The Tale of Tales

by Giambattista Basile

  “He entered the house but didn’t find her, since she had gone to the woods for some firewood to scald the water for her stepdaughter, who was corked up in Bacchus’s tomb even if she deserved to stretch out in Love’s cradle. Looking for Caradonia and finding that she had disappeared, Cuosemo began to shout, ‘Hey, where are you?’ And a tabby cat that had been sleeping in the ashes came out with these unexpected words, ‘Meow, meow, your wife is plugged up inside the barrel—meow!’ When Cuosemo went over to the barrel and heard a certain faint and suffocated moaning, he took a hatchet from near the hearth and smashed it, and as the staves dropped away it looked like a backdrop being lowered for a scene where a goddess recites the prologue.15 I don’t know how it was that the bridegroom didn’t drop dead before all that splendor; he stood there for a long time, staring at her like someone who has just seen a house imp. Then, when he was himself again, he ran to embrace her, saying: ‘Who put you in this dreadful place, O jewel of my heart? Who hid you from me, O hope of my life? What is the meaning of this—a splendid dove in this hooped cage and a griffin vulture at my side? What’s going on? Speak, my pretty face; comfort my spirits; let this breast be relieved!’

  “At those words Cicella answered by telling him the whole story, without leaving out a single word, of everything she had had to bear in her stepmother’s house from the moment she first stepped foot there to when Bacchus turned off her spigot by burying her in a barrel. After Cuosemo heard this he had her squat down and hide behind the door, and when he had put the barrel back together again he summoned Grannizia and stuffed her into it, saying, ‘Stay in here for a bit, just long enough for me to have an enchantment made that will protect you from the evil eye.’ And then he corked the barrel tightly, embraced his wife, and threw her onto a horse and took her straight to Pascarola, which was his land.

  “After Caradonia came back with a great bundle of sticks, she made a big fire and put on a large cauldron of water. As soon as it started to boil she poured the water into the hole in the barrel and stewed all of the flesh off her daughter, who was grinding her teeth as if she had taken a bite of the sardonic herb16 and shedding her skin like a serpent leaving its slough. When it seemed to her that Cicella was most likely drenched to the bone and had stretched out her feet for the last time, she broke open the barrel and saw—oh, what a sight!—her own daughter, cooked by her crude mother. And tearing her hair out, scratching at her face, pounding her breast, slapping her hands together, beating her head on the wall, and stamping her feet, she made so much noise and such a racket that the whole village came running. After she did and said incredible things, for there were no words comforting enough to console her and no advice that could calm her, she raced off to a well and—splash!—jumped headfirst in and broke her neck, proving the truth of the saying that when you spit into the sky it falls back on your face.”

  This tale had barely ended when, following the order given by the prince, Giallaise and Cola Iacovo, one of them a cook and the other the court cellar master, sprung out before them dressed in the style of old Neapolitans, and recited the eclogue that follows.

  THE STOVE*

  Eclogue

  Giallaise and Cola Iacovo

  GIALLAISE: Nice to see you, Cola Iacovo!

  COLA IACOVO: You’re the welcome one, Giallaise! Tell me, where are you coming from?

  GIALL.: From the stoves.

  COLA: The stoves in this heat?

  GIALL.: The hotter the better!

  COLA: And don’t you croak in there?

  GIALL.: I’d croak, brother, if I didn’t go!

  COLA: What sort of pleasure do you get out of it?

  GIALL.: The pleasure of tempering the pain of this world, where you have no choice but to get angry, since these days everything goes the wrong way.

  COLA: I believe you’re making fun of me. Do you think I’m a blockhead, and that I’m not capable of fishing down deep? What do stoves have to do with the world?

  GIALL.: You think you’re fishing deep, but you’re not fishing at all! Do you think I’m talking about the sort of stove where you’re shut up in a little room and just sit there without moving until you suffocate and die of heat? No, no. I’m talking about that other thing at the mere thought of which every pain in this anguished life is cut in half; and what I see makes that thing of mine swell up!

  COLA: This is all news to me. You astound me! On my word, you’re not such an ass as you seem!

  GIALL.: Well, then, you should know that there’s another stove in this world into which both good and evil trickle. You may have joy and pleasure by the barrel and grandeur the size of a horse’s chest, and yet everything ends in tedium and is wearisome. And to prove that this is true, open up your ears and listen, and in the meantime take comfort, for every human joy and amusement follows this track.

  COLA: You truly deserve a nice gift! Go ahead, speak. I’m listening to you with my mouth hanging.

  GIALL.: You see, for instance, a fine young girl. You take a liking to her, you send for the matchmaker, you arrange the marriage, you enter into agreement, you call the notary so that he can draw up the vows; you go up and kiss the bride, who is full of pomp and frills; you, too, wrap yourself up in a new suit, like a prince; the musicians are called; the banquet takes place, people dance. In short, that one night is anticipated with more desire than a sailor has for wind, a scribe for lawsuits, a thief for crowds, and a doctor for illness. And then night falls, that night of ill omens, and it wears mourning clothes, poor wretch, because freedom—miserable fellow!—is dead! Your wife squeezes you in her arms, and you know not that they are galley chains! The blandishments and caresses, the little charms and tenderness last for three days, but before the fourth arrives you already feel tedium, you curse ever having made mention of any of it, and damn a thousand times those who were its cause. If the poor girl speaks, you take it the wrong way and scowl and glare at her; when you’re in bed you’re like a two-headed eagle;1 you writhe if she kisses you; and there will never again be anything good in that house.

