The Tale of Tales

by Giambattista Basile

  “When Cagliuso arrived, the king delivered him a great dowry and his daughter, and after a month of festivities Cagliuso said that he wanted to take his bride to his estates. The king accompanied them to the border of his kingdom, and they set off for Lombardy, where, on the cat’s recommendation, Cagliuso bought some properties and land, and became a baron.

  “Cagliuso now found himself rolling in wealth, and he thanked the cat over and over again, saying that he owed his life to her and his greatness to her good offices, that a cat’s devices had done him more good than his father’s wits, and that she should therefore feel free to do and undo whatever she thought fit and pleased her with his possessions and his life. Finally, he gave her his word that as soon as she died—a hundred years from then!—he would have her stuffed and placed inside a golden cage in his own bedroom, so that he might always keep the memory of her before his eyes.

  “The cat listened to this show of braggadocio, and before three days had gone by she pretended to be dead and stretched herself straight out in the garden. When Cagliuso’s wife saw this she shouted, ‘Oh, my husband, what a great tragedy! The cat is dead!’ ‘And may every evil accompany her,’ answered Cagliuso. ‘Better her than us.’ ‘What shall we do?’ replied the wife. And he: ‘Take her by her foot and throw her out the window!’

  “Hearing of this fine reward when she would have least imagined it, the cat began to say, ‘This is the great gratitude for the fleas that I picked off your neck? These are the thousand thanks for those rags I got you to throw away, so worn out that you could have hung them on spindles? This is what I get back, after having dressed you as elegantly as a spider and fed you when you were hungry, miserable, and threadbare? When you were in tatters, covered with shreds, all patched up, and coming apart at the seams, you corpse stripper? This is the fate of those who try to wash an ass’s head! Get lost, and may everything I’ve done for you be damned; your throat doesn’t deserve to be spit in!10 What a lovely golden cage you’ve prepared for me, what a fine burial you’ve planned for me! There you have it: you offer your services, you make sacrifices, you labor, you sweat, and all for this nice prize! Oh, miserable is he who fills up his pot with the hopes of someone else! That philosopher was right when he said, “If you go to bed an ass, you’ll wake up one!” In short, the more you do, the less you should expect. Good words and wicked actions deceive only the wise and the mad.’

  “So speaking and shaking her head, she headed out of there, and however much Cagliuso tried to lick her down with the lung11 of humility, nothing could get her to come back. And as she ran off without once turning her head, she said, May God save you from the rich who become poor and from the beggar who has worked his way up.”

  5

  THE SERPENT*

  Fifth Entertainment of the Second Day

  The king of Long Acres marries his daughter to a serpent, and when the king discovers that he is a handsome young man he burns his skin. The young man tries to break a glass window to escape and instead breaks his head, for which he can find no remedy. The king’s daughter leaves the house of her father, and after she learns the secret for healing her lover from a fox, she kills the fox with a ruse. Then with the fat of the fox and various birds she lubricates the wounded young man, who is the son of a king, and he becomes her husband.

  The poor cat was pitied beyond measure for having been so badly compensated, even if one person said that there was at least something about which she could be consoled, since she was not alone. For nowadays ingratitude has become a domestic ill, like the French disease1 or the wheeze,2 and people who have done and undone, consumed their property, and ruined their lives to serve that race of ingrates find themselves destined to a common burial at the hospital just when they thought they had their hands on much more than golden cages. Meanwhile, seeing that Popa was prepared to speak, they became silent, and she said, “Those who are too curious to know the business of others have always brought the ax down on their own feet, as the king of Long Acres can testify. Because he stuck his nose in a certain business, he tangled his daughter’s spinning and ruined his poor son-in-law, who tried shattering a window with his head but ended up with a shattered head himself.

  “Now it is said there once was a countrywoman who longed for a child more than a litigant longs for a sentence in his favor, a sick person cool water, and an innkeeper the passing of a guarded caravan.3 But although her husband labored daily with his hoe, she never managed to see the fertility she desired.

