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.