“But after he was on that mountain for fifteen days, Tittone thought that he would go and look for the other sisters. When he asked his sister and brother-in-law if he could take leave of them, the hawk gave him one of his feathers, saying, ‘Take this with you, Tittone, and hold it dear, for you may find yourself in a situation in which you’ll deem it a treasure. Enough said; take good care of it and if you need something, throw it on the ground and say, “Come out, come out,” and you will sing my praises.’ Tittone wrapped up the feather in a piece of paper, put it in a little bag, and with a thousand ceremonies left, and after a devastating walk he reached the wood where the stag and Vasta lived. Devoured by hunger, he went into their garden to pick a few pieces of fruit, and was seen by his sister. When she recognized him in the same way that Fabiella had, she introduced him to her husband, who gave him a warm reception and treated him as he would a prince. After another fifteen days Tittone wanted to leave in search of the other sister, and the stag gave him one of his hairs, with the same words that the hawk had used for his feather.
“And so he set out with a handful of coins that the hawk had given him, and just as many that he had received from the stag, and he walked so far that he reached the end of the earth, where, unable to proceed because of the sea, he engaged a ship, with the plan that he would search all the islands for news of his sister. He set his sails to the wind and traveled so far that he was carried to the island where the dolphin lived with Rita. As soon as he landed he was seen by his sister, who recognized him in the same way that the others had, and he received a thousand caresses from his brother-in-law. And when he wanted to leave to go back to see his mother and father after such a long time, the dolphin gave him one of his scales and told him the same things, at which he took a horse and began to trot.
“But before he was half a mile from the seashore, he entered a wood—free port for fear and shadows, where a nonstop fair of darkness and fright was held—and there he found a great tower in the middle of a lake that kissed the feet of the trees so that they wouldn’t reveal its ugliness to the Sun, and at one of the windows he saw a most beautiful young woman at the feet of an awful dragon, which was asleep. When she saw Tittone she said, speaking softly in a voice that inspired great compassion, ‘O my handsome young man, sent perchance by the heavens to comfort my miseries in this place where never a Christian face is seen, take me from the clutches of this tyrannical serpent that stole me away from the king of Clear Valley, my father, and confined me to this wretched tower, where I have nearly perished and turned rancid!’ ‘Alas,’ said Tittone, ‘what can I do to serve you, my fair lady? Who can cross this lake? Who can climb that tower? Who can approach that awful dragon that terrifies you with his stare, sows fear, and generates diarrhea? But hold on, wait a minute, let’s see if we can get rid of that serpent by using someone else’s sleeve. “Step by step,” said Gradasso!3 Now we’ll see if this fist is empty or full!’4
“That said, he threw down, at the same time, the feather, the hair, and the scale that his brothers-in-law had given him and said, ‘Come out, come out!’ As soon as they hit the ground, the falcon, the stag, and the dolphin all appeared in the same way that drops of summer water give birth to frogs, and all together they shouted, ‘Here we are, what is your command?’ When Tittone saw this he said, with great happiness, ‘I want nothing more than to remove this poor young woman from the claws of that dragon, to get her away from that tower, to destroy everything, and then to take her home with me as my lovely wife.’ ‘Hush,’ answered the hawk, ‘the bean sprouts where you least think it will. We’ll make the dragon spin on a coin,5 and you’ll see that there’ll be a shortage of earth beneath his feet.’ ‘Let’s waste no time,’ replied the stag. ‘Troubles and macaroni are best when they’re hot.’
“As he was saying this, the hawk summoned a troop of griffins that flew up to the window of the tower, stole the girl, and carried her away from the lake to where Tittone and his brothers-in-law were. And if from afar she had looked like a moon to him, up close she was so beautiful that he found her to be a sun. But while he was hugging her and uttering sweet words to her, the dragon woke up, hurled itself out the window, and was swimming toward Tittone with the intention of devouring him when the stag conjured up a team of lions, tigers, panthers, bears, and bogeys that attacked the dragon and tore it to pieces with their claws. When this was done Tittone wanted to leave, but the dolphin said, ‘I intend to do something to help you, too,’ and so as not to leave even the memory of such an accursed and wretched place, he made the sea rise so high that it overflowed its bounds and smashed the tower with such fury that it was uprooted from its very foundations.
