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Boccaccio on stage

Boccaccio on stage
Giovanni Boccaccio (1313– 1375), after the graphic artist Raffaello Morghen (engraving 1822)

By: Mario Vargas Llosa
Translated by: Gino Luka

Lectio magistralis held at the University of Florence (June 5, 2014). The University of Florence has awarded the writer Mario Vargas Llosa the academic title Honoris causa in European and American Language and Literature.

Since the first time I read it Decameron, when I was a child, I thought that the initial situation presented in the book, before the narration began, was mainly a theatrical situation: trapped in a plague-stricken city, with no possibility of escape, a group of young arranged to escape to an imaginary place, telling each other different stories after being stuck in a cottage.


Faced with an intolerable reality, seven girls and three boys manage to escape through fantasy, moving into a world of stories that they tell each other and that transport them from that painful real world to another place, of words and dreams, where they remain immune to the plague.

Would it be possible for this situation to be seen as the very symbol of the reason for the existence of literature?

Since time immemorial, don't we, human beings, live inventing stories to fight, often unconsciously, a reality that oppresses us and turns out to be insufficient to fulfill our desires?

The situation that serves as a framework for the stories of The Decameron there is no better way to express the nature of theater: to present on a stage something that, while it continues, is a life that replaces real life, at the same time reflecting it, with all its shortcomings and always coupled with those things which, to meet our pressing needs and demands, we need to fulfill our existence and enjoy it fully.

Since then, the idea of ​​a theatrical piece inspired by Decameron it has been one of those projects that often accompany me, to which I have often returned over the years, until one day, finally, I decided to commit to making it happen. The time I have spent writing this text has been the most stimulating time I have experienced, thanks to Giovanni Boccaccio. Reading and re-reading the text, trying to reconstruct through re-reading and through excursions to the places where he lived and wrote, this has been a happy undertaking.

In late medieval Florence, the first lights of the Renaissance were already emerging. Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch, - the three literary stars of this process, - are the sources in which we must quench our thirst to assimilate what is the best of Western culture: With them, forms, models, ideas and aesthetic values ​​were born that have remained standing to this day, illuminating the whole world.

Giovanni Boccaccio was in Florence when the Black Death struck the city in March 1348. The epidemic originated – apparently – in southern Italy, where it was carried by ships laden with spices arriving from the Far East. The rats carried him all the way to Tuscany. The writer and poet was then about 35 years old. Without that terrible experience—the plague is said to have wiped out a third of Florence's one hundred and twenty thousand inhabitants—he would not have written it Decameron, this absolute masterpiece and pillar of Western narrative prose; and perhaps he would have remained, as he was, an intellectual and elitist writer, who preferred Latin to his dialectal language and who was more concerned with theological, classical, and erudite research than with authentic literary creativity, more accessible to the general public.

The experience of the bubonic plague made him a different man and has been decisive in bringing to light the great narrator, author of stories celebrated by countless readers throughout the centuries, in every corner of the world. In a certain sense, the plague, - that is, the possibility of a cruel death - made him more humane, bringing him closer to the common people with whom until then - since he belonged to the family of a merchant of good social standing - he had have a cold acquaintance. The thirst for fun and amusement of the ten young men trapped in Villa Palmieri was born as an antidote to the horror displayed by the spectacle of the plague, which turned the streets of Florence into a daily apocalypse, as explained on the first day.

Something similar happened to Boccaccio, who until that moment had devoted himself more to study - mythology, geography, religion, history, the Latin classics - that is, more to the intellectual life than to the sensual one.

Plague,—that is, death in its cruelest manifestation,—revealed to him the wonder of bodily life, instincts, sex, eating and drinking. Decameron is the evidence of this return. Can't say it lasted long. A few years later the passion for spiritual matters - knowledge and religion - would have seized him again and led him away from the path of his contemporaries, from what Montaigne called "common people", directing him to libraries, to theology , to the encyclopedia of the world of classics.

His continued and growing interest in Greek culture is one of the first signs of the admiration Renaissance humanism would show for the Hellenic past: its history, its philosophy, its art, its literature, and its theater.

