The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (49 page)

Seeing the ravages of the Black Death, Petrarch envied “happy posterity who will not experience such abysmal woe, and will look on our testimony as fable!” A Carthusian monk, after attending the burial of his prior and all thirty-four others in his monastery, with only his dog for a companion went searching for a refuge. “No bells tolled and nobody wept no matter what his loss,” a Sienese chronicler reported, “because almost everyone expected death … people said and believed, ‘This is the end of the world.’ ” We know now that the cause of the Black Death is a plague bacillus that thrives in the stomach of a particular flea that lives in the fur of the black rat. The “bubonic” form infects the bloodstream, causing buboes, or swellings of the lymph glands, and internal hemorrhages, while the more lethal and more communicable pneumonic form enters the respiratory system.

In the fourteenth century, when neither cause nor remedy was known, the plague was a melodramatic reminder of how a whimsical Fortune ruled mankind. All the more so because Europe had been relatively free of the most lethal epidemic diseases since about the eighth century. The Jews, of course, were among the first to be blamed, and across Germany, the Flagellants led thousands of Jews to slaughter. The plague had arrived in Europe in October 1347, at the Sicilian port of Messina on Genoese ships coming from the Black Sea. Within three years it would cut down a third of the population of Europe.

In the winter of 1348, when the plague reached Florence, the flower of late medieval Europe, the city was already reeling from civil disorders. Two of its most important banks, including Boccaccio’s father’s firm, had failed. Boccaccio was understandably exaggerating when he reported “that more than 100,000 human beings lost their lives within the walls of Florence, what with the ravages attendant on the plague and the barbarity of the survivors
toward the sick.” We now know that at least half of Florence’s 100,000 population died in that plague year. People would retire apparently well and die of the disease before they awoke. Seldom did an afflicted person survive more than five days. The usual course was much shorter. A doctor, it was said, might catch the disease at the patient’s bedside and die before he could leave the room. The chronicler of Florence, Giovanni Villani (1280?–1348) ended his life in the middle of a sentence—punctuated by the Black Death.

Luckily for us, Boccaccio was there and survived to write the
Decameron
between 1348 and 1352. His eyewitness account of the plague became the “Introduction to the First Day.” “To take pity on people in distress is a human quality which every man and woman should possess,” Boccaccio begins, while asking the reader’s sympathy for his own frustration in love. To all who have been kind to him he offers this book and “where it seems to be most needed”—to women.

He promises “to provide succour or diversion for the ladies, but only for those who are in love, since the others can make do with their needles, their reels and their spindles. I shall narrate a hundred stories or fables or parables or histories or whatever you choose to call them.” These were to be recited in ten days by seven ladies and three young men who had fled the plague.

In the “Introduction to the First Day” he apologizes for the “unpleasantness” of what he must now describe, the “deadly pestilence” of 1348. “And were it not for the fact that I am one of many people who saw it with their own eyes, I would scarcely dare to believe it.” He recounts the terrifying spread of the disease, the futile efforts to avoid infection, the callousness of frightened Florentines. “In the face of so much affliction and misery, all respect for the laws of God and man had virtually broken down and been extinguished in our city.” Women lost their modesty, men lost their inhibitions. Natural feelings were smothered and “more often than not bereavement was the signal for laughter and witticisms and general jollification.”

One Tuesday morning at the height of the plague seven young ladies are
praying in the deserted church of Santa Maria Novella. Then in come three young men (none less than twenty-five years of age) “in whom neither the horrors of the time nor the loss of friends or relatives nor concern for their own safety, have dampened the flames of love.” One of the ladies, Pampinea, proposes that the young men join them just outside Florence in a country estate for the duration of the plague—“shunning at all costs the lewd practices of our fellow citizens and feasting and merrymaking as best we may without in any way overstepping the bounds of what is reasonable.” Then, “in a spirit of chaste and brotherly affection,” accompanied by one or two maids and three manservants, they all take up residence in a palace with a spacious garden two miles outside the city.

To entertain themselves for the next two weeks they agree that every day one of them will reign as king or queen, will announce a theme for the storytelling, and call on each to tell a story. The sovereign for the day names the king or queen for the next day, and so it will go until each of the ten has reigned and they have told one hundred tales. Just as Dante’s
Divine Comedy
, which Boccaccio much admired, has one hundred cantos, so Boccaccio offers his hundred tales. A deeper parallel has been suggested. Perhaps plague-stricken Florence was Boccaccio’s Hell, the storytelling palace and gardens embellished by pastoral peace and lyric and dance were his Paradise, and the tales themselves were his Purgatory.

But Boccaccio was a refugee from Dante. Unlike the
Divine Comedy
, which is ranged in orderly levels of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, Boccaccio’s Human Comedy reveals the bewildering miscellany of human experience. The topics for the
Decameron
days are conspicuously earthy and heterogeneous. Boccaccio not only does not preach but does not even reveal a sense of sin. Unlike Dante, he does not take responsibility for the truth of the stories told. Instead he assigns this responsibility to the tellers of the tales, whose varying credibility adds spice, ambiguity, and nuance.

So Boccaccio creates a human panorama of love, courage, cowardice, wit, wisdom, deceit, and folly, seen through the eyes of the ten young people. The themes of the Days all somehow touch on the mysteries of Fortune. On Day I and Day IX, each may choose any theme. But the other days have their special themes: (II) on people who, after misfortunes, attain an unexpected state of happiness; (III) on those who attain their desires (or recover what was lost) through their ingenuity; (IV) about those whose loves have an unhappy ending; (V) who suffer misfortune but finally attain happiness; or (VI) who, by a clever gambit have managed to escape loss or danger; (VII) the tricks wives have played on their husbands; (VIII) men or women on their lovers, or by men on men; on a final day (X) about those who have acted generously or courageously.