  “One day the poor man went into the mountains to collect a bundle of firewood, and upon opening it at home he found a lovely little serpent in among the branches. When Sapatella, for this was the name of the countrywoman, saw this, she let out a great sigh and said, ‘There you have it: even serpents have little serpents, and I was born to this world unlucky, with a hernia of a husband who isn’t a good enough gardener to give me a graft.’ To these words the serpent answered, ‘Since you cannot have children, take me; you’ll be making a good deal and I’ll love you more than I love my own mother.’ When she heard a serpent talking Sapatella nearly died of fear, but then she took courage and said, ‘If for nothing else, because of this loving nature of yours I’ll be glad to accept you as if you had come out of my own knee.’4 And so she gave him a little hole in the house for his cradle and fed him what she had with the greatest affection in the world.

  “Day by day he grew, and when he was a big little thing he said to Cola Matteo, the countryman he considered his father and master, ‘Oh, Daddy, I want to get married.’ ‘Well, then,’ said Cola Matteo, ‘we’ll find another serpent like you and we’ll make a shopkeeper’s agreement.’ ‘What do you mean, a serpent?’ answered the little serpent. ‘So we’re one and the same with vipers and grass snakes? It’s quite clear that you’re an Antuono5 and that you can’t tell the wheat from the chaff! I want the daughter of the king! You go this very instant and ask the king for his daughter and say that a serpent wants her.’

  “Cola Matteo, who was an unsophisticated man and didn’t know too much about these games of Empty the Barrel,6 simply went to the king and brought him the message, saying, ‘Don’t blame the messenger, or he’ll get as many blows as there are grains of sand. Now you should know that a serpent wants your daughter for his wife; and so I come, in my capacity as gardener, to see if we can graft a serpent with a little dove.’ The king’s nose told him that Cola Matteo was a blockhead, and to get him off his back he said, ‘Go tell this serpent that if he turns all of the fruit in my park to gold I will give him my daughter,’ and after he had a good laugh he dismissed him. But when Cola Matteo gave this answer to the serpent, the serpent said, ‘Tomorrow morning go and gather all the fruit pits you find in the city and sow them in the park, and you’ll see pearls strung on rush stems.’

  “Cola Matteo, who was a bit off, was able neither to reply nor to disagree, and—as soon as the Sun swept away the rubbish of the shadows from Dawn’s damp fields with its golden brooms—he went with a basket on his arm from square to square gathering up all the pits he could find, peach pits and apricot pits and wild prune pits and cherry pits, and all the nuts and seeds he found on the roads. And then he went to the park and sowed them as the serpent had told him to do, and—no sooner said than done—they sprouted and grew trunks, leaves, and fruits, all of glittering gold, and when the king saw this he went into an ecstasy of amazement and was overcome with delight.

  “But then Cola Matteo was sent by the serpent to ask the king about his promise. ‘Don’t hit so hard,’ said the king, ‘for if he wants my daughter I want something else. He must turn all the walls and the grounds of the park into precious stones.’ When this was reported by the farmer to the serpent he answered, ‘Tomorrow morning go and gather all the pieces of things you find on the ground and throw them onto the roads and walls of the park, for we intend to catch up with this cripple.’

  “And—as soon as Night was exiled for having st
ooged for swindlers, and started gathering up its bundles of twilight from the sky—Cola Matteo put a basket on his arm and began to go around gathering fragments of jars, pieces of lids and lidlets, bottoms of clay pots and pans, rims of basins, handles of pitchers, lips of chamber pots; and he collected as many broken lamps, smashed flower pots, cracked jugs, and fragments of crockery as he was able to find in the streets. And when he had done what the serpent had told him to do, the park was paved with emeralds and chalcedonies and plastered with rubies and carbuncles, and its splendor sequestered vision in the warehouses of eyes and planted marvel in the provinces of hearts.

