Tomato Rhapsody

by Adam Schell

  The crowd gasped.

  “Stop it,” Mari repeated. “You’re embarrassing all of us.” “Why do you not speak, boy? Does the truth have your tongue?”

  “Stop it!” Tears began to well up in Mari’s eyes and she pushed Giuseppe’s shoulder.

  “Can you not defend yourself, boy?” “Leave him alone!” said Mari. “Or must a girl defend you?” “Shut up!” Mari yelled.

  “Do it, boy, reach down your trousers and give one a pluck. Prove to me that you and my daughter didn’t fu—”

  Mari smacked Giuseppe across the face, knocking the word from his mouth.

  Women shrieked. Men gasped. Bertolli ran to find the Good Padre.

  “I am not your daughter!”

  Slowly, Giuseppe turned to face Mari. “Lo … avete … scopato?” Did … you … fuck … him?

  With her left hand Mari smacked Giuseppe. Hard as she could.

  Giuseppe’s head snapped to the side. Slowly, he turned back to face Mari. His eyes glaring so intensely they could burn holes in wood. “Lo avete scopato?” he repeated.

  With her right hand Mari smacked Giuseppe.

  Davido wanted to do something—lunge across the stand and choke the life out of the bastard—but he couldn’t bring himself to move. The fear made his limbs too heavy.

  Giuseppe’s face began to redden, blood trickling down his nose. “Lo avete scopato?”

  Again, Mari smacked Giuseppe.

  “Lo avete scopato?”

  Tears streamed down Mari’s cheeks, her body quivering with fury. She went to smack Giuseppe again, but this time he caught her wrist.

  “Lo avete scopato?” he said, twisting her wrist.

  “Yes!” Mari screamed, “I fucked him! I fucked him in that sauce and you ate it!”

  And then Giuseppe smacked back.

  In Which We Learn

  the Significance of the church’s

  Dictum Coitus di chastatia

  It did not last long, but it was brutal and it was awful and it had many in the crowded tavern feeling soiled and conflicted—none more so than Cosimo. Here he was the Duke of Tuscany and he didn’t even have the courage to stop a lowly rogue like Giuseppe from beating a wonderful girl like Mari or the brother of his beloved courtesan. All he could do was watch. Even his chef had the courage to act—recklessly, ridiculously—throwing his face in front of Giuseppe’s fist.

  And now Cosimo could not get what he’d seen and heard out of his mind. The way Mari’s entire body had crumpled from the force of Giuseppe’s open-palmed smacks across the side of her face. The ferocity with which Giuseppe lunged across the tomato stand, grabbed the bewildered Ebreo boy by the hair, twisted his neck and pummeled a half-dozen hard punches into his face. The pathetic manner in which the old Ebreo slipped and fell to the ground as he tried to pull his grandson away. The horrible sound of Giuseppe’s hands as they pounded against innocent flesh. The combination of jeers and gasps that tellingly divided the crowd between those who craved vengeance and those who sought mercy. And then, the worst sound of all, the sound that Cosimo could not purge from his head: the sound of young lovers being torn apart while calling out each other’s names.

  Thank God the Good Padre was quick to the scene, pulling Giuseppe off Davido with such facility that a raving adult seemed suddenly like a squealing child, or who knows what may have happened. Even so, it was not a good ending, with Giuseppe cursing the Good Padre and “the wicked Ebreo” as he dragged Mari off by the hair, and the Good Padre escorting the old Ebreo and his beaten grandson onto their donkey-drawn wagon and hurrying them off.

  And now, with the onset of evening and only an old mule as his transport, Cosimo was afraid there wasn’t time enough to return to his villa and muster up a legion of guards to keep the next travesty from occurring. For Cosimo had little doubt another travesty would occur. He knew Giuseppe’s type too well; whether they wore the clothes of a petty landholder, politician or pope, such men were dispassionate, shrewd and adept at exploiting tragedy for great personal gain.

  It was depressing to Cosimo that so many in this village that he had come to adore seemed just as vile and cowardly as the aristocrats he had left behind; indeed, as cowardly as himself. Not a single man in the crowd, save for Luigi, raised a finger toward Mari’s defense. Only the Good Padre and Mucca, blessed Mucca, dared to confront Giuseppe. And, to Cosimo, a startling number of villagers actually seemed to share Giuseppe’s outrage, raising their fists and voices in approval, as if Mari’s feelings for the boy were a threat to their very existence, her virginity a communal possession.

