The Musical Brain: And Other Stories

The Two Men

I WAS THE ONLY PERSON WHO visited the house where the two men lived in seclusion; I used to wonder if anyone else knew of their existence. Once, in the early days, I resorted to a trick I’d learned as a kid, playing at spies: I stuck a hair to the front door and the frame, and the next day it was still there, unbroken. I think I did it again, to make sure, but later, as the years went by, those suspicions came to seem absurd. By then I was sure that the secret was safe, not because anyone was trying to protect it, but because of indifference, or incredulity, or the desertion of the surrounding area. I never saw any neighbors; it was a street of run-down little houses that looked as if they must have been inhabited by old people, but if that was the case, those people can’t have gone on living through all the years of my visits. Maybe the houses were empty.

It seemed that the men had always been living there, just the two of them, all on their own. If they hadn’t been born in the house (which seemed unlikely), they must have grown up there, behind closed doors, never going out, so as not to reveal their deformities. Merciful guardians had shielded them from the gazes of the world, so that they wouldn’t be treated like monsters. They weren’t monsters. Except for their hands and feet they were just like other men, and even well proportioned: athletic and strong, with something savage about them, something of the animal perfection that we like to attribute to savages; but this might have been a result of their circumstances. I estimated their age at somewhere between thirty and forty: the prime of life. Their features, gestures, and reactions were vaguely similar, but this too may have been an illusion created by the very special circumstances that had brought them together. I never knew if they were related; at first it seemed almost self-evident that they were brothers, but the simplest reasoning obliged me to abandon that idea, which persisted nevertheless, the term “brothers” taking on a broader or more figurative meaning. The more likely scenario was that they were unrelated, and had been brought together by their corresponding deformities, which were so strange that they must have been unique to that pair.

One of them had giant feet, the other, giant hands. The proportions were more or less the same in both cases. The feet of “the one with the feet” and the hands of “the one with the hands” were as big as the rest of their bodies, or even slightly bigger. The hands of the one with giant feet were, like the rest of him, normal in size. The “one with the hands” had normal feet. The oversize extremities were truly amazing: huge masses of flesh, bone, muscle, and nails, almost always resting on the floor. They didn’t quite have the standard form: as well as being gigantic, they were swollen, and somewhat misshapen; perhaps the forms of feet and hands are gradually determined by use, and these were never used, or hardly ever.

That was all: the hands of one, the feet of the other. The two men couldn’t have been more different, and yet, in a way, they were the same. It must have been because of the opposition, or a kind of asymmetrical symmetry, as if putting them together would have made a man with giant hands and feet, or as if they had resulted from the division of a man like that. . But putting them together the other way would have produced a perfectly normal man. You had to assemble and disassemble their images mentally, because there was something inherently illusory or inconceivable about those men, something that made it impossible to believe your eyes when faced with what, believe it or not, was real. It must have been their complementary opposition that made them seem alike.

They dominated the space they occupied, invincibly. They filled it right up, as far as perception was concerned, at least. . I couldn’t take my eyes off them. The way they were was simple enough and yet I always felt that I still hadn’t quite understood. Physically, they had plenty of room to move; after all, apart from the hands and feet, they were the size of ordinary men. The house in which they lived wasn’t big, but nor was it especially small. It looked as if it had been uninhabited for many years before they came. In a way, it still seemed empty: the few pieces of furniture had been pushed into the corners, and stood there unused, covered with dust. The power sockets were encrusted with saltpeter and rust, and the wires were exposed. There were abandoned spiderwebs in the corners of the ceiling, hanging down in shreds. I didn’t know if the house belonged to the men, if one of them had inherited it, or if they were squatters. That was just one of the many things I never found out. It surprises me how little I knew about a situation that was such an important part of my life. It’s true that I didn’t have anyone to ask. All I could do was speculate, invent a story on the basis of what I could see; but I didn’t even invent much: an irresistible lethargy came over me as soon as I tried to think about it, a visceral aversion that may have resulted from the intuition that my brain was in danger. It was as if the vision they afforded, always the same yet always changing, was somehow meant to remain wordless.

They occupied what seemed to be the biggest room; I don’t know if it really was because I never explored the whole house. It was the biggest of the rooms I went into when I visited, and strangely it wasn’t the front room, which in that house (built back to front, apparently) was a little living room with a door straight onto the street, but a room right at the back, which must have been a bedroom. That back room had a window that looked onto a patio, but whether the patio was big or small, I really can’t say, because I never went over to look, and even if I had, it wouldn’t have been much use because the glass was frosted. I assumed there was a patio there because of the light coming in. I don’t know if the electricity was connected. I never went to the house at night. My “visiting time” was midafternoon, and if I made two visits, the other one was just before midday.

I saw them against the background of that window, which filtered the light and, depending on the weather and the season, made them opaque or radiant, contrasting with their silhouettes or suffusing their bodies with a glow that seemed to emanate from within. The faded ochre of the walls gave that light an artificial, yellowish tinge that was slightly disturbing.

