Pirandello's Henry IV Read Free Page B

that would have been extremely dangerous.
    DOCTOR    Now this, this is something I want to know about. Extremely dangerous, you say?
    MATILDA    (
lightly
) Well, because he wasn’t like the others . . . and I wasn’t brave enough not to laugh it off. . . anyway I had no patience for anything serious, I was just a girl, I hadn’t done my share of living, so I laughed along with everyone else. I was sorry later . . . I hated myself, actually, because my laughing at him got all mixed up with those fools laughing at him.
    BELCREDI    Like they do with me, more or less.
    MATILDA    You make people laugh by humiliating yourself—that’s the opposite.
    DOCTOR    So, as I understand it, he was already in a bit of a state.
    BELCREDI    Yes, but in his own way.
    DOCTOR    What do you mean?
    BELCREDI    Dispassionately in a state.
    MATILDA    Dispassionately!? He threw himself into life—
    BELCREDI    I’m not saying he was putting it on. Not at all. He was often worked up. But I’d swear he’d immediately dissociate himself from the state he was in, observing himself—even, in my view, when he was at his most spontaneous. I think, furthermore, it had a harmful effect on him. Sometimes he’d get into these hilarious fits of rage against himself.
    MATILDA    That’s true, he did.
    BELCREDI    And why was that? (
to the Doctor
) The way I see it, that outside view of himself, like someone watching himself playing a part, separated him from what he was feeling—which then seemed to him not exactly fake, because he wasn’t faking his feelings, but something he had to act out as a self-conscious intention, to make up for the authenticity he couldn’t feel. So he would go to extremes, improvise, exaggerate, anything to lose his self-awareness . . . that’s why he’d come across so erratic, frivolous, even at times ludicrous.
    DOCTOR    And . . . antisocial, would you say?
    BELCREDI    No, not at all! He was game for anything—he was famous for organising dances, tableaux vivants, benefits—allfor the fun of it, you see. But he was a very good actor, that’s the point.
    DI NOLLI    As a madman he’s even more impressive, magnificent, terrifying.
    BELCREDI    From the word go. Imagine it, when the accident happened and he was thrown . . .
    MATILDA    It was dreadful. I was right next to him. I saw him under the hoofs, the horse bolting . . .
    BELCREDI    At first we didn’t think he was seriously hurt. There was some commotion, and the cavalcade came to a halt. People wanted to know what had happened, but he’d already been picked up and carried into the house.
    MATILDA    There was nothing, not a scratch, no blood . . .
    BELCREDI    We thought he’d just passed out.
    MATILDA    Then, when a couple of hours later—
    BELCREDI    Yes—he showed up in the hall, that’s what I was coming to.
    MATILDA    The look on his face—I noticed straight away.
    BELCREDI    No you didn’t, none of us did. We didn’t realise, you see . . .
    MATILDA    Well, of course
you
didn’t—you were all acting like lunatics.
    BELCREDI    We were acting our parts, having fun; it was a beargarden.
    MATILDA    You can imagine the shock when we realised he wasn’t pretending.
    DOCTOR    Ah, you mean, because he . . .
    BELCREDI    Yes, he joined in. We thought he’d recovered and was acting up like the rest of us—and better than us, because, as I said, he was very good. We thought he was playing along with everyone else.
    MATILDA    They started flicking him with their whips . . .
    BELCREDI    And then he drew his sword. He was armed as a king, of course. He