  “At this spectacle the king was dumbfounded and couldn’t understand what had happened; but when the serpent sent the message once again to keep his word, the king answered, ‘What has been done is a trifle unless he transforms this palace into solid gold.’ And after Cola Matteo reported this other whim of the king to the serpent, the serpent said to him, ‘Go get a bunch of mixed greens and lubricate the foundation of the palace with them, and we’ll see if we can satisfy this crybaby.’ That very instant Cola Matteo put together a big bundle of chard, turnip greens, garlic chives, purslane, arugula, and chervil, and when he had lubricated the base of the palace, it immediately began to shine all over like a gilded pill that could have made a hundred houses constipated by ill fortune evacuate their poverty.

  “And when the countryman returned on behalf of the serpent and presented the request for his wife, the king, seeing every road cut off, summoned his daughter and said, ‘My dear Grannonia, in order to trick someone who wanted to be your husband I proposed terms that I thought would be impossible to respect. But now that I see I have been caught up with and am under an obligation—and I know not how!—I beg you, if you are a blessed daughter, to allow me to keep my word and to content yourself with what the heavens will and I am forced to do.’ ‘Do what you please, my lord daddy,’ answered Grannonia, ‘for I will not veer one iota from your wishes.’

  “When he heard this the king told Cola Matteo to have the serpent come, and, hearing the call, the serpent came to court in a carriage made of solid gold and pulled by four golden elephants. But wherever he passed the people fled, terrified at the sight of such a large and frightening serpent out for a ride in the city. When he arrived at the palace all of the courtiers trembled like rushes and then cleared out, until not even the scullery boys were left, and the king and queen, frozen with fear, holed themselves up in a room. Only Grannonia stayed put and didn’t budge, and although her father and mother shouted, ‘Run for it! Get out of here, Grannonia! Save yourself, Rienzo!’7 she wouldn’t move a hair and said, ‘Why should I run from the husband that you have given me?’

  “When the serpent entered the room he grabbed Grannonia around her middle with his tail and gave her a bunch of kisses; the king shat a quarter bushel of worms, and if you had bled him no blood would have come out. Then the serpent took her into another room, locked the door, and, shaking his skin to the floor, became a splendid young man who had a head covered with golden curls and eyes that cast a spell on you. And after embracing his bride, he picked the first fruits of his love.

  “The king, who saw the serpent hole up with his daughter and then close the door, said to his wife, ‘May the heavens send that good soul of my daughter to rest in peace, for there’s no question that she’s gone; that accursed serpent has probably gulped her down like an egg yolk.’ And he put his eye to the keyhole so that he could see what had become of her. But when he saw the incredible grace of the young man and the skin that he had left on the ground, he gave the door a kick and went in, and then took the skin and threw it on the fire, where it burned up.

  “At the sight of this the young man cried, ‘Ah, you renegade dogs, you’ve got me!’ and transformed into a dove. As he tried to escape he flew into the glass panes of the windows and banged his head so many times that at the end he broke the window. But he emerged so badly battered that there wasn’t one whole piece of his noggin left. Grannonia, who found herself happy and wretched, full of joy and ill fated, rich and penniless, and all in the same moment, clawed at her face and lamented to her mother and father that her pleasure had been muddied, her sweetness poisoned, and her good fortune sent down the wrong path. They apologized, saying that they hadn’t intended to cause any harm.

  “But she kept on moaning until Night came out to light the catafalque8 of the Heavens for the Sun’s funeral procession, and when she saw that everyone had gone to bed, she took all her jewels, which she kept in a writing desk, and left through a secret door, intending to search until she found the goods that she had lost. After she left the city, guided by the light of the moon, she met a fox, who asked her if she wanted company. Grannonia answered, ‘You’d be doing me a favor, sister, since I’m not too familiar with these parts.’

  “And so they walked along until they came to a wood—where the trees, playing like children, made little houses to hide the shadows in—and since by then they were tired of walking and wanted to rest, they retired under the cover of the leafy branches, where a fountain played at carnival with the cool grass, pouring down pitcherfuls of water.9 And after lying down on a mattress of tender young grass, they paid the duty of rest that they owed to Nature for the merchandise of life, and they didn’t awake until the Sun, with its usual fire, gave sailors and couriers the signal to continue their journeys.

