The Dollmaker

by NICCOLO TUCCI

HAD HE known the detail that suddenly became obvious to him in a cold-blooded manner the very moment his eyes fell upon his work, he would never have done it. He would have seen that such a thing was an illusion. He would have known, as he knew now, that motion, such as we have it in our bodies, is an exception in the world at large and not only in a room or even in an apartment. An exception; while standstill, such as you have in dolls (in this one here), is the rule. The dollmakers are certainly wise people. Yes, wise people. He should have seen one before doing his work. And the dollrnaker would have told him that the way to make dolls is not the easy one, and when a doll is made, then the dollmaker has but one idea — to make it move, or look as if it could —and that is why he makes his dolls of such material as will last, avoiding all such material as might disintegrate too soon. The material he had used was bad and his method was bad. He should have seen a dollrnaker before. Now it was too late.

The world is not made up of living people. It may seem so because we always talk to living people and to them only. Some people who have no one around will talk to cats, and you can hear their voices in the next room, and they sound silly, because the cat won’t answer, but that suffices to maintain the illusion that the world is made up of living people, while it is not. If people were more in the habit of discussing at least some of their problems with chairs, or trees, or anything that is no human being, then perhaps they would appreciate the fact that there are people too and that they live. Because the world is not made up of living people, and neither is the universe, as the book on the shelf two inches from the finger of the doll so clearly explains it. Life as we know it, says that book, is an exception or a freak (yes, that is the word in the book, life is a freak), in other words, a strange coincidence, not certainly the rule. But the same can be said about the world without trying to peep into the universe. The world is not made up of living people, and that is why one should never make a doll, never make dolls, unless one makes them as a dollmaker and only as a dollmaker, with the idea of putting in the movement at the end. Yes, at the end, after the doll is made.

There are too many objects in a world. Also in a room. Too many objects and one person or two, or even three, but then more and more objects for each new person that comes in to stay. Too many objects. And most objects resemble living things or are made to resemble living things. That is why the dollmakers were right, and he, who had finished his work and was watching it now, was wrong, completely wrong. Take a cat for example, a cat playing with the most shapeless unintentional object in the room: a sheet of paper rolled into a pellet, not even rolled, just crunched and thrown away. An inanimate thing. A doll. It is not true that the cat plays with it. The cat touches that thing and sees it move, and does not know his own movement has gone into that thing and made it move instead of staying buried in it, as it would in a stone or in a doll such as t his one right here. (The cat touched the doll’s foot, and his movement stayed buried in that foot.) So the cat does not know that the paper is light or that the ball is round. He sees movement, he runs, he acts, he plays the cat, a serious thing, not just a game. But if the paper ball refused to move, if it were strong enough to take in the cat’s movements and keep them buried in itself, the cat would stop lending his life to what can only take it from him without giving him anything. Because the world is not made up of living things, the world is like a mortuary, and the sky too is a huge mortuary. Dead stars, dead planets, and plain stones, for example the moon, probably a world that someone killed. And now it also fills the universe, it also remains there, like a lump in our orbit, the evidence of crime.

The sky a mortuary, the moon a corpse. What a strange thought to have. And yet, quite a compelling thought. A useful thought, if thought at the right moment. Had someone told him, “Hey, you, don’t forget that the moon is a corpse; it does not smell because that happened long ago, it’s dry by now, buried in darkness and kept cold forever; it could not smell, it never did. Besides, who could arrest the man who killed a world?” Well, if anyone had reminded him of that, astronomy would have taught him a lesson in morals. That is how useful science can be if applied at the right moment, not in school, when no one makes mistakes and turns out dolls he never intended to make. But no one was there to remind him. He would never have made that easy doll, that white beautiful doll, life-size, lying now finished on the floor of his room; he would never have used the materials he used — the long black hair, the sleeping face of the beautiful woman he loved, the eyes half closed, as the eyes of a doll should always be, and the great naked body that had known every part of him — he would never have used it, he would never have cut it that way, never have seen so many unknown parts of the inner machine falling out of those wounds on one side. He would never have done it , no, he would not, even if she had done those things that made him suffer so, even if she had spent her nights in bed with other men, even t hen he would not, because he thought that stopping life was a good thing, and now there was a doll instead of life, and he wanted to give it life and add movement to it, because life is no crime, even if life takes love from us and gives it to another, even then it’s no crime. Because there are too many objects in a room, because the world is not made up of living people, because we are alone, so wake up now, wake up I want to kill you again, but I will never do it, I will say it, just once, then let you go, completely, to destroy everything in life where it will be destroyed in an effort to keep it: the beauty gone, the hair discolored, while now I’ve made a doll, I’ve made a doll, I can play with it, I can speak to it, for another two hours, perhaps five, then will come the police and teach me a lesson.