The Musical Brain: And Other Stories (23 page)

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.