  “Upon awakening they stayed on a good deal longer listening to the songs of various birds, since it was a great pleasure for Grannonia to hear their twittering. When the fox saw this she said, ‘You’d feel even more pleasure if you understood what they’re saying, as I do.’ Since by nature women are just as prone to curiosity as they are to chatter, when she heard these words Grannonia begged the fox to tell her what she had heard in bird language. The fox let Grannonia beg for a good long time, so as to stimulate even greater curiosity for what she was about to say, and then told her that the birds were conversing among themselves about a misfortune that had befallen the king’s son, who was as handsome as a fairy. Since he had refused to satisfy the unreined desires of an accursed ogress, he had been put under a curse: he would be transformed into a serpent for seven years. He was already close to finishing this time when, after falling in love with the daughter of a king, he was with his new bride in a room and left his skin on the floor. The mother and father of the bride, however, were too curious, and they burned the skin. Escaping in the form of a dove, he broke some glass trying to fly out of the window and smashed himself up so badly that as far as the doctors were considered he was a desperate case.

  “When Grannonia heard her own business being discussed, she asked first off whose son this prince was and then if there was any hope that a cure might be found for his condition. The fox answered that the birds had said that his father was the king of Wide Ravine, and that there was no other secret for plugging the holes in his head—so that his soul wouldn’t leave him—than to lubricate his wounds with the blood of the very birds that had told this story. At these words Grannonia knelt before the fox, begging her to do the service of catching those birds so that she could remove their blood, and then they would split the earnings like two good friends. ‘Slow down,’ said the fox. ‘Let’s wait until night, and when the birds go to roost just leave it to your mommy here; I’ll climb up the tree and cut them down one by one.’

  “Autro tanto piacere senterrisse ’ntennenno chello che diceno, comme lo ’ntenno io.” [“You’d feel even more pleasure if you understood what they’re saying, as I do.”]

  “And so they passed the whole day talking first of the young man’s beauty, and then of the mistake made by the father of the bride, and then of the accident that had occurred, and as they chatted about this and that the day came to an end, and the Earth spread out a big piece of black cardboard to collect the wax from the torches of Night.10 As soon as the fox saw the birds getting drowsy amid the branches she climbed stealthily up and,
one by one, plucked out every oriole, goldfinch, wren, chaffinch, woodcock, owl, hoopoe, skylark, finch, screech owl, and flycatcher in the tree, and when she had killed them she put their blood in a little flask she carried with her on her travels for refreshment. Grannonia was walking on air with joy, but the fox said to her, ‘Oh, you’re dreaming this happiness, my girl! You’ve done nothing if you don’t also have my blood to mix with the birds’!’ That said, she ran away.

  “Grannonia, who saw her hopes dashed to the ground, took recourse in the woman’s art of craftiness and flattery, and said to the fox, ‘Fox, my dear, you would be right to save your skin if I were not so indebted to you and if there were no other foxes in the world. But since you know how much I owe you and, furthermore, that there is no lack of the likes of you in this countryside, you can rest assured of my word and not act like the cow that kicks the pail right when it’s full of milk. You’ve done so much, and now you’re going to miss the best part! Stop right there; believe me, and accompany me to the city of this king, and I’ll be like a bought slave to you.’ The fox, who would never have believed that the quintessence of foxiness could be found, found herself outfoxed by a woman, for once she started walking at Grannonia’s side they had not gone fifty paces before the girl planted a blow with the club she was carrying and hit the fox’s noodle so hard that she was able to get the blood straightaway and add it to the little flask.

  “Then she began to get her feet moving, and she arrived at Wide Ravine, where she headed for the royal palace and had word sent to the king that she had come to heal the prince. The king ordered her to be brought before him and marveled at seeing a girl promise what the best physicians in his kingdom hadn’t been able to do. Even so, since there’s no harm in trying he said that it would give him great pleasure to witness the experiment. But Grannonia replied, ‘If I am to produce the effect that you desire, I want you to promise to give me the prince for my husband.’ The king, who considered his son dead, answered her, ‘If you give him back to me free and healthy, I’ll give him to you free and healthy, for it’s no big thing to give a husband to someone who gives me a son!’