The Third Old Man’s Tale: The Stubborn Wife

Then the third old man said, “Demon, don’t disappoint me. If I told you a story that is stranger and more amazing than the first two would you grant me one-third of your claim on him for his crime?” The demon replied, “I will.” Then the old man said, “Demon, listen.”

But morning overtook Shahrazad, and she lapsed into silence. Then her sister said, “What an amazing story!” Shahrazad replied, “The rest is even more amazing.” The king said to himself, “I will not have her put to death until I hear what happened to the old man and the demon; then I will have her put to death, as is my custom with the others.”

THE EIGHTH NIGHT

The following night Dinarzad said to her sister Shahrazad, “For God’s sake, sister, if you are not sleepy, tell us one of your lovely little tales to while away the night.” Shahrazad replied, “With the greatest pleasure”:

[The Third Old Man’s Tale]

This mule was once a woman, my wife. I was young, some fifty years ago. I had gone off on a journey and was absent from her for a whole year. When I returned, I realized at once that I had forgotten to tell her before I left, where I was going and why. She did not speak to me for forty days straight. I begged and pleaded and told her I would do anything, because she was my wife and I wanted to please her, but still she did not speak to me. I was a soft man in those days, not like any other man you might meet who tells his wife what to do and kicks her around and forces himself upon her whenever he gets an urging to. But my wife, she did not see it that way. She did not realize how good she had it, the stubborn little devil, and she behaved like a spoiled child who did not get his way. She never did listen to reason, my wife. Very thickheaded. She was a stubborn woman.

And so, it went on like that for a while, her pouting about like a puppy dog, and me acting like a fool in trying to persuade her to have mercy on me. It was an honest mistake, forgetting to tell her where I had gone, and I had meant her no harm. Surely she understood that but carried out her act for attention. I thought I might leave again after some time had passed, because what was the point of staying at home? My journey had been long and grueling, and I had even lost the sight in my left eye—I still cannot see from it today. But I thought, anything would be better than this. I was a prisoner in my own home.

On the fortieth night, I had packed all my things, which were not very many, in an old sack from out back where we kept the livestock. The next morning, the forty-first day, I rose earlier than usual to get a good start on my journey in that first day. I went back out to collect my sack of things and be off, but when I opened the sack to make sure I had not forgotten anything, inside it was my wife! I was surprised, of course. I did not understand how a woman could fit into a sack, or when she had gone there, but she did, and there she was.

I thought I might turn around and go, just leave my things wherever my wife had put them and run off. I started to, but then my wife jumped out of the sack, and suddenly she changed, right before my eye. She became a mule, this very mule right here, and she has been a mule ever since then.

It did not take me a long time to understand—well, to remember. Long before that, years and years ago, when my wife was not yet my wife but merely a girl, something had happened to her. She had told me the story, but I never once even considered believing it until that day, when she turned into a mule right before my eye. The story she told me was this.

When my wife was a young girl, there had been a strange visitor at her father’s home, an old woman with a leathery face and mean eyes and a crotchety voice. The woman had stayed longer than expected, living out back with my wife’s father’s livestock. One day, when my wife had run off from her mother to pet the animals, the woman had come out of her haystack and said to my wife something like this: “Little girl, you think yourself so pretty, don’t you? Just wait until you become old like me.”

“I will never be old like you,” my wife had said. And the mean old woman’s eyes went red and she grabbed my wife by the hair and poured a sour elixir down her throat.

“There you go, little girl,” the old woman had said. “If you think you will never grow old, then let it be true. You do not have to be like me. But one day, an uncertain day far into the future—but not so far that it will never come—you will become on the outside exactly what you are on the inside. Whatever is worst about you, most vile and unbecoming, is what you will become. This is what you deserve, pretty little girl. For the world to see you as you are on the inside, not as some pretty little girl whose insides do not match her face.”

And so my wife, stubborn as she was, had become a mule right before my eye, and she has been by my side, the mule that she is, since that morning.