They were naked. At first, I think, it seemed natural to me. After all, how could you put on trousers if your feet had a girth of two yards? How could you get hands the size of sheep through the sleeves of a shirt? But thinking it over, I realized that explanation didn’t stand up. The one whose feet prevented him from wearing trousers could still have put on a shirt, a jacket, or a tunic. And the other one, whose hands couldn’t fit through any kind of sleeve, could perfectly well have worn trousers, even socks and shoes, had he wished, and covered his upper body with something like a poncho or a toga. The only thing they couldn’t have done was dress in the same way; but they could have worn clothes, if they’d wanted to. Why didn’t they? Was it that they didn’t want to draw attention to the difference between them? Or were they renouncing human ways? They didn’t need clothes for warmth. Oddly, in a house that must have gone for decades without repairs or maintenance, the room was well insulated. There was a series of very cold winters, but even then the house was always peculiarly warm, as if heated (although I never saw any kind of heater, and in fact I’m sure there wasn’t one). I always saw them in that room, as I said, but that doesn’t mean they were always there. What I know for sure is that it’s where they received my visits or waited for them, like actors before a performance. They probably spent the greater part of their time in that room, and if they happened to be somewhere else when I arrived, they rushed back as soon as they heard me come in through the front door. I say this because, very occasionally, only one of them was there when I entered the room, and the other appeared just a few seconds later.

Maybe they generated that puzzling, constant warmth themselves. . why not? It might have come from their bodies, or from the huge hands and feet. No one had studied those unprecedented malformations; who could say what powers and properties they might have possessed?

Leaving aside the men’s feet and hands, their preference for nudism could be explained by the movement of their bodies, which would have been sufficient to keep the surroundings warm. The one with the enormous feet moved his torso and arms, shook himself, quivered, raised his hands to the sky in a gesture somewhere between supplication and stretching, clasped his head, turned it, tilted it forward, bowed down, bent himself double, and waved his arms in all directions as if he were multiplying them, with the fingers wiggling around like worms. The other man, with his gigantic hands resting on the floor on either side of him, thrashed his legs and feet about, tapping, stamping, pedaling. Meanwhile, the enormous extremities were not entirely still; with movements of submarine slowness, they accompanied the nervous jittering of the other body parts, like whales among schools of fish.

They can’t always have been so agitated; perhaps what I saw was exceptional, or a show they put on specially for me, but if so there was nothing systematic about it, because there were days when I would find them languid, or rigid like statues, sometimes not even blinking, seemingly void of life. Maybe they were alternating, or competing with each other, or playing. I really had no way of knowing what their routine might be: I couldn’t extrapolate from my limited observations or speculate on the psychology of individuals so radically unique. There was never any real communication between myself and them, in spite of all those years of daily contact. But not because they couldn’t speak. As for me, I’d say I’m fairly talkative, when I’m with people I know and trust, which is how I felt about them in the end, or maybe even from the start, although there was always an unbridgeable gap. The reason we didn’t talk was that we had nothing to say. The difference that separated them from me was somehow too extreme. No, not too extreme. I take that back. In the end, it was just a question of sizes, a purely quantitative difference, if you like. But it had been applied improperly, differentially, to parts instead of the whole. I understood perfectly well that with hands like that, or feet, in the case of the other man, they couldn’t manage their lives like everybody else. If life was a puzzle in which each piece had to fit into its place to recompose the landscape, what could you do with a piece a thousand times bigger than all the rest? That was what condemned me to silence. Only someone who could provide an answer to the question, a solution to the problem, would have been able to speak to them. And I had no answer, no solution. For a reason I never fully understood, I’d convinced myself that I was the last person who’d be able to come up with a solution, perhaps the only person who couldn’t.

This lack of communication was also due to the brevity of my visits. “House calls” was how I thought of them, remembering a colloquial expression for the popping in and out that leaves no time for relaxed conversation, the dutiful visits typically paid by the young to the old, or the healthy to the ill, or the busy and successful to the idle and lonely. . But I was not a doctor, nor was I especially young or healthy, much less successful. Visiting the men had consumed my youth. I had withered. I wasn’t much younger than they were; a little, perhaps, but they had a supernatural self-possession, an indefinable vigor, that rendered age irrelevant. I said that they gave an impression of strength and health, in spite of their complementary deformities. I had always been fairly healthy, but anxious too, in a vague sort of way, about illness and death. Of course I had normal-size hands and feet, and could get dressed and go out into the street, and live a normal life with my family, and take the men their food. Sometimes I’d think: I have the hands of one, and the feet of the other. What if it had been the other way around? What a nightmare! Together, with their well-formed limbs, they made up a normal man, and with the malformed ones, a complete invalid. As they were, they could only nourish my infinite perplexity.

I never stayed long, because I wasn’t paying social calls: I was there to help and meet a need; I was their only point of contact with the outside world. But basically, the visits were brief because I didn’t want my family to find out. Although that reason didn’t always apply. There were times when I was alone at home and could have spent hours or whole afternoons with the men. Maybe the habit of not lingering (or not finding a reason to linger) had already been established. Of course I didn’t keep a record of how much time I spent in the house, and for a fair while before and after the visits, I was too tense to look at my watch, so I couldn’t work it out, but I estimate that on average it would have been three, four, or five minutes; maybe more, or less, I don’t know. I was aware that it wasn’t long, and a kind of automatic politeness or tact, which was entirely out of place in the circumstances, made me worry that I might offend them by giving the impression that I was running away from a disgusting sight.

