There were two brothers.
The youngest one had but one love. The love of his youth. A lover who went away for a while and came back, and whom he married, thirty years on, so that they could grow old together – so that they could help each other as they faced the approach of death.
The oldest, on his good days, would convince himself that he also had been in love. Was it his fault if this love, and the force of the feelings that grew inside him, had become fragmented, split between a multitude of faces and all too similar bodies? Yet every other day, and every night without a miss, he knew that he had never loved.
And so lived the two brothers, in the same town but on either side of the river: the brother with the fragmented love, the eldest, and his younger brother, the brother with the single love.