Boccaccio's first works – Filocolo, Filostrato, Teseida, Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine, Amorosa Visione, Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta, Ninfale Fiesolano – are inspired by books, not by real life, but by read life; and whether they are written in Latin or in a dialectal language, they do not transmit direct experiences of life experience, but of culture, or of life that has become a philosophical or theological theory, a literary myth, a form of social docks, of love, court life and chivalry transformed into literature. Its value, more or less, lies in a conventional framework, a good part derived from models, among which Dante's poetry.

The revolution implied in Decameron - and this, thanks to the plague, is a serious warning that the life of the soul is only one dimension of life and that there is another, which is more related to the body, desires, passions and bodily functions than to the mind or knowledge - and lies in the fact that in those novels real, material life and not the elite of ideas, but what is common to all - artisans, peasants, merchants, pirates, pirates, monks and nuns, kings, nobles, adventurers, etc. - becomes the protagonist without the theoretical mediations of literature.

Me Decameron begins, even at a high level, realism in European literature. This is one of the reasons for his immense popularity, just as Don Quixote will have, after a few centuries. Decameron first circulated in manuscript copies and achieved enormous prestige and circulation; the first printed edition appeared almost a century and a half later, in Venice, in l492, the year of the discovery of America, and Queen Isabella the Catholic is said to have been one of its most enthusiastic readers.

Without the experience of 1348 Boccaccio would not have been able to write the first magisterial day with which he begins Decameron, describing the massacres caused by the plague, the horrific panorama of a city filled with piles of corpses, because no one has time to give a humane burial to all those who perish as victims of the deadly disease, which manifests itself with tumors in the body and armpits, with high fever and severe spasms.

Strangely enough, after these first chilling and ghastly pages, populated by disease and death, the mortar disappears from the book and practically never returns in the hundred novels (or appears almost invisibly in a few lines), as if it had been annihilated by the namatization. that drives those seven girls and those three boys to tell only stories that extol pleasure, banter, and fun (though sometimes achieved through crime or cruelty).

The truth is that, apart from those pages of the Preface on the first day, where the plague is the protagonist, the rest of the book is dominated by a spirit of hilarity, irreverence, debauchery, mockery, which interprets life as an adventure with a primordial purpose, which is sexual pleasure accompanied by the amusement of the man and, in some cases, also of the woman.

Storytelling, te Decameron, is not a spontaneous activity, which depends on the initiative of each of the speakers, but a ritual supported by a strict protocol. There is a queen or a king, both temporary—for they reign only for a day—but during their brief reign their authority is real: No one challenges their power, and the petty courtiers submit to them without reluctance. It determines the type of entertainment and sets the order that the speakers should follow. Narrative sessions take place in the afternoon - nine o'clock - and take place only five days a week, excluding Friday for liturgical reasons, and Saturday to respect the biblical day of rest.

Before starting, the ten young people walk in the gardens of Villa Palmieri, enjoy the scents of flowers and the song of birds, eat, drink, sing and dance, preparing their bodies and minds to go to an imaginary place, in the world of fiction.

The novels begin with a prologue, usually short, with a philosophical and abstract character, but then, with few exceptions, they adapt to a system where the first and most prominent feature is realism; almost all simulate a reality that is known through life experience, rather than simulating an unreality, as happens in fantasy stories. (there are actually only a few of them that are fantastic in nature, but do not pass the fingers).

The characters of the stories, cultured or uncultured, rich or poor, noble or plebeian, live all kinds of adventures, and all are in search of—almost always succeeding in—lustful pleasure in the first place, and wealth in second place.

Decameron it is a monument dedicated to hedonism. Pleasure, more in a material sense than a spiritual one, is the main objective for his characters, men and women. They give themselves to each other with pleasure, without prejudice, violating taboos and moral or religious principles, without the slightest fear of rules or social opinion. Sensuality, body, appetites are objects of exaltation and cult for the characters The Decameron.

It could be said that the approach of the plague—the inevitable death—gives these storytellers a freedom of speech and expression that they would otherwise never have allowed themselves; and in addition, the breaking of all moral restraints for the realization of their desires.