There’s a simpler and more concrete explanation for the brevity of my visits: in the room where they received me, as opposed to the rooms I passed through on the way, there was no furniture. That bare room had the air of a cage at the zoo, or an exhibition space, and accentuated the impression of inhumanity. As with the clothing, one might have thought at first that the physical peculiarities of the two men ruled out furniture; but, again, thinking it over sufficed to reveal that there was no fundamental impossibility. Chairs, armchairs, carpets, sideboards, pictures, tables. . why not? Perhaps it would have been necessary to take certain precautions when moving around, but that was all. And if they could have worn clothes and had furniture, why did they prefer to remain naked in an empty space? This didn’t puzzle me at the time. All through those years I simply accepted that things were as they were. That numbing of curiosity was psychologically justifiable: given the prodigious monstrosity of one man’s hands and the other man’s feet, details of clothing and furniture receded into the background. That enormous mystery (enormity itself) repelled any kind of explanation, while its gravitational force attracted and swallowed up everything else.

I shouldn’t have felt guilty about my flying visits; no one else came to see them, so they had no point of comparison. Anyway, the notion of courtesy was completely alien to them. They were only interested in what I brought, which they accepted without a word of thanks or any particular signs of pleasure. This makes it sound like feeding stray cats in a square or a derelict house, or, to return to an earlier comparison, stepping into an animal enclosure at the zoo. Nothing could be further from the truth. The two men were utterly and terribly human; in that regard, there was, if anything, an excess, not a deficiency: they were all too human. There was no reason why the unfortunate deformities that isolated them should diminish their humanity; on they contrary, they accentuated it. And if the men treated me with something like disdain, or irony, or a hurtful indifference, how in the name of humanity, precisely, could I fail to forgive them? I had to be grateful that resentment hadn’t made them hate me (although more than once, as I left the house, dismayed by their rude behavior, I suspected that they did). They had good reason to see me as privileged by fate: free as a bird, I could come and go unnoticed among my fellow men.

I had to make an effort to adopt their point of view. From where I was standing, my situation didn’t seem privileged at all, and I didn’t feel so free. My freedom was punctuated by the daily visits to their house, as if by the pecking of an implacable vulture. Sometimes I reproached myself for “taking it so seriously,” but deep down I knew I had no choice; there were no intermediate degrees of seriousness. Although the commitment I’d taken on was entirely personal and had remained secret, I couldn’t abandon the men. And I had to accept the consequences, which were so far-reaching that they shaped my whole life. Having to be on duty every day, without fail, meant that I couldn’t envisage travel abroad, or vacations by the sea, or weekends in the country, or even long visits to museums or the houses of friends and family members. In order to maintain the routine, I had to pretend to be a man of obsessively sedentary habits, who went out for supposedly constitutional walks at certain times of the day, rain or shine, and kept to himself, which was terribly hard for me, as by nature I’m drawn to travel, adventure, and change. I didn’t complain to anyone, because I would have had to explain, and I tried not to grumble to myself either, so as not to become embittered. When I heard other people complaining about some small or large but essentially solvable problem, I felt the full weight of my predicament. There was a kind of symmetry in this predominantly asymmetrical picture: the two men, prisoners indoors, had made me a prisoner outside.

I couldn’t take on jobs that involved serious responsibilities and long hours of work, and I had to stagnate at a mediocre level that didn’t reflect my capacities. Since I wasn’t at liberty to reveal my real reasons for saying no, it was universally assumed that I was eccentric, neurotic, or disabled in some way. Me! I’ve always been rational and practical, almost to excess. The limitations sharpened my skills, and the little I was able to accomplish, though fragmented and impaired by my alienated way of living, was of remarkable quality, and resulted in an abundance of offers and invitations. But gradually they became less frequent, and then stopped altogether when everyone came to the conclusion that I would always decline. All those missed opportunities left me with a feeling of dissatisfaction, which turned into melancholy, discouragement, and despair. My youth was vanishing, it had gone by in a changeless twilight, leaving me with nothing. My projects and talents had promised so much, and in exchange for all that I had nothing; I felt dispossessed. Daily exposure to something tragic and irreparable, in an atmosphere of unreality, had cast a veil of misfortune, tinged with horror, over my life. After so many years, the secret had become definitive, cutting me off from the rest of the world, and even from my hopes.

