The Decameron Project Read online

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  PREFACE BY CAITLIN ROPER

  n March 2020, bookstores began selling out of a book from the 14th century—Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, a collection of nested tales told by and for a group of women and men sheltering in place outside of Florence as the plague ravages the city. In the United States, we were beginning to self-isolate, learning what it meant to quarantine, and many readers were looking for guidance from this ancient book. As the coronavirus began its spread across the world, the novelist Rivka Galchen approached The New York Times Magazine and told us that she’d like to write a story recommending Boccaccio’s Decameron to help readers understand the present moment. We loved the idea, but wondered, instead, what if we made our own Decameron, filled with new fiction written during quarantine?

  We began reaching out to writers with a request for pitches—some sense of the stories they hoped to tell. A few were working on novels and didn’t have time. One was taking care of small children and hadn’t figured out how, and if, he could write under the circumstances. Another wrote: “I’m afraid the fiction-writing part of my brain is not finding any inspiration from the current crisis.” We understood. We weren’t sure if our idea had legs.

  But then, as the virus gripped New York City, and we were scared, and grieving, we began hearing something else, something hopeful—interest, and tantalizing story ideas. Novelist John Wray said he wanted to write “about a young man in Spain who rents his dogs to people in order to help them duck curfew restrictions by pretending to be walking their pets.” Mona Awad’s idea began: “On her 40th birthday, a woman visits an exclusive spa in order to get one of their infamous facials as a special gift to herself. When she’s there, they offer her a highly experimental treatment that involves the removal of certain bad memories in order to truly brighten, plump, and smooth the skin.…” Charles Yu told us he had a few ideas, “but the one that excites me the most is a story told from two points of view: the virus and the Google search algorithm.” Margaret Atwood’s pitch for the story she would like to write was: “It is told to a group of quarantined Earthlings by an alien from a distant planet who has been sent to Earth as part of an interstellar aid package.” That’s it, that was the whole pitch. How could we say no? We wanted to read all of these stories. In fact, we assigned too many to fit in a magazine issue. We quickly realized, with pain, that we had to stop reaching out to writers.

  When the stories began rolling in, even as we were plunged deeper into one of the scariest experiences of our lives, we knew these writers were creating art. We hadn’t expected the degree to which they would be able to turn the horror of our current moment into something so powerful. It was a reminder that the best fiction can both transport you far from yourself but also, somehow, help you understand exactly where you are.

  The magazine issue was published on July 12, as the virus was surging again in the United States. The response from readers was swift and enthusiastic. Our inboxes filled with letters to the editor remarking on the solace provided by these tales. We can think of no greater aspiration for this project, both in its original form and now as the book you hold in your hands, than to provide delight and consolation during a dark and unsteady time. We hope you read it in good health.

  en young people decide to quarantine outside Florence. It’s 1348, in the time of the bubonic plague. The afflicted develop lumps in their groins or armpits, then dark spots on their limbs. Some appear healthy at breakfast but by dinner are sharing a meal, it is said, with their ancestors in another world. Wild pigs sniff and tear at the rags of corpses, then convulse and die themselves. What do these young people do, after fleeing unspeakable suffering and horror? They eat, sing songs, and take turns telling one another stories. In one story, a nun mistakenly wears her own lover’s trousers on her head, as a wimple. In another, a heartbroken woman grows basil in a pot that contains her lover’s severed head. Most of the stories are silly, some are sad, and none are focused on the plague. This is the structure of Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, a book that has been celebrated now for nearly 700 years.

  Boccaccio, himself from Florence, most likely began writing The Decameron in 1349, the same year his father died, probably of the plague. He finished the book within a few years. It was first read and loved by the very people who watched roughly half their fellow citizens die. The stories in the book are largely not new but are instead reincarnations of old familiar tales. Boccaccio ends The Decameron with a joke about how some readers might dismiss him as a lightweight, although, he explains, he weighs a lot. What to make of all his playfulness at such a moment?

  Along with many others, in mid-March I watched two rockhopper penguins waddling free at Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium. Wellington the penguin took a shine to the belugas. Though at that time I had probably already read dozens of articles about the novel coronavirus, it was those curious, isolated penguins that made the pandemic real for me emotionally, even as the videos also made me smile and were a relief from “the news.” In May, three Humboldt penguins visited the uncannily empty halls of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City and lingered at the Caravaggio paintings. Those penguins themselves had something of the startle of art—the reveal of the ever-present real that’s hidden, paradoxically, by information.

  Reality is easy to miss, maybe because we’re looking at it all the time. My daughter, who is six, had little to say and few questions to ask about the pandemic, save for now and again floating a plan: to tear the coronavirus into a million pieces and bury it in the ground. She found it too upsetting a “story” to think about it directly. But when the news was about personal protective equipment, her figurines began to wear armor made out of foil chocolate wrappers, string, and tape. Later they were wrapped in cotton balls. They engaged in detailed battles I didn’t understand. In quieter reading moments, my daughter became obsessed with the series Wings of Fire, in which young dragons work to fulfill a prophecy that they will bring an end to war.

