Tomato Rhapsody

by Adam Schell

  “Oh, Chef Luigi,” young Gian chirped as he dreamily sniffed the pungent clump of fungus, “I know Papa will love them.” The boy leaned against the kitchen door, jostling a wreath of garlic bulbs and causing a few sheaths of garlic skin to flake off.

  “And in which dish, young Princess Margarita,” asked the pompous truffle seller, “does your father most like truffles?”

  Repugnant, thought Luigi as he scraped his clog against the wooden floor to whisk the garlic peelings out the door. “Mustn’t make a mess of my kitchen, now, young prince.”

  “But,” from out of nowhere the more slovenly of the pair of truffle sellers stammered, “but you’re dressed like a princess?” The man seemed genuinely overcome, as if the mass of his bafflement suddenly slipped through a crack in his discretion.

  Luigi stiffened.

  Leaning against the frame of the door, Prince Gian continued to sniff the truffle, then replied nonchalantly, “So, what of it?”

  “Well,” the slovenly man continued, eyes wide and transfixed upon the boy, “it just seems not proper.”

  The pompous truffle seller turned to his underling: his eyebrows raised in disbelief, his lips bent with rage. “Shut your mouth!” he snapped.

  Now the young prince stopped his sniffing and looked contemptuously at the pompous truffle seller. “You do not,” the prince said with a surprising authority, “tell anyone to shut his mouth before the Prince of Tuscany.”

  There was a pause, heavy and tense, as Prince Gian held his gaze upon the pompous truffle seller. Luigi’s blood froze in his veins. The man did not appear to take kindly to his remonstration. Finally, a forced smile broke the man’s lip-lock and he lowered his eyes. “My apologies, young lord,” he said, though Luigi didn’t believe a word of it.

  Satisfied, Prince Gian now turned to address the slovenly truffle seller. “May I,” he asked the man rather sweetly, “see your hands?”

  “My what?” the man asked, seemingly more confused than ever.

  “May I,” repeated Gian, “see your hands?”

  The man nodded nervously as he moved his hands from behind his back to before the prince’s eyes. His hands were thick and calloused; dirt dusted and colored his skin and impacted in black bands under his fingernails.

  “I tell you,” said the boy as he simultaneously assessed the man’s hands and fondled the truffle he held, “what seems not proper. It was your hands that dug up the truffles, no?”

  Sheepishly, the slovenly truffle seller nodded.

  “And from the smell of it,” Gian continued, “it was your hands that wrangled and led the sows?”

  Seeming to wilt under the boy’s doe-eyed gaze, the man nodded, again.

  “Yet,” the boy let his eyes wander from the slovenly one’s hands to the pompous one’s boots, “from the looks of it, the profits are all his.”

  Mio Dio! Luigi could not help but smile, suddenly feeling as if the negotiations had not gone totally awry. Now, thought Luigi, if only the boy would put on a pair of trousers, he’d one day rule all of Italy.

  Awkwardly, the pair of rhymers stood there, the wind sapped from their sails by a twelve-year-old prince in a dress, when suddenly—thankfully for the duo of truffle sellers—the air filled with the clanging of a large bell.

  Young Gian gasped and his eyes blossomed with excitement. “Papa!” he squealed, sounding very much like a young girl.

  “The duke!” a voice echoing from inside the house began to shout out. “The duke approaches.” A pair of guards scrambled and began to push open the enormous entrance gates. The young prince and the pair of truffle dealers momentarily forgot their business and turned their attention to the open gates. In an instant, the great home awoke from its lazy Sunday slumber to a bustle of activity. Butlers, servants, stablemen and a contingent of Guardia Nobile di Meducci began to emerge from the villa’s numerous exits, hurriedly neatening their appearance as they fell into position alongside the arching carriageway that swept before the colossal home’s main entrance.

  Unstirred by the commotion, Luigi took the truffle from the distracted prince just as the boy ran off in the direction of his father’s carriage. Luigi brought the truffle to his nose and gave it another sniff. How had this conceited rogue and his rank companion, who dressed and smelled like a barnyard mule, managed to come up with truffles so grand, particularly two months before the start of the truffle season? From the looks of them, Luigi wondered if the fungus hadn’t sprung from the more slovenly one’s navel.

  “I’ll be back,” Luigi said to neither one in particular as he left the pair of rimatori waiting outside the kitchen door. With the servants otherwise occupied, it was an opportune moment to have a look about one of the lesser-used rooms of the villa and choose some meaningless trinket of the duke’s or lady duke’s that Luigi could use to barter for the truffles.

