Chapter 9

It was not odd, accordingly, that a friendship should spring up between this oddly assorted couple, though there were times when Pareso’s admiration for the other’s physical dimensions filled me with a vague distrust. I thought, at first, that it was a common loneliness, a common solitariness of spirit, that had drawn these two men together. Still later I tried to argue that this affinity was based in some way on the appeal of opposites, since the one was so singularly the complement of the other, the huge Norwegia…