Tomato Rhapsody: A Fable of Love, Lust and Forbidden Fruit - By Adam Schell Page 0,45

Love Apple impacted solidly in his right ear.

Instantly, there was silence, dead silence that spread from the surrounding crowd to the entire market. Heads turned, people left their shopping aside until nearly all the marketgoers, all but Mari, Davido and Nonno, were gathered around Vincenzo. Close enough to see what happened, but far enough back to keep clear of the murderous poison that had killed him.

“Gli Ebrei,” a lone voice in the solidifying crowd shouted out. “Gli Ebrei del Pomo di Amore.”

The crowd took to grumbling. Heads began to now turn in the direction of the Ebrei stand. Eyes narrowed, expressions went cross. A pair of men slid on their thick leather gloves, stepped forward, grabbed Vincenzo from under his arms and dragged his lifeless body fifty or so feet and then dropped him before the Ebrei.

“Oy, merda,” babbled Nonno as he became terribly aware he and Davido were no longer going to be ignored. Nonno turned to look at his grandson. He saw the bewildered expression on the boy’s face, the nearly completed tomato pyramid before him and the ripe fruit gripped in his left hand. Could he have been so foolish, thought Nonno?

“Assassino!” Mucca took a half step into the semi-circle surrounding Vincenzo’s body and the Ebrei stand. “Murderer!”

A hot burst of adrenaline shot through Mari and roasted what remained of her amorous goose bumps. She heard the angry words and saw through a fracture in the crowd the prone body of Vincenzo. Mari squinted to better observe the shocking sight and could have sworn she saw his eyes twitch. Mio Dio, thought Mari as she continued to focus her vision upon Vincenzo, does that cacasodo have no shame? Suddenly, a scenario flashed before her. Where was Benito? How odd that he should shuffle off so shortly before all this. And what was in that weighty satchel of his? Oh, no, thought Mari, as she grabbed a bucket of water from under her stand and made her way over to the scene, what had Giuseppe put the ogre up to?

A horrible silence thickened the air as Davido looked upon the body before him and the soft tomato: smashed, splattered, destroyed upon and into the man’s ear. What happened, he wondered, that my eyes could so quickly go from gazing upon that beautiful girl to looking upon this? Davido swallowed hard. He thought of his young cousins who would often have fights with the overripe tomatoes they found upon the ground, and wondered if he’d ever see them again.

“You,” said Mucca as she pointed to the tomato in Davido’s hand, “you killed him.”

Davido followed the squat woman’s finger and looked oddly at his own hand, which he wasn’t even certain was part of his body, and wondered why it held a tomato. His defense left his mouth like a wounded whisper: “No.”

“You did!” Mucca yelled. “I never liked him much, but he was one of ours and you killed him.”

“No,” Davido repeated faintly, shaking his head in dismay.

“Of course,” blurted a man in the crowd, “of course the Ebreo would seek to kill a pork merchant!”

“No.”

“Then how did this happen?” Mucca asked while pointing to the dead man on the ground.

Davido was speechless and he returned the peasant woman’s contemptuous gaze with a look of dumbfounded apology. Their eyes held each other in an awkward pause until an egg flung from the rear of the crowd suddenly hit Davido upon the neck. The shell stung and burst upon his collarbone, its innards quickly sliming down his shirt like a fast-moving slug.

The blow to his grandson, though harmless, erupted the stomach acid in Nonno with a sickening force. He had been in these situations before and was fearful that the barrier between angry words and action had just been broken.

A clamor erupted from the crowd as a second piece of produce, a baton-like green zucchini, crashed before Davido, toppling his tomato pyramid and sending a hundred tomatoes bouncing to the cobblestones. To a chorus of jeers, the floodgates of retribution opened. Instantly, the air was filled with other fruits and vegetables as the villagers reached for whatever produce was near at hand. Soft peaches, overripe plums, soggy figs and heads of loose-leaf radicchio began to crash and bang all around and upon the foreigners in their midst. Thank goodness, for Davido and Nonno’s sake, it was late August, a time in which most of summer’s fruits and vegetables were well ripened and the hard tubers of autumn were still a