Tomato Rhapsody

by Adam Schell

  Cosimo di Pucci de’ Meducci, who governed under the title Cosimo the Third, was descended from, as he often put it, the lesser lineage of a long and dubious line of inbreeds, half-wits, perverts, pedants, scoundrels, tyrants, sodomites and syphilitics, who seemed to have both an extraordinary love of the arts and an uncanny proclivity for getting themselves assassinated. Amongst Cosimo’s direct ancestors and relatives were three popes, two queens of France, nine dukes of Tuscany, plus more cardinals, princes, princesses and foreign royalty by way of arranged marriage than he cared to recollect. Quite frankly, though, he despised almost all of them and harbored a great deal of contempt for his own family name.

  For as long as he could remember, Cosimo was envious of the rural peasants who tended the land and populated the small towns and villages throughout his province. Yes, they were an ignorant lot, but from what little he knew they seemed to possess an honest joy and bawdiness for which Cosimo would have traded all his useless power and privilege. Even the lyrical and jubilant peasant dialect, Etruscanato Antiquato 6, rhymed and rolled from belly to tongue. It was a far cry from the reserved and gestureless Nuovo Italiano spoken by the nobility, which Cosimo was the lax, ineffectual and reluctant leader of. He had been educated to speak the New Italian, but he hated the dialect of the gentry whose forked tongues managed to freeze and crack even the warmest of Italian vowels. It was a sound, particularly as spoken by his wife, that would drive icicles into his ears. Great spells of silence were Cosimo’s most common recourse, days on end when he would do little more than grunt and point, all the while dreaming in silence of how he’d gladly forfeit his title and a lifetime of speech if but for a day he could work amongst the rows of grapes and speak with the rapture and rhythm of a peasant.

  For Cosimo, royalty and reputation seemed to serve up far more sourness than sweetness. In his first twenty years of life, Cosimo had endured the murder of two uncles, three assassination attempts upon his father (which ended up killing two food tasters, one of whom young Cosimo was especially fond of), two short yet brutal wars against the powerful Milanese clans to the north and, cruelest of all to a thirteen-year-old boy, the disappearance of his favorite cousin and only childhood friend.

  Over the next twenty years, Cosimo endured the syphilitic demise of his father; the ravages of two plagues in Florence; a fierce and drawn-out conflict with the Spanish, who forever used Tuscany as their battleground with the French; an unwanted, politically arranged marriage to an aloof Austrian princess who expressed not an inkling of love for him (nor he for her); the usurpation of nearly all his power by his cousin the Queen of France; and, most recently and significantly, the poisoning of his beloved courtesane. She’d been poisoned by arsenic-laced honey she drizzled upon her chestnut polenta as she and Cosimo enjoyed a late-morning breakfast. Murdered a mere two weeks after Cosimo had given a less than enthusiastic recommendation that his eldest cousin, then a cardinal, would make a fine and pious Pope.

  Of late, Cosimo had even come to feel that his own loins mocked him, as with the onset of his son’s pubescence came the seemingly irrefutable evidence that his sole progeny had acquired the familial trait of being born a man more meant to be a woman. So much so that ever since the ravishingly beautiful and surprisingly maternal Queen Margarita of Naples visited Florence, young Prince Gian had taken to wearing his mother’s dresses and calling himself Princess Margarita.

  His son’s peculiarity was but one of many anomalies, indignities and heartbreaks Cosimo had endured since he’d inherited the Dukeship of Tuscany. It was a title he neither coveted nor felt particularly worthy of. Despite the pomp, power and privilege, the title was a hellish burden and his near two decades as duke had been marked by fits of horrendous depression. Though he’d largely managed to keep Tuscany out of war, great violence had nonetheless been perpetrated against him. And over the course of two years (three months, thirteen days and seven hours) since the death of his courtesan, time dripped by like winter sap oozing from a dying chestnut tree, every moment a torment caught between the nostalgia of memory and the reality of her non-existence.