  Of course, Cosimo knew that fathers often place a foolish pride upon their daughters’ chastity, but Giuseppe was hardly a father to Mari. Neither was this a case of rape or salacious seduction. No, from the manner in which Mari called after Davido as she was dragged away, and he after her, the truth of their feelings was undeniable: young and innocent and beautiful love. Indeed, it made Cosimo sick with despair and self-loathing to think that he had let such a thing be killed before his very eyes.

  “Order! Order!” Vincenzo took off his shoe and pounded it against the table. “Po shall be heard!”

  The tavern quieted. All heads turned to Augusto Po. “Vincenzo is right,” said Po smugly, pointing to a specific page in the large book he held. “The Church’s Dictum Coitus di Chastatia 19 does clearly state that if a virgin Catholic daughter be deflowered before wed and out of faith, then in payment for the aggrieved family’s disgrace, the perpetrator is to pay by forfeiture of his estate.”

  “There!” shouted Vincenzo over the grumbling of the crowded tavern. “There you have it. Giuseppe does have his rights, and we here have no right to act against a deceived father or our Mother Church.”

  “Oh, hypocrites! The lot of you,” said the Cheese Maker as he rose from his seat. The room drew quiet. “Sanctimonious blowhards seething over a ruined virgin bed, all blind to the lives and lies you’ve led. Feigning holiness as if we have not shared a life; I know many here who rolled in hay with another ‘fore you bedded your wife. And now you spew this venom toward a deed you seemingly abhor, when who amongst you has not turned another man’s daughter to whore—or at least longed to?” The Cheese Maker looked about the room and then softened his tone. “Please, good neighbors, this is Mari we speak of, daughter of our deceased friend, yet we brand his child a harlot and contemplate such end. She is but a young woman, who in the folly and hotness of youth perhaps did err, but banishment and forfeiture?”

  “Have you no shame?” said Vincenzo disgustedly. “No pride? Nor even eyes to see the sin? A serpent hath slithered into Eden and deflowered our kin!”

  “I saw only love,” said the Cheese Maker.

  “But what of the sauce?” shouted Vincenzo.

  “Is it even true?” questioned the Cheese Maker.

  “Now you call Giuseppe a liar?” Vincenzo’s face crinkled. “Are you blind? Were you not there? Could there be a greater sign of culpability than her temerity and his timidity?”

  The tavern went quiet. Even the Cheese Maker said nothing.

  “Ah,” scoffed Vincenzo, “even our milk-hearted friend is at a loss to defend the malicious act of the Ebreo coward, who would serve us to eat as food the Cristiana he deflowered.”

  “Please,” said the Cheese Maker as he looked about in disbelief, “this is madness. It was an act of the young, the foolish and imprudent, but to answer with forfeiture and banishment? My God, this is Mari we’re speaking of, flower of our village.”

  “Hmm,” it was Augusto Po who broke the mortifying silence, “a flower now plucked.”

  “Shut up,” Mucca snapped at Po. “You nasty, heartless miser.”

  There was a grumble in the tavern. Some on the side of Mucca, others seeming to side with Po. The Cheese Maker looked about, desperate to make eye contact with anyone, anyone but Vincenzo and Giuseppe, but throughout the room heads were lowered in shame and confusion. “Bobo,” the Cheese Maker shouted across the tavern,
“please, wise fool, say something. Surely you must see the truth here?”

  All heads turned to Bobo. Slumped upon a stool at the bar, he barely lifted his head to face the room. “Bobo says nothing.”

  “Ha,” blurted Vincenzo, “what a pleasant surprise! Besides, the laws that govern premarital carnality care not of the coupling’s mutuality. The law is the law and the law is with Giuseppe. And as we, his kinsmen, shall abide his word, let Giuseppe be heard.”

  Still in his tomato-stained shirt and seeming much the maligned father, Giuseppe slowly stood up. “Tomorrow,” he said without passion or menace, “a militia’s to be raised to exact the penance: she’s to a nunnery and the Ebreo from Tuscany to Venice.” And then Giuseppe snatched up Vincenzo’s shoe and hurled it directly and squarely into the face of the Cheese Maker.

  The sound startled Cosimo and put the fear of God into his belly. He had never heard the awful cracking sound of a nose breaking.

