“And so they went to the prince’s room, and no sooner had she lubricated him with the blood than it was as if he had never been wounded. When Grannonia saw the prince strong and vigorous she told the king to keep his word and the king, turning to his son, said, ‘My son, you’ve just seen yourself close to death and now I see you alive and I can hardly believe it. But since I promised this young lady that if she healed you you would be her husband, now that the heavens have bestowed this grace upon you allow me, out of all the love you have for me, to grant what I promised, since my gratitude obliges me to pay this debt.’
“To these words the prince answered, ‘My lord, I would like to have such liberty with my own desires, so as to be able to give you as much satisfaction as I have love for you. But since I have given my word to another woman, I believe neither that you will consent that I break my promise nor that this young lady will advise me that I do this wrong to the one I love, nor that I will be able to change my mind.’ When Grannonia heard this she felt an indescribably profound pleasure as she realized that she was still alive in the prince’s memory. And, her face turning crimson, she said, ‘If I made it so that this young lady loved by you were content to let me win the game, would you not yield to my desires?’ ‘It will never happen,’ answered the prince, ‘that I banish the lovely image of my beloved from this breast! Whether she makes preserves of her love or gives me a dose of senna to purge it with, I will always have the same longing and the same determination, and even if I found myself in danger of losing the game at the card table of life I would never trip things up like that or play such a trick!’
“Grannonia could no longer keep herself in the shackles of deception, and she revealed herself for who she was, since the room had been kept closed and dark on account of the prince’s head wounds and the fact that she was disguised had caused the prince not to recognize her. But when he did recognize her he immediately embraced her, dizzy with jubilation, and told his father who she was and what she had suffered and done for him. And then they sent for the king and queen of Long Acres and, by common consent, celebrated their marriage, and above all they derived great amusement from the trick played on the fox, concluding at the very end that Love’s pleasures are always seasoned with pain.”
6
THE SHE-BEAR*
Sixth Entertainment of the Second Day
The king of Dry Rock wants to take his daughter for his wife. Thanks to the trickery of an old woman, the girl changes into a bear and flees to the woods. She falls into the hands of a prince, and he sees her in her true form in a garden where she is arranging her hair and falls in love with her. After various adventures she is revealed to be a woman and becomes his wife.
The entire tale that Popa told had the women shaking with laughter, but when the subject turned to their own cunning, which could trick even a fox, they really split their sides. And women truly have so many different forms of cunning that you could thread them by the hundred on each hair of their head, like little chips of garnet.1 Fraud is their mother, falsehood their wet nurse, flattery their teacher, duplicity their counselor, and deceit their constant companion; and they twist and turn men in whatever manner they please. But let’s return to Antonella, who was getting frisky as she waited for her turn to speak. After seeming lost in thought for a while, as if she were reviewing her thoughts, she spoke in this manner: “That wise man spoke well when he said that a bitter command cannot be sweetly obeyed. Man must command things of the right measure in order to obtain obedience of a corresponding weight; from inappropriate orders is born resistance that cannot be overcome, as, in fact, happened to the king of Dry Rock, who asked his daughter for something that was not due him, thus giving her cause to flee and risking the loss of honor and life.
“Now it is said that there once lived a king, the king of Dry Rock, who had a wife who was the mother of beauty itself. Right at the fastest point in her race of years she fell from the horse of health and broke her life; but before the candle of her life was put out at the auction of years2 she called her husband and said to him, ‘I know that you’ve always loved me with all your heart; therefore, in the dregs of my years show me the froth of your love and promise me that you will never marry unless you find another woman as beautiful as I once was. Otherwise I will leave you with a curse squeezed from these tits,3 and I will hate you even when I’m in the world beyond.’
