‘Sir, there is a gentlewoman of this city who would be glad of a few words with you, if you have no objection.’
When he heard this, Andreuccio immediately assumed, on looking himself up and down and thinking what a handsome fellow he was, that the woman must have fallen in love with him, as though he were the only good-looking youth at that time to be found in Naples. So he readily agreed, and asked where and when the lady would like to see him.
‘You may come whenever you wish, sir,’ said the maid. ‘She is waiting for you at her house.’
‘Lead the way then,’ Andreuccio promptly replied. ‘I’ll follow you.’ And without leaving any message at the inn, off he went.
The maid conveyed him to the lady’s house, which was situated in a quarter called The Fleshpots,1 the mere name of which shows how honest a district it was. But Andreuccio neither knew nor suspected anything of all this, being of the opinion that he was on his way to see a gentlewoman in a perfectly respectable part of the city. Eventually, with the maid leading the way, they arrived at the lady’s house, and Andreuccio went boldly in. The maid had already hailed her mistress with the words ‘Andreuccio’s here!’, and as he mounted the stairs he saw the lady coming out on the landing to receive him.
She was still very young, tall in stature, with a very beautiful face, and her clothes and jewellery were a model of good taste. Just before Andreuccio reached her, she opened her arms wide and descended three steps to meet him. Then she clasped him round the neck and remained for some time without speaking, as though hindered by a surge of powerful emotion. Finally, her eyes filling with tears, she kissed his brow and said, in a somewhat faltering voice:
‘Oh, Andreuccio my dear, how delighted I am to see you.’
Not knowing what to make of this barrage of affection, he replied, in tones of deep astonishment:
‘My lady, the pleasure is mine.’
Then she took him by the hand, and led him up to the main room of her house, from whence, without another word, she passed with him into her bedroom, which was all fragrant with roses, orange-blossom and other pleasant odours. There he saw an exquisite curtained bed, a large number of dresses hanging from pegs, as is the custom in those parts, and other very beautiful, expensive looking objects. He had never seen such finery before, and was firmly convinced that the lady must be nothing less than a genuine aristocrat.
Having made him sit by her side on a chest at the foot of the bed, she began to address him as follows:
‘Andreuccio, I am quite sure you must be astonished at me for embracing you like this and bursting into tears, for you do not know me and it may be that you have never even heard of me before. But you are now to hear something that will possibly increase your astonishment, for the fact is that I am your sister. I have always longed to meet all of my brothers, and now that God has been good enough to allow me to see one of them, I shall no longer die disconsolate when the time comes for me to depart this life. But in case you know nothing of this, I will tell you all about it.
‘Pietro, who is my father as well as yours, lived for many years in Palermo, as I suppose you may have heard. Being a good and amiable man, he was greatly loved there, and he is still loved there to this day by those who knew him. But of all his profound admirers, none loved him more than my mother, who was a widowed lady of gentle birth. Indeed, she loved Pietro so deeply, that she abandoned all fear of her father, her brothers and her good name, and their friendship became so intimate that it led to the birth of the person you see here now, sitting beside you.
‘When I was still a little girl, Pietro’s business called him away from Palermo and he returned to Perugia, leaving my mother and me to fend for ourselves, and as far as I have been able to discover, he never gave either of us another thought. For this reason, but for the fact that he was my father, I would be inclined to reproach him bitterly, considering (to say nothing of the affection he should have had for me, his own daughter, born neither of a serving-wench nor of any low-class woman) the ingratitude he displayed towards my mother. For she, prompted by her unswerving devotion, surrendered herself body and soul to this man, without so much as knowing who he was.
‘But never mind about all that. Wrongs committed in the distant past are far easier to condemn than to rectify. At all events, the fact is that he abandoned me when I was still a tiny child in Palermo, where I eventually grew up, and my mother, being a wealthy woman, married me off to a worthy nobleman from Girgenti, who out of affection for my mother and myself came to live in Palermo. Being a staunch supporter of the Guelphs, he began to intrigue on behalf of King Charles of Naples. But before the plot could be sprung, it reached the ears of King Frederick,2 and we had to flee from Sicily just as I was about to become the greatest lady in the island. Of our huge store of possessions, we took away only those few things we were able to carry with us, and leaving behind our lands and palaces, we came as refugees to this country, where we found King Charles so well-disposed towards us that he made good some of the losses we had suffered on his account. He gave us estates and houses, and as you will see for yourself, he makes generous and regular provision for my husband, or in other words your brother- in-law. And that, my dear sweet brother, is how I came to be in Naples, where, thanks more to God than to yourself, I have met you at last.’ And having said all this, sobbing with affection, she embraced him a second time and kissed him once again on the forehead.