  19 A papal edict written in 1299, and adopted by much of Europe, that governed sexual behavior, improprieties and punishments.

  In which We Learn

  How Michelangelo Dealt with

  Sadness, or How Pizza Came to Be, Part I

  Nonno sliced the cheese, ladled some tomato sauce from a pot on the stove into a small bowl and cut a piece from the focaccia he’d brought back from Pitigliano. It was the only food they had in the house. Though it was of little solace, Nonno knew for certain that Davido had gone and made an additional pot of sauce. He’d been there in the evening as Davido made it. At least Nonno had that to comfort him, that his grandson had the decency not to serve the villagers the tomato sauce in which he and the girl had made love. Nonno set the food upon a tray. Davido had not eaten since morning. He’d not even wiped the blood from his face. He’d done nothing but sulk before the fire for hours. Though Nonno wanted to berate the boy for his utter stupidity, he figured food would do his grandson more good. They would be leaving at tomorrow’s dawn—the whole clan, all thirteen of them, leaving for Pitigliano.

  This was the kind of thing that Ebrei were killed over and Nonno couldn’t risk that. Had it been Spain, Davido never would have made it out of the market alive. They would spend the autumn, maybe even the winter, in Pitigliano. Nonno didn’t believe that any of these villagers would come looking for Davido there, but he couldn’t imagine the farm a safe place, at least for the time being. After the new year, Nonno would send a messenger to the Good Padre to gauge the sentiment of the villagers. If the Good Padre reported back that it was safe and the farm had not been razed, then, and only then, would Nonno and his kin return. Davido, however, would not. He would be sent to Florence, to marry and live out the next few years in the ghetto.

  How could he have been so stupid? thought Nonno. There wasn’t an Ebreo in all of Europe who didn’t know better. This was why Nonno didn’t chastise his grandson, because he knew that Davido did not act from lust or stupidity, or any base desire, but from love. It was plain to see. The girl was beautiful and brave, and Nonno was not so out of touch with the idea of youth to discount the notion that, as a young man, if he’d met such a girl, she would have surely stolen his heart too. Indeed, in Il Nuovo Mundo, Nonno had met such a girl when he was but a few years older than Davido, and that, like this, did not end well. It was all painfully evocative of the love he’d lost a half century ago. And the way his grandson and the girl called after each other, it was enough to break his heart. But it was a love that never could be and certainly was not worth dying over and Nonno knew that from his own experience.

  Nonno did not believe in dying for a cause, but rather in living for one, and he always looked at the numbers. That’s the horrible lesson he’d learned in Spain, the thing Torquemada 20 had taught him: Ebrei, no matter where they lived or how assimilated, were but a minority, and, whether by rancor or whim, if sentiment turned against them their only salvation was to flee. This was the thing, Nonno believed, that an Ebreo must accept—that his Davido must accept: there were certain forces an Ebreo couldn’t resist, certain battles an Ebreo couldn’t fight, certain loves he couldn’t have, no matter how much he desired, as it would be his very death and the death of all he loves. An Ebreo has no choice but to reconcile himself to survival and all the awful demands, choices and emotional scars that come along with it. The forever sadnesses, as Nonno called them, which forevermore stain the heart and mind.

  Though Nonno never spoke of it, he had come to believe that there were two types of sadness: temporary sadness and the forever kind. Temporary sadness may burn very hot at first—for years even—but, over time, it was a sadness that the mind could reconcile and a pain the heart could forgive. Forever sadness, on the other hand, was that sadness that created in the heart permanent embers: cinders of anguish that smoldered away in perpetuity and could at anytime burst into flame, igniting a pain nearly as fresh as the day it first arrived.

  The awful truth that life had taught Nonno was that forever sadness was born of guilt: that the pain that forever blistered his heart was not caused by randomness or the force of God, but by cowardice—that if only one had acted with greater courage or cunning the outcome could have been different. This was why the death of his granddaughter, of all the sadnesses that Nonno endured, and there were many, lay heaviest upon his heart. For he could have chosen differently; he did not have to let his granddaughter become a courtesan, especially one to the Duke of Tuscany.

  As Nonno now lifted the tray of food and headed toward his grandson, he saw there, glowing before the fire, a young man in the throes of sadness, a sadness, Nonno feared, that would last forever.

  “Eat, Davido,” said Nonno, as he set the tray of food on the footstool near where his grandson sat. “You must eat something.”