But it wasn’t all bad. It never is. When a whole life is affected, as it was in my case because of the way the two men had contaminated everything, the totality itself arranges certain displacements in order to reestablish a sustainable balance. Creative energy always finds some way to break through, even when circumstances conspire to smother it. And my circumstances did not have an entirely negative effect. The negative, of course, contains its own negation. Along with all the drawbacks of my unfortunate situation, there was a decisive advantage: I was the only one who knew about the two men, the only person in the world aware of an extraordinary phenomenon. Though sometimes I wasn’t sure of that dubious privilege, and felt that someone else must have known. Before I came along, someone must have visited and fed them. Someone had brought them together and taken them to that house. And before all that, they’d had parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters perhaps, a childhood, a history — and there’s no history without people. But as the years and the decades went by, I gradually became convinced that the secret was safe with me and that I was its sole guardian. I was standing in for the father, the grandfather, and all the others. Dubious as it was, the privilege was mine.

From that point on, I couldn’t help wondering how I might derive some benefit from my position. Not that I imagined for a moment preying on the misfortune of others. If I’d gone public, if I’d “sold” or exhibited them, I wouldn’t have been able to live with the guilt. Anyway, I wouldn’t have known how to do it. But it didn’t seem immoral to hope for some material gain to compensate for everything I’d been obliged to sacrifice.

I would have liked to photograph or film them, but of course that wasn’t possible. I wouldn’t have dared to go there with a camera. I would have had to explain, and I couldn’t predict how they would react. Although they had never behaved aggressively with me (except for their haughty indifference), or with each other, their naked bodies had always seemed to harbor a potential for violence. Their mobility was not as limited as the colossal burden of their extremities might have suggested. They could move quickly. This had been confirmed on those rare occasions when I entered to find that one of them was absent from the room: very soon, and moving very quickly, the missing man would come in through a side door. Once in the room, where I almost always found them, they hardly shifted, even when they were seized by the Saint Vitus’s dance that I described earlier. But their fixedness seemed to be a choreographic choice, rather than a limitation imposed by the law of gravity. Presumably, the giant hands and feet were equipped with muscles in proportion to their size; they can’t have been dead weights. And the rest of the men’s bodies, which, as I said, were well formed, must have become exceptionally strong. I never saw a demonstration of that strength; like so many other things about them, it was a mystery, a secret chamber that might have contained anything.

I couldn’t predict how they would have reacted if they’d seen me taking photographs. They might have shut themselves up like that because they wanted to remain hidden, but their isolation might also have been a consequence of their limited mobility, or just the way things had turned out. Perhaps it was one of those confinements that result from inertia or procrastination. After all, there are plenty of people who never go out, not because they have something to hide but simply because they don’t enjoy it, or they’re happy staying home, or whatever. The case of the two men was special, but, precisely because they were so isolated, whether or not they knew it was special was open to doubt. If each of them had only the other as a model of normality, one man might have looked at his own giant hands, and at the normal-size hands of his companion, and then at his own feet and the giant feet of the other man. . There was really no way for them to know what the normal proportions were. How could they tell? It’s true that they also had me to consider, and I didn’t have giant hands or feet, but I might just have been a third case. When I had discovered them, many years earlier, they hadn’t tried to hide themselves. Had they made an exception for me? And, if so, why? Why me? Or was it that they didn’t mind being seen, and that the only reason no one else had seen them was that no one else had come? Maybe they’d only accepted me out of necessity or convenience, or because they knew, somehow, that with me their secret would be safe.

In any case, the photos that I didn’t take would not have been used for revelations or publicity. Although I was motivated by a desire for material gain, my aim would have been different.

That aim, to express it in a rough and ready way, was “artistic.” Art, too, could produce material gains, and I wasn’t just thinking about money; the material realm is broader than that. Even if the “earnings” of a work of art are purely spiritual, the concrete nature of the work itself is enduring and effective, and capable of transforming life.

It’s not that I had a clear and worked-out plan, but I felt that I could do something original with the vision they afforded me. Photos and video were out of the question, which left the possibility of drawing. Obviously I wasn’t an artist, and I had no special training. Lacking the slightest talent for the visual arts, I never would have thought to venture into that field (or at least approach its edges) if I hadn’t been led to do so by certain incidental circumstances for which the two men were responsible. So there was a kind of poetic justice in my use of them as models.

By “incidental circumstances” I mean simply the conditions imposed on my life by the work of visiting them daily. The two men came into my life just when it was liable to be thrown off course. I had completed my desultory studies in the humanities and was about to settle on a vocation. That, in a way, was what they provided. I don’t mean that I devoted myself entirely to serving them, and neglected everything else. It might have been like that at the start (for the first few years, that is), but then I managed to confine them to a small compartment of my existence, partly, perhaps, by keeping them secret. And yet, although that compartment was small, it irradiated all the rest; the men were never far from my thoughts. How could they have been? Because of the daily routine, the unavoidable midafternoon appointment, every day without fail, they were always on my mind. The way the visits interrupted the day, and the strangeness of the interruption, its monstrous, almost supernatural character, prevented me from applying myself to other tasks in a concentrated way. I’ve already said how much I had to sacrifice in financial and professional terms. There was also a sacrifice of attention. In my youth I’d sometimes dreamed of pursuing advanced studies, which might have satisfied my taste for scholarship, but I had to give up that idea. As time went by, it became increasingly difficult for me to read a whole book, let alone undertake any serious and focused research.