In that frantic and almost desperate search for pleasure, the characters of The Decameron they manage to come out on top, as if they were rewarded by a secret command that gives an ontological value to the quenching of appetites: vindication for life. Boccaccio tells, on the first day of The Decameron, that one of the effects of the plague had been the bankruptcy of the morals which prevailed in Florence, and that the inhabitants of Florence, during those days of plague and death, indulged in immorality and fornication, violating the norms, rules, and manners which had hitherto had limited sexual relations to some extent.

In the case of the ten young men locked up in Vila Palmieri, those sexual outbursts were only verbal, they only occur in the stories that tell, during those ten days (which, in fact, are fourteen) their behavior could not be more discreet and and more restrained than that, although the narrative voice of The Decameron shows at the beginning that the three boys had fallen in love with three of the girls, but without identifying them. They sing, dance, eat and drink, yes, but then they each go to their own room and not even the slightest sexual debauchery happens between them. No one makes love or indulges in amorous pastimes. Exaggerations occur in stories, they are exclusive attributes of fiction.

Have these young men fled Florence just to escape the apparition of the sick and the corpses? Pampinea, inspired to come up with the idea of ​​holed up in Villa Palmieri, utters a phrase that suggests a more ambitious goal than simply leaving the city just to get ripped off. She refers to that escape as a kind of redemption, an initiative that would have saved the group from death: «[…] moreover, without offending anyone, is it up to us and any other honest person to use the means we have , to preserve our lives?». Pampinea thinks that pretending is much more than fun: it is a possible antidote to the carnage caused by the epidemic. From this reflection of the clever girl arises, in the work Los cuentos de la peste (Tales of the plague) the idea that belongs to Giovanni Boccaccio, that by telling some events it is possible to build a labyrinth where the plague gets lost and has no chance to escape. reaches the storytellers.

Te Decameron, pleasure, the supreme value, justifies the worst deceptions and lies, as demonstrated – one example among dozens and dozens of examples – by the wonderful story of Ricciardo Minutolos (the sixth novel of the third day), who, to introduce hand Katela, Filipelo Siginolfo's wife, tricking her into believing that her husband is also cheating on his wife. This cynical reasoning convinces Katel, who then uses the same morality by imitating Ricciardo, her seducer. Cynicism, irreverence and meanness, laced with strong humor, make up the moral of almost all the stories. Anything is allowed when it comes to achieving satisfaction, especially when trying to make for ourselves the woman we want (or as the case may be, the man we want). Women easily succumb to these temptations for reasons of power, for money or even simply for a desire.

For example, in the story of the lusty abbot and Ferondo's wife (the eighth novel of the third day), the latter agrees to be seduced by the abbot because of the jewels he has been promised, even to enjoy some freedom, while the lecherous abbot fill her husband's mind with the fact that he is dead and has arrived in Purgatory. But there are also some exceptions: heroic women who defend their virtue to indescribable extremes, like Griselda in the last novella who endures without complaint all the terrible trials with which Gualtieri, her husband, puts her through measure her loyalty and her spirit of sacrifice (or, perhaps, just for fun). This Grizelda, in a sense, is an exception, because in the world of The Decameron, in relation to desire there is equality between the sexes. Women, like men, have desires and act relentlessly to fulfill them.

For example, in the tenth novella of the second day, the wife of the judge Ricciardo da Kinxica, robbed by the usurper Paganino, refuses her husband to pay the ransom for her because – she tells the judge to his face – her husband never does love, while the pirate does, even often. This does not mean, however, that men and women are always absolutely equal. From this point of view, the book's message contradicts itself.

On the ninth day, when the young Joseph appears before King Salamone to ask what he must do so that his wife, so disdainful, will obey him, he advises him to imitate what he will see in Ponte all'Oca (Goose Bridge). And what Gjiosefo sees there is a muleteer hitting one of his mules several times in a row with a perch because it will not cross the bridge. Gjiosefo does the same with his wife and, after a peaceful beating, the woman becomes bedridden and loved.

However, in the novels taken together, the woman is far from always subject to the whims or abuses of the man. In most of them, the opposite happens. The woman is presented as a free being, full of initiative and, like the man, uses her cunning to achieve pleasure by deceiving her husband.

The novels celebrate these victories of women who act with the same impudence, frivolity and whimsy that men use to seduce their wives. The ability to use these tricks is unlimited, for both women and men, and if in this story Giozefo abuses his wife to tame her, in many others it is the men who remain deceived and humiliated by their wives. which, in their turn, seek satisfaction outside the conjugal bed.

