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1.
1951, Italian Alps...
The pamphlet that shifted my family's future read as follows:
The species is believed to have first been planted by Roman Emperor Hadrian. His many excursions led him to a fervent affinity for the so-called 'Warrior's Respite'. In times of war, the brave were obliged to flee their homes and plunge their lives into all color of peril; then, when each campaign had ended, the warriors were provided with whatever comforts the land and the human will could provide, assuming there was a loving home to which they were able to return.
Perhaps the strangest attribute of this fig-like white fruit is that there seem never to have been more than two hundred vines in existence at any one time. A long life-span and intricate regenerative ability are the ways in which the plant has come to deal with its characteristic scarcity. Science at large has worked at best inattentively to understand this particular species of runner, perhaps from limited access, but we do know that private logs were always kept by its caretakers and that one of Hadrian's original plants is still with us today.
The flower of this variety is impressive, vibrant. It would have to be referred to as the Emperor's Lotus, to distinguish it from the far more common, even legendary Lotus species, known from Greek epics and the spanning metaphors of the Far East.
Those who have known Hadrian's plant intimately, until now a requirement of anyone who has been invited to know, and to taste it, call it simply the Lotus. The name is most often used as reference to (and most discussion concerning the plant tends to move toward) the fruit of the Emperor's Lotus, instead of the flower. For, though the flower bears a brilliant and unforgettable musky scent, it is the fruit whose nectar has been used as a narcotic and is purported to produce effects of shapeshifting when consumed in unadvisably large, chronic doses.
Very few people, of course, have ever heard tell of this variety of fruit, most likely because its owners have not wanted to risk losing the individual specimens they have come to love throughout their lives. Today's caretakers are not direct descendents of Hadrian, but they have, it is known, a family history which makes them just as mythic and worthy a dynasty. It is their private mountain, Fontessere, where every exemplar of the plant can be found to exist; it is indeed here, at Fontessere, where their fourteenth heir, a certain Beatrice Cucinotta, has opted to open her gates to the public.
It is time, she recounts, to open the doors to her family's masterfully secretive world, and so open the life of the Emperor's Lotus fruit to observation, and thereby, to deeper understanding.
She believes that modern industrial society may become a threat to the survival
of her family's treasure. The unique and potent wine which has been traditionally
extracted from this fruit (there need not be any process of fermentation,
oddly, as the fruit itself houses a milky, alcohol-based nectar suspected
of both narcotic and hallucinatory effect) has not been selling at its accustomed
markets. There was a network of villages throughout the valley that were afforded
the luxury of purchasing five cases each per annum, and these villages would
then take the labor upon themselves of distributing the bottled nectars to
high-profile clients in certain major cities around the world. All was done
according to a strict, specialized code of discretion. The result was a degree
of wealth both in the villages and for the Cucinotta family which could not
have been acheived so efficiently by any other means. So, the numbers were
kept to a minimum, and no less-than-trustworthy visitors were ever allowed
to inspect the plant, and none were allowed to carry away a sample.
Today, the noble donna Beatrice Cucinotta-Balla offers these mythic estates
to you, for inspection, in twelve languages. Among the wonderful artwork and
folklore which may be encountered here, you may find Beatrice's own photographic
work appealing. The book in which her prints have recently been published,
Rustica, is available in the main house, sitting room. And, of course,
you are invited to a private tasting of the lotus nectars in the rear piazza.
2.
This type of literature is not to be trusted! These capricious hillside advertisements. Rewritings of history. Retraction. Entitlement. Privation feigning aperture. Sales. It is sheer propaganda, shamelessly spreading legends of incredible wealth and enduring sacrosanct isolations. Idyll. Promise of a solace nowhere to be found. A fine but necessarily false message which can only promote decadent and wanton behavior, and in the best of people.
Still, it seemed at those earliest moments too much of an enchantment, and
it would be our fate, my family's charge, to cultivate the largest surviving
measure of the species. This moment in time, this family excursion, this introductory
leaflet: the cornerstone of a dynastic idyll. Idyll is, after all, that implied
plateau to which we all aspire, in vain and through the agonies of dwelling
on Earth. We are helpless to resist the humanity of this aspiration, though
it brings much of the inward discomfort of the dreaming species.
With all of this suddenly apparent, on the mountainside at Fontessere, the
order of things became clear to Dr Byron Sound:
It must be attempted!
I remember he told my mother he would die from shame if he didn't at least make the effort.
We would expand the network of distribution (as a matter of principle), and we would feed (at least figuratively) off the plenty of the vine. Its penchant for regeneration could be ours, thought my father, the good world-weary Dr Byron Sound. He never imagined how forbidden was his ambition, how much of an affront to harmony in the cosmos.
An idealistic and exhausted physician would hardly have suspected the difficulties involved in keeping a lotus vineyard. The very method of gain would become the seed pattern of demise... the force of gathering a fortune unto himself would spell the dissipation of the same sad fortune. A fatal and unstoppable reality, the force of gravity, the pull of future times.
Prehistory [ excerpted ]
