Seven young women and three young men get together in a country house outside Florence for 10 days to tell each other 100 wild stories of love. The stories – erotic, tragic, comic, tender, savage, wise – are designed to distract the minds and hearts of the group from the terror of the plague that has overtaken Italy. Being sequestered away from the city, the group hopes to avoid infection.
The tales comprise Boccaccio’s 14th century masterpiece The Decameron. Until I took my copy of The Decameron from my bookshelf in 2020, I had not read it for about 20 years. In my journal for May 8, 2020, I have written, “Replaced lampshade in carport. Reading Decameron.”
From time to time, the lampshade fills up with dead moths. So I take it down and empty it. Some rituals of everyday life must go on. But while I can attend to the handful of dry and dusty broken bodies of moths, wash the shade, and generally brighten up the carport, there are many ordinary things I am forbidden from doing. Going to concerts, movies, festivals, weddings, funerals. For the planet is afflicted with a deadly virus, and I must protect myself and others by isolating myself in my house in regional Victoria.
The interior of the house is lined with books. I read them and I write them. I love the stories inside the books, and I love the physicality of the books as objects. My Decameron is in two volumes. The binding is imitation black leather, tooled with fake gilding in vaguely Arabian designs. On the spine, the gilding is mingled with splashes of soapy green. The stock is cheap and yellowing, the type is heavy and cramped, and the endpapers are marbled in a colour that resembles dried blood. It was printed in Spain, and it doesn’t say who translated it into English.
The prose is formal, matter-of-fact, and mesmerising like a fairy tale. A random quote, “In our city, abounding with everything that is good, there was formerly a beautiful lady, wife to a certain worthy knight.” Things go downhill from there, with people hiding behind bedroom curtains, and so forth.
The Decameron was just one of the many books I re-read in 2020.
Reading didn’t only distract me from the invisible enemy of the virus, it inspired me to write a sketchy personal history of my reading, beginning with things I read as a small child. My first books were produced under the restrictions of the World War II, so they were cheap and plain, and I still have them, complete with my childish pencil marks.
The memories awakened by these old books moved me to write down what it was like being a child in Launceston in the early 1940s. The war was a fact of life, a reality that ruled my life even though I was living far away from the horrors and violence.
As a very young child I knitted bandages for the Red Cross, and collected silver paper for some reason I have never really understood. We had a bomb shelter at the bottom of the garden in Launceston, and I used to enjoy looking at the large, pastel-coloured maps of the world pasted on the walls. We wore real gas masks as we played in the garden. Butter and sugar and lots of other things were rationed. We lived in a street with a sign on the telegraph pole that said “This Is A War Savings Street”.
The realities of the 2020 pandemic with its rules and restrictions were echoes, for me, of realities of the years of the war. The pandemic continues. Wars continue. Boccaccio’s bubonic plague eventually died out, although the bacterium that causes it is still around today. I continue to read the books on my shelves, finding there solace – and inspiration – a hundred wild stories of love.
Carmel Bird is one of Australia's most successful writers. She writes fiction, non-fiction, short stories and essays. She has written books on the art of writing, and has edited anthologies of essays and stories. She was awarded the Patrick White Literary Award in 2016. Carmel Bird was born in Launceston and educated at the University of Tasmania. Her most recent novel is "Field of Poppies". For more about Carmel and her books, see carmelbird.com.
