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. .