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Cola Iacovo Aggrancato has a scoundrel of a buddy who sucks him out of everything, and since he’s unable to get him off his back with tricks and stratagems , he pulls his head out of the bag and banishes him from his house with rude words. The tale was truly wonderful and was told with grace and listened to with attention , so that a thousand things contributed to give it the juice necessary to provide pleasure. But since every little bit of time that put itself between one tale and the next kept the slave jerking about as if she had a cord around her neck,1 Iacova was urged to take her turn at the lathe. She put her hands into the barrel of nursery stories to refresh the thirst of the audience and spoke in this manner: “Lack of discretion, ladies and gentlemen, causes the merchant’s measure of good judgment to fall from his hands, the architect’s compass of manners to lose accuracy, and the mariner’s needle of reason to go awry. And when it takes root in the soil of ignorance, it produces no fruit but shame and humiliation. You can see this happen every day, and in particular it befell a certain bald-faced buddy, as I’m about to tell you. “There was a certain Cola Iacovo Aggrancato of Pomigliano,2 husband of Masella Cernecchia of Resina3 and a man as rich as the sea who didn’t even know what he owned, since his pigs were in the pen and he had enough straw to last him till morning.4 With all of this, and in spite of the fact that he had 10 The Buddy Tenth Entertainment of the Second Day 203 This tale, devoid of fairy-tale elements, is in the mold of the Boccaccian novella. Both of the main characters are also variations of stock characters familiar to the repertoire of comic theater from Plautus on—the parasite with the bottomless stomach and his miserly host. Penzer gives variants from a number of collections of Italian popular tales; Grimm 61, “Little Farmer,” has some of the same motifs. 1. li deve li butte (Neap.): lit., “that gave her the jerks”; “inflicted upon those condemned to torture by the rope, which caused painful sprains and dislocations” (Rak 432). 2. Pomigliano d’Arco, between Naples and Nola. Cola Iacovo’s surname (Aggrancato) means “stingy” in Neapolitan. 3. “Outside of Naples, it was built over the ancient city of Herculaneum” (Croce 568). 4. “Burlesque ways of indicating an abundance of goods” (Croce 219). neither children nor troubles and that he weighed his brass by the bushel, he could have run a hundred miles without dropping half a cent5 and, subjecting himself to every sort of deprivation, he led the miserable life of a dog, and all so that he could save up and accumulate. “Nevertheless, every time he sat down to eat barely enough to keep alive, it was just his misfortune that a bad-day buddy of his would turn up and refuse to leave him alone for a moment; as if there were a clock in his body and an hourglass between his teeth he presented himself at feeding time so that he could join them and, unabashed, he stuck to them like a tick, and they couldn’t have driven him off with a pickax. He counted the bites that went into their mouths and came out with quips and beat with a stick until he was told, ‘Please, help yourself.’ At which point, without having to be begged too hard, he would throw himself between husband and wife and, as if overcome with cravings, dying of hunger, sharp as a razor, fierce as a hound sent to sic, and with a wolfish craving in his belly and lightning speed—‘where are you coming from, the mill?’6 —he would wave his hands around like a piper, roll his eyes like a wild cat, and work his teeth like a grindstone. He swallowed things whole, not allowing one mouthful to wait for the next, and when his cheeks were good and full, his tummy loaded and his belly like a drum, when he had seen the bottom of the plates and swept up the whole town, without even saying ‘take care’ he would grab a jug of wine and suck it up, empty it dry, siphon it off, glug it down, and drain it all...

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