A smile in the pandemic

An implacable disease has broken out. A silent enemy, its stealthy advance appears inexorable, as it leaves a trail of victims behind it. At first, many sicken, and then with terrible finality, they begin to die.

Italy is one of the first places struck. In Florence, where the ravages are just starting, a group of young people decide they will be safer outside the city than inside. They make for a villa at Fiesole, in the hills nearby.

Fiesole. Not a bad place to be locked down

A breach of the lockdown rules? Perhaps there were none at that time. But in any case, they are in that place alone, and they have to find a way to pass the time.

Seven young women and three young men. They decide that each day they will elect one of their number to be King or Queen. The monarch for the day will choose a theme. Then everyone has to tell a story on that topic.

The themes range widely. Some are noble and elevating, like those of the day devoted to acts of great generosity. Some can be fearsome, such as Isabella and the Pot of Basil, one of the fiercest revenge stories written. The majority, however, are funny, concerned with the clever way people get out of scrapes, or trick each other to achieve their aims. Often, at the core is love, in the widest possible sense, from the purest of loves to something, shall we say, far earthier.

And what could be more appropriate? Love and laughter. What better way to tackle the fear and depression that accompany a terrible illness?

Some of you reading this post, especially if you’re Italian, may be saying “I recognise this story”. You’d be right. This isn’t a tale of Coronavirus in 2019. It’s a story set against the background of a far worse affliction, the Black Death, in 1348.

What’s more, the story’s a fiction. The seven women and three men, noble and virtuous even when they’re telling stories bordering on the erotic, emerged from the imagination of one of the world’s greatest storytellers, Giovanni Boccaccio.

Boccaccio's statue in the
Uffizi gallery in Florence

The book, the Decameron, is a monument to his skill. He had never previously published a short story. There was no tradition of writing such pieces anywhere in Europe. And here he produced a hundred of them.

Most of the stories were not invented by him. Indeed, many were old folk tales, or traditional stories from different countries. But he had to collect them and write them up himself.

What’s more, he wrote them in a strange language. In the fourteenth century, there was no such nation as Italy. The name applied only to a geographic entity, the peninsula where people spoke a variety of languages, related though often very different from each other, and none of them called ‘Italian’.

However, half a century earlier, the great poet Dante had written his extraordinary three-volume poem, The Divine Comedy, in his native language, Tuscan. Another great poet, Petrarch, a contemporary and friend of Boccaccio’s, had also written poems in that language.

Boccaccio, as a Florentine, was also a Tuscan speaker. The huge influence of these three writers, using that language, is one of the major influences that led to Tuscan becoming the basis of today’s Italian, when Italy appeared as a nation at last, over five centuries later. That’s why anyone who knows modern Italian reasonably well can still read Boccaccio with no great difficulty.

But writing prose fiction in Tuscan? In his day, this wasn’t viewed as an appropriate activity for a learned man. When his friend Petrarch called on him, he made that point forcefully. Only women read prose fiction in the vernacular language, the poet admonished him. Tuscan was a ‘vulgar’ language. Women were uneducated. Writing in that language for such an audience was simply undignified.

Men like them, when writing prose, wrote the great noble language of all the best thinkers. They wrote Latin.

That’s all very ironic, today. The Decameron is still read widely, and enjoyed by anyone who likes hilarious, serious, sad, noble, raunchy, astonishing stories. Boccaccio’s Latin works are read by a handful of Academics and no one else.

Amusingly, I think Boccaccio knew that might be the case. The best manuscript of the Decameron – and this was still before the start of printing in Europe, so all books were handwritten – is held in a Berlin museum and it’s in Boccaccio’s own hand.

He produced that copy just two years before his death. So clearly, despite Petrarch’s reproaches, Boccaccio loved this peculiar work of his enough to go to the extraordinary length of writing it all out once more, by hand, even as he approached the end of his life.

He loved his work, as his readers today still do. And the work is a wonderful roller coaster ride through love and fun and laughter and astonishment. It amazes and amuses us. Above all, it raises our spirits.

What better antidote to the pain that comes in the wake of an affliction?

Even if we can’t retreat to the hills above Florence to enjoy his stories.