She had told her tale very glibly and with great self-assurance, neither stammering at any point nor swallowing any of her words. For his part, Andreuccio remembered that his father really had been in Palermo, and he knew from his own experience how lightly young men are apt to regard the love of a woman. So what with her tears of affection, her fond embraces and her chaste kisses, he was more than satisfied that she was telling the truth. And when she had finished, he replied:
‘I beg you not to take my amazement too much to heart, madam, for to tell you the truth I have never had the slightest knowledge of your existence. For some reason or other, my father never spoke of you and your mother, or if he did I never came to hear of it. But I am all the more delighted to find my sister in Naples, because I was feeling rather lonely here and the discovery was so unexpected. I myself am merely a small trader, but I know of no man, however exalted his station, who would not be equally delighted upon finding such a sister. There is one thing, though, that I would like you to explain: how did you know I was here?’
To which she replied:
‘I learned about it this morning from a poor old woman, who often comes to see me because she spent a long time with our father in Palermo and Perugia; or at least she tells me she did. And if it weren’t for the fact that I thought it more decorous for you to come to my own house than for me to visit you in another’s, I would have called to see you hours ago.’
After saying this, she began to inquire about all of his relatives, naming each one individually, and Andreuccio, allowing himself to be led even further up the garden path, told her how they all were.
As it was a very hot evening, and they had been talking together for some little time, she sent for Greek wine3 and sweetmeats and saw that Andreuccio was given something to drink, after which he got up to go, saying it was time for supper. She refused to allow him to do any such thing: on the contrary, pretending to be deeply hurt, she flung her arms round his neck, saying:
‘Alas, now I am quite certain how little you care for me! What else am I to think, when you are with a sister you have never seen before, in her own house, where you should have stayed from the moment you arrived, and now you want to leave me to go and have supper at some inn! Really! You are going to sup with me. My husband is not at home, for which I am very sorry, but though I am merely a woman, I am quite capable of supplying you with a little hospitality.’
Andreuccio, not knowing how else to reply, said:
‘I care for you just as much as any man should care for his sister, but if I don’t go back they will be wa
iting for me all evening to turn up for supper, and I shall cut a bad figure.’
Whereupon she said:
‘Good heavens, as if I didn’t have anyone in the house who could be sent to tell them not to expect you! But you would be doing a much greater kindness, and no more than your duty, if you were to send word to your companions that they should come and have supper here. And then afterwards, if you still insist on leaving, you could all go back to the inn together.’
Andreuccio replied that he would rather do without his companions that evening, and that he would place himself entirely at her disposal, if this was what she really wanted. She accordingly went through the motions of sending word to the inn that they should not expect him for supper. Then after a lot of further talk, they sat down to a splendid supper, consisting of several courses, which she cunningly prolonged until darkness had completely fallen. When they got up from table, Andreuccio said he would have to go, but she refused to hear of it under any circumstances, telling him that Naples was no place to wander about in at night, especially if one was a stranger, and that when she had sent word to the inn not to expect him for supper, she had told them he would not be sleeping there either.
He swallowed all this, and since, being taken in by appearances, he was enjoying her company, he stayed where he was. After supper, she engaged him, not without her reasons, in a protracted conversation about this and that, and when the night was well advanced she left Andreuccio to sleep in her room, with a page-boy to show him where to find anything he needed, whilst she herself retired into another room with her maidservants.
The heat was stifling, and so, on finding himself alone, Andreuccio stripped to his doublet and removed his hose and breeches, and laid them under his bolster. Nature demanded that he should relieve his belly, which was inordinately full, so he asked the page where he could do it, and the boy showed him a door in one of the corners of the room, saying:
‘Go through there.’
Andreuccio passed jauntily through, and chanced to step on to a plank, which came away at its other end from the beam on which it was resting, so that it flew up in the air and fell into the lower regions, taking Andreuccio with it. Although he had fallen from a goodly height, he mercifully suffered no injury; but he got himself daubed from head to foot in the filthy mess with which the place was literally swimming.
Now in order to give you a clearer picture of what has preceded and what follows, I shall describe the sort of place it was. In a narrow alleyway, such as we often see between two houses, some boards, and a place to sit, had been rigged up on two beams, running across from one house to the next; and it was one of these boards that had collapsed under Andreuccio’s weight.
So finding himself down there in the alley, Andreuccio, cursing his bad luck, began calling out to the boy. But as soon as he had heard him falling, the boy had hurried off to tell his mistress, who rushed into her room and made a rapid search for Andreuccio’s clothes. These she found, together with his money, which being a doubting sort of fellow he stupidly carried with him wherever he went. And so it was that this woman of Palermo, this self-styled sister of a Perugian, obtained the prize for which she had laid her trap. Being no longer interested in Andreuccio, she quickly went and locked the door through which he had passed just before he fell.
Receiving no answer from the boy, Andreuccio began to call more loudly, but it was of no use. His suspicions being already aroused, he began, now that it was too late, to see how he had been hoodwinked, and having climbed a low wall dividing the alleyway from the road, he scrambled down into the street and went up to the front-door, which he was easily able to identify. He stood there for ages, vainly calling out, and shaking and beating the door for all he was worth. Finally, plainly perceiving the predicament he was in, he burst into tears and said to himself:
‘Oh, poor me! What a sudden way to lose five hundred florins and a sister!’