This catalog of human experience does not commit tellers or listeners to any philosophy or theology. Boccaccio’s world shows no cardinal virtues or deadly sins. A third of the stories take place in Florence, and more than three quarters are set in Italy. But the rest come from across the world, from England to China, from antiquity to Boccaccio’s day, where most occur. The actors include peasants and workers along with the familiar knights and squires, pilgrims, and abbots of the troubadours. Women play leading roles.

The
Decameron
with good reason has been called “the epic of the merchant class.” Instead of celebrating the canonical medieval virtues, the stories tell us how much can be accomplished by a quick wit, a ready tongue, shrewdness, and foresight in the marketplace. What all men and women share is their struggle to defeat ill fortune and exploit good fortune while satisfying their sexual desires. Boccaccio has escaped from Dante’s allegory into the everyday world of love and lust, wit and deception, stinginess and generosity. If he does not teach the art of living virtuously, he does teach the “art of living well.”

Boccaccio confessed that few of the stories were entirely his own invention. He appropriated the elements of his tales from Spain, France, Provence, and the Near East, from folklore, myth, and legend. Surprisingly, even his “eyewitness” account of the plague was adapted from the chronicle of an eighth-century Italian Benedictine monk, Paulus Diaconus. But he had the modern talent for renewal, for making twice-told tales seem new.

The very concept of a human comedy, a secular sampling of man’s everyday experiences on earth, had to be created by Boccaccio. In a favorite tale, the very first on Day I, we taste the flavor of the
Decameron
as we follow the surprising career of a notary, Cepperello of Prato, who delighted in lying and cheating. “He would take particular pleasure, and a great amount of trouble in stirring up enmity, discord and bad blood between friends, relatives and anybody else; and the more calamities ensued, the greater would be his rapture.… Of women he was as fond as dogs are fond of a good stout stick.… He would rob and pilfer as conscientiously as if he were a saintly man making an offering.” He was hired to go to Burgundy to use his guile to collect unpaid bills. But in the midst of business he suddenly fell ill, and his death seemed imminent.

The two Florentine brothers with whom he was lodging feared the consequences for them if this wicked blasphemer died on their premises. How could they get rid of their unwelcome lodger—alive or dead? Cepperello, overhearing their concerns, asked them to summon a holy friar for his confession. The naive friar listened dutifully to Cepperello’s sanctimony. His excesses of kindness and generosity revealed him as an uncanonized saint. For example, he even confessed to the sin of boasting of his virginity.
He confessed to his “gluttony” when, after long periods of fasting or prayer, “he had drunk water as pleasurably and avidly as any great bibber of wine.” The greatest sin of his life, he finally recalled, was that as a child he had once rudely cursed his mother. When Cepperello died, the priest arranged a service “of great pomp and ceremony” in the monastery. Thereafter the townspeople celebrated the purity of his life, “called him, and call him still Saint Ciappelletto. Moreover it is claimed that through him God has wrought many miracles, and that He continues to work them on behalf of whoever commends himself devoutly to this particular saint.”

Perhaps Cepperello’s career was not unique among the saints. The next two stories, which happen to concern Jews, both show a liberated modern irreverence. The Jew Abraham is the object of his Christian friend Johannot’s charitable hopes that he will be converted. Against his Christian friend’s advice, the Jew travels to Rome to size up the religion at its headquarters. On his return he reports that in Rome he had found the Church dignitaries to be “gluttons, winebibbers, and drunkards without exception, and that next to their lust they would rather attend to their bellies than to anything else, as though they were a pack of animals.… He saw that they were such a collection of rapacious money-grubbers that they were as ready to buy and sell human, that is to say, Christian blood, as they were to trade for profit in any kind of divine object.” But the friend hears that the trip had firmly convinced the Jew to become a Christian. How could this be? Abraham explains. The highest dignitaries of the Church, he said, seemed to be using all their efforts to destroy the Christian religion at its headquarters. “But since it is evident to me that their attempts are unavailing, and that your religion continues to grow in popularity, and become more splendid and illustrious, I can only conclude that, being a more holy and genuine religion than any of the others, it deservedly has the Holy Ghost as its foundation and support.”

There is not a saint or a scholar among the
Decameron
tales. While their commonest theme is love, they could also provide footnotes of sadism and masochism. Yet, whatever their tales, the visible conduct of the ten nubile young people is conspicuously proper.

The tale of the love of Ghismunda and Guiscardo is a favorite of all the “stories about the sorrows of others.” Tancredi, prince of Salerno, dotes on his daughter and cannot bear to give her away in marriage. She falls in love with Guiscardo, one of her father’s valets of humble birth, sends him letters, and has secret rendezvous with him in a nearby cave. Tancredi determines to put an end to their affair and he kills Guiscardo. Then, to “console” his daughter, Tancredi sends her a handsome goblet of gold in which he has put Guiscardo’s heart. When she sees what is in the goblet, she determines to pour poison in the goblet and drink it so she and her beloved may be
finally reunited. But before the fatal draft she addresses her obdurate father: “It is clear, Tancredi, that you are made of flesh and blood and that you have fathered a daughter made of flesh and blood, not one of stone or of iron.… I was deceived by you. Will you say … that I consorted with a man of low condition? Poverty does not diminish anyone’s ability, it only diminishes his wealth! Many kings and great rulers were once poor, and many of those who plow the land and watch the sheep were once very rich, and they still are.”

One of the most popular stories on the day devoted to people attaining their desires was how the innocent maiden Alibech was taught by the monk Rustico to put the Devil back into Hell. To prepare her for the lesson, he stripped himself naked and instructed her to do the same, when she asked: