Scene 11

Maille was essentially a profoundly excessive person – which is why his world consisted of many rules and restrictions. One of them, among the strictest, was to shun cakes and tarts of all types – in particular their consumption during broad daylight. For someone like Maille who indulged in a leisurely evening meal every day, it required a total cake ban – otherwise it would lead to a bloating of the body, this son of a Lemusan gym teacher was convinced.

As this vanity was, however, somewhat embarassing for him, he hid his draconic anti-cake rule behind the claim that he found cakes simply repugnant: the desperate attempt to castigate one's own greed was cloaked in a stuck-up I'm a gourmet-attitude, which was also distinctly more elegant.

However, that was also not the entire truth: Maille needed namely the empty space of asceticism, this vacuum of gratification, of fulfilment, this hunger, this passion for calories, for the pleasure of chewing, for salt, for sugar, for fat – and he needed this feeling of satiation at least once a day, this curry-, or roast pork-pregnancy. It seemed to him like almost a spacial law, the Yin und Yang of his intestines. The hunger, the emptiness, that was the freedom to wish oneself the most varied satisfaction, to think of, to evidence – the feeling of satiation on the other hand was the proof of being imprisoned in one's body, in the heaviness of being. One was dependent on the other, a dialectical dilemma – like the relationship between a glass and its contents, between a ferry and its passengers.

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