2
" A girl, hardly ten, holding a Barbie doll by its hair, bent over the edge of the fountain, sprinkled her face and forearms, and stared to the side for a moment as Piccoletto, who was also seated on the edge of the fountain, his legs outspread, chewing at his silver crucifix, pulled off his socks. The girl stared long into his leg holes at his balls hanging from his baggy yellow underwear and at the creased foreskin draped over the head of his large member. "
― Josef Winkler , Natura morta : eine römische Novelle
7
" With an air somewhat distraught, nostalgic, and sad, a Spanish teenager glanced at the face and bust of a Sicilian-speaking postulant selling holy paraphernalia, who shook hundreds of small statues of Christ out of numerous plastic bags, letting them fall crackling into a trunk, while his father, rooting around in the bowl, taking one tiny crucifix after another in his hands, stared at them appraisingly. "
― Josef Winkler , Natura morta : eine römische Novelle
8
" A little humpbacked man with a waxen face, his cadaverous skin covered in black blotches, crossed himself and kissed the black fingertips of his emaciated hand, while a group of nodding bishops dressed in red, wiping the sweat from their chins with kerchiefs embroidered with yellow mitres, walked past him through Saint Peter's Square. His eyelids and eyelashes were painted black with mascara, his eyes were yellowish and blood-spotted, his sparse hair was dyed black, his moustache flecked with gray. Wheezing, he pulled his mouth open and closed and grasped his throat with a hand covered in golden rings. "
― Josef Winkler , Natura morta : eine römische Novelle