  Davido did not respond. He sat before the fire, comatose, still in his blood-and-tomato-stained shirt. The fire crackled before him, throwing glimmers of light across his beaten face. His cheeks were red and raw, his right eye and lips puffy and swollen.

  Nonno stood there for a moment waiting; assessing the room, the fire, his grandson, the situation, his own memories. “Do you think,” said Nonno, breaking the extended moment of silence, “that I was not young once? That I do not know this pain you are in? I do, Davido, I do. More than you will ever know. But you must remember, child of my child, life is long and the winning is in the living. Now eat.” Nonno pushed the tray a bit closer to his grandson. “You will need your strength. We leave for Pitigliano in the morning.”

  Nonno began to leave, but then stopped. He didn’t want to say it, to so state the obvious, but perhaps his grandson needed to hear it from him. “You are an Ebreo, Davido, and she is a Cristiana.” And then he turned and shuffled from the room, knowing that after that, nothing more need be said. Nonno was only twenty or so feet away, opening the door to his bedroom, when he heard the tray come crashing to the floor. Nonno paused for a moment, contemplating what he should do. Then he stepped inside his room and shut the door. Some things, he knew from experience, can only be dealt with alone.

  Michelangelo was in his mid-sixties when he met and fell in love with a beautiful and charming fifteen-year-old boy named Cecchino dei Bracci. When Bracci suddenly died a year later, it was said that Michelangelo fell into such a fit of despair that he wrote more than fifty love poems dedicated to the boy and sculpted the boy’s elaborate tomb—from marble—in less than a month, an unheard of feat. Certainly, the spasm of creativity that now impelled Davido was hardly on par with that of Michelangelo, but it was driven by the same despair. That horrendous feeling that something holy and sacred, something that one values more than his own life, has been ripped from him, and the mind, in a confused and desperate effort to maintain sanity and provide an outlet for the grief, erupts in a torrent of creativity.

  And so it was that Davido lay upon the warm stones before the fire in absolute anguish. In his fit, he had knocked the tray of food over, slid from his chair and collapsed to the floor. What a coward he consid
ered himself. He had just stood there while that monster beat Mari. Now he was sobbing, heartrending sobs. The salt from his tears burned his raw cheeks; vomitus acid scorched the back of his throat. He sobbed with such ferocity that he felt as if his guts might explode from his mouth. Surely, if there’d been any food in his stomach, he would have ejected it upon the bricks before the fire. Instead, he vomited up bile and sadness. All the sadness that sat in the pit of his stomach, sadness over the death of his parents, over the death of his sister, and now this new sadness, the seeming death of everything he loved—Mari and tomatoes. But mostly Davido sobbed for himself and for that calamitous moment when he most needed to be courageous, how he proved to be an utter coward.

  Davido lay there for a long time, until a loud pop from the fire drew his attention like that block of marble must have drawn Michelangelo’s. There, two feet before him, lying upon the hot bricks, Davido beheld the sight of the tray’s spilled contents. A bit of tomato sauce had splattered upon the focaccia; a slice of cheese hung partially over the bread and had begun to melt. Davido’s tears paused. He sat bolt upright and slid his body closer to the focaccia. Reaching for the bowl of sauce, with his hand he scraped what remained on top of the focaccia and spread it about with his fingers. He took the slice of cheese that lay partially upon the focaccia and centered it on the sauce-covered bread. He slid the sauce-and-cheese-topped square of bread closer to the fire and watched as the cheese began to melt, brown and bubble. He rotated the focaccia several times to cook it evenly on all sides. From a bundle of herbs he had set above the fire some weeks ago to dry, he sprinkled some oregano on his creation.

  Gingerly, Davido lifted the toasted focaccia from the hot stones. The crust burned slightly against the tips of his fingers, and through his swollen lips, he blew to cool it. Davido brought the slice to his mouth and bit down. His lower teeth cracked through the toasted crust. His upper teeth broke through the layer of warm, soft cheese and bread. He began to chew. His swollen lips shimmered in the firelight. His eyelids closed as every ounce of sensate awareness transferred to his palate. At first it was the primordial satisfaction of teeth crunching into warm food that enthralled him but, as he chewed, the sauce and cheese and crust melded and blossomed into a flavor so extraordinary that only one thought, the highest praise Davido could possibly offer, overwhelmed him: “Mari,” he gasped, “Mari.”