In the world of The Decameron the routine of marriage quickly extinguishes the sexual illusion. Spouses feel the sweetness of love only at the beginning of their marriage. Then, the sexual fire is extinguished and both seek satisfaction outside the marital hearth, to the point that in most novels adultery is a necessary condition for sexual satisfaction.

to "Decameron” no one scruples to disguise the defects and vices which are involved in the human condition; indeed, the raison d'être of many narratives is to depict man as a slave to his baser passions, with no possibility of anything stopping them. Revenge plays a big role in the book.

The narrator of the novels does not exercise any kind of censorship, nor does he make the slightest effort to hide, justify or restrain the vengeful spirit that some of the characters possess. Only humor sometimes plays a mitigating role in cruel revenges and, even; even sadistic acts that are carried out in some stories.

In the seventh novella of the eighth day, the young Rinieri takes revenge with an unparalleled ferocity against the widow Elena because he was the victim of her objections. The ninth novella of the eighth day is no less cruel,—more summer malice than revenge,—wherein Master Simone is furiously abused by the bandits Bruno and Bufalmaco only because he is guilty of the crime of being naive and gullible.

Entertainment, to Decameron, justifies wickedness. The villains Bruno and Bufalmaco play another prank on the deserter Calandrino and convince him that he is pregnant in order to deprive him of a good dinner (third novel of the ninth day). Something similar happens in the fourth novella of the ninth day, in which the hooligan Fortarrigo steals and strips the desolate Angiulieri, leaving him half-naked in the middle of the field, removing himself as if he were the victim of a thief. In this way, the swashbuckler achieves his goal and, in addition, entertains himself and the readers.

The moral of these stories is as clear as daylight: anything goes to achieve sexual or gastronomic pleasure and to pass some time pleasantly. Cheating, farce, lying, robbery, everything is allowed when it comes to bedding a lady, embezzling someone else's money or enjoying a party with all the goodies.

The human being, the servant of his instincts, lives to fulfill them. This harsh realism is more unusual, since many of the characters in these stories were not invented by Boccaccio; it was about real people, some of them contemporaries of the author and the stories, - according to the research of researchers such as Vitore Branka (much of this data I got from his book with the title "Medieval Bocaçio" Medieval Bocaçio and from the publication of his critic i The Decameron), – seem to describe or start from facts and situations that actually happened, although perhaps modified by Boccaccio and alienated to make them more literaryly convincing, but without worrying about disguising the protagonists . This freedom is extreme when it comes to criticizing the religious - priests, monks and nuns - present at Decameron (as well as the clergy in general) as a corrupt seed, lustful and wicked, contrary to every form of spiritual character, covetous, shameless and simony, exploiting the naivety of the faithful and ready to profit at their expense, without even the slightest scruple.

If we think that since then the secular power of the Church was too great and that she had absolute power to fight her enemies, this part, repeated endlessly in the novels of "The Decameron”: A merciless critique, sometimes bordering on caricature, of the arrogance and meanness committed by the priests of the Catholic Church everywhere.

In this sense, it is difficult to imagine two works more antagonistic than Decameron and Dante's Comedy, of which Boccaccio was an avid reader and scholar. He was the first to write the Life of Dante and to baptize the Comedy with the epithet "divine" that accompanies it to this day. Dante's great poem begins to be known in 1312 with Inferno, Purgatory in 1315, and Parrizi, immediately after the Author's death, in 1321.

Although Dante put many religious sinners in Hell, his work is saturated with religiosity and is the literary peak of the Christian conception of religion, the world and the afterlife, in defense of the strictest orthodoxy.

In the history of literature there is no literary testimony inspired by Christian doctrine more ambitious and ingenious than the Comedy. Decameron, on the contrary, written only half a century after the appearance of Dante's masterpiece, is far from presenting a similar identification with Christian theology and philosophy.

In front of them, it maintains a distance that, without being able to be declared atheistic, can be considered secular and indifferent to theological concerns, just as it is to politics.

