Читать книгу Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers - Antonia Quirke - Страница 28

nce upon a time there lived a family of ogres called the Noltes. They were enormous, and even the smallest of them still looked as big as a mountain. He was called Nick. Being so small, Nick felt different from the other ogres, but he also felt different from all the other people he came across, because he was still an ogre. So Nick was never quite sure who he was. Was he big, or small? This was something he thought about all day. He realised he knew a secret – big ogres were also small ogres. After all, Nick was both.

One day when Nick was thirty-five, some men came along and said, ‘An ogre! Stand there and look ogre-ish while we film you.’ Nick did as he was told. In a very gruff voice he pretended to be a proper ogre like his brothers and uncles were. They made him wear a scuba-diving suit and go under the sea, and people saw the film, which was called The Deep, and said, ‘Oh, look, a real ogre!’ He had thighs like tree trunks, and a neck like a bull, and a chin like a boulder. He was awfully funny and handsome and looked the very picture of a big happy ogre.

Nick pretended to be a big ogre in lots of films, even though he knew the secret that big ogres were really small ogres. Nobody else knew or cared, but to Nick it was very perplexing, because he saw that all big things were really very small inside, and the rest of the space inside big people and big ogres was filled with sadness, dreadful sadness. Which nobody ever talked about, and they certainly wouldn't believe you if you did!

And Nick was the saddest of them all. How could he tell everybody that he wasn't big at all, but very small and filled with sadness, just like they were? He stretched himself up as high as the sun and then toppled over with an enormous crash. His legs and arms turned into stone, and his ribcage too, and his head turned into a great wooden door. He wasn't an ogre any more, he was just a ruin. But when people went in through the wooden door they were amazed at what they saw! On the walls were four great big pictures, of Nick as a painter, and as a horrible policeman, and a frightened lawyer, and, in another one, as an ogre afraid of his father. But the strange thing about all the pictures was that, in them, Nick was very small. Just about the size of your thumb!

‘How sad it is in here,’ the people said, standing inside the ruin of Nick. ‘There certainly is a lot of empty space inside an ogre!’ And then Nick stepped out from behind a candlestick. He was just as big as your thumb. Everybody fell silent, and Nick said, ‘See how small I am! This is what it's really like inside big ogres.’ Everybody was very surprised. So they all went home that night and felt happy because Nick was telling the truth, and the truth always makes people happy. So by telling the truth about ogres, Nick had also got rid of some of the sadness inside the people and everybody was very grateful to him. Nick was the most truthful ogre there had ever been!

And they never forgot those four wonderful pictures. (New York Stories, Q&A, Cape Fear, Affliction.)