His huge muscles were attractive to women. Aware of this, Nar always tensed himself as he walked, so his muscles would bulge out noticeably. He never let his arms dangle but instead bent them slightly at the elbows, which thrust forward the musculature of his chest. It also had the effect of raising his shoulders, which, though sloping by nature, looked broad when overgrown with muscles. Constant tensing had become such a habit with him that even in his sleep he occasionally played with his biceps.
At seventeen he moved from a small town to a big city, started college and devoted himself to the study of science with the thoroughness and doggedness of the provincial. But he poured no less energy into athletics. Having once seen a photograph of a famous body builder, Nar was fired with the dream of such a body. Life in the big city supported this dream, and he started working out almost every day. Nar acquired magazines and other body-building literature, and before long the walls of his room were decorated with photographs, not of women’s but of men’s bodies, consisting of hypertrophied clots of muscle, for the cultivation of which had garnered international prizes.
The more his body developed muscles, the more deeply besotted with love for it Nar grew. He especially valued his body for its power to get attention from women. True, this was not always successful. Or rather, practically all women paid some sort of attention to him, but he did not always receive that warm attention that slides so easily into tenderness. Some girls looked sardonically at his jacket bulging with muscles and inquired: “You pad yourself there or something?”
“It’s all real – feel for yourself,” Nar replied seriously.
“Maybe some other time,” said the girls, preferring to take his word for it.
At one of his first student parties a certain curious young woman asked him to let her see his muscles for herself. She led Nar into another room, which was empty, and asked him to strip to the waist. While he was neatly folding his jacket and shirt on a chair, the young woman managed to undress completely, dropping her clothing to the floor, so that when he turned to face her a sight met his eyes that he beheld for the first time in his life.
“What a big chest you have, like a woman’s,” she exclaimed, and kissed him on the nipple. The muscle tensed by reflex, and his chest jumped forward. The girl burst out laughing and kissed him on the lips.
Although his mind was trying to dissociate itself and give the body freedom, Nar managed to connect two circumstances: the girl’s incipient interest in his athletic physique and the pleasure that he had just received. And subsequently Nar observed that the sexual experiments to which he subjected his body followed an unvarying pattern: a woman, enraptured by his body, would offer hers. Once he had discovered this law of nature, Nar tried to make it work for him as often as possible.
Summers he tried to spend on the beach, even when the days were overcast. He strolled along the shore conversing with young women. Sometimes he played volleyball, but Nar’s movements, hampered by his abundance of muscles, were not fast enough, with the result that some of the slimmer players – whom Nar privately called “runners” – played a livelier game than he did. This being the case, once he had struck a few blows to show off the musculature motion, he left the game circle as if disappointed in the skill of the other players.
In winter, Nar looking impressively manly, went out to rub himself with snow and yet to avoid giving anyone the impression that he was cold. He also walked to the river, to a swimming hole used by winter swimmers. With a stony face he plunged through the large hole in the ice and shoved ice floes out of his way. A crowd of spectators, from whom Nar drew ecstatic looks, gathered around him. It was no wonder, therefore, that in winter Nar habitually went around with a cold.
To his supreme regret, however, he was obliged to wear clothing much of the time, and since clothing hid his musculature, he tried to delegate to his clothing that function of getting attention which his body, had it been nude, would have performed. For this reason he selected colors that ran from bright green to orange, and his outfits were festooned with darts, half belts, miniature pockets, borders and similar accouterments. On seeing Nar in his current finery, one of his friends said to him, “You’d be better off going naked, it’d be more decent.”
But whenever anyone told him to his face that he was tastelessly dressed, Nar demanded logical proofs of this assertion, which of course, no one was able to produce, and he felt that he had won the argument.
Occasionally, as he scrutinized his body, Nar was reminded that he would have to die someday, and that all the labors invested in producing such gorgeous muscles would be lost without a trace, together with the muscles themselves. Recoiling in horror from this thought, Nar stuffed it into a dark corner of his consciousness and went on working out. When he walked down the street past display windows, he looked at his reflection and rejoiced that he was still young and had before him a long life with such a handsome and powerful body.
Once he happened to see an advertisement for lessons at a mime studio. Nar enrolled that very day and happily bought himself the mime’s uniform of black tights and leotard. During his first lesson he bent his arm too suddenly and tore his right sleeve along the seam. But one of the female students offered to mend it. When a few days later they wound up in bed, the girl communicated to him her fears of becoming pregnant, and flatly refused to take seriously the contraceptive that he was beginning to slip on with clumsy fingers. As a compromise the girl turned her back to him. At first Nar was shocked, as associations to homosexuality rose to his mind, but then desire got the upper hand and he rid himself of it by accepting her terms. Nar felt that the girl expected some kind of compromise from him, so she might receive that share of sensation which was due her by the laws of nature; but, now that he found himself in a state of contentment, he no longer wanted to think about her, and he fell to admiring his abdominal muscles. The girl gazed with tenderness at Nar’s body, which had served her as an art object, and whose purely aesthetic charm would suffice for just one more rendezvous.
When he had completed about a month’s study of the art of mime, Nar decided to give his friends a demonstration of his progress. He was not too lazy to prepare properly: he changed into his black leotard and announced the title of his act: “Bird of Prey.” Whatever he may have been attempting to portray – bending from the waist and jutting his arms out behind him – more than anything else it resembled an exercise for the oblique muscles of the spine. Several of the spectators expressed the opinion that if this was a bird it was certainly not predatory, but more likely domestic, of the genus “turkey.” And indeed, a certain resemblance to a bird could be observed in the way he strutted, but this came naturally to him without need of any lessons. Of this his gratified audience informed him plainly and without mincing words. After this debut Nar discontinued his lessons at the mime studio.
Nar’s ever-growing love for his own body continually provoked in his acquaintances a desire to tease him, and Nar accepted this stoically. But many people were simply exasperated by him, and when, as sometimes happened, they spoke to him rudely, he tried to “clear up any misunderstanding.” Instead of replying in kind or ceasing to associate with the man who had thus insulted him, he would cry out in honest astonishment: “Look, what have I done to you?” – at which they simply gave up on him and walked away.
On occasions when a fight was brewing from an already insupportable mass of insult, Nar would puff out his muscles and glint his eyes in the direction of the offender, by which means he would manage to frighten his adversary and induce him to make conciliatory gestures, which Nar always accepted eagerly.
Once, as he was walking along the street with a woman, a passerby shoved him. Nar grabbed him by the sleeve and demanded an apology. The man obediently paused, as if trying to decide whether or not to apologize, and then suddenly struck Nar in the face. Nar lost consciousness for a second, but remained in his feet. Returning to himself, he saw that the fellow was running, and rapidly getting away. Nar took off after him, but quickly realized that he would never catch him – Nar was a slow runner, and this character had already vanished from view. Since there was no blood, and the pain passed quickly, Nar gave up and returned to the girl, who was crying with fright. That evening the girl was extremely affectionate, and Nar loudly vituperated the “scoundrel” as he attentively studied his undamaged face in the tiny mirror of her compact.
When