I dress myself as much as possible like the Prince, the same cut and the same materials. Any pieces left over from a suit of his ordering are used for me. At my side I carry a sword as he does, only shorter. And if anybody pays heed to my deportment, it is as dignified as his.
Thus I have become rather like the Prince, only a great deal smaller. If anyone looked at me through the kind of glass with which the buffoons in the western tower study the stars, they might think that I was he.
There is a great difference between dwarfs and children. Because they are about the same size, people think that they are alike, and that they suit each other; but they do not. Dwarfs are set to play with children, forced to do so, without a thought being given to the fact that a dwarf is the opposite to a child and that he is born old. As far as I know, dwarf children never play-why should they? It would only look macabre, with their wizened old faces. It is nothing less than torture to use us dwarfs like that. But human beings know nothing about us.
My masters have never forced me to play with Angelica, but she herself has done so. I won’t say that she did it out of spite, but when I look back on that time, especially when she was quite tiny, it seems as though I had been the victim of carefully thought-out malice. That infant, whom some people think so wonderful with her round blue eyes and her little pursed mouth, has tormented me almost more than anyone else at court. Every morning, from the time she could scarcely toddle, she would come staggering into the dwarf’s apartment with her kitten under her arm. “Piccoline, will you play with us?” I answer: “I cannot, I have more important things to think about, my day is not meant for play.” “Then what are you going to do?” she asks impertinently. “One cannot explain that to a child,” I reply. “But at least you’re going out, you aren’t going to lie abed all day! I’ve been up such a long long time!” And I have to go out with her, I dare not refuse for fear of my masters, though inside I am raging with fury. She takes my hand as though I were her playmate; she is always wanting to hold my hand, though there is nothing I detest so much as sticky childish paws. I clench my fist in wrath, but she simply takes hold of my fist instead and drags me around everywhere, chattering all the time. We visit her dolls which have to be fed and dressed, the puppies sprawling half-blind outside the kennel, the rose garden where we have to play with the kitten. She takes a tiresome interest in all kinds of animals, not full-grown ones, but their young-in fact, in everything small. She can sit and play with her kitten for ages and expect me to join in. She believes that I too am a child with a child’s delight in everything. I! I delight in nothing.
Sometimes it really seems as though a sensible idea were passing through her head when she notices how bored and bitter I am, for she looks surprisedly up at my furrowed old man’s face. “Why don’t you enjoy playing?”
And when she receives no answer from my compressed lips or from my cold dwarf’s eyes with the centuries of experience in their depths, a shyness shadows her newborn baby eyes, and she is actually silent for a while.
What is play? A meaningless dabbling with nothing at all. A strange “let’s pretend” way of dealing with things. They must not be treated as they really are, not seriously; one is only pretending. Astrologers play with the stars, the Prince plays with his building, his churches, the crucifixion scenes, and the campaniles, Angelica with her dolls-they all play, all pretend something. Only I despise this pretending. Only I am.
Once I crept into her room as she lay sleeping with her detestable kitten beside her in bed and cut off its head with my dagger. Then I threw it out onto the dungheap beneath the castle window. I was so furious that I hardly knew what I was doing. That is to say, I knew only too well. I was carrying out a plan which had long been germinating during those revolting playtimes in the rose garden. She was inconsolable when she saw that it was gone, and when everybody said that of course it must be dead, she sickened with an unknown fever and was ill for a long time, so that I, thank goodness, did not have to see her. When at last she got up again, I was obliged to listen all the more to her woeful narrative of her darling’s fate, of the incredible thing which had happened. Nobody cared how the cat had disappeared, but the whole court had been upset because of some inexplicable drops of blood on the girl’s neck, which could be interpreted as an evil omen. Anything which can possibly be taken as an omen is of tremendous interest to them.
In fact, throughout her childhood she never left me in peace although the games gradually changed. She was always hanging on to me and would have liked to confide in me, though I did not want her confidences. Sometimes I wonder if her importunate affection for me might not have had the same source as her weakness for kittens, puppies, ducklings, and so on; if, maybe, she were not happy in the grownup world, perhaps feared it, after some scare or other. It had nothing to do with me! It was no doing of mine if she wandered about in loneliness. But she always wanted to cling to me and this did not lessen after she had left her infancy behind her. Her mother ceased caring about her as soon as she stopped being doll-like. She was pretending too, everybody pretends. And her father, of course, had his own business to attend to. He may have had other reasons for not being interested in her, but that is a matter on which I will not give my opinion.
Not until she was ten or twelve did she begin to be silent and self-contained, and I was rid of her at last. Since then she has left me in peace, thank goodness, and keeps to herself. But I still fume when I think how much I have had to endure for her sake.
Now she is beginning to grow up, she is fifteen and will soon be reckoned a woman. But she is still very childish and does not conduct herself at all like a lady of quality. It is impossible to guess who is her father. It might be the Prince, but she may just as well be a bastard, and this treatment of her as though she were a princess may be quite superfluous. Some call her beautiful. I can see nothing beautiful in the childish face with its half-open mouth and big blue eyes which look as if they understand nothing at all.
Love is something which dies and when dead it rots and becomes soil for a new love. Then the dead love continues its secret life in the living one, and thus in reality there is no death in love.
As far as I can understand this is the experience of the Princess, and on it she bases her happiness. For undoubtedly she is happy; she spreads happiness around her in her own way. For the moment Don Riccardo is happy.
The Prince also, perhaps for the feeling which he once kindled in her, is still alive. He pretends that her love still lives. They both pretend that their love still lives.
Once the Princess had one of her lovers tortured, because he had betrayed her. The Prince suspected nothing, and she induced him to condemn the other for a crime which he had never committed. I was the only one who knew the true circumstances, and I was present during the torture in order to let her know how he bore it. He was not in the least heroic-about average.
Maybe he is the girl’s father. How should I know?
It might just as well be the Prince, for the Princess cajoled him most endearingly, and at that time their love had a second blooming. She embraced him every night, offering him her betrayed bosom which hungered for its lost lover. She caressed her Prince as though he were a man who should be tortured, and he returned her caresses as in their first passionate nights of love. The dead love con-tinued its secret life in the living one.