It is true that Boccaccio's stories take place in the authoritative context of the spirituality of Christianity, which no one is questioning, but this authority is more representative than real, more rhetorical, without spiritual content, since the protagonists of the novels practice a morals that fundamentally contradict the Church's commandments, which are constantly violated without the slightest qualm. This means that Boccaccio's great admiration for Dante had a more literary than religious character.

We do not know when Boccaccio first read the Divine Comedy, but he must have been very young, for in his first novel, the Filocolo, written in Naples about 1336, when he was an apathetic student of justice, pays a great tribute to Dante, especially his poetry, which he has always admired and even imitated.

Throughout his life, Boccaccio copied the Comedy three times and once the work New Life (Vita Nuova) to contribute to their spread. This admiration may have been the subject of subtle discussions with the master Petrarch, whom Boccaccio met in 1350, in Florence, where he had just returned from Ravenna. Boccaccio would become, from that moment on, Petrarch's loyal reader and friend.

In the twenty-four years that followed, the two writers exchanged a rich correspondence that proves their close relationship and is a rich source of information on the history and culture of the time. According to Amedeo Kuondam, this friendship also had the character of a constant confrontation because, unlike Boccaccio who always declared himself a faithful disciple and admirer of Petrarch, the latter was only tolerant and sometimes even contemptuous of what his friend wrote .

Petrarch was born in Areco in 1304, but since he was very young he lived in Avignon, where he met Laura, the inspiration of hundreds of his famous sonnets. Since Laura died in 1348, it is thought that she may have been a victim of the plague in Florence, as was one of Petrarch's illegitimate children who also died of the epidemic.

The relationship with Boccaccio was strengthened when Petrarch, in 1350, after abandoning the spiritual retreat in Provence, decided to go to Rome to win the indulgence of the Jubilee Year. During the journey, fulfilling the demands of his Florentine admirers, he agreed to meet them before going to Rome. And that meeting turned out to be of fundamental importance mainly for Boccaccio, who would later become his main interlocutor and with whom he would have shared readings and discussions on Seneca, Cicero, Tito Livy and the Fathers of the Church.

A few years later, after learning of Boccaccio's physical and financial ruin, since he had retired to Certaldo, Petrarch, before he died in Padua, left him fifty gold in his will so that he would be able to bought a set of dressing gowns.

We don't know if Boccaccio finally did it, because he died a year later, in 1375. Secular, popular and realistic inspiration i The Decameron went on to fade into Boccaccio's work in later years, until, he undertook several official trips charged with administrative duties in both Italy and France. (What he certainly valued most was the task of sending ten gold in aid to Sister Beatrice, Dante's daughter, locked up in the cloistered monastery of Santo Stefano degli Ulivi, in Ravenna). And since then the youthful vocation for classical Greco-Latin culture and religion was reborn within him. He therefore wrote books of historical erudition, cartography and theology, such as "Genealogie deorum gentilium" (Genealogies of pagan gods), for which he worked from the 50s until his death), "De casibus virorum illustrium" (Unfortunate cases of persons famous) of "De mulieribus claris" (Famous women, 1361-1362).

The first is an encyclopedic treatise somewhat confused and with different designs, while the other two are moralistic books and refer to the classics, in prose and verse; the latter also features a diatribe against women.

Later he abandoned Latin to return once more to the dialectal language, in his study of Dante: "Trattatello in laude di Dante" (Biography of praise dedicated to Dante), there from 1360. This was a period during which he came closer to the Church, and in fact that same year Pope Innocent VI gave him the minor order (jacon) and the benefice of the clergy. It is said that it was then that he intended to burn it Decameron, after he regretted the lascivious and anticlerical nature of the novels, and that Petrarch, along with several others, managed to turn his mind. However, it would have been impossible at that point to eradicate it, because manuscript versions of the book circulated in half of Europe, found imitators, and were read not only privately but also in public, on street corners and in taverns, from wandering poets and itinerant storytellers. It was a year with the most ups and downs in his life, because that same year in 1360 he was compromised in a conspiracy, in which some of his friends had participated, so he was abandoned by society.

He lived his last years in poverty and solitude, in his native land, Certaldo, where he contracted a disease that would make his old age very bitter: dropsy. His body swelled up so much that he could barely move. He lived alone, assisted by Bruna, an old maid, and devoted himself to the revision of the Latin translations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey made by his friend and Hellenist Leoncio Pilato.

