It was as if Claire and I had been living in parallel passageways or tunnels, never knowing that we were moving side by side, like lost souls in the same purgatory, finally to meet at the end of those passageways. As if the passageways had ever joined; as if we had ever really connected. What a foolish fantasy that had been! No, the passageways were still parallel, only now the wall separating them was like a glass wall, and I could see Claire, an untouchable figure...No, even that wall was not always glass; at times it again became black stone, and then I did not know what was happening on the other side, what had become of her in those intervals when the cameras were off. I was even convinced that during those moments her face changed, that her lips curled with disgust and she was perhaps laughing at me with some other man, and that the whole story of the passageways was my own pathetic delusion, and that after all there was only one tunnel, dark and solitary: mine, the tunnel in which I had spent my entire miserable life. And in one of those sections of the wall I had seen this girl and had naïvely believed that she was moving in a tunnel parallel to mine, when in fact she belonged to the wide world; and perhaps out of morbid curiosity she had approached one of my strange windows, and had glimpsed the spectacle of my irredeemable loneliness. And then, while I kept moving through my passageway, she lived her normal life outside, that curious and absurd life in which there are dances and gaiety. And sometimes it happened that when I passed by one of my windows she was waiting for me; but at other times she forgot that poor caged being, and then I, my face pressed against the wall of glass, watched her in the distance laughing or dancing without a care in the world or, which was worse, I did not see her at all, and imagined her in obscene places I could not reach. At those times I feel that my destiny is infinitely more lonely than I had ever before imagined.