I found myself reduced to reading magazine articles. But which magazines was I to read? My studies in the humanities had given me an appetite that news and political magazines could never satisfy, but I found the abstraction of academic journals exhausting, and although I went through phases of reading popular science and history magazines, they never really captured my interest. So in the end, the most satisfactory source of intellectual nourishment for me, almost the only source in fact, turned out to be art magazines. What began as a way to pass the time — not chosen but arrived at by elimination — became a kind of need. Reorganizing my meager budget, I took out a number of subscriptions, and rationed my reading so I’d never run out. Beyond a certain point, I didn’t have to worry: since I kept the magazines carefully in boxes, my collection eventually ran to thousands, and the back issues (they didn’t have to be twenty years old: one or two years was enough) became new again for me, given the distracted state of mind in which I read them. Though to call it reading might be a stretch; I really just leafed through them. I’d look at the illustrations, read the beginning of an article, or skim it to see how the author explained or justified the works that were reproduced, then keep flicking. .

This contact with art, though it might seem superficial from what I just said, gradually shaped my interests, my tastes, and even my vision of the world. In fact, a deep connection developed between my practical “job” of going to feed the two men and my amateur interest in the most extreme forms of so-called “contemporary art.” I should make it clear that the magazines I’m talking about were not for antiquarians or historians; they focused on art in its current state, which since the 1970s has been a perpetual search for difference and originality, an endless escalation. From outside, it might have seemed like a meaningless eccentricity contest. But when one entered into the game, the meaning became apparent, and dominated everything else. It was, in fact, a game of meaning, and without meaning, it was nothing. The artists could exhibit whatever they chose: a glass of water with a few dead flies floating in it, old newspapers, a machine, a hairstyle, a diamond; or they could choose not to exhibit anything at all and go running after a car instead, or kill a chicken, or leave a room empty. Freedom was taken to its limits, and beyond. It was easy to criticize, or mock, these new developments in art, so easy that criticism and mockery lost their force and hardly seemed worthwhile. The perplexity and disapproval expressed by the enemies of contemporary art resulted from their way of viewing the work in isolation, taking no account of the history behind it. I sometimes felt rather weary myself, leafing through a new issue of one of the magazines, seeing nothing but photos of rubble, wheelchairs, blurry television screens, messy rooms, expressionless faces, or embalmed animals. But a reading of the texts that accompanied the photos, even a fragmentary and interrupted reading, showed that there was always a justification; sometimes it was disappointing, but sometimes, often (or was I fooling myself?), it struck me as acceptable, intelligent, even dazzling. I had my collection of favorite artists, to which I was always adding. Human creativity, on this set of premises at least, was inexhaustible.

One of the things that appealed to me about this new system, and prevented me from rejecting it out of hand, was that its multiform proliferation did away with the need for traditional talents and their cultivation, which had been seen as the substance of art. It was no longer necessary to be a born artist, or to undergo special training; the days of masters and apprentices, virtuosos and botchers, were over. Anyone could do it; there was only one condition: it had to be something that had never occurred to anyone before. Year after year I was amazed by the ideas that kept occurring to the new artists appearing on the scene. And often, almost always, those ideas were perfectly simple; their only merit was originality. The reaction they elicited was invariably the question: Why didn’t I think of that?

It was this line of reasoning that led me to see the two men, with their strange deformities, as an artistic idea. An idea that might have prompted me to wonder, somewhat ruefully: Why didn’t I think of that? And indeed, never in a thousand years would I have come up with it on my own. But there it was: given to me, to me and nobody else. In practical terms, I might as well have thought of it. In a sense, in every sense, it was typical of the “artworks” that I kept seeing in the magazines, the kind that got noticed at biennales and documentas, the kind that won prizes and were discoursed upon in articles. In a sense, too, I had a right, after all I’d done for that “idea,” to say that “it had occurred to me.” Admittedly, if that had really been the case, if I’d been choosing an idea for an artwork, I would have chosen something else. Morbid and monstrous subjects didn’t appeal to me, although they were fashionable in the art world. But I had to make the best of it, because, left to my own devices, nothing at all would have occurred to me.

At least, nothing that good. Because although the subject wasn’t to my taste, I had to admit that the “idea” was excellent. Two men, one with enormous hands, the other with enormous feet, symmetrical, asymmetrical, inexplicable: they had everything it takes to work as art. No one would believe they really existed; they were too much like the inventions of a mind intoxicated by contemporary art magazines. As to keeping the secret and not betraying the trust that had been placed in me, I could set my mind at rest because labeling something as art dispels all suspicion of reality forever.

But how was I to proceed? The medium didn’t matter, I knew that much. All the medium had to do was record the idea. In these new forms of art, recording and documentation are everything. My initial plan of photographing the men might seem to be at odds with my artistic project. But although they might have thought I was intending to reveal their reality, no one else would have seen it that way. These days, in the art world, thanks to digital editing tools, which are widely accessible, photography is just another medium for documenting fiction. And apart from the fact that it’s used extensively by avant-garde experimenters (though not as much as video), photography would have been ideal for me, mainly because I wouldn’t have had to manipulate the images (I couldn’t have, anyhow, given my technological ignorance), but everyone would think I had, and very well at that.

