Insel Page 11

  Quite forgetting my determination to slug him—I glowed with the satisfaction of a successful psychiatrist—“I have cured him of his fixed idea—” I congratulated myself—

  Then with his lightning variability of mood, his eyes diluting in a difficult introspection,

  “Outside the Lutetia,” he pondered wonderingly. “That’s funny. I had exactly the same experience.”

  “You couldn’t,” I was about to retort, “it’s not in Kafka,” but checked myself, wishing to keep him on the subject of his radiation.

  “That’s why I adore talking to you—why I cannot allow you to suffer for me. I know too well what suffering is,”—and suddenly he threw up his head. The almost mummified chords of his throat vibrating in an ecstasy.

  “Die Liebe—wie schön—wie sch-ö öö -n—Love— the one beauty of Life.” He gloated with the same singing inflection with which he had been wont to celebrate steak. There is nothing else, he concluded. Evidently he was sane as any man in his therapeutic measures for saving woman from vain regret.

  Without transition his fixed enchantment turned to a staggering stare. “Die Liebe?—It’s the Strahlen!” he hooted across to me in the haunted voice of the obsessed.

  “Insel,” I urged, bewildered, “don’t look like that. Your Strahlen are evidence of something in you—something noble.”

  “So edel—” I trilled in remembrance of my contact with that flawless spirit. But as if leaping out of himself for once to take stock of an Insel I did not know and as if what he saw was horrible, Insel took that clear, that soaring word and wrapping it in bitterness, hurled it at himself.

  “So edel,” he echoed, infinitely disabused.

  “At all events,” I said as a pleasant jolt— “I am going to bring you your suit. You’re going to look so fine.”

  As I passed the table I missed the phosphorescent bone.

  “Hadn’t you a comb?”

  “It’s here,” said Insel—stretching out a skeletal arm toward the floor—there stood his shoes. In one was stored the white comb. The other was stuffed with a huge white handkerchief. They were his wardrobe.

  A warm appreciation stole around my heart for that adorable domesticity of the tramp, which first attracted me, when in my childhood, a clown, taking off his tattered overcoat displayed a wash-hand stand built into the lining.

  At that moment my friend Insel was very dear to me.

  Then in a sudden I realized how always, and inevitably in attempting to follow it, I must run off the track of Insel’s mind—himself unaware that nothing about him could ever stir from a so-mysteriously-appointed place, Insel had retrieved his comb pour se faire une beauté, awaiting my arrival with his breakfast!

  With a kick of tiny annoyance at a toe of his wardrobe, “Personally, I do not admit the power of the microbe, but if you do—I fear you’ll be poisoned,” I warned him.

  Then I gave him his suit.

  When I came in again, Insel was pacing the studio in stealthy meditation. His mischievous assurance was so much his axis and at once so exteriorized that his whole implication seemed to have contracted to the finger of old fashioned comedians pressed to a nose under a crafty eyelid—Insel was feeling so sly— Then, going into reverse—as it was time for him to leave, he began fiddling abstractedly with a gratitude he did not know what to do with. “You have been very good to me,” he mumbled shamefacedly. “There is nothing I would not do for you—if ever,” inspired, “you have a pair of boots which need cleaning.”

  “Insel,” I exclaimed encouragingly, “you needn’t say things like that about yourself.”

  With a jerk he pulled himself out of an underlying complex.

  “That was a figure of speech.” And inclining towards the couch with the bowing, palm-of-the-hand-drooping invitation with which saints in primitive pictures lead the eye to some sacred center, “Now you be ill, and go to bed so I can nurse you,” he pleaded adoringly.

  I had to refuse. As I came to think of it, I wouldn’t know how to be nursed when ill.

  So Insel, as if in prison or barracks, began folding up his sheets and blankets, I took a seat. With the stuff of my cape draping the chair, I felt like an emperor taking pride in a supreme buffoon.

  There is no grace on earth to compare with a willowy man afflicted with levitation.

  “It’s pure selfishness my allowing you to do this. It’s up to Bebelle—only I do so enormously enjoy your plastic geometry,” I observed to Insel, who, as if fitting a label to perfection, swayed his dreary silhouette of aereal bones, against a lifted sheet bleached in the reflection of his phosphorescence.

  “If you want to make a fortune,” I advised him, “you should go on the Music Halls— Have you ever heard of Baggesson—one of the geniuses of the century? He broke white plates.

  “You are even more wonderful folding white things up—”

  “It would be utterly useless,” Insel protested. “Nobody ever sees in me what you see in me—”

  “Well, you frighten the ‘people’ out of their wits, that ought to give you a hold on your audience. Of course, you’d need to rehearse— Have someone sit in the back of the theater and tell you where you get your effects. You should ‘come on’ in the fearful chatter of an earthquake and then all you’d have to do would be to leisurely tidy it up— I assure you you’d have the whole theater hallucinated.”

  When he had stacked up his covers like a deck of cards, there was still one ceremony to perform, I took him