Tomato Rhapsody: A Fable of Love, Lust and Forbidden Fruit - By Adam Schell Page 0,92

her mother, even with help, at least twice as long. Mio Dio! Mari felt a cleaver of guilt and desire split her in half. It was just too long to be away. “Please?” Mari looked desperately to the Cheese Maker and then gestured to the bakery’s roof. “I’ve got to get back to my wine barrel,” Mari lied. “If Giuseppe sees it unattended, I’ll be in an awful heap.”

“By all means, love,” answered the Cheese Maker, both sweetly and urgently. “Go, go! I’ll see to your mother.”

Now Davido heard the strum and beat of the minstrels’ lute and drum, and the crowd pushed in more forcefully. A man whom Davido might one day come to know as Signore Solo Coglione, the tavern keep, smiled at him warmly as he took hold of Davido’s donkey’s rein and paraded the boy, with all the other outlandishly adorned Cavalieri, around the piazza. Everything was happening so fast. It seemed to Davido like pure chaos, but he could tell in the ecstatic faces of the villagers and the coordination of their actions that there were centuries of purpose and tradition informing every move.

The parade continued about the piazza, while the villagers began to divide and cluster together by color around their quadrant’s Cavaliere and donkey. The townspeople frolicked and gulped from wine-filled goblets, jugs and bottles. They sprinkled knight and donkey alike with wine, not unlike priests sprinkling parishioners with holy water, until it seemed as if it were raining red wine. They kissed the donkeys’ noses and scratched lovingly between their ears, and many, to Davido’s surprise, even rubbed their donkey’s testicles in a way similar to how Davido had seen Catholics rub the bald head of Saint Francis statues for good luck. The villagers now pumped their fists in the air as each Quadrante took turns shouting out their number at the top of their lungs: “Numero Uno, Numero Due, Numero Tre…” and so on. Davido’s ears perked with expectation as the piazza rung with dieci, undici, dodici, but alas, not even one voice called out in support of number thirteen. And before Davido knew what was happening he found himself coaxed into position, side by side with all the other Cavalieri into something of a starting line.

Davido did not turn to look—he was too nervous to do so—but on his right he glimpsed the beefy ogre of a man who had given him his wine bottle, and on his left, the pork merchant who seemed to dislike Ebrei immensely. This did not strike Davido as an especially promising starting position. Then a rope was pulled before the racers to keep the donkeys from moving forward. The crowd was pushed back to the hay-and dirt-lined edges of the track until they formed a perimeter of humanity ten persons deep, creating a perfect race oval, with the statue of the Drunken Saint at its center.

The noise echoing throughout the piazza was overwhelmingly loud as the crowd continued shouting out the cycle of numbers time and again: “Numero Sei, Numero Sette, Numero Otto …” Davido scanned the crowd to find the stabilizing face of Mari. He could not locate her, but his vision found his grandfather just as the Good Padre positioned Nonno beside the wine table and placed a wine screw in his hand. Davido held his grandfather’s eyes, hoping to glean from them any strength and insight he might have to offer. Slowly, Nonno’s lips broke with the slightest of smirks and in an instant Davido got what he was searching for.

’Tis strange, thought Davido through the noise and chaos, that a smirk can reveal so much. On the surface, Nonno’s smirk did exactly what a good smirk does: it mocked Davido’s current predicament and reproved him for ignoring the wisdom and cautions of his grandfather. But beyond the mockery, there was a crinkle of the lip and a glint in the old man’s eyes that revealed how it was that his grandfather had survived Colombo’s voyage, the desperate years living among the Indiani of the New World, the decade spent hiding throughout Italy, the plagues, the heartbreaks and everything else. Put simply, his Nonno was mad. Not mad as in angry or crazy, but mad in that he possessed a cultivated and indomitable life force that was somehow greater than the circumstances life threw at him, no matter how dire. In that moment Davido saw that there was something about Nonno that could not be broken. He hoped to God that