“When Tittone saw this, he thanked his brothers-in-law as best he could and told his future bride to do the same, since it was due to them that they had escaped such a great danger. But the animals answered, ‘On the contrary, we are the ones who should be thanking this lovely lady, for she is the reason we will return to our original state. Because of our mother’s unkindness to a fairy we have been since birth under a curse that forced us to remain in this animal form until we freed the daughter of a king from some great trouble. And now the moment we so desired has arrived! Now the string of berries has ripened! We already feel a new spirit in our lungs and new blood in our veins!’ As they were saying this they became three splendidly handsome young men, who one after the other tightly embraced their brother-in-law and squeezed the hand of their new relative, who had gone into raptures of happiness. When Tittone saw this he said, with a great sigh, ‘O lord God, why can’t my mommy and daddy take part in this joy? They would melt to bits if they discovered they had such charming and handsome sons-in-law!’ ‘It’s not night yet!’ answered the brothers-in-law. ‘The shame of seeing ourselves disguised like that had induced us to flee the sight of men, but now, thank heavens, that we can appear among people we all want to be together under one roof with our dear little wives, and live our lives happily. Let’s soon be on our way, then, so that before the Sun unpacks the merchandise of its rays at the customshouse of the East tomorrow morning, our wives will be with us.’
“That said, to avoid going on foot—since they had nothing but the frayed nag that had carried Tittone there—they made a splendid carriage pulled by six lions appear, and all five of them got inside. They traveled all day, and in the evening found themselves at a tavern, where as they were getting ready to work their teeth they passed the time reading the many testimonials of ignorance of the men who had left their mark on those walls.6
“Finally, when the others had eaten and put themselves to sleep the three young men, pretending to go to bed, busied themselves all night so that in the morning—when the stars, bashful as maidens, refused to be seen by the Sun—they were reunited with their wives at the tavern. After many rounds of hugs and a joy that cannot be imagined, all eight of them got into the same carriage and at the end of a long journey reached Green Knoll, where the king and queen received them with incredible caresses, since they had recovered their capital of the four children whom they had considered lost, and through usury had gained three sons-in-law and a daughter-in-law who were four columns of the temple of beauty.
“And when the kings of Lovely Field and Clear Valley were informed about what had happened to their children they both came to the festivities, adding the fat of joy to the soup of happiness and putting an end to all of the past anguish, for an hour of happiness makes a thousand years of torment be forgotten.”
4
THE SEVEN LITTLE PORK RINDS*
Fourth Entertainment of the Fourth Day
An impoverished old woman beats her gluttonous daughter, who has eaten seven pork rinds, and when she makes a merchant believe that she did it because the girl had worked too hard filling seven spindles, he takes her for his wife. But the girl does not want to work, and it is thanks to the help of a fairy that her husband returns from a trip and finds the cloth spun. After another of his w
ife’s tricks he resolves to make her work no longer, so that she will not fall ill.
Everyone blessed Meneca’s mouth for having told the tale with so much gusto that she was able to bring before the eyes of her listeners things that had happened so far away. This stirred up Tolla’s envy, and she was overcome by a desire to jump clear past Meneca that rose from the little bones in her feet. And so first she cleared her throat and then she said, “Every word that is uttered is either half or whole; and thus whoever said, ‘crooked face, straight fortune’ knew something about how things go in this world, and perhaps had read the story of Antuono and Parmiero:1 ‘Good luck, Antuono, and don’t bat an eye, for you can catch fig peckers without a trap!’ For experience teaches us that this world is a spitting image of the land of Cockaigne,2 where those who work most earn least, and those who live best take life as it comes and let the macaroni fall into their mouths; and you can touch with your hand the fact that the feet and clothes of Fortune are earned with broken-down boats and not with oiled ships, as you shall now hear.