  COLA: He who marries is an unlucky gardener! He sows happily for just one night, then reaps a thousand days of torments.

  GIALL.: Now a father sees his little baby born. Oh, what delight, oh, what fun! Right away he has him wrapped in buntings of silk and cotton wool; he polishes him like a pestle and hangs all sorts of things on his shoulders:2 wolves’ teeth, figs, half-moons, and coral and amulets and little pigs, so that he’s the spitting image of a street vendor! He finds him a wet nurse; he has eyes for no one else; he talks to him in cutesy talk: “How is pretty little baby? Me love you so much! You dada’s little sweetheart! Mama’s little yum-yum!” And while he’s sitting there absorbed, with his mouth hanging open, listening to “caca” and “din-din,” everything that squirts out ends up on his lap! In the meantime the boy grows like a weed and flowers like broccoli; the father sends him to school and spends the pupils of his eyes for him. And right when he had counted on seeing him become a doctor the boy gets out of hand; he takes the wrong track; he mixes with sluts, deals with crooks, and hangs out with gangs and young hoods; he receives and hands out blows, and argues with barbers and scribes. And thus his father, weary of him, either kicks him out or curses him or, to get his sad head back on straight, has him taken prisoner and thrown into a castle.3

  COLA: What do you expect if not prison? A wicked son who’s as changeable as the moon grows up to take either an oar in the galleys or his place on the rope.

  GIALL.: You want some more? Even eating, which is a necessity of life, grows tedious. You stuff your belly full, devour, swallow, engorge, raze, rake, ingurgitate, pork down, move your jaws, shovel it in under your nose; you fill up your cheeks with the sweet and the sour, the lean and the fatty, and send your chops trotting; you spend your time at banquets and bazaars. And at the very end, when you find that your stomach is full of indigestion and your farts reek of sulfur and your
burps of rotting eggs, you lose your appetite, and your tedium grows so great that meat stinks, fish makes you sick, sweets become absinthe and bile, wine your enemy, and you barely keep yourself alive with a little sip of broth.

  COLA: If only it weren’t true that lack of moderation, more than anything else, makes you shit blood, and every ill enters through the throat!

  GIALL.: If you play cards, dice, marbles, skittles, the Cedrangolo game,4 chess, tiles; if you spend your time, risk your soul, and compromise your honor on this, you leave your money behind and lose your friendships, and can’t sleep soundly or ever eat a whole morsel. Your mind is always on this accursed vice, where two agree to put you in the middle and divide the earnings in half; and yet when you realize you’ve fallen for it and you’ve been conned, your losses become tedious to you, and when you see a game it’s as if it were fire and plague.

  COLA: Blessed are those who flee from it! May it stay far from me, watch out for your legs!5 You lose your days even if you don’t lose your money.

  GIALL.: And entertainments,6 which are not as risky and provide more pleasure, are also cause for bother: farces, comedies, and mountebanks; the woman who jumps rope, the other with a beard, and the other still who sews with her feet; jugglers with their bagatelles; the goat that walks on reels. In short, all amusements become tedious: buffoons and jokes, fools and madmen.

  COLA: That’s why Compar Biondo7 used to sing, “There’s no lasting pleasure in this world!”

  GIALL.: Music is something you feel all the way down to the little bones in your feet, with its many varieties of graces and modes, trills, fugues, flights and warbles, and falsetto pieces and retropoints and passacaglias; with voices that are melancholy or cheerful, low or soaring, that sing in arias or in the part of a bass or a falsetto or a tenor; with keyboard or wind instruments, or with strings made of cord or metal. And yet it all grows tedious, and if you’re not in the proper mood, your lungs swell the wrong way and you could smash both theorbo and lute.8

  COLA: When you’re not in your right mind, anyone—even Stella and Giammacco9—can sing and warble, and a symphony10 will still sound worse than a dirge.

  GIALL.: I won’t say a thing to you about dancing: you see round leaps and trick jumps, cabrioles and fawn steps, chasses and curtsies. For a bit you like it and it gives you pleasure, but then it becomes an August cure: you find even four steps tedious, and you can’t wait for the torch dance or the fan dance11 to start and the party to end so that you can beat it out of there, your feet tired and your head in pieces.

  COLA: Without a doubt it’s a waste of time; hopping around consumes you, and you don’t gain a thing from it.

  GIALL.: Conversations and business meetings, amusements and get-togethers with one’s friends, drinking and reveling in taverns and hanging out at the Gelsi bordellos, turning the town square upside down with your rusty blades and latrine covers, never having a moment of peace, your head spinning, your heart reeling. And once the flower of your years, when your blood is hot, is past, you find all of this more tedious than anything and, lowering your head and hanging your carob pod12 over the fireplace, you withdraw to mind your own affairs and feel only tedium for those years that gave you the shadows of pleasure and the reality of sorrow.