Boccaccio dedicated his last intellectual venture to his teacher Dante. He was employed by the Florentine nobility to give lectures aimed at promoting Dante's work to the general public, and he gave his first lecture on 23 October 1373 in the Church of Santo Stefano di Badia, a few steps from the author's ancestral home. of Comedy. The audience, - according to the witnesses, - was diverse: people of the people, religious, authorities, intellectuals, people of high society.

The lectures, for which he was paid one hundred gold, lasted for several months, but they were suddenly stopped, of course because of his health problems. On his writing table in Certaldo remained the 59 lectures he had written on Dante and one last – the 60th – that he did not manage to finish.

Like the Homeric poems, Don Quixote, or the novels of Victor Hugo and Dickens, the novels of The Decameron over the centuries they have been adapted to all genres in order to reach a wider audience than that of the readers of the literary text: versions adapted for children, theatrical, radio, television and cinematographic versions, in addition to cartoon novels, fêtes and films TV series.

"Los cuentos de la peste" are also a work inspired by the immortal novels of that universal Florentine. They do not pretend to be a theatrical adaptation of The Decameron, because to stage, dramatized, the hundred novellas of Boccaccio's book would be an impossible undertaking and, in any case, impossible to appear in the theater. This is a very loose version of that work, in a smaller format, taking as its inspiration an essential fact of The Decameron – the flight towards the fantasy world of a group of people to avoid the plague that has spread in their environment – ​​builds a fictional story with stories that smuggle into the real world a fictional reality, which, in turn, replaces lives characters, saving them from the greatest disaster of the human condition: death or extinction.

Real life fades little by little throughout the play until it dissolves completely in the labyrinth of fictions told and represented by the five characters, a procedure in which they themselves disappear and diminish while their real lives – which we do not get to know entirely – are replaced by fantastic lives told and embodied in a way that comes later.

This is not an operation of fantasy but of fantastic realism - they are different things - since this is what actors do when they go on a stage to perform a play and it is what we all mortal beings do when we imagine ourselves to be living adventures or situations different from those that outline our daily existence.

We usually do this in private, in secret. The five characters of "Los cuentos de la peste" do it publicly, through small performances that want to be antidote to the plague. Interpreting for them is a life-or-death mission, a fight for survival.

Are there five characters in the play or just four? Aminta, the Countess of the Holy Cross (Contessa della Santa Croce) does not seem to have the same nature as other fugitives from the real world, but that of a citizen of the fantasy kingdom, a creation of Duke Ugolino, for whom the creation of others are not aware, a being that does not have the same concreteness as others, it is only a narrative character. The other four aspire to become, definitely, that's why they came to Villa Palmieri; but, strictly speaking, only Aminta is in this situation.

This different nature of the Countess of the Holy Cross – a real ghost among the four fictional characters – should come out during her performance, in the way she moves, speaks and reacts to the events of experienced or told by other characters of the work.

Among these four, only Panfilo and Filomena come from the list of The Decameron. Boccaccio doesn't tell us anything about the ten young men who hide in Villa Palmieri to tell the story, except that they were happy, in their twenties, and belonged to good families.

Panfilo and Filomena acquire different identities during the development of the play. Is one of these the real one? There is no way to find out; the spectator may decide or accept that the true identity of those young people lies precisely in the fact that they do not have an identity, which is the same as saying that they have fragile and elusive identities that change according to the circumstances and the stories they embody, as happens with actors in real life. The same applies to Duke Ugolino and to Boccaccio. In the case of the latter, since the character of the work is inspired by a historical figure, it is clear that he has a real identity under many disguises with which he is hidden and transformed during "Los cuentos de la peste".

A clarification: although Boccaccio lived the experience of the plague when he was a relatively young man - thirty-five years old - in the work he is presented as he was when he was old, according to witnesses, that is, very fat and slow in movement, even though he was lively and, we can say, rejuvenated by a plague that, on the one hand, terrorizes him because of the approach of death, on the other hand, revives him because it makes him live the history that it will make him immortal.

Boccaccio of "Los cuentos de la peste" is an imaginative and sensual character, who likes bodily pleasure and fantasy, and sees no inconsistency between material pleasures and the spiritual life which, according to him, lies more in literary creativity and in intellectual knowledge, rather than in religious mercy.