“There once was a miserable old woman who, with distaff in hand, went spitting on people in the street and begging alms from door to door, and since ‘with craft and deceit you can live half the year,’3 she made some tender-lunged little women who fell for anything believe that she wanted to make I don’t know what kind of rich dish for her emaciated daughter, and thus managed to get hold of seven little pork rinds. She brought them home with a nice armful of sticks that she had gathered from the ground and gave them to her daughter, telling her to put them on the fire to cook while she went back out to beg some farmers for a few greens that she could use to make a little soup.
“Saporita, the daughter, took the rinds and burned off the bristles, and then put them in a little pot and started to cook them. But they boiled in the pot less vigorously than they boiled in her own gullet, for the aroma that came out of the pot was a lethal challenge on the battlefield of her appetite and a credit check in the bank of her throat. Finally, no matter how hard she tried to resist, she was provoked by the odor from the pot, pulled by her own natural gluttony, and strangled by the hunger that was gnawing at her, and she let herself go and tried a little bit, which tasted so good that she said to herself, ‘If you’re afraid, you should become a cop! Since I happen to be right here, let’s eat up! And may thunder and rain come falling down on me! What is it but a pork rind? Is that such a big deal? I have enough hide on my back to pay for these rinds!’ As she was saying this she swallowed the first one, and when she felt her stomach cramp up even harder with hunger, she reached for the second one, then she snatched the third one, until piece by piece, one after the other, she had done away with all seven of them. But once she had messed things up like that, she began to think about her mistake and imagine that the rinds were going to stick in her throat, and she decided to pull the wool over her mother’s eyes; she found an old shoe, cut its sole into seven parts, and put them in the pot.
“In the meantime Saporita’s mother came back with a little bunch of cabbages, which she minced up, stalks included so as not to lose a crumb, and as soon as she saw that the pot was boiling at full steam she threw the vegetables in and added a bit of grease a coachman had given her in alms, left over from oiling a carriage. Then she spread a cloth over a little chest of old poplar wood, pulled two crusts of stale bread out of her sack, took a wooden cutting board from the dish rack, broke the bread into tiny bits, and ladled the vegetables and the pieces of hide over it. But when the old woman started to eat she immediately realized that her teeth were not those of a shoemaker and that the pork rinds, as if by a new Ovidian metamorphosis, had become buffalo tripe. She turned to her daughter and said, ‘You did me in, you damned sow! What sort of crap did you put in the soup? What, you think my stomach has become an old shoe that needs resoling? Confess right now what’s going on or you’ll regret the day you were born, for I won’t leave a single bone of yours in one piece!’ Saporita began to deny everything, but as the old woman’s pained cries gained force, the girl finally blamed the steam of the pot for having blinded her to the point of committing this bad act. When it became clear to the old woman that her meal had been poisoned, she grabbed hold of a broom handle and began to work it like a lathe, so that she caught the girl and then let her go more than seven times, beating her wherever she was able to.
“At Saporita’s shrieks a merchant who happened to be passing by entered the house, and when he saw how cruelly the old woman was treating her, he took the club from her hand and said, ‘What did this poor girl do for you to want to kill her? Is this a way to punish her, or to get rid of her? Could it be that you caught her throwing spears or breaking money banks?4 Aren’t you ashamed to be treating a poor little girl this way?’ ‘You don’t know what she did to me,’ answered the old woman. ‘This shameless girl sees that I’m without a penny and pays no attention; she wants me to be ruined by doctors and pharmacists. Now that it’s hot outside I ordered her to stop working so hard so that she won’t fall ill, because I haven’t the means to cure her. And this morning that self-centered thing insisted on filling seven spindles just to spite me, even though she risks weakening her heart and spending a couple of months in the depths of her bed.’