Just for fun, here’s a retelling, rather than simply a translation, of one of my favourite stories in the collection.

Chichibio and the Crane, from the Decameron

Currado Gianfigliazzi was a nobleman of Florence, a man known for his generosity and style. He led the life of a knight, often taking time away from his duties to go hunting with hawk or hound.

One day, he brought down a fat young crane, and sent it to a good cook he had, a Venetian called Chichibio, to dress it and roast it well for dinner that evening.

Chichibio, who looked as naïve as he was, trussed and dressed the crane and started roasting it over ther, with all the skill he had. When it was nearly done and giving out a wonderful odour, Brunetta, a young woman of the neighbourhood who Chichibio longed to make his own, came into the kitchen and when she saw and smelled the crane, begged him to give her one of the thighs.

He replied emphatically, “you won’t be getting any part of that bird from me, Brunetta, not from me you won’t”.

Irritated, she answered, “Well, too bad for you, if you feel that way. Just remember that if you don’t give me a thigh, you’ll be getting nothing to satisfy your desires from me either.”

They argued heatedly but, in the end, to avoid falling out with her, Chichibio cut off a thigh from the crane and gave it to her.

That evening when the bird was served up to Messer Currado and some guests of his, Currado was astonished to see a leg missing. So he had Chichbio called from the kitchen and asked him what had happened to the missing thigh.

The Venetian, an expert liar, replied without hesitation, “Sir, cranes only have one thigh and one leg.”

“What on earth?” stormed Currado, furious. “Only one thigh and leg? Do you think I’ve never seen a crane before?”

“Sir,” replied Chichibio, “that’s just how it is, and I’ll show you as much whenever you have the time.”

Currado, out of respect for his guests, chose not to pursue the matter just then, but simply said, “If you claim you can show me that they only have one leg, something I’ve never seen or heard before, I want to see it tomorrow. And if it’s like you say, I’ll be fine. But if not, I give you my word that I’ll give you something to remember me by, with regret, till the day you die.”

That was as much as they said to each other that night. But at first light the next day, Currado whose anger had not dissipated at all while he slept, got up and called for horses. Then mounting Chichibio on a nag, he rode off to a river where cranes could often be seen at dawn.

“We’ll soon see whether it was you or I who lied last night.”

Chichibio, seeing that his master was as angry as ever, and that he had to find a way to make good his lie, which he had no idea how to do, rode along behind him. He was terrified and would have made off if he could see any way of getting away with it. But, seeing no way of escaping, all he could do was keep going, haunted by images of cranes on two legs, in front, behind or on either side of him.

But when they reached the river bank, he happened to catch sight, before Currado, of a dozen or more cranes all standing on one leg, as they do when sleeping. Immediately, he pointed them out to Currado.

“Now, sir, look at those cranes standing over there. You can see that I was telling you the truth last night – they each have just one thigh and one leg.”

Currado saw them and replied, “wait. I’ll show you that they have two.”

Moving closer, he shouted “Hey! Hey!” at the cranes. They immediately put their other legs down, took a few steps and flew off.

Currado turned to Chichibio, and said, “so what do you say now, you miserable liar? Do you see that they all have two legs?”

Chichibio, frightened and not knowing where to look, answered, “Yes, sir. But last night you didn’t shout ‘hey, hey’ at the crane. Had you shouted, it would have put down the other thigh and leg, just like these ones did.”

Currado found that answer so funny that his anger simply evaporated and he burst out laughing.

“Chichibio, you’re right. That’s what I should have done.”

So, thanks to his quick and clever answer, Chichibio dodged his bad luck and made his peace with his master.

Glimpsing a different world

The great advantage of FaceTime is that you can see the person you’re talking to as well as being able to talk to them. On the other hand, the disadvantage of FaceTime is that if you don’t turn off the video link, the other person can see you too.

The other problem is that, if you can’t get your earphones to work on your laptop, the people in the train carriage around you will hear your entire conversation.

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve given an account of an overheard conversation here. So I was glad to hear this one, if only so that I could regale you with it too.