“The king, who loved her from here all the way up to the terrace, burst into tears when he heard this last wish of hers, and for a long time was not able to answer even one accursed word. Finally, when he had stopped sobbing he said to her, ‘If I ever want to hear anything about a wife again, may I first be struck by gout; may I first be hit by a Catalan spear; may I first be treated like Starace.4 Get this out of your mind, my darling; don’t even dream that I could love another woman! You were the beginning of my affection, and you will take with you the rags of my desires.’ While he was saying these words, the poor young woman, who already had the death rattle, rolled her eyes and stretched out her legs for the last time.
“When the king saw that Patria had been unplugged,5 he unplugged the spigots of his eyes and made such a racket banging around and shrieking that his whole court came running. And as he called that good soul by name, he cursed the bad fortune that had taken her away from him and, tearing at his beard, rebuked the stars that had sent him this disaster.
“But then he decided to act according to that saying that goes, ‘The pain of a sore elbow and the pain of a lost wife both hurt a lot but go away soon,’ or that second one, ‘One in the grave and another between your thighs.’ And Night had not yet come out onto the drill ground of the heavens to review the bats when he started to count on his fingers: ‘My wife has gone and died on me and now I’m a widower and miserable, with no hope of seeing anyone but this poor daughter that she has left me. And so I’ll need to find some way to have a male child. But where do I start pecking? Where do I find a woman whose beauty is identical to my wife’s, if every other woman looks like a harpy when compared to her? I want you back here, now! How do you find another one, with a stick? How do you look for another one, with a bell? Nature made Nardella—may she rest in glory—and then broke the mold!6 Alas, what a labyrinth she’s put me in, what a cage the promise that I made her has become! But what am I saying? I haven’t seen the wolf yet and I’m running away? Let’s take a look, let’s see, let’s try to understand. Is it possible that there’s no other ass in Nardella’s stable? Is it possible that the world must be lost for me? Is there perhaps a shortage of women; are they becoming extinct? Or has the seed for them been lost?’
“Thus speaking he immediately had a proclamation and an order issued by Master Iommiento:7 all the beautiful women in the world were to come to be judged at the touchstone of beauty, for he intended to take the most beautiful for his wife and endow her with his kingdom. Word of this spread everywhere, and there was not a woman in the universe who did not come to try her luck. There was not a hag, no matter how deformed, who did not join the mix, since when the subject of beauty is broached there’s not a witch who admits to defeat, there’s not an orca that gives up: every single one of them puffs up with pride, every single one of them wants the best! And if the mirror tells her the truth, she blames the glass that does not show her as she really is and the quicksilver that was applied incorrectly.8
“Now at this point the land was full of women, and the king put them in line and began to walk among them like the Grand Turk9 when he enters his seraglio to choose the best Genoese whetstone on which to sharpen his Damascus knife.10 And as he came and went up and down their ranks like a monkey that is never still, and peered at this one and that one and looked them over from head to toe, one seemed to him to have a crooked forehead, one a long nose, one a wide mouth, one thick lips; this one was as tall as a beanpole, that one short and deformed, one too swollen, and one excessively frail; the Spanish woman displeased him because of
her sallow color, the Neapolitan was not to his taste because of the platform heels she walked on,11 the German seemed to him cold and icy, the Frenchwoman too featherbrained, and the Venetian looked like a distaff of flax with her bleached hair.
“At the very end he sent them all away with one hand in front of him and the other behind, one for one reason and one for another. And seeing as so many beautiful faces had all come to naught, he had decided to strangle himself when he happened to bump into his own daughter, and he said, ‘Why am I looking for Maria in Ravenna12 if my daughter Preziosa was made in the same mold as her mother? I have this lovely face in my own house and I go to the asshole of the world looking for another one?’ But when he made his intentions clear to his daughter, she flew off the handle and gave him a piece of her tongue, and I’ll let the heavens tell you about it in my place. Enraged, the king said to her, ‘Lower that voice and stuff that tongue back in there, and make up your mind to tie this marriage knot tonight or else the biggest piece left of you will be your ear!’
