The Clown (The Essential Heinrich Boll)

by Heinrich Böll

I looked at myself in the mirror: my eyes were utterly empty, for the first time I didn’t need to empty them by looking at myself for half an hour and doing facial exercises. It was the face of a suicide, and when I began to put on my make-up my face was the face of a corpse. I smeared Vaseline over my face and ripped open a half-dried tube of white make-up, squeezed out what was left and painted myself completely white:

not a stroke of black, not a spot of red, all white, even my eyebrows painted over; my hair above it looked like a wig, my unpainted mouth dark, almost blue, my eyes, pale blue like a stony sky, as empty as a Cardinal’s who will not admit to himself that he has long since lost his faith. I was not even afraid of myself. With this face I could become a success, I could even be hypocritical about the thing which in all its helplessness, in its stupidity, relatively speaking appealed most to me: the thing Edgar Wieneken believed in.