  When there’s a radical and true and important story happening at every moment, why turn to imagined tales? “Art is what makes life more interesting than art,” the French Fluxus artist Robert Filliou noted in one of his works, suggesting that we don’t catch sight of life at first glance. As if life were one of those trick images, like the skull in the Hans Holbein the Younger painting The Ambassadors, which is noticed only when the viewer stands off to the side—looked at straight on, it might be mistaken for driftwood, or not noticed at all. In the Italian of Boccaccio, the word novelle means both news and stories. The tales of The Decameron are the news in a form the listeners can follow. (The rule of the young people’s quarantine was: No news of Florence!) The first story is a comic account of how to deal with a soon-to-be corpse; the comedy gives cover to the catastrophe too familiar to be understood.

  But over the course of The Decameron, the tone and content of the stories the young people tell one another shifts. The first few days are mostly jokes and irreverence. Then the fourth day is 10 stories in a row on the theme of tragic love. The fifth: stories of lovers who, after terrible accidents or misfortunes, find happiness. Boccaccio writes that during the Black Death the people of Florence stopped mourning or weeping over the dead. After some days away, the young storytellers of his tale a
re finally able to cry, nominally over imaginary tales of tragic love, but more likely from their own hearts.

  The paradox of Boccaccio’s escapist stories is that they ultimately return the characters, and readers, to what they have fled. The early stories are set across time and space, while the later stories are often set in Tuscany, or even in Florence specifically. The characters within the stories are in more contemporary and recognizable binds. A corrupt Florentine judge is pantsed by pranksters—everyone laughs. A simpleton called Calandrino is tricked and wronged again and again—should we laugh? By the 10th day, we hear tales of those who behave with nearly unimaginable nobility in the face of a manifestly cruel and unjust world. Under emotional cover—it’s only a story—the characters experience hope.

  Boccaccio’s series of stories told within a frame was itself an old structure made new again. In One Thousand and One Nights, the frame is Scheherazade telling stories to her husband, the king. If the king gets bored, he’ll kill Scheherazade, as he did his wives before her. The nested stories of the Panchatantra show characters—often animals, sometimes people—navigating difficulties, dilemmas, and war. In all these cases, the stories, in one way or another, are lifesaving, even as their being entertaining is one of the main ways they can save a life. Reading stories in difficult times is a way to understand those times, and also a way to persevere through them.

  The young people of The Decameron didn’t leave their city forever. After two weeks away, they decided to return. They returned not because the plague was over—they had no reason to believe it was. They returned because having laughed and cried and imagined new rules for living altogether, they were then able to finally see the present, and think of the future. The novelle of their days away made the novelle of their world, at least briefly, vivid again. Memento mori—remember that you must die—is a worthy and necessary message for ordinary times when you might forget. Memento vivere—remember that you must live—is the message of The Decameron.

  ot easy to find a good apartment in New York City, so imagine finding a good building. No, this isn’t a story about me buying a building. I’m talking about the people, of course. I found a good apartment, and a great building, in Washington Heights. Six-story tenement on the corner of 180th and Fort Washington Avenue; a one-bedroom apartment, which was plenty for me. Moved in December 2019. You might already see where this is going. The virus hit, and within four months half the building had emptied out. Some of my neighbors fled to second homes or to stay with their parents outside the city; others, the older ones, the poorer ones, disappeared into the hospital 12 blocks away. I’d moved into a crowded building and suddenly I lived in an empty house.

  And then I met Pilar.

  “Do you believe in past lives?”

  We were in the lobby, waiting for the elevator. This was right after the lockdown started. She asked, but I didn’t say anything. Which isn’t the same as saying I didn’t respond. I gave my tight little smile while looking down at my feet. I’m not rude, just fantastically shy. That condition doesn’t go away, not even during a pandemic. I’m a Black woman, and people act surprised when they discover some of us can be awkward, too.

  “There’s no one else here,” Pilar continued. “So I must be talking to you.”

  Her tone managed to be both direct and, somehow, still playful. As the elevator arrived, I looked toward her, and that’s when I saw her shoes. Black-and-white pointed oxfords; the white portion had been painted to look like piano keys. Despite the lockdown, Pilar had taken the trouble to slip on a pair of shoes that nice. I was returning from the supermarket wearing my raggedy old slides.

  I pulled the elevator door open and finally looked at her face.

  “There she is,” Pilar said, the way you might compliment a shy bird for settling on your finger.

  Pilar might’ve been 20 years older than me. I turned 40 the same month I moved into the building. My mom and dad called to sing “Happy Birthday” from Pittsburgh. Despite the news, they didn’t ask me to come home. And I didn’t make the request. When we’re together, they ask questions about my life, my plans, that turn me into a grouchy teenager again. My father ordered me a bunch of basics, though; he had them shipped. It’s how he has always loved me—by making sure I’m well supplied.