Duke Ugolino, the oldest of the characters, noble and celibate, obsessed with hunting and adventure, has cultivated throughout his life an impossible love, with a woman of course fictional and with whom he shares a sharp, cruel passion, almost sadistic and almost masochistic, a woman in whom she pours out her hidden fantasies and appetites and with whom she refuses to play.

How much of this thing, which he lives and shows on stage, is true and how much is false?

There's no way of knowing: as with the other characters, we can say that the only certain and incontrovertible thing we know about him refers to the series of shifting personalities he adopts as he tells and performs. Duke Ugolino, Boccaccio, Panfilo, Filomena and Aminta are fictions, completely fictional beings, actors who in their complete abandonment to the show transubstantiate into the beings they represent. They have become unreal to escape the plague and there they have remained, in that dangerous and elusive territory, just as theater and literature are.

Music, ballet, pantomime and mime are central to the show. Characters not only tell and represent stories; but they are both mimed and parodied, in silence, when Duke Ugolino and the Countess of the Holy Cross play their part, or when, in one episode, two characters are isolated and the others are excluded from the action. This never stops; in these latter cases, others continue the stories, silently, using gestures, expressions, and gestures.

The music serves to transport us to that distant time and to create a pleasant and hopeful, entertaining and invigorating environment with which, in their shelter at Villa Palmieri, the plague escapees dedicate themselves to the task of inventing and living the simulation.

In this sense, "Los cuentos de la peste" remain faithful The Decameron of Boccaccio, although for the remaining part they do not agree with the model. Few works have exalted literary fiction as much as this one, to the point of giving narratives not only the function of entertaining and enriching the life experience with imaginary experiences, but even that, most definitely, of immunizing man against death. This, of course, must be understood in a symbolic sense: Nothing can prevent the human being, sooner or later, from being defeated by time. Saved from the black plague, thanks to the literary illusion, should be understood as a metaphor: The ten young people who are confined to Villa Palmieri come out of that isolation with a greater dose of vitality than what they had at the moment of arrival; are now more aware of the wealth and happiness that life offers, and at the same time more aware of the need to endow this life, which for no one is eternal, with a project and with a creativity that, somehow, to extend it beyond death, to leave a trace when the body has ceased to exist.

Thus, literature, theater and the arts protect the human being against the demoralization that can produce dangers such as the Black Death. Every human being is an actor, most of us are without knowing it.

All of us, at many moments in our lives, set aside spontaneity and, both in what we say and in what we do, insert someone who says and does for us what we think should be said or done in that circumstance.

All of us become two-faced, even without realizing it at all, driven by a consciousness that determines what, in that particular context and in that particular situation, is useful to say or do. This is not hypocrisy, but theater, attention to forms, civilization. Theater is not an accidental fact, it is a result of that deep tendency that resides in all of us and that pushes us, in certain situations, to want to get out of ourselves, to escape from the prison we are in, and to to become someone else.

Actors are those "others" that all of us would like to be, those who, without ceasing to be what they are, are even many, depending on the roles they play in each show. Actors do it professionally. The rest of us, the common people, are out on stage, when we "perform" we maintain appearances and social norms, when we superimpose a social ego on our authentic ego, or when, in the privacy of our intimacy, the we surrender to the fantasy of being someone else, to do what we have never done and will never do in reality.

Somehow, the sons and daughters of The Decameron who flee the city of Florence to escape the plague and are forced to tell each other different stories, – to be someone else, – symbolize that central feature of the human condition. This is also, respecting the proper distances, the story that the characters of "Los cuentos de la peste" live (tell).

Boccaccio's novels transport readers (and their listeners) to a world of fantasy, but that world is rooted quite deeply in the reality of life experience. For this reason, besides encouraging them to share a dream, they form and instruct them to better understand the real world, everyday life, with its miseries and its greatness, teach them to understand what in the world is bad or very bad and what could and should be better.

Seven centuries before discussions about the engagement of the writer came to light, on engagée literature, Giovanni Boccaccio brought it to life. He didn't do it because he was guided by ideological motives, but by his sure intuition and his pioneering sensibility. /Palimpsest/

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