  However, on this morning, as his speeding carriage blasted the grape-sweet air into his nostrils, Cosimo could feel the death-grip of melancholia recede and, for the first time in two years, he grinned. He was returning from Rome, where he had just successfully completed an official errand commissioned by his eminent second cousins, the King and Queen of France. By all appearances, his charge had been to travel to the Vatican and negotiate a series of religiously tolerant and economically inclusive papal decrees regarding the French-controlled Kingdom of Tuscany. However, the King and Queen of France were not so foolish as to leave the construction of important documents up to a mumbling, milk-hearted, whoremongering, bucolic dreamer like Cosimo. Cosimo was entirely aware that his real task was to play the part of official baby-sitter. He was the imperial pawn put in place by the King and Queen of France to undermine the Vatican and guarantee that the reluctant signature of his other cousin, Pope Leon XI, would grace the handful of documents.

  Though Cosimo could have cared less, the stakes were rather high. The powers that controlled Europe were in flux. The Polish Empire was gaining strength and had begun to expand southward, encroaching into lands long controlled by the Turkish Empire. The Polacks wanted access and control over a southern port city, namely Venice, and they’d recently won a decisive victory over the Turks at Budapest, a major step in their march to the sea. This was not good for France, as it meant that Venice, an independent and important trading partner with France, could soon be under the sway of France’s most significant European rival, the dreaded Polacks. Along with strengthening the army and readying for war, France needed to make its own ports and markets more attractive to foreign investment, and the only way to do so was to guarantee, as in Venice, that every Moro, Greco, Turco, Ebreo, Gipsi, Africano, Indiano and Orientale banker, shipper, trader, merchant, mercenary, charlatan and scoundrel would be free to conduct commerce without religious-based restriction and taxation. So, in the name of self-preservation, spurred on by greed and rivalry, sponsored by a heartless king and queen and signed into law by a hate-mongering Pope, Tuscany had just passed its most liberal laws to date, granting commerce a divinity not even the Church could molest.

  The morning’s dew cooked to vapor and carried the slight aroma of rosemary through the carriage windows, filling Cosimo’s nostrils with the musk of nostalgia. For rosemary was her scent. In the years since her death, the shape of her face and contour of her body had begun to slip from his mind’s grasp, but her aroma never left the tableau of Cosimo’s dreams. The sweet perfume eased away the eight days of tension and conjured up memories of his courtesan so acute that Cosimo could feel his flesh tingle beneath the caress of his reminiscence. Oh, lamented Cosimo, who had never had the courage to tell her how dearly he loved her, she would have been so pleased by the news he had to tell!

  Cosimo undid the first few buttons of his trousers to allow the restorative breeze to better circulate about his body. He closed his eyes and, from the safety of his carriage, recalled with vivid detail the sweet irony of his unintended revenge. He had not meant nor planned to enact a vendetta upon his cousin, which was why he deemed the events that transpired to have been divinely inspired. Oh, it was a slight reprisal in relation to the bloody retributions that marked his family name, but his love had known well that Cosimo had little taste for blood or family tradition. It was a poetic revenge, the kind of which his mistress would have approved: a soul-stirring sign that the eyes of his angel were still upon him.

  Cosimo could still hear the echo of his cousin’s footsteps as he approached the aft chamber of the palace where Cosimo and the French entourage waited. Outrageously, they had been waiting for eight days and had grown fat on a constant diet of excuses about the Pontiff’s “regrettably” busy schedule. Each day their meeting would be planned, delayed and then inevitably postponed. Through the days of monotony, Cosimo seemed to lose a deg
ree of control over his mind, always waiting for the meeting to occur, always on edge.

  The pervasive lack of light in the interior Vatican chambers trapped Cosimo in the dank shadows of memory. There, Cosimo spent much time revisiting and lamenting over that which had been stolen from him. He had little doubt that it was then Cardinale Meducci who “disappeared” his cousin and only childhood friend, just as it was the newly ascended Meducci Pope, Leon XI, who had destroyed his beloved paramour.

  Despite Cosimo’s desire to ponder more pleasant thoughts, he was unable to meditate on anything but the pending meeting with his cousin and all that this horrible man had stolen from his life. It was a cloudy meditation, one that wavered between vengeance and cowardice, anger and despair, and it culminated as Cosimo turned and caught sight of the flowing bloodred robe and the face that seemed to eat the light around it. Adrenal-laced fear flushed through Cosimo’s veins with such a sudden hotness that he nearly loosed his bowels. It was his cousin.

