Once upon a time, in a land not so far away, there lived a woman who wanted her very own Prince.
Not necessarily one with a white horse, although a horse would not have hurt. Not necessarily one with a castle, although castles have always helped.
No.
The Prince was something harder to describe.
He was another world.
A door.
A promise.
The suggestion of rooms into which ordinary people did not enter.
For a while, the woman believed she had found him.
He had the robes. Or something that looked like robes from a distance.
He had authority around him, and silence, and that strange light which gathers around people we cannot quite reach.
The woman looked at him and saw a kingdom.
For that is the first rule of princes: a Prince need only carry the idea of a Prince.
But princes, like kingdoms, do not always last. And thus it came to pass.
And one day the woman found herself crying in her tower.
And that is when the pauper appeared. On his bike. There was a narrow balcony high above the courtyard where they smoked cigarettes and watched the lights of the city blinking through the dark. In winter the cold crept beneath the door; in summer the night air came in warm and restless.
There was a kitchen where glasses gathered beside the sink and bottles appeared on the table and conversations began while someone was cutting bread.
And there was a sofa beside the bed.
A curious arrangement, almost too close together, as though whoever had built the room had never quite decided where conversation ended and sleep began.
The pauper liked that room.
There were no thrones there.
No heralds announcing who was supposed to be whom.
Only the balcony, the kitchen, the sofa and the bed.
And the woman.
“Tell me,” said the pauper.
And the woman told him.
She told him on the balcony, smoke rising between them and vanishing into the night.
She told him in the kitchen, leaning against the counter while something cooked and something else went cold.
She told him from the sofa beside the bed, with her legs folded beneath her, while the pauper sat close enough to hear the changes in her voice.
She told him how she had met the Prince.
She told him what had happened.
She told him what had almost happened.
She told him what had been promised and what had never been promised at all.
She told him of rooms and messages and journeys and silences.
She told him of tenderness.
She told him of cruelty.
She told him things which made the pauper laugh.
She told him things which made him angry.
She told him things she had told nobody else.
And the pauper listened.
Now the pauper was very good at listening.
This was partly because he was clever.
It was partly because he was curious.
And it was partly because listening was his trade.
He had spent much of his life wandering the kingdom asking questions.
He had questioned kings and ministers, merchants and scholars, players and vagabonds, people at bus stops and in taverns.
He knew an old trick.
If you remain quiet just a little longer than people expect, somebody will usually begin talking.
And the woman talked beautifully.
So beautifully, in fact, that the Prince grew more splendid each time she spoke of him.
On the balcony he grew taller.
In the kitchen his robes became finer.
On the sofa beside the bed he acquired whole chambers that perhaps had never existed at all.
“Was he really like that?” asked the pauper.
“Yes.”
“And did you love him?”
The woman looked away.
Perhaps out towards the balcony.
Perhaps towards the empty glass on the table.
“It was complicated.”
The pauper smiled.
Complicated was good.
Complicated could last all evening.
And so the woman told her story, and the pauper asked his questions, and between them something curious happened.
They built a Prince.
Not the man himself.
The man himself was somewhere else by then.
No.
This was The Prince.
The Prince with the capital letters.
The Prince was memory and longing and disappointment stitched together into robes.
He was what had happened.
He was what might have happened.
He was the future which had never arrived, preserved carefully inside the past.
If the man disappointed the woman, then clearly he had not been the right Prince.
The role remained waiting.
There was always another actor somewhere in the kingdom. Or beyond.
The pauper understood all this.
Or thought he did.
He himself was no Prince.
Everybody could see that.
His fingernails were dirty.
His clothes never quite matched.
His morals had been collected in messy bundles and regularly revised.
He drank too much.
He swore.
He laughed at solemn things.
He said things at dinner tables which better-dressed men would only think.
He was clever, perhaps.
But lowly.
And rather proud of it.
For paupers have their vanities too.
The Prince had his robes.
The pauper had his rags.
If the Prince was vain about being elevated, the pauper was equally vain about being low.
Dirt beneath the fingernails can become decoration.
Still, the woman liked the pauper.
More importantly, she trusted him.
Princes are difficult people to confess to.
A Prince may judge.
A Prince may leave.
A pauper?
A pauper sits beside the fire and listens.
Or on the little balcony while the ash grows long on the end of a cigarette.
“You won’t judge me?” asked the woman.
“No.”
“You understand?”
“I think so.”
And she laughed.
That was his part.
He made the stories lighter.
He mocked the Prince when mockery was required.
He defended him when perhaps he had been judged too harshly.
He asked whether a silence meant this.
Whether a look meant that.
Whether cruelty might have concealed fear.
Whether tenderness might have concealed cruelty.
Sometimes the woman would say:
“I never thought of it like that.”