  COLA: All that pleases man is like a straw fire; it passes and is destroyed, it collapses and melts away!

  GIALL.: There’s no sense in our head that is without whimsy: the eye soon grows weary of contemplating resplendent and lovely things, magnificence, beauties, paintings, spectacles, gardens, statues, and buildings; the nose of smelling carnations, violets, roses and lilies, amber, musk, civet, seasoned broth, and roasts; the hand of touching soft and tender things; the mouth of tasting juicy mouthfuls and the choicest of morsels; the ears of hearing fresh news and gazettes. In short, if you count it up on your fingers, all that you do, see, and hear, both amusements and hardships, becomes, at the end, nauseating.

  COLA: Man, who is made solely for the heavens, would become too attached to the earth if in this world he found complete satisfaction; that’s why baskets of sorrow are thrown into our mouths, whereas pleasures are rationed out.

  GIALL.: There is only one thing that never grows tedious but always restores you and leaves you happy and comforted: and that is knowledge joined with wealth. For this reason that Greek poet said to Jove with warm and heartfelt prayers, “Give me, my lord, coins and virtue!”

  COLA: You’ve got a chamber pot and a half of reasons to think that, for you never get your fill of one or the other. He who has both relish and salt is made great by his gold and immortal by his virtue!

  The eclogue was so tasty that the audience, enchanted by pleasure, with great reluctance recognized that the Sun, tired of doing the Canary dance13 all day in the fields of the heavens, had sent out the stars to do the torch dance and had itself retired to change its shirt. And so, when they saw that the air had grown dim, the usual order to return was given and everyone retired to their own houses.

  End of the third day.

  IV

  THE FOURTH DAY

  Dawn had just come out to take its cut from the laborers,1 since the Sun would be rising at any time, when the white prince and black princess met at their place of appointment; the ten women had also just arrived, after filling their bellies with red mulberries that left their faces looking like a dyer’s hand. And together they all went and sat next to a fountain, which served as a mirror to some citron trees that were braiding their hair so as to blind the Sun. Deciding to pass in some way the hours until it was time to get their jaws moving, to please Tadeo and Lucia they began to discuss if they should play Saw the Brick,2 Head or Tails, Full or Just Wind,3 Bat and Stick,4 Morra,5 Odds or Evens, Bell,6 Norchie,7 Little Castles,8 Get Near the Ball,9 Put Them Together or Divide Them Up,10 Touch,11 ball, or skittles. But the prince, annoyed by so many games, ordered that some instruments be brought in and that in the meantime there be singing. And right away a group of servants who knew how to play rushed out with lutes, tambourines, cithers, harps, pipes, fire throwers, cro-cros, Jew’s harps, and zuche-zuche,12 and after they performed a nice symphony and played “The Tenor of the Abbot,” “Zephyr,” “Cuccara Giammartino,” and “The Dance of Florence,” they sang a handful of songs from the good old times13 that are easier to pine for than to find today, and among others they sang

  Shoo, get out of here, Margaritella,

  you’re too much of a scandal for this fellow,

  since for any trifling bit of dirt

  first you want a pretty little skirt.

  Shoo, get out of here, Margaritella.

  And that other one:

  I would like, O cruel one, to become

  a patten, so that I could be under that foot; but if you knew about it,

  you would run all the time, just to torture me.

  And then they followed with

  Come out, come out, sun,14

  warm up the Emperor!

  Little silver bench

  that’s worth four hundred,

  or a hundred and fifty,

  it sings the whole night;

  Viola’s singing,

  The schoolmaster, too,

  Oh master, master,

  Send us off soon,

  For master Tiesto is coming down

  With lances and swords

  Accompanied by birds.

  Play, play, little bagpipe,

  And I’ll buy you a pretty little skirt,

  A skirt of scarlet cloth,

  But if you don’t play I’ll break your head.

  Nor did they fail to play that other one:

  Don’t rain, don’t rain,15

  I want to go and dig!

  To dig the wheat

  Of master Giuliano.

  Master Giuliano,

  lend me your lance,

  I wa
nt to go to France,

  from France to Lombardy,

  where madam Lucia is!16

  Right when they were at the best part of their singing the victuals were brought to the table, and when they had eaten until their bellies were about to burst Tadeo told Zeza to head things off by beginning the day with her tale. Following the prince’s command, she thus spoke:

  1

  THE ROOSTER’S STONE*

  First Entertainment of the Fourth Day

  Mineco Aniello becomes young and rich due to the powers of a stone found in a rooster’s head, but when he is tricked out of it by two necromancers he goes back to being old and penniless. As he is wandering through the world he receives news of his ring in the Kingdom of the Mice, and with the help of two mice he gets it back, returns to his previous state, and takes revenge on the thieves.

  “The thief’s wife does not always laugh; he who weaves fraud works on the loom of ruin; there is no deceit that cannot be discovered, nor are there betrayals that never come to light; the walls spy on scoundrels; and thievery and whoring make the earth split open and tell about it, as you shall now hear, if you keep your ears where they should be.