He said a lot more besides, then began to shout and to pummel on the door all over again, creating such a disturbance that he woke a number of the people living nearby, who got up out of bed as they could not endure the racket. One of the woman’s maids came to the window, all bleary-eyed, and said in tones of annoyance:
‘Who is knocking down there?’
‘Oh,’ said Andreuccio, ‘don’t you recognize me? I am Andreuccio, the brother of Madonna Fiordaliso.’4
‘My good man,’ she replied, ‘if you have had too much to drink, go and sleep it off and come back in the morning. I don’t know any Andreuccio; you are talking nonsense. Be off with you, for goodness’ sake, and let us sleep.’
‘What!’ said Andreuccio. ‘Talking nonsense, am I? You know very well I’m not. But if it’s really true that Sicilians make a habit of discovering blood-relatives and then forgetting all about them, at least give me back the clothes I left there, and I’ll go away gladly.’
‘My good man,’ she said, hardly able to contain her laughter, ‘you must be dreaming.’
As she said this, she simultaneously withdrew her head and closed the window, whereupon Andreuccio, who no longer had the slightest doubt that he had lost everything, grew so distressed, that whereas he was very angry to begin with, he now became almost frantic with rage. Deciding that force was a more effective weapon than words for retrieving his belongings, he picked up a large stone and started all over again to rain blows on the door like a madman, this time with much greater energy.
Taking exception to his hammering, many of the neighbours previously roused from their beds now appeared at their windows, and regarding him as some troublemaker who had invented the things he was saying in order to make this good woman’s life a misery, they began to shout in unison, like all the dogs in one particular district howling at a stray.
‘This is a fine way to carry on,’ they shouted, ‘coming round here at this hour and knocking up honest women with your ridiculous tall stories. For heaven’s sake clear off, man, and please let us get some sleep. If you have any business with the lady, leave it till the morning and stop annoying us like this in the middle of the night.’
Being, perhaps, encouraged by this chorus of abuse, a man concealed inside the house, who was the good woman’s bully, and whom Andreuccio had as yet neither seen nor heard, came to the window and said, in a low, fierce, spine-chilling growl:
‘Who’s that down there?’
Andreuccio raised his head towards the point from which the growl was coming, and caught sight of a face which, so far as he could judge, clearly belonged to some mighty man or other, who had a thick black beard and was yawning and rubbing his eyes as though he had just been roused from a deep sleep.
‘It’s me,’ replied Andreuccio, not without marked trepidation. ‘The brother of the lady who lives here.’
The man did not wait for Andreuccio to finish, but adopting an even more threatening tone, he exclaimed:
‘I don’t know what restrains me from coming down there and giving you the biggest pasting you’ve ever had in your life, you miserable drunken idiot, making all this racket in the middle of the night and keeping everyone awake.’ He then retired from view, and bolted the window.
Being better informed than Andreuccio about the sort of person he was, some of the neighbours addressed Andreuccio in hushed, compassionate tones, saying:
‘For God’s sake, be a good chap and take yourself off, unless you want to be killed down there tonight. Do go away for your own good.’
So Andreuccio, terrified out of his wits by the man’s voice and appearance, and urged on by the advice of these people, whose words seemed to him to be prompted by Christian charity, set off with the intention of returning to the inn. He had no idea where he was, so he simply struck out in the direction from which, following in the maidservant’s footsteps, he had come on the previous day. All he felt certain of was that he would never see his money again and that he was the most wretched man alive.
However, he had not progressed very far when he became uncomfortabl
y aware of the odour emanating from his person, and, deciding he had better make for the sea in order to have a wash, he turned off to the left and started to walk along a street known as the Ruga Catalana.5 As he was approaching the upper part of the city, he happened to see two people coming towards him carrying a lantern, and fearing lest they might turn out to be officers of the watch or a pair of cut-throats, he decided to avoid them by slipping quietly into a nearby hut. But the two men also came into the same hut, as though it were the very place they had been heading for. Once inside, one of them put down some iron tools he had been carrying over his shoulder, and they both began to inspect these and pass various comments about them. Presently, the first man said:
‘What can be causing this unholy stench? I reckon it’s the worst I’ve ever smelt.’
As he said this, they raised their lantern a little, and catching sight of poor Andreuccio, they let out a gasp of astonishment and demanded to know who he was.
Andreuccio at first said nothing, but when they took the light nearer to him and asked him what he was doing there, covered with filth in this manner, he told them the whole story of his adventures. The two men, who could well imagine where all this had taken place, said to each other:
‘It must have happened round at Butch Belchfire’s6 place.’
Then one of them said, addressing Andreuccio:
‘Listen, friend, you may have lost your money, but you can thank God that you happened to fall and couldn’t get back into the house. Because if you hadn’t fallen, you can rest assured that as soon as you were asleep you would have been done in, and in that case you’d have lost your life as well as your money. What’s the use of crying over spilt milk? You’ve about as much chance of plucking stars from the heavens as you have of recovering a single penny. But you may very well have your throat cut, if you ever breathe a word about it and he finds out.’
The two men then conferred briefly together, after which they said to him:
Tales From the Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio Page 29