And the pauper was pleased.
For although he did not know it yet, the pauper was no longer merely listening to her story.
He was helping her write it.
Every question changed something.
Every laugh placed a little asterix next to one detail.
A raised eyebrow moved a character from one side of the page to the other.
The sofa beside the bed became something stranger.
It was neither quite public nor private.
Neither sitting room nor bedroom.
Neither court nor chamber. Sacred and profane.
One could sit there and tell secrets while pretending that secrets were all that was being exchanged.
The woman had given him the pieces.
Together they arranged them.
And so the Pauper became something else as well.
He became the Keeper of the Story.
Now this was a very special position.
The Keeper knew things the Prince himself did not know.
He knew the foolish things.
The shameful things.
The things that had no place in a fairy tale.
The woman could tell the Keeper that she had wanted one man while lying beside another.
She could tell him whom she had deceived.
Whom she had desired.
She could tell him of mistakes and lies and secret rooms.
She could tell him about the doors she had opened.
And the doors she had closed.
And the doors she had stood before for years, waiting for somebody on the other side to turn the handle.
But The Prince had to remain beautiful.
For a long time, this arrangement worked perfectly.
There was only one rule. That the pauper must remain the pauper.
He did not know this rule.
Some rules become visible only when somebody breaks them.
One evening, while the candles burned low the pauper asked:
“What did he have that I don’t?”
He may even have laughed when he said it.
The woman did not laugh.
And somewhere in the little kingdom something shifted.
Perhaps the balcony door moved in the wind.
Perhaps nothing happened at all.
But the question had escaped.
And once a question escapes, it is surprisingly difficult to put it back in its cage.
After that, the stories began to change.
The Prince was no longer merely a character.
The lovers were no longer amusing figures wandering through the woman’s history.
The stories which had once floated lightly through the kitchen began to acquire weight.
Names which had once caused laughter now landed heavily on the table.
Old lovers entered the room like ghosts.
The pauper could almost see them occupying the chairs.
One appeared on the balcony.
Another leaned against the kitchen cupboard.
Another seemed to be lying invisibly across the bed.
The pauper had invited none of them.
Yet there they were.
The Keeper of the Story began using the story as evidence.
And that is a dangerous thing.
For there is an old law of courts and kingdoms:
The fool may laugh at the King only while everybody knows he does not wish to be King.
The pauper had spent years sitting comfortably at the edge of the court.
He had been allowed close precisely because nobody believed he wanted the throne.
Then one day the fool looked towards the crown.
And the whole room changed.
“Why not me?” he asked.
The mirror had developed desire.
The witness wanted to become a character.
The Keeper of the Story wanted the story to change.
And the woman, who had spoken so freely, suddenly looked at the pauper differently.
“I never offered you that.”
“But you told me everything.”
And there lay the riddle.
For the pauper believed these statements contradicted one another.
They did not.
She had told him everything precisely because she had not offered him anything.
The border between them had not prevented their intimacy. It had made the intimacy possible.
Now he was confused.
Fairy tales had taught him badly.
Surely, he thought, this was the moment when everybody discovered that the ragged man beside the Princess had been the true Prince all along.
The dirty clothes would fall away.
The animals of the forest would gather.
Somebody would discover a crown in a bush.
But no flock of white birds appeared at the window.
No fairy godmother came knocking at the door.
The pauper remained the pauper.
One night, or perhaps one morning, or perhaps gradually over many months, the pauper finally spoke the words that ended the play’s 11-month run.
“I love you.”
The candles went out.
The music stopped.
The balcony door closed.
The kitchen became merely a kitchen.
The sofa became merely a sofa beside a bed.
“No,” said the woman.
Why not?
The answer came back with the simplicity of an enchanted door closing.
“Because not.”
The pauper had never encountered such an answer.
He examined it from every side.
He tapped it.
He pushed it.
He looked for the hidden hinge.
Surely every locked door had such a mechanism.
But no.
This made him very sad.
For a while.
He wandered around the castle walls carrying everything he knew.
There was rather a lot of it.
Then the pauper sat down exactly where he was.
His fingernails remained dirty.
His clothes remained rather bad.
No crown appeared.
No horse came looking for him.
And slowly he began to suspect that this might be the point.
The Prince had never been waiting inside him.
Perhaps The Prince had never been entirely inside any man.
Perhaps the Prince was a shape in the woman’s imagination, made from longing and distance.
And so, at last, the pauper stood up.
He thought of all the things he knew.
Then he did something unusual for a man who had spent his life asking one more question.
He stopped asking.
And he walked away.
There was no happily ever after.
Not yet.
But somewhere beyond the castle walls there were other roads, other kitchens, other balconies, other stories.
And for the first time in a very long while, he did not know where any of them led.
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