Elisa, teller of the Zima story

Elisa, teller of the Zima story, is a member of the women’s storytelling company formed amid the plague, and her two recorded interventions show both her practical concern for the group’s safety and her sharp interest in the hazards of assuming one can outwit another. As a teller, she frames a courtship plot around a costly favor, a silent wife, and Ricciardo il Zima’s decision to speak in her place.

Identity and Place in the Company

Elisa, teller of the Zima story, belongs to the company of seven women and three young men whose stories are presented as solace for women in love. The book’s opening describes women as more confined than men: while men can seek diversion outdoors and through varied pursuits, women are often kept within the narrow bounds of their chambers and left with their thoughts. Elisa’s role as both participant and storyteller places her within the collective answer to that isolation: the company makes conversation and narrative a shared form of diversion.

Her presence is also visible in the group’s discussion of how to leave the city safely. When Pampinea proposes that the women depart and take pleasure in the countryside, Filomena cautions that they should not rely on their own leadership. Elisa replies that men are the head of women and that women’s enterprises rarely succeed without male direction. Yet her response is not only an abstract appeal to custom: she points out that most of the women’s male relatives are dead, while those still alive have fled in separate directions. Inviting strangers, she adds, would risk scandal and trouble wherever the company went. Her intervention thus combines conventional deference to male authority with a practical recognition that, in the crisis at hand, the usual sources of guidance and protection are unavailable.

A Teller Who Distrusts Easy Assumptions

Elisa’s surviving tale begins after Pamfilo has finished his account of Fra Puccio. Asked by the queen to continue the storytelling, she introduces a Pistoian gentleman’s misjudgment with a brisk observation: people who know much may assume that others know nothing, and in trying to overreach them can discover that they have been outwitted instead. She considers it foolish to test another person’s wit without cause. The remark supplies a compact interpretive frame for the episode that follows, where desire and apparent advantage lead characters into an encounter whose result depends on what is said—and what is left unsaid.

The narrator characterizes Elisa’s manner as rather tart, though not malicious, and attributes it to an old habit. That description accords with the pointed generalization at the start of her tale. Her wit is not presented as cruelty; it is a means of exposing the confidence behind a mistaken judgment. She moves quickly from that observation to a particular case, inviting the listeners to watch how a man’s assumptions about another person’s intelligence shape his conduct.

The Tale of Ricciardo il Zima

The gentleman at the center of Elisa’s story is Francesco Vergellesi, a wealthy and capable man whose judgment is compromised by extraordinary covetousness. Appointed provost of Milan, he has made preparations for the journey but cannot find a palfrey handsome enough to satisfy him. In Pistoia, meanwhile, Ricciardo il Zima is a rich young man of comparatively humble family, conspicuous for his fine dress and appearance. He has long loved and courted Francesco’s wife, described as beautiful and virtuous, without success.

Ricciardo possesses one of the finest palfreys in Tuscany and prizes it for its beauty. Knowing that Francesco needs just such an animal, he offers it to him in exchange for permission to speak with his wife. The bargain converts Ricciardo’s cherished possession into access to the woman he has unsuccessfully pursued. Elisa’s framing makes the exchange more than a display of wealth: it gives the encounter its conditions, setting a covetous husband’s desire for the horse beside the lover’s desire for a hearing.

The wife keeps silent when Ricciardo speaks with her. He then answers himself in her person, and the tale’s heading signals that events proceed according to the effect of the answer he has supplied. In this construction, her silence is not a blank space in the story: it is the circumstance that allows Ricciardo to script a response and make his own speech consequential. The available account establishes this device and its announced effect without detailing the eventual outcome.

Narrative Function

Elisa’s contribution joins the social concerns of the frame narrative to the mechanics of the embedded tale. In the company’s debate, she weighs women’s need for guidance against the dangers of dependence on absent or unfamiliar men. In her story, the central exchange likewise turns on access, speech, and the power to shape another person’s answer. The parallel does not make the situations identical, but it gives her tale a particular resonance within a gathering whose members are negotiating how to act together under pressure.

Her narrative also puts her opening skepticism into dramatic form. Francesco’s appetite for a fine palfrey and Ricciardo’s calculated offer create a test in which each man’s assumptions matter; the wife’s silence gives Ricciardo room to act, while Elisa’s own narration directs attention to the risk of mistaking another’s reserve for an absence of agency. She is therefore not merely the teller who fills a turn in the day’s sequence: she selects a plot in which a confident interpretation can become the instrument of an unforeseen result.