  Meanwhile, the duke’s horse-drawn carriage coursed through the open gates of his country villa and passed the kitchen entrance. Upon seeing his father’s carriage, Prince Gian Gastone, sole heir to the title, ran eagerly from the kitchen of the chef he adored to greet the father he worshipped. As he ran along the carriageway, Gian tripped over his dress twice and crushed one of the ripe melons against the tender young flesh of his chest. He gathered his feet and made it to his father’s carriage as it came to pause, just before the master butler could position himself at the coach’s door.

  Panting and full of expectancy, young Gian opened the carriage door to the greatest sight his young eyes had ever beheld. It was a shocking image, but it filled the remaining sixteen days of young Gian’s life with strokes of bliss. And on the morning of the seventeenth day, when the organs of his body finally succumbed to the virulent poison laced within the fig jam he’d eaten, it was the image from earth that young Gian took to heaven. For Gian Gastone di Pucci de’ Meducci, sporting a dress and dripping fresh melon, opened the door of the carriage to find his father fully naked, bastone in hand, and dreaming of the Courtesane Ebreane he had so loved.

  6 Etruscanato Antiquato (Old Etruscan): the early-Italian dialect that evolved in Tuscany in the centuries after the ancient Etruscans were conquered by Rome (396 BC) and their indigenous language combined with Latin over the centuries to form Italian. Like many of the earliest languages (Aramaic, Greek, Hungarian, Basque), developed and spoken before the advent of writing, Old Etruscan was a largely rhyming idiom.

  Linguists and anthropologists theorize that rhyming language developed as a means to facilitate memorization before the emergence and widespread understanding of written language. The conceit was elevated to an art form by traveling poets who used rhyme for the creation and performance of their epic poems (Homer). With the creation of the printing press (Venice, 1426), and by the time of the Renaissance, Nuovo Italiano had replaced its rhyming precursor as the official dialect of the educated, elite and city dwellers. By the sixteenth century, Etruscanato Antiquato was considered a quaint dialect spoken by rural peasants and eccentrics, commonly called rimatori (rhymers), and a sure sign of illiteracy.

  In which We Learn

  the Recipe for

  Insalata di Pomodoro e Menta

  “Cousins,” said Davido, abandoning the storytelling tone he’d just been using. He sat up and turned his head in the direction of what caught his eye. “Go tell Nonno a visitor approaches.”

  Even at their young ages the children had inherited a suspicion of strangers and they sprang up like a five-headed hydra from between the rows of tomato plants. Each head popped up in order of age, from eight to three, and mimicked the sudden shift in countenance of their next elder kin. “Go on,” Davido snapped his fingers, “now.” Heeding their cousin’s charge, the five children sprang from the field and ran off toward the large stone and wood barn.

  Davido stood, to better size up the odd sight advancing in the distance. At first glance he registered an equine lope and what looked like the brown cassock of an itinerant monk. He squinted and shaded his brow for better foc
us, but still couldn’t tell whether the man was upon a donkey or a mule, though from the ears, large and pointy, he knew it wasn’t a horse. That mattered to Davido greatly, as Ebrei were subject to a degrading law of the land that only permitted them to own and ride upon donkeys. Even the humble mule was off-limits. However, what really confused Davido, and what he thought must be an illusion of the late-afternoon sun, was the apparent skin color of the figure in the distance.

  With the man still eighty paces down the driveway and presently waving, Davido turned and began to walk toward the barn. The handling of church envoys was something usually done by Nonno, and Davido thought it best to let his grandfather know that it looked as if a lone priest was approaching. A priest, who in the distance appeared the color of a late-summer eggplant—but Davido wasn’t exactly sure he’d mention that.

  At just the moment he climbed into his tub and began to lower his old bones into the hot water for his Sunday afternoon bath, Nonno’s eardrums rang as all the grandchildren hollered his name from somewhere outside the barn. The old man’s peaceful sigh transformed into an obstinate grunt and Nonno paused for a moment to reconcile himself to the inevitable disturbance of his Sunday ritual. After the three-hour wagon ride from Florence, his old bones needed a good soaking.

  Because the creature was nearby and seemed to have the emotional capacity to appreciate the sanctity of a Sunday bath, Nonno looked to the old donkey standing beside his tub. Signore Meducci was his name, called that because he seemed to have been left behind from when the Meducci wine-makers owned the property. Plus, the donkey treated just about everyone but Nonno the way a fallen monarch might treat his keepers—with equal parts disgust and disinterest. From the onset, the old beast had taken to standing in the barn during Nonno’s Sunday bath, apparently enjoying the fire’s warm embers and herb-scented steam. Nonno did not object to the donkey’s presence and felt a certain empathy for him, figuring that when one reaches a certain age he 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 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.