“When the merchant heard this, he thought that such an industrious girl could become the fairy of his household, and he said to the old woman, ‘Put your anger aside, for I want to relieve your home of this danger by taking this daughter of yours for my wife and bringing her home with me, where I will have her live like a princess, since, thanks be to the heavens, I raise hens, fatten pigs, and keep pigeons, and I can’t even turn around in my house, it’s so full! May the heavens bless me and the evil eye stay far from me; I have barrels of wheat, crates of flour, jugs of oil, pots and bladders of grease, beams hanging with lard, dish racks full of crockery, piles of wood, heaps of coal, a chest of bed linens, and a bridegroom’s bed, and, above all, with my rents and other revenues I’m able to live like a lord. Besides, I’m going to invest a few dozen ducats at the fairs, which if all goes well will make me an even richer man.’ The old woman, who saw this good fortune rain down on her when she least expected it, took Saporita by the hand and handed her over to him, as is the use and custom in Naples,5 saying, ‘Here she is: may she be yours for now and for many fine years, and may you be healthy and have beautiful heirs!’
“The merchant put his arms around her neck and then took her home, and he could barely wait until it was market day to make some purchases. When Monday arrived he got up early in the morning and went off to where the countrymen sold their wares, and bought eighty rolls of flax.6 Then he brought them to Saporita and said, ‘Now you can spin as much as you like. You don’t need to be afraid of meeting up with another raging madwoman like your mother, who broke your bones because you filled up spindles, since for every ten spindles you fill I intend to give you ten kisses, and for every wick7 you prepare I’ll give you this heart! So work cheerfully, and when I get back from market, which will be in twenty days, have these eighty rolls of flax spun, for I intend to have a nice pair of sleeves made for you, of red cloth trimmed with green velvet!’
“‘Get out of here, and make it snappy!’ answered Saporita under her breath. ‘Now you’ve really filled the spindle! Just look how you’re running to slip it in the ring!8 If you expect shirts from my hands, you can start stocking up on scrap paper! You think you’ve found it? You think I drank the milk of a black goat9 and can spin eighty rolls of flax in twenty days? Damn the boat that brought you to this town! Go on, you’ve got time; you’ll find your flax spun when livers have hair and monkeys have tails!’ In the meantime her husband left and Saporita, who was as gluttonous as she was lazy, had been waiting for nothing better than to take out packages of flour and cruets of oil and make fritters and fried pizzas, which she nibbled like a mouse and devoured like a pig from morning till night.
“But when the date of her husband’s return arrived, s
he began to spin the fine thread of fear10 thinking about the uproar and racket that was bound to occur when the merchant found the flax in exactly the same state as he had left it and his chests and jars empty. And so she took a very long pole and wound twenty rolls of the flax onto it, with all the tow and hards, and after sticking an Indian gourd with a large hairpin and tying the pole to the parapet of the terrace, she began to lower this abbot of all spindles from the terrace down to the ground, using a large pot of macaroni broth as her moistening dish.11 And while she was spinning thread that was as thin as a ship’s cables and squirting the passersby every time she wet her finger, just like at carnival, some fairies happened to pass by and were so amused at this hideous vision that they almost died laughing, and for this gave her an enchantment: all the flax she had at home would not only be immediately spun but also made into cloth and bleached. This was instantly done, and Saporita began to swim in the grease of joy when she realized that this good fortune had rained down from the sky upon her.
“But to make sure her husband would never again bother her about such a matter, she put herself to bed on top of a pile of hazelnuts, and when he arrived she began to complain, and turning this way and that she made the hazelnuts crack so that it seemed like her bones were breaking. And when her husband asked how she was feeling, she answered in a pained and miserable little voice, ‘I couldn’t be worse, dear husband, for I haven’t one whole bone left in me! What, does spinning eighty rolls of flax in twenty days and making cloth out of it besides seem like gathering a bit of grass for the sheep to you? Go on, husband, you forgot to pay the midwife, and the ass has eaten up all your discretion! When I’m dead my mother won’t be making any more of me, so you’re not going to catch me at these labors fit for a dog again; I don’t intend to empty the spindle of my life because I’ve filled too many spindles!’ Caressing her, the husband said, ‘Stay healthy, my dear wife, for I’m more concerned about this lovely loom of love than I am about all the cloth in the world! Now I realize that your mother was right to punish you for working so hard, since it makes you lose your health. But take heart, for I intend to spend an eye and a tooth to get you well again; just wait, I’m going for the doctor right now.’ And as he was saying this he ran off to get master Catruopolo.12
The Tale of Tales Page 39
