That was alclass="underline" 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.