Creeps by Night: Chills and Thrills

Clarimonde and I have discovered a strange new game, and we play it all day long. I greet her, and immediately she returns the greeting. Then I drum with my fingers on my window-pane. She has hardly had time to see it before she begins drumming on hers. I wink at her, and she winks at me. I move my lips as if I were talking to her and she follows suit. Then I brush the hair back from my temples, and immediately her hand is at the side of her forehead. Truly child’s play. And we both laugh at it. That is, she really doesn’t laugh: it’s only a quiet, passive smile she has, just as I suppose mine must be.

For that matter all this isn’t nearly as senseless as it must seem. It isn’t imitation at all: I think we would both tire of that very quickly. There must be a certain telepathy or thought transference involved in it. For Clarimonde repeats my motions in the smallest conceivable fraction of a second. She hardly has time to see what I am doing before she does the same thing. Sometimes it even seems to me that her action is simultaneous with mine. That is what entices me: always doing something new and unpremeditated. And it’s astounding to see her doing the same thing at the same time. Sometimes I try to catch her. I make a great many motions in quick succession, and then repeat them again; and then I do them a third time. Finally I repeat them for the fourth time, but change their order, introduce some new motion, or leave out one of the old ones. It’s like children playing Follow the Leader. It’s really remarkable that Clarimonde never makes a single mistake, although I sometimes change the motions so rapidly that she hardly has time to memorize each one.

That is how I spend my days. But I never feel for a second that I’m squandering my time on something nonsensical. On the contrary, it seems as if nothing I had ever done were more important.

Wednesday, March 16

Isn’t it queer that I have never thought seriously about putting my relations with Clarimonde on a more sensible basis than that of these hour-consuming games? I thought about it last night. I could simply take my hat and coat and go down two flights of stairs, five steps across the street, and then up two other flights of stairs. On her door there is a little coat-of-arms engraved with her name: “Clarimonde...” Clarimonde what? I don’t know what; but the name Clarimonde is certainly there. Then I could knock, and then...

That far I can imagine everything perfectly, down to the last move I might make. But for the life of me I can’t picture what would happen after that. The door would open — I can conceive that. But I would remain standing in front of it and looking into her room, into a darkness — a darkness so utter that not a solitary thing could be distinguished in it. She would not come — nothing would come; as a matter of fact, there would be nothing there. Only the black impenetrable darkness.

Sometimes it seems as if there could be no other Clarimonde than the one I play with at my window. I can’t picture what this woman would look like if she wore a hat, or even some dress other than her black one with the large purple dots; I can’t even conceive her without her gloves. If I could see her on the street, or even in some restaurant, eating, drinking, talking — well, I really have to laugh: the thing seems so utterly inconceivable.

Sometimes I ask myself whether I love her. I can’t answer that question entirely, because I have never been in love. But if the feeling I bear toward Clarimonde is really — well, love — then love is certainly very, very different than I saw it among my acquaintances or learned about it in novels.

It is becoming quite difficult to define my emotions. In fact, it is becoming difficult even to think about anything at all that has no bearing on Clarimonde — or rather, on our game. For there is truly no denying it: it’s really the game that preoccupies me — nothing else. And that’s the thing I understand least of all.

Clarimonde — well, yes, I feel attracted to her. But mingled with the attraction there is another feeling — almost like a sense of fear. Fear? No, it isn’t fear either: it is more of a temerity, a certain inarticulate alarm or apprehension before something I cannot define. And it is just this apprehension that has some strange compulsion, something curiously passionate that keeps me at a distance from her and at the same time draws me constantly nearer to her. It is as if I were going around her in a wide circle, came a little nearer at one place, withdrew again, went on, approached her again at another point and again retreated rapidly. Until finally — of that I am absolutely certain — I must go to her.