Diksha Sundriyal
Love and lust take over the residents of Villa Santa in Netflix’s ‘The Decameron,’ when they quarantine themselves in the countryside to escape the pestilence. What begins as a vacation and a reprieve soon turns into something else entirely as the villa’s residents find themselves succumbing to their basest desires and doing things they’d never imagined before. The character who breaks free of her self-imposed limits and explores herself in ways she hadn’t before is Neifile. The wife of a nobleman, with whom she has great friendship and love but no physical and sexual connection, Neifile is one of the purest of hearts, which is why her death feels the most hard-hitting. SPOILERS AHEAD
An Act of Affection Costs Neifile Her Life
Neifile was devoted to god. She spent her days praying and thinking of the higher force in charge of the whole world. In doing so, she also took care of her chastity, due to which she and her husband, Panfilo, hadn’t yet consummated their marriage. Even as Neifile’s desires for sex increased, Panfilo seemed entirely uninterested in disturbing her chastity, which, unbeknownst to him, started to push his wife away from her. He was gay and had no intention of making love to his wife. However, instead of talking about his sexual preferences with her, he lied to her, and this led her to seek sexual satisfaction somewhere else.
At the villa’s first person to catch Neifile’s eyes is Dioneo. He is the most desirable man of the lot, and Neifile finds herself inundated with sexual thoughts whenever she looks at him. His advances towards her encourage her feelings, and she comes very close to having sex with him. She straight up offers it to him, but by then, he is already entangled with Licicsa and refuses Neifile’s offer for sex. Still, having spent several days in his company, Neifile develops affection for him, which leads her to give him a parting kiss after he dies of the plague.
The plague comes to Villa Santa with the sex workers that Ruggiero invites on his first night there. While everyone else is pushed out of the place, only Neifile and Dioneo can stay behind. Neifile spends the night with Ruggiero while Dioneo partakes in the festivities outside. Unbeknownst to him, one of the women has pestilence, and she infects everyone. Within one night, the situation gets so bad that everyone, apart from Neifile and Ruggiero, is dead by the morning. When Neifile discovers this, she asks her friends, who had been banned from the villa, for help. It is on their return that they find Dioneo struck dead by pestilence.
Because he is the first one of the group that arrives in Villa Santa at the beginning of the story to die, his sudden death is shocking for everyone. Neifile is the only one who approaches him, and when saying a prayer for him, she gives him a peck on the forehead. This is her way of saying goodbye to the man she had been attracted to and probably would have died with the same night had she chosen him over Ruggiero. But by kissing him, she invites the pestilence to her own body and, soon enough, falls sick.
Like everyone from the night of the party, Neifile’s sickness takes hold of her quickly. By then, she and Panfilo had cleared up things between them, and she spent her remaining hours talking with him about all the things they didn’t talk about because of their hesitations, fuelled by the embarrassment of certain things. By the second day, the sickness has taken hold of her completely, and she succumbs to it with Panfilo by her side.
You must be logged in to post a comment.