  “I tried to get toilet paper,” Pilar said in the elevator. “But these people are panicking, so I couldn’t find any. They think a clean butt is going to save them from the virus?”

  Pilar watched me; the elevator reached the fourth floor. She stepped out and held the door open.

  “You don’t laugh at my jokes, and you won’t even tell me your name?”

  Now I smiled because it had turned into a game.

  “A challenge, then,” she said. “I will see you again.” She pointed down the hall. “I am in number forty-one.”

  She let the elevator door go, and I rode up to the sixth floor, unpacked the things I’d bought. At that time I still thought it would all be over soon. It’s laughable now. I went into the bathroom. One of the things my dad sent me was 32 rolls of toilet paper. I slipped back down to the fourth floor and left three rolls in front of Pilar’s door.

  A month later, I was used to logging in to my “remote office,” the grid of screens—all our little heads—looked like the open office we once worked in; I probably spoke with my co-workers about as much now as I did then. When the doorbell rang, I leapt at the chance to get away from my laptop. Maybe it’s Pilar. I slipped on a pair of buckled loafers; they were raggedy, too, but better than the slippers I wore the last time she saw me.

  But it wasn’t her.

  It was the super, Andrés. Nearly 60, born in Puerto Rico, he had a tattoo of a leopard crawling up his neck.

  “Still here,” he said, sounding pleasant behind his blue mask.

  “Nowhere else to go.”

  He nodded and snorted, a mix between a laugh and a cough. “The city says I got to check every apartment now. Every day.”

  He carried a bag that rattled like a sack of metal snakes. When I looked, he pulled it open: silver spray-paint cans. “I don’t get a answer, and I got to use this.”

  Andrés stepped to the side. Down the hall; apartment 66. The green door had been defaced with a giant silver “V.” So fresh, the letter still dripped.

  “ ‘V.’ For ‘virus’?”

  Andrés’s eyebrows rose and fell.

  “Vacant,” he said.

  “That’s a nicer way to put it, I guess.” We stood quietly, him in the hall and me in the apartment. I realized I hadn’t put on my mask when I answered, and I covered my mouth when I spoke.

  “The city is making you do this?” I asked.

  “In some neighborhoods,” Andrés said. “Bronx, Queens, Harlem. And us. Hot spots.” He took out one of the cans and shook it. The ball bearing clicked and clacked inside. “I’ll knock tomorrow,” he said. “If you don’t answer, I got the keys.”

  I watched him go.

  “How many people are left?” I called out. “In the building?”

  He’d already reached the stairs, started down. If he answered, I didn’t hear it. I walked onto the landing. There were six apartments on my floor. Five doors had been decorated with the letter “V.” No one here but me.

  You’d think I would run right down to Pilar’s place, but I couldn’t afford to lose my job. The landlord hadn’t said a word about rent forgiveness. I went back to the computer until end-of-day. I felt such relief when No. 41 hadn’t been painted. I knocked until Pilar opened. She wore her mask, just like me now, but I could tell she was smiling. She looked from my face to my feet.

  “Those shoes have seen better days,” she said, and laughed so joyfully that I hardly even felt embarrassed.

  Pilar and I made trips to the supermarket together; two trips to the store each week. We walked side by side, arm’s length apart, and when we crossed paths with others, we marched single file. Pilar talked the whole time, whether I was next to her or behind her
. I know some people criticize chatty folks, but her chatter fell upon me like a nourishing rain.

  She came to New York from Colombia, with a short stay in Key West, Florida, in between. She’d lived in Manhattan, from the bottom to the top, over the span of 40 years. She played piano and idolized Peruchín; had performed with Chucho Valdés. And now she gave lessons to children in her apartment for $35 an hour. Or at least she had done that, until the virus made it unsafe to have them over. I miss them, she said, every time we talked, as four weeks became six, and six became 12. She wondered if she’d ever see her students and their parents again.

  I offered to help set up remote piano lessons. I’d use my job’s account to set up free chat sessions for her. But this was three months in and Pilar had lost her playful ways. She said: “The screens give the illusion that we’re all still connected. But it’s not true. The ones who could leave, left. The rest of us? We were abandoned.”

  She stepped off the elevator.

  “Why pretend?”

  * * *

  She scared me. I can see that now. But I told myself I’d become busier. As if I’d transformed. But I fled from her. We were all living on the ledge of despair, so when she said it—“We were abandoned. Why pretend?”—it was as if she spoke from down in that pit. A place I found myself slipping into often enough already. So I went to the store by myself, and I held my breath when the elevator passed the fourth floor.

  Meanwhile, Andrés continued to work. I didn’t see him. He knocked on the door each morning, and I knocked from the other side. But I saw evidence of his work. Three apartments on the first floor marked with a “V” one week. Next time I went to the store the other three were painted.

  Four on the second floor.

  Five on the third.

  One afternoon I heard him kicking at a door on the fourth floor. Shouting a name I hardly recognized through the muzzle that was his mask. I left my place and walked down. Andrés looked shrunken at the door of No. 41. He kicked at it desperately.