Heinrich Böll
Opinioni di un clown

Three hours.

Just three hours in a rust-colored apartment in post-war Bonn, a swollen knee, a bottle of cognac in the fridge, a phone in the lap from which you can smell the scent of the person on the other end of the line, a one-mark coin - the last one - dropped out of the fifth-floor window.

Melancholy and headache.

Just three hours to let the dried-up white makeup fall from Hans’s face, a twenty-eight-year-old clown in decline who has reached rock bottom, who had committed the most serious sin for a clown: arousing pity. And all that remains is the Man.

And a name that echoes: Maria... Maria... Maria...

Maria, Hans’s wife without being his wife. Maria the Catholic, worn out by miscarriages, constantly consumed by guilt instilled by a life "in sin." Maria the adulteress, who leaves Hans to marry a prominent member of German Catholic hypocrisy, to finally live in prescribed piety.

Whore.

Loneliness. Total solitude, despite the stage of Hans's memories teeming with characters, a parade of falsehoods in the oppressive air of Bonn: respectable upper-middle-class, renegade Nazis, members of suffocating Catholic circles, converted Protestants. Nothing but negative figures, masks of inconsistency.

Three hours.

Three hours to leave the rust-colored apartment, go to the station to earn a few coins by playing the Litanies of Loreto on the guitar, behind a Chaplin hat containing the last cigarette. The show must go on.

A few more minutes to get dressed, put on the blue sweater, squeeze the now dry jar of white paint, carefully apply it to the face, finish putting on makeup, set aside the Man and return to being a clown.

The professional attire is the best armor that exists, only saints or amateurs are vulnerable. I withdrew from the mirror, I withdrew deeply into myself and at the same time detached myself. 

Not even facial exercises work anymore, the eyes are already empty, expressionless. They are those of a suicide.