He is tall and broad in his shoulders. He looks just a little bit too heavy and, yes, he is slow. That’s what you have already expected when he was walking towards you. He is slow in speech, in vision and in hearing alike. He has knitted his thinking into the outside world and it takes him much time to follow his own complicated patterns. That knitting business happened a long, long time ago, probably when he was still a boy. Everything had been so flat, that’s what he remembers about being a small child. But after he had started weaving his words into the flatness next to him everything became light and friendly and comprehensible. For ever and ever, if he only stuck to it. All that he has forgotten and so he doesn’t realize that his gazing at you is meaningless. That he is unable to understand by using his senses. Instead he needs endless chain molecules of words to decipher life around him. While talking to you he actually reads from a kind of woven carpet – tales from Arabian nights in chemical codes.

A single voice and a body plus high-pitch and a mouth plus wood and a shadow –  must be Rosa in the living room. Oh, Rosa, you’ve brought flowers, ah, yellow tulips, my favourites in April. And I can see, they aren’t from those endless rows of greenhouses in the Netherlands, they are from here, from the countryside where we live. Have I told you about the article on cultivating tulips in the Netherlands? I am all against greenhouses, you know that, but in the countryside it’s different. I’m glad we have some farming left so that we can support our local dealers. You are right, I shouldn’t talk like the government does. But it’s true what the mayor says, we do live in a closely-knit, eh, human, let’s say, eco-system, together with the local farmers, and their wives. And of course, there’s more to it than producing and selling and buying and, eh, vice versa, year after year. It’s tradition and it’s future, and it all happens at the same time, Rosa. Shouldn’t you take the white porcelain vase instead of the glass vase? The cylindrical form looks somewhat industrial, doesn’t it? Thank you for the beauty in my life, Rosa. I see, it’s already time for dinner.

But he doesn’t see, he’s only using words.