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 wilclass="underline" 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.