  Pope Leon XI was a fairly tall man marked by a gaunt and severe countenance that sunk his eyes into pools of shadow beneath the quarry of his brow. His nose was long and slender with a flat bridge in the most Roman of ways; it seemed always to cast a mountain of shade upon one pronounced cheekbone or the other. Even his temples, devoid of hair, seemed to fall off into shadow. Cosimo imagined not even Lucifer himself could carry so much darkness upon his face.

  Cosimo had not seen his cousin for some time, but he recalled him as a man who seemed to thrive on hate. Hate was the breath and food of his existence and Cosimo could hardly imagine how the prospect of being the first Pope to grant freedom of movement, ownership and commerce to every godless Moro, Greco, Turco, Ebreo, Gipsi, Africano, Indiano and Orientale in Tuscany must have twisted his cousin’s wretched gut. But, alas, as Cosimo knew, even Pope Leon XI had his superiors, and should the Polacks come to dominate Europe, a Franco-Italian Pope would need a legion of food tasters to protect him.

  Pope Leon entered the room without looking up to greet his cousin nor any member of the French/Tuscan envoy. Despite his lack of acknowledgment of the guests, all in attendance rose until His Holiness took his official seat at the enormous marble table right alongside Cosimo. It was the closest physical proximity Cosimo had shared with his cousin since he was a child.

  Immediately, the Pontiff began to feign perusal of the documents awaiting his signature. He knew full well what he was about to sign, but he continued the charade if not for the appearance of piety then at least to unsettle his cousin. Pope Leon leaned into the document, as if scrutinizing a particular passage, when the oddest thing occurred: sunlight fell upon his profile.

  The arrangement of the room was such that the only shaft of direct sunlight came from a slender, western-facing rectangular window located a few feet behind and to the right of where the Pope sat. The window couldn’t have been much larger than a foot in width and three feet in height, but it was just large enough to catch a sliver of the afternoon sun and undo the darkness that Pope Leon seemed to so covet.

  Drained of shadow, a new light was cast upon Cosimo’s fear. He had not seen his cousin for years, but in contrast to what Cosimo recalled from his youth, his cousin appeared to have not only aged, but veritably rotted. In the light, Cosimo noticed the age-spotted epidermis of his cousin’s hand and how his skin looked thin as paper. How unsightly tributaries of blue veins spidered across his bald head and ashen complexion. How the white of his eyes appeared jaundiced and bloodshot, and how his once piercing blue irises had faded to gray. In the light, Cosimo could see all the joy this hateful man had taken from him.

  As Pope Leon reached for his quill, Cosimo observed a tremor in his cousin’s hand. He was unsure whether age or rage had caused the palsy, but he imagined it was both. Methodically, the Pope dipped the quill into the inkwell and then brought his hand to the portion of the paper that would soon turn a mere document into a papal decree. Black ink from the quill tip leached onto the parchment like dye suddenly cast into a pool of clear water as Pope Leon XI began his Holy Roman imprimatur. It was a long, slow signature, and as the Pontiff’s quill formed the curves and angles of his name, Cosimo noticed a slight trickle of blood careen down his cousin’s nostril. Ever so briefly, the droplet paused, trapped in the sharp triangle of cartilage that defined the inner tip of the Pope’s beak; and then, with the final stroke of his quill, the droplet gave way, punctuating Pope Leon’s signature with sanguinity.

  Mortified, the Pope set down his quill and ran his longish middle finger across his nostril. It streaked his pale digit with red blood. Incredulous, the Pope turned and glared at Cosimo. It was a look of such venom that Cosimo felt his heart spasm with fear, yet he could not turn away. In the light, Cosimo saw the twitch of his cousin’s brow, the swelling of the veins across his left temple and the rupturing of blood vessels that latticed his eyes. It was the first time Cosimo had seen blood run from someone’s eyes since the arsenic poison ate through the tear ducts of his courtesan. Instantly, Cosimo felt the torment in his heart relent and an overwhelming feeling of sadness sweep through his being. If only I were a farmer, he thought, if only I were a farmer.

  Now, in case the reader is wondering what an aristocrat like Cosimo di Pucci de’ Meducci the Third, Grand Duke of Tuscany, has to do with our provincial romance, rest assured: Cosimo the Third serves a purpose. The reader should note that our tale is not a love story, not at all, but a romance, and according to the renowned 14th-century Italian dramatist Pozzo Menzogna, “There’s a significant difference between a love story and a romance.”