Behind me in my carriage was a man – my apologies, a gentleman, though that term has nothing to do with gentleness and everything to do with class – with what I’d have to say was a perfect example of a plummy accent. That’s an accent that’s rich and round. Not rich as in food, but rich as in bank balance. Round not as in personally fat, but as in being born to live on the fat of the land. It was redolent of the best, by which I mean the most expensive, kind of public school – in Britain, the name we use for the more pricey private schools. 

In short, his voice dripped with the kind of confidence that comes of years of study – or at least attendance – at a school designed to train its pupils to the highest and most acute levels of belief in entitlement.

The FaceTime call came in to him at what would have been around 9:00 in the morning in the eastern United States, which was where it was made. The speaker was an American woman and she clearly had financial responsibility for a venture in which she and the gentleman had some kind of association.

“I’m afraid I didn’t realise,” she was saying, “that he would run up $50,000 in costs crossing the Atlantic in just six months. I hadn’t budgeted for that.”

Mumble, mumble, mumble came the reply. It seems he realised he could be heard.

“I understand,” she replied, a little louder, as though trying to beat down unfair criticism, “I’d budgeted that amount for a full year. Can a pilot really run through that sum in just six months?”

Clearly whatever he said next got under her skin a little.

“I know,” she said, “I realise I made a mistake. I realise it was my mistake. Thanks for helping by pointing it out. Thank you.”

Something in her tone suggested that the gratitude she was expressing wasn’t entirely sincere.

I missed the next few exchanges. Firstly, because I was trying to focus on my work a little. Secondly, because you’re not supposed to eavesdrop on strangers’ conversations, are you? And thirdly because, in any case, the train went through one of those super-rattly bits where I couldn’t have heard anything even if I’d tried.

But then suddenly the voices boomed out more loudly than ever. Hers at least.

“Well, Italy comes under my responsibility. Maybe I should go. Though the only place I really like there is Florence.”

Really? We’re writing off Arezzo? Milan? Turin? Rome? Venice, pearl of the Adriatic, for God’s sake?

“I could go there,” she went on,

“Ah,” the plummy one replied, now loud enough to hear him and as plummy as they make them, “if we forced you, you’d be prepared to go there, would you?”

It was rather a flat joke and it was delivered in a flat tone. It missed its mark entirely.

“What? What?” she asked.

He repeated his witticism, which seldom has a good effect even if it starts out supremely witty, and this one hadn’t.

‘Ah,” she said, “yes. I could stand Florence if it becomes absolutely necessary.”

But there was no laugh, no cheerful acknowledgement of humour.

I missed a few more sentences and when I picked up the conversation again, it began to appear that their association wasn’t merely a business one.

“I have to go to work,” she was saying, “I’m just a poor defence attorney having to appear for mere criminals.”

I couldn’t help feeling that the sarcasm was really beginning to ooze now.

“We’ve just got into Market Harborough,” said Plummy Voice. 

That was strictly true, as I quickly verified by looking out of the window, but it struck me as not entirely relevant to her comment. It seems she agreed.

Nothing remarkable about Market Harborough station
And yet Plummy Voice remarked on it

“Oh my God. That is so English. That’s you being English, isn’t it? It’s your way of saying that you don’t give a damn about me. That you don’t even like me.”

I didn’t catch his reply but it clearly wasn’t satisfactory.

“Well, you’re dull. I don’t like you either. I don’t like you at all. You’re dull. You’re very dull. No one likes you. You’ll end up alone.”

I’ve got to admit that he struck me as profoundly boring, but then I may not have been predisposed to like him from the moment I first heard his voice.

“I’ve got indigestion,” he answered, which struck me as a remark completely in the same category as “we’ve arrived in Market Harborough”.

“Well!” she cried, and I mean cried, as in shouted, “at least you’ve got that!”

What did she mean? That having indigestion made him marginally less dull? That it meant he had some company? You know, “you’re never alone with indigestion”?

But pretty soon she was being winsome.

“Before I go, you’ve got to say something nice to me. Something really nice.”

A pause.

“You don’t have to say it out loud.”

There was another slightly longer pause. And then she gave a little peal of laughter. Was it silvery? Was it dirty? Was it a cross between the two?

I couldn’t tell. So I was left trying to work out just what he’d said by way of farewell. Still, there are things I don’t need to be explicitly told. My imagination can supply plenty of possibilities.

As I expect can yours.