Heinrich Böll
Opinioni di un clown

There is a book and inside is Hans the clown, as sad as all clowns who can no longer make people laugh because they haven't laughed in a long time. 

Sometimes, while drunk, he tries new acts and a bottle of empty schnapps hinders him; then tears fall, makeup runs, and he finds himself in the mirror: tired, alone.

Because Maria has been gone for a long time and when you are born a monogamist like Hans, it's difficult to look for anything else if you've already found everything you needed. 
So you find yourself in pieces, holding a puzzle made up of all the world's absences, a puzzle that depicts emptiness and Henriette at the stop, leaving never to return.

A sea dotted with distant islands and a clown, capable only of gathering moments until the moments become memories he is besieged by.

Behind, among the islands, a Germany hiding its fears in embarrassment, a lost wanderer who, after hunger, is content to nourish himself with whatever he finds, packaging it roughly, giving it out cheaply: Catholicism, respectability, participation, solidarity, pretense.

Yes, pretense: but now the tricks and imitations no longer work and the wounds don't heal, Maria doesn't return, Henriette is dead, and the makeup of a clown doesn't reassemble on the face.