidly into his ear stung and stunned the pork butcher Vincenzo and sent him crashing against his rack of sausage links like a lumbering drunkard. But he didn’t realize it was a mortal wound until his senses sorted out that it was a Love Apple that struck him and he saw the red juice and aghast expression splattered across the tunic and face of his closest customer, Augusto Po. Instantly, Vincenzo felt the forbidden fruit’s deathly seeds and juice drip into the cavity of his ear and his brain set fire as he clasped his head, keeled over and yelled bloody murder.

Petrified, the crowd around Vincenzo’s stand leapt back. Men hollered and women screamed. Vincenzo rolled from his knees and fell to the cobblestones like a pigeon shot mortally in one wing. Drained of life, his screams receded to ghastly moans. He began to writhe and reel upon the ground, the acid burning down his ear canal and eating away his brain. The crowd surrounding him doubled, tripled, quadrupled, until nearly half the market was there to see Vincenzo take his final breath and his body go lifeless. Killed by a hurled