However, as I said, I had to give up on the idea of taking photos. Which left the perfectly adequate alternative of drawing. A series of drawings, a folio, and maybe a book eventually, with texts to explain or justify the idea — but not too much because the value of the idea depended on its mystery, its inexplicability, its openness to any kind of suggestion. It would be an open series, but not too extensive, twenty drawings at most, enough to show the men in all their positions and from every angle, at rest and in movement. I set only one constraint for myself: both men had to figure in every drawing; there would be no drawing that showed only one of them. That would unify the project, and supply its enigmatic meaning.

But the problem was that I didn’t know how to draw. I’d never learned. Or, granting that everyone knows how to draw (badly, at least), I should say that I’d never actually sat down and done it: I’d never practiced. This wasn’t an insuperable obstacle, because the quality of the draftsmanship wasn’t crucial; the drawing was just a means of documentation, so all I had to do was make sure the viewer understood that it was a picture of two naked men, of normal size and shape, except that one had the feet of a giant sixty feet tall, and the other’s hands were correspondingly huge. It can’t have been that hard. The scene might have been made to be drawn.

It’s easy to say, “All I had to do. .,” but in order to achieve that effect, some effort and a certain degree of skill were required. Especially to make sure that the viewer understood exactly. Because if the drawing was clumsy, as mine would have been, the disproportionately large hands and feet might have come across as just another clumsiness, or a bad imitation of Picasso. And even if the drawing were adequate, there were still dangers: for example, the hugeness of the extremities might have seemed to be an effect of perspective.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. There was a prior difficulty, which I noticed when I started thinking about it in practical terms. I realized that substituting drawing for photography didn’t get me very far. One way or another, you have to draw from life, and just as I couldn’t take photos, I couldn’t pull out pencil and paper and proceed to draw the two men. Or I might have been able to, but I wasn’t planning to try.

Drawing in the absence of the model means working from memory, which would have required me to retain visual detail, and that was a capacity I didn’t possess. Or maybe I did, but unwittingly, because it wasn’t something I’d ever tried to do. So I began to try, without taking any precautions, not suspecting that the trial, even if it never went beyond the planning stage, could alter my relationship with the men. I tried to imprint them on my retinas: their lines, their shapes, their volumes. It was a new way of looking at them: in all those years, those decades, which made up the greater part of my life, I’d never looked at them like that. The difference was that now I was bringing memory into play, anticipating its operation, trying to turn time to my advantage. I’d never done this before. Why would I have bothered, when the one thing I knew for sure was that I’d be seeing them again the next day? Now my presence in the room, and theirs, was charged with memory in the form of an intensely physical, palpable, almost sensual attention. “I’d never looked at them like that.” I wanted to take them away with me, and that intention, though I never came close to realizing it, disturbed me, stirred dark impulses, and left me feeling guilty. It didn’t produce the desired effect. My visual memory, which had never been exercised, wasn’t about to spring into action just because I told it to.

There were other ways of going about it. A drawing without a model was a caricature, a scribble, a diagram. But I didn’t have to use a live model: life drawing was for students, and I wasn’t studying to become a painter. Those jointed dolls that graphic artists use presented the same problem: too didactic. My very specific and pressing requirements could have been satisfied by photographs, or good drawings, of naked men. I could have copied them or used tracing paper (an invaluable crutch for novices like me). I would have been able to find satisfactory specimens in any pornographic magazine; but of course I would never have dared go to a newsstand and buy one, which made me curse my fearfulness, because that would have been the ideal solution. There was another possibility: those drawing manuals with anatomical plates. I could trace the outlines of two men, leaving the hands off one and the feet off the other, and then use a photocopier to magnify the original drawing by a factor of fifty, and trace the hands and feet off that. But what would they think at the copy center if I asked them to blow up drawings of naked men? The best thing would be to make a good tracing of the hands and feet, without bodies, and take that to be enlarged.

All this ingenious and detailed planning got me nowhere. It might have been different if I’d done it at the start. But earlier, when I was planning to draw the men from memory, I’d developed that new way of looking, the gaze with built-in memory, which, although I’d since given up the idea of using it, discouraged me from copying or tracing photographs or drawings, and even from looking for them. There was a vast, yawning gulf between the two approaches. Seeing the men in that new way, I discovered how inexhaustibly rich the form of a body is, and how drastically it is simplified by drawing, which intellectualizes it and turns it into a game. Perhaps if I had gone for a long time without seeing the men, memory would have worked naturally and accomplished the process of simplification. But since I was seeing them anew every day, memory adhered to vision, and was loaded with subjective and objective reality; this enriched it, admittedly, but with a sterile richness, which paralyzed me. My artistic dreams dissolved and left me with nothing.

I don’t know if the men noticed these subtle machinations. I had momentarily taken on the role of hunter and attempted to make them my trophies. It was a short-lived fantasy, soon swallowed up by a broader and darker confirmation of our relationship’s immutability. Though it wasn’t a real relationship, or not what we normally think of as a relationship between human beings. But that only made it more intimate. Again and again I wondered how it had all begun. I had ceased to wonder if it would ever end.

