Her mysterious cosmos is hermetically sealed. Only insects manage to penetrate this dark world; the ones that succeed in getting in fall victim to her bizarre passion for collecting and keeping things in order, but also her suppressed aggression.
Maria’s world is the household and the housework, a well-organized ritual consisting of fastidious gestures and a precisely-timed parade of daily chores. Sometimes she sets herself absurd tasks, like trying to move the dead flies and other objects telekinetically.
She has no real contact with the world outside. Out on the street she counts her steps, lost in her own thoughts; she is more preoccupied with listening to her own heartbeat than heeding the people around her. Maria moves as if in a vacuum. Only from a safe distance does she dare secretly observe the comings and goings of a sympathetic neighbour. Time passes, as if it were a bitter, viscous mass.
One morning the telephone rings. The voice of a man can be heard. It’s Dieter, the neighbour from one of the rear apartments. Under a pretext they meet in his apartment, a veritable labyrinth of piles of newspapers and paper. Dieter turns out to be Maria’s soulmate – he too is slightly odd, afraid of people, with a mania for collecting things. And he too is brimming over with longing. Both immediately recognize their kindred spirits and fall helplessly head over heels in love.
From now on nothing is as it was before. When Dieter asks Maria about her past she falters. She doesn’t know what to say to him. She bolts out of Dieter’s apartment in great consternation. Her emotions are in turmoil, her thoughts churning. It’s as if something is bubbling up inside her, something inside is being put in motion – in a terrifying new way.
As Maria runs out of the building in dismay, Heinz enters their apartment to search for her secretly accrued savings. He has gambling debts. With brute force Heinz breaks open the wooden figure in which Maria has hidden her money. The actions inflicted on the mistreated figure are in some way magically transferred to Maria’s body. As Heinz drops the figure into the aquarium she finds herself fighting desperately for breath. She falls unconscious on the street and is nearly run over by a bus. Water runs from her mouth…
The little wooden figure, which she has named ‘Fomimo’, is very special for Maria. Since her childhood she has written letters to Fomimo every day and hidden them in a lounge-room cupboard which has a false back to it. When Maria comes to, she decides to rescue the letters from oblivion – and with them her life’s story. When she opens the cupboard, a veritable flood of paper streams out.
She begins to read, letter after letter. Images from her childhood appear before her. Scenes from her own birth flash before her eyes, a birth that led to the death of her mother. One after another other nightmarish images, grotesque figures and overwhelming visions rush through her mind. Then the memory of a momentous event that happened when she was sixteen forces its way to the surface. A school friend, a boy, rings the bell and inveigles his way into the apartment where Maria is alone all day. Her inhibitions and her shyness excite him and he flirts with her, entices her to him. Just as she hesitantly overcomes her inhibitions and allows him to kiss her, her father unexpectedly arrives home. The brief romance degenerates into a traumatic experience. Her father is at first paralyzed by shock and jealousy, then grabs his ‘rival’ by the hair and throws him out of the apartment – and promptly collapses.
He never recovers and from this point on remains bed-ridden.
Maria’s horrified feelings of shame and guilt have molded her entire life. It’s how her father has been able to force her into marriage with his card-game buddy Heinz.
But she has a chance to change her life.
Her memories and her unexpected love for Dieter seem to bring so many suppressed emotions to the surface, the missed opportunities, her secret desires and especially the lust for life that she thought she no longer had, which she has avoided for so long by investing her time in senseless, quirky activities. Maria now dreams of just one thing – to get away from this self-destructive half-life and the chains of the past, which are to some extent self-inflicted.
Events change course in an almost fateful way. Maria’s previous tendency to just go through the motions of life now transforms into highly calculated actions. Harmless objects like the tea-kettle or Fomimo the wooden figure change into ‘accomplices’ in the hands of a ’re-awakened’ Maria, and become tools of her sudden and lethal liberation. Maria’s final and comprehensive blow, aimed above all at her husband and her father, rebounds on her.
As Maria loses everything and throws herself into the abyss, only a miracle can save her.
And it seems Maria has a guardian angel.
