Bruno's Tricks against Calandrino

Bruno’s relationship with Calandrino is a recurring comedy of unequal understanding: Calandrino treats Bruno as a trusted companion, while Bruno reads that trust as an opportunity to stage deceptions. In both the search for the Heliotrope and the theft of Calandrino’s pig, Bruno makes his victim’s own credulity and fear do the work of the trick. The pattern is not simply that Bruno lies; he builds a convincing situation, recruits other participants, and lets Calandrino interpret its signs in the way most damaging to himself.

Companions on Unequal Terms

Calandrino is a painter described as simple-witted and given to strange habits. He spends much of his time with Bruno and Buffalmacco, two fellow painters who are merry but shrewd and well-advised. They keep his company because his simplicity often amuses them. The arrangement gives their association its comic tension: Calandrino regards the men as companions whose help and confidence he can seek, but they understand his confidence as something they can manipulate.

The Heliotrope episode makes this imbalance particularly clear. After hearing Maso del Saggio describe a stone that makes its bearer invisible, Calandrino does not keep the information to himself or test the story. He goes looking for Bruno and Buffalmacco, whom he especially favors, because he wants them to join him in finding the stone before anyone else does. He even imagines using it to take money from the moneychangers’ tables. His eagerness to share a supposed opportunity with his companions becomes the means by which Bruno and Buffalmacco turn the opportunity into a practical joke.

The Heliotrope and a Shared Performance

Bruno does not originate the false account of the Heliotrope: Maso supplies it, claiming that the stone can be found in the Mugnone and that its bearer cannot be seen. But Bruno takes charge of making Calandrino’s belief actionable. When Calandrino has forgotten the stone’s name and proposes collecting every black stone, Bruno appears to reason carefully about the search. He argues that the midday sun makes stones harder to identify and that passersby might discover the secret; they should return early on a holiday instead. Buffalmacco endorses the plan, and Calandrino accepts it as sound advice rather than recognizing that the delay gives the two men time to prepare their deception.

On Sunday morning the three leave Florence through the San Gallo gate and search the bed of the Mugnone. Calandrino eagerly gathers black stones, filling his bosom, then his gathered-up gown and mantle. Bruno and Buffalmacco pick up stones as well, but their crucial contribution is to act as though Calandrino has disappeared. Within earshot, they wonder aloud where he has gone and suggest that he has left them behind. Calandrino takes their staged failure to see him as proof that the Heliotrope has worked. Bruno then throws a stone at Calandrino’s shins, and Buffalmacco strikes him in the back with another. Calandrino feels the blows but remains silent, convinced that the men cannot see him.

The joke carries its own apparent confirmation into the city. At the San Gallo gate, the gatekeepers, forewarned by Bruno and Buffalmacco, pretend not to see Calandrino and let him pass with his heavy load. His wife, Mistress Tessa, is the person whose greeting finally breaks the illusion. Because she sees him, Calandrino decides that she has undone his good fortune. He takes the stones upstairs and beats her severely. Bruno and Buffalmacco arrive afterward, feigning vexation at the supposed trick Calandrino has played on them by leaving them on the riverbank. Their performance keeps him explaining rather than accusing: he recounts how they failed to see him and how the gatekeepers let him pass, treating the bruises and the stones as evidence of his discovery. Bruno’s part in the prank thus extends from planning and staged invisibility to the assault that Calandrino’s mistaken interpretation directs against his own household.

The Pig and the Sham Ordeal

A later episode renews the same relationship through a more profitable trick. Calandrino owns a small farm near Florence, received as his wife’s dowry, and ordinarily goes there with Mistress Tessa to kill and salt a pig. One year, because she is unwell, he goes alone. Bruno and Buffalmacco learn that he has killed the pig and visit him while staying with a neighboring priest, a close friend of theirs. Bruno proposes that Calandrino sell the animal, spend the proceeds with them, and tell his wife it was stolen. Calandrino refuses, convinced that she would not believe him and would drive him from the house.

After Calandrino has invited them to supper but they have declined, Bruno and Buffalmacco decide to steal the pig themselves. Bruno devises the means: knowing that Calandrino is stingy but readily drinks when others pay, they take him to a tavern, where the priest pretends to cover the bill. Calandrino drinks heavily and returns home late. He thinks he has shut the door but leaves it open; while he sleeps, Bruno and Buffalmacco enter and carry the pig to the priest’s house. The theft therefore succeeds not through force but through Bruno’s calculated use of Calandrino’s habits and of the hospitality that disarms his suspicions.

The next morning, Bruno redirects Calandrino’s distress into another performance. He first encourages him to make a public outcry over the missing pig, then helps propose an ordeal that will supposedly identify the thief. Bread and cheese might alert a guilty neighbor, Bruno says, so the men instead arrange for ginger boluses and wine. He goes to Florence, buys a pound of ginger boluses from a druggist, and has two dog-balls made with fresh hepatic aloes. Covered in sugar and marked so he can distinguish them, the bitter substitutes are made to resemble the genuine boluses. Bruno presents the plan as a favor to Calandrino and says he will administer the pills himself.

When the neighbors assemble, Bruno places Calandrino in the line and gives him one of the aloes-filled dog-balls. Calandrino spits it out as soon as he tastes the bitterness. Bruno pretends that some other cause may have made him reject it and gives him the second one. Calandrino struggles to keep it in his mouth, sheds tears, and finally spits it out too. The onlookers take this staged failure as proof that he stole his own pig, and some rebuke him. The false ordeal converts Bruno’s theft into apparent evidence against the victim.

Exposure, Payment, and Recurrence

Once the neighbors have gone, Bruno and Buffalmacco make their private accusation explicit: they say they believe Calandrino sold or gave away the pig and invented the theft to avoid treating them with the money. Bruno links the charge to the earlier Heliotrope search, recasting Calandrino’s account of that day as another of his own tricks. This reversal is effective because the companions know what happened at the Mugnone, while Calandrino cannot make his experience persuasive to them. His oaths do not restore his credibility; the two men use his previous embarrassment to make the new accusation sound plausible.

Bruno then adds a further threat. He claims someone at the gathering reported that Calandrino keeps a woman for his pleasure and may have sent her the pig. The assertion is presented as an accusation, not established as fact. Bruno and Buffalmacco demand two pairs of capons and threaten to tell Mistress Tessa everything if Calandrino refuses. Calandrino, already distressed by the ordeal and fearing his wife’s anger, gives them the capons. Bruno and Buffalmacco take them back to Florence after salting the stolen pig, leaving Calandrino to bear both the loss and the mockery.

Across the two episodes, Bruno repeatedly turns Calandrino’s readiness to believe into a mechanism with visible consequences. At the Mugnone, it makes him carry home a lapful of stones and blame Mistress Tessa when she sees him; at the farm, it lets Bruno steal the pig, stage a test that condemns Calandrino, and extract further payment. The second story explicitly recalls the first, so the association acquires a history: Bruno can invoke the earlier trick to discredit Calandrino in the later one. Their recurring relation is therefore not a single prank but an escalating comic pattern in which Calandrino seeks companionship and advantage, while Bruno controls the setup and leaves him to mistake humiliation for proof.