“When Preziosa heard this decision she withdrew to her room to wail over her bad fortune, and she left not a tuft of hair on her head. In the midst of these dismal laments, an old woman who often supplied her with makeup came passing by, and when she found her closer to the world beyond than to this one and heard the cause of her sorrow, she said, ‘Keep your spirits up, my dear girl; don’t despair, for every ailment has its remedy, apart from death. Now listen: tonight, when your father wants to behave like a stallion—though he has more in common with an ass—put this stick in your mouth, and you’ll immediately become a bear. And then clear out, for in his fear he’ll let you escape, and go straight to the woods, where the heavens have preserved a good destiny for you. And when you want to look like a woman, which you are and always will be, take the stick out of your mouth and you’ll return to your original form.’
“Preziosa embraced the old woman and ordered that she be given a nice apronful of flour and some slices of ham and lard, and then she sent her off. And as the Sun, like an unsuccessful whore, began to change quarters, the king had musicians brought in and invited all of his lord vassals to great festivities. Following five or six hours of Moorish dancing13 they sat down at the tables, and after they ate beyond all measure the king went off to bed. But when he called the bride to bring him the register in which to settle their amorous accounts, she put the stick in her mouth and took the shape of a terrifying bear, and then went in to him. Terrified by this marvel, he rolled himself up in the mattress and wouldn’t stick out his noggin even when it was morning.
“In the meantime Preziosa left and set off in the direction of a wood—where the shadows conspired to see if they could, at dusk, cause the Sun some affront—where she lived in sweet conversation with other animals, until one day the son of the king of Running Water came to that land to hunt. He set eyes on the bear and almost died of fright, but when the animal started circling him, crouched close to the ground and wagging its tail like a puppy, he took courage. Caressing it and saying ‘oink oink, meow meow, cheep cheep, coo coo, grunt grunt, and snort snort,’ he brought it home and ordered that it be taken care of as if it were he in person, and he had it put in a garden next to the royal palace so that he could see it whenever he wanted to from his window.
“Now when everyone else had gone out and the prince was all alone in the house, he went to the window to look at the bear and saw that Preziosa had taken the stick out of her mouth so that she could arrange her hair, and was combing out her golden braids. At the sight of this beauty beyond all imagination, he was stunned with wonder, and, throwing himself down the stairs, he ran into the garden. But Preziosa, who had become aware of the ambush, thrust the stick into her mouth and turned back into what she had been before. When the prince got down there and didn’t find what he had seen from above, he was so bewildered by the deception that a great melancholy came over him, and in four days he fell ill, repeating over and over again, ‘My dear bear, my dear bear!’ When his mother heard this lament she imagined that the bear had treated him badly in some way, and ordered it to be killed. But the servants had become enamored of the tame nature of the bear, who made even the stones in the street love her, and since they were too compassionate to slaughter her, they brought her to the wood and told the queen that they had done away with her.
“When word of this reached the prince’s ears he did unbelievable things, and as soon as he got out of bed he wanted to make the servants into stew. But when he heard from them what had really happened, he got on his horse, half dead, and rode all over and searched so hard that he finally found the bear. Then he brought her back home, put her in a room, and said to her, ‘O, lovely morsel fit for a king, holed up in that skin! O, candle of love, shut inside that hairy lantern! Why all this tenderness with me? So that you can watch me writhe in agony and take leave of me, hair by hair? I’m dying of longing, consumed and spent on account of this beauty, and you can see the clear proof of it: I’m reduced to a third of what I was, like boiled wine; I’m nothing but skin and bones; and I’ve got a fever that’s double-stitched to these veins of mine. And so lift the curtain of that stinking hide and let me see the stage set of your beauties; remove, oh, remove the branches from that basket and let me take a look at your lovely fruit; lift that drapery from your door and let these eyes come in and see the pomp of your marvels! Who put such a sleek piece of work in a jail woven of fur? Who locked such a lovely treasure in a strongbox made of hide? Let me see this monster of grace, and take my every desire as your payment, my darling, for only the fat of this bear can cure my twitching nerves!’
