My wife is dead and buried.
I am alone in the house, alone with the two maids. So I am free again. Yet what good is it to me, this freedom? I am within reach of what I have wanted for the last twenty years (I am thirty-five), but I have not the courage to grasp it, and, besides that, would anyhow no longer enjoy it very much.
I am too frightened of anything that excites me, too frightened of a glass of wine, too frightened of music, too frightened of women; for only in my matter-of-fact morning mood I am in control of myself, sure that I will keep silent about my act.
Yet it is precisely this morning mood that is intolerable. To feel no interest - no interest in any person, any work, even any book - to roam without aim or will through an empty house in which only the indifferent guarded whispering of two maids drifts about like the far-off talk of warders around the cell of a sequestered madman, to be able to think, with the last snatch of desire in an extinct nervous life, about only one thing, and to tremble before that one thing like a squirrel in the hypnotic gaze of a snake - how can I persevere to the end, day in, day out, in such an abominable existence?
Whenever I look in the mirror - still a habit of mine - I am astounded that such a pale, delicate, insignificant little man with dull gaze and weak, slack mouth (a nasty piece of work, some people would say) was able to murder his wife, a wife whom, after all, in his own way, he had loved.