  In a love story, the obstacle(s) to achieving love lie primarily within the protagonist(s), usually in the form of an overly inflated sense of pride. This excessive conceit puts the lovers at odds with each other, while the characters who surround them mock and rejoice in the foolery and antics of such prideful persons as they desperately try to avoid what everyone knows to be ultimately unavoidable. Hence, the love story is predisposed to comedy.

  In a romance, however, the love between the protagonists is never in question—from the moment they first set eyes upon each other they know their hearts have been pierced by Cupid’s arrow, or rung by Il Tuono dell’ Amore, the thunder of love, as Menzogna put it. A romance’s conflict, unlike a love story, stems not from self-created issues of pride, but from the more severe burdens that family and society place upon the lovers. ’Tis why the romance is predisposed to tragedy, for the whittling away of one’s vanity is often a comical affair, but the confronting of deeply held societal and familial prejudices, resentments, laws and traditions is an altogether different and all too often tragic set of challenges. Hence, in a romance, time and place are critical to understanding the familial and societal forces that the lovers must confront and circumvent in order to finally unite.

  So, while Cosimo di Pucci de’ Meducci the Third, Grand Duke of Tuscany, may or may not have much to do with our story, the decree he and his cousin Pope Leon XI just signed into law helps establish our romance’s setting, and is the instrumental stroke of serendipity that will soon unite an Ebreo tomato farmer and a Catollica olive grower at the Monday morning market of our fair hamlet. Not to mention, had we not briefly peered into Cosimo’s world we never would have met his chef and come to know the story of pizza.

  “I want to smell it! Let me smell it!” blurted the queerly dressed boy as he reached up and tried to grab the earthen-like clump currently in the hands of the family chef.

  “Patience, patience,” the chef replied while raising the truffle out of reach of the boy’s grabby hands and smiling in-authentically. “Now, off you go, and put those melons back.”

  “But Papa loves truffles and you always let me smell them.”

  “Shh,” said the chef, hastily pressing his forefinger to the boy’s lips. “Best not to disturb official business.”

  “Father does not care what I disturb,” replied the boy.

  “And who might Father be?” asked the older and more po
mpous-looking of the two truffle-selling rhymers standing just outside the kitchen door.

  “Cosimo di Pucci de Meducci the Third,” the boy said proudly. “Grand Duke of Tuscany.”

  “Is that so?” said the rhymer. “And that would make you … ?”

  “Princess Margarita, heir to Duke—”

  “Oh, stop it,” the chef interrupted. “Your name is nothing of the sort.” The chef could see the smirk on the smug rhymer’s face and this bothered him immensely. “Oh, very well, Prince Gian,” said the chef as he handed the large truffle over to the boy, effectively conceding the negotiations before they had even begun. “Sniff away, if you must.”

  Though Prince Gian’s young mind could hardly fathom such a thought, it wasn’t easy heading up the kitchen for the Meducci family and Chef Luigi was in a bothered state for several reasons. First, ever since meeting Queen Margarita of Naples, his boss’s curious child had not only taken on the queen’s name, but the mortifying habit of wearing his mother’s dresses and stealing the melons Chef Luigi planned to use for lunch to fill out the gown’s vacant breast pouches. Despite himself, Luigi couldn’t help but feel a bit flattered by the prince’s attention, but what if, Luigi thought often and with great concern, the child should trip over the gown and hurt himself in the kitchen? He would most assuredly be out of a job then. Nonetheless, it wasn’t the antics of the prince that currently vexed Luigi (he had grown well accustomed to Gian’s behavior); it was the vulgar duo of rimatori who had sought out the royal kitchen in hopes of selling some truffles.

  They were a rank pair, one pompous and the other slovenly. The kind of rough-hewn village folk who might have bullied and abused Luigi when he was a young boy at the orphanage and sent to market for the day’s shopping. They would never have made it past the villa’s guards had not the pair of early-season truffles in their possession been so extraordinary. The truffles were unlike anything Luigi had ever seen or smelled, and he had to have them. The problem was, the pompous rhymer knew it, and if there was anything Luigi hated, it was parting with money, even if it wasn’t his.