“But after repeating these things over and over again he saw that he was throwing away his words. And so he went back and flung himself into bed, and he came down with such a terrible illness that the doctors gave these affairs of his a bad prognosis. His mother, who had no other pleasure in the world but him, sat at the side of his bed and said, ‘My son, whence is born all this heartbreak? What sort of melancholic humor has gotten hold of you? You’re young, you’re well loved, you’re great, you’re rich; what are you missing, my son? Tell me, for “the shamefaced pauper always has empty pockets.” If you want a wife, you choose and I’ll put down the deposit; you take and I’ll pay. Don’t you see that your pain is my pain? Your pulse is throbbing, as is my heart; you have a fever in your blood and I have an ailment in my head, for there is no other bastion of my old age but you. And so be cheerful; you’ll cheer up this heart of mine and avoid seeing this kingdom go to ruin, this house crumble to the ground, and this mother shave off all her hair.’14 When the prince heard these words he said, ‘Nothing can comfort me but the sight of the bear. Therefore, if you want to see me healthy allow her to stay in this room, and I want no one but her to take care of me, make my bed, and cook for me. And, without a doubt, the pleasure I derive will make me healthy in four snaps.’
“Even though his mother thought it a mistake to have the bear act as cook and maid and suspected that her son was raving, all the same, to content him, she had the bear come. As soon as the bear arrived at the prince’s bed she lifted her paw and felt the patient’s pulse, which frightened the queen, who thought that from one moment to the next she might tear off his nose. But when the prince said to the bear, ‘My dear Chiappino,15 don’t you want to cook for me and feed me and take care of me?’ she lowered her head, indicating that she accepted the proposition. And so his mother had an armful of chickens brought in, and the fire was lit in a fireplace right there in the bedroom, and water put to boil; and the bear, taking a chicken in her hand, scalded it, plucked it expertly, and when she had gutted it stuck part of it on a spit and with the rest made a nice gratin. The prince, who hadn’t been able to keep even sugar down, was now licking his fingers, and when he had finished stuffing himself she gave him something to drink with such grace that the queen wanted to kiss her on the forehead.
“After that the prince went downstairs to provide the tou
chstone of all doctors’ judgments,16 and the bear immediately made the bed and, running out to the garden, picked a pretty bunch of roses and orange blossoms and scattered them on top of the bedclothes, so that the queen said that this bear was worth a fortune and that her son had a chamber pot of good reasons to hold her dear.
“At the sight of this lovely service, tinder was added to the prince’s fire, and if before he had consumed himself by the dram, now he was destroying himself by the quintal, and he said to the queen, ‘Mother, my lady, if I don’t give this bear a kiss, my last breath will leave me!’ The queen, who saw that he was about to faint, said, ‘Kiss him, kiss him, my lovely animal, don’t let me see this poor son of mine perish!’ The bear went over to him, and the prince grabbed her cheeks and couldn’t get enough of kissing her, and as they stood there muzzle to muzzle, I don’t know how but the stick fell out of Preziosa’s mouth and the most beautiful thing in the world was left standing there in the arms of the prince. Squeezing her with the amorous pincers of his arms, he said to her, ‘You fell into the trap, my finch, and now you won’t get away from me again without good reason!’
“Adding the color of her embarrassment to the canvas of her natural beauty, Preziosa said to him, ‘I am already in your hands. I beg you to respect my honor, and you may chop and weigh and turn me whichever way you like.’ When the queen asked who this beautiful young lady was and what had forced her into this savage life, Preziosa told the story of her misadventures, leaving out nothing, at which the queen, praising her as a good and honorable girl, told her son that she would be content if she became his wife. And the prince, who desired nothing else in life, immediately gave her his word. His mother blessed the couple, and this lovely union was celebrated with great festivities and light displays, and on the scale of human judgment Preziosa was able to verify that those who do good may always expect good.”
The Tale of Tales Page 23