In the course of writing the above and trying to reconstruct my abortive artistic adventure, I realized that its failure was only part of a larger defeat. It wasn’t just that I hadn’t produced my folio or book of drawings; I’d never even tried to draw the men, not even in the sort of idle doodling that you do while chatting on the phone. More than that: I hadn’t even drawn them mentally. It was as if some kind of taboo had been operating. It wouldn’t surprise me: the whole thing seemed to have been placed under the sign of taboo. “Art” had come into in the story more as a means of deep explanation than as an actual project. The men themselves were the “artwork,” such as it was, and they resisted transposition into any medium apart from the harsh reality in which they existed.

If art had been, and was, an unrealizable daydream for me, perhaps it had served to lighten the crushing load of reality waiting for me every day when I had to face that scene in the back room of the house. Which wouldn’t have been all that hard, because there was already something unreal about the scene itself. Yet it was on the side of reality, and probably all the more real for being near the limit. I would have given anything to escape. But I didn’t have anything to give, and I suspected that the limit would follow me: I was myself that blurry line separating the real from the unreal. The flight was within me already, crucifying me.

I don’t think the descriptions I’ve given so far fully convey how desperate I felt. I’m not going to try to remedy that; my means of expression have wasted away under the effects of solitude and secrecy — they’re means of isolation now. I couldn’t even express it to myself. I felt only emptiness as I set off on that route I knew so well, there and back, the mute emptiness so typical of anxiety, an empty feeling that wasn’t opening but closing, enclosing me, forever. I ended up trying not to think at all (which is impossible). I would have liked to be a machine, an automaton; and in a way that’s what I became, at least in part. I brutally repressed all calculations of the time that had passed (the most distressing thing for me). But the calculations performed themselves, using various reference points, the handiest being the ages of my children. I had been visiting the two men in their house since before my children were born (though how long before, I refused to work out), and my children had grown up, they were no longer children, or teenagers, they had turned twenty, then thirty. . I could see the signs of aging in my wife’s face, as she could no doubt in mine. My family, my loved ones, the only ones with whom I could have shared a human destiny, had always been separate from me, leading separate lives. I had lived in the hope that my isolation would come to an end, as a blind man dreams of seeing or a paraplegic longs to walk again. These are not gratuitous comparisons. In some ways, if not in all, I seemed to be a normal man, one of the many who assuage their pervasive ill-being or psychological distress by reminding themselves that they’re healthy, they have money, and that others are worse off. It’s true that I could see and walk. Every day I walked to the house where the two men lived, and I saw them. . The miracle that the blind man and the paraplegic hoped for in vain had been bestowed on me, but only to engender a secret. There was something miraculous about the situation; but it was the worst kind of miracle, the kind that occurs only in real life.

That was what weighed most heavily: the reality of the secret. Not so much its substance as its defiant persistence. That was what I found so mortifying, such an unfair punishment; the secret had given real existence to the most unreal aspect of the world: time. The content of the secret, on the other hand, was not so problematic, because it bordered on hallucination, literature, cinema, and “special effects,” any of which might have provided a justification. It was not a mere coincidence that I had looked for a way out via “art,” whose function would have been to cover reality with a veneer of fantasy, and give me the illusory impression, at least, of having regained control.

But it didn’t work. It backfired. Reality persisted, and the contrast with my artistic daydream made it all the more real and cruel. I began to long for another kind of secret: the kind that is kept in the mind and stops being a secret as soon as it is expressed. Mine was an external fact, with all the willful independence of facts out there in the world. And it wasn’t one of those accidental facts, some fleeting, inoffensive conjunction in time and space. For my benefit and mine alone, it had revoked that temporariness in which the rest of humanity lulled itself to sleep with a beatific smile. I had to go to that room every day and see the men; I had to “believe my eyes,” as novelists used to say in the old days (but the men were saying just the opposite). The golden light coming in through the large window, in mysterious gradations of transparency, was like an oil that made the men’s movements fluid and silent. There was something animal about them; they had the poise and indifference of wild beasts. It seemed as if they could destroy the world from within, at the atomic level, just by being there. . But these are digressions, disconnected ideas, the only kind I ever had when I thought about the two men. Humans have no way to construct the perception of beings like them. That was the source of my solitude, and also, perhaps, of their human inhumanity.

I had intended to scrutinize their faces, in search of an expression, since no one can maintain a perfect neutrality forever. But it was futile. Their faces were irrelevant and inexpressive. They were smooth, regular faces, which seemed to predate the birth of expression, manly but with something feminine or childlike about them, too. They gave the men an archaic, doubly concrete character, making them undeniable. They were a small part of the world, a tiny part, and hidden, but it was a center that moved mountains and seas, all the while remaining a sordid little detail, a regrettable accident that had befallen me.

Yet I couldn’t even be certain that it had befallen me. What happens hasn’t really happened unless it can be told, and the two men didn’t fit into any tellable story. It wasn’t just the need for secrecy, or my shame, that stopped me from telling anyone. There was a kind of obliteration or hollowing in them that made it impossible. The story wasn’t theirs but mine, the story of my failure and helplessness, of something vaguely monstrous slowly growing. In the end, the spiderweb of my lies and miserable stratagems — those flimsy strings of spittle with which I kept provisionally tying one moment to another — solidified, becoming impenetrable, rock-hard. But even rocks wear away with time.

Reason, or logic, the mechanical logic that blindly governs the events of this world, indicated that eventually, at some point, the conditions for my liberation would be fulfilled. There would be no need for a cataclysm or a revolution or a titanic effort of the will: everyday permutations would suffice. Which meant that the conditions could be fulfilled at any moment, perhaps very soon. Perhaps it had happened already, and all I had to do was open my eyes and see it.

But first I would have had to know what I was supposed to be seeing. I had no idea what those conditions might have been; I couldn’t conceive of them, although this shouldn’t have been inherently difficult. Again, as always, it was a matter of “seeing”: that was the key. But seeing wasn’t as simple as keeping your eyes open. A mental operation was involved. Thought had to blaze a path through the dense jungle of the visible. .

And then one day it struck me that the giant feet of one man and the giant hands of the other had begun to shrink. I’d been so distracted or blind that I hadn’t noticed them reverting to almost normal, or completely normal, dimensions. I found the idea strangely confusing. Only time could have provided a confirmation of what was happening, but it was the action of time, precisely, that obliterated the traces, or scrambled them, tying them into a knot. It wasn’t impossible. Every impossibility has a basis in the possible. After all, one of the men had always had normal-size feet, and the other, normal-size hands. This alternation, or distribution, or asymmetrical symmetry, might have been the source of my confusion. There was something in them that had always resisted clarification: for me they had always been an inseparable pair. I mentioned that they tried to avoid being seen singly; so my memory or perception of them (my “idea” of them) was double; but at the same time the difference between the members of the pair could not have been greater. I could only recognize them by means of that difference: one of them was “the one with the feet”; the other, “the one with the hands.” The prodigious enlargement of those extremities was so striking that it made any other characterization impossible or superfluous. So if the monstrous element had disappeared, would I have been able to say which was which, or, more precisely, which had been which? Through all those years, maybe ever since I’d first seen them or (this comes to the same thing) grasped what made them special, I must have been under the unconscious impression that they were a single man. One man in two manifestations. First impressions, of course, are crucial. That’s why I never considered the question of individuality. It wouldn’t arise until the hypothetical moment, on time’s farthest horizon, when the hands of one man and the feet of the other had shrunk to normal dimensions, when both, that is, had the same size feet and hands. In that scenario there was at once a possibility and something impossible.

By transporting myself in imagination to that far horizon of time, I could ask how the change might have come about. In such cases, the question is typically whether it took place in a gradual, continuous, and imperceptible way, or occurred by leaps from one stage to the next, or happened all at once. They say that habit has a blinding effect. The brain, which is always looking for ways to save energy, cancels or dulls the perceptions that are most frequently repeated in everyday life, skipping over them, taking them for granted, the better to concentrate on what’s new, which might be important for survival, whereas familiar features of the environment have been ruled out as potential threats.

The misplaced tact that had always governed my relationship with the two men prevented me from fixing my gaze, in an obvious way at least, on the enormous hands and feet, but I was also inhibited by the very common reluctance (which, in my case, was particularly strong, almost a taboo) to look in detail at anything monstrous, deformed or horrible, for fear it might become an obsession, or prove to be unforgettable (when everything beautiful is forgotten). Perhaps this is a remnant of ancestral superstitions. Attention skirts around whatever might “leave an impression.” To shut my eyes would have been impolite, as well as impractical. Which left me with only one option: peripheral vision.

This might seem a contrived and twisted solution, but it can be exemplified by a situation from everyday life that’s familiar to all of us (or at least to all men): finding yourself face-to-face with a naked man, in the locker room of a gym, for example. You don’t fix your gaze on his genitals, do you? But I should add that what I’m offering as an example, that is, as a rhetorical device to convey my meaning, is actually no such thing. Because it was incontrovertibly the case that the two men were naked, and their genitals exposed.

These associations of ideas might have led me to suspect that the two men got dressed and went out to work, or even that each of them lived with his family, and that the house was their secret place, to which they went in the afternoon, just in time to strip off and be there waiting for me when I arrived. An absurd and impossible fantasy, but it did cross my mind, like so many others. Fantasies I tried, in vain, to use as arms against the mental void into which the hopelessness of my life had cast me. It was enough to make me hate the human race and turn me into a misanthrope, if I wasn’t one already. At certain moments, trapped in the circles of my partial, peripheral vision, I felt a fierce irritation, a stifled, suffocating fury. Why were they enslaving me? What did they need me for? They were younger and stronger than I was, more resolute and free. If they’d been real invalids, they would have aroused pity, and I would have had a good reason for taking care of them. But as they were — athletic, statuesque, proud — what I felt for them, rather than pity, was admiration: in them I saw the beauty of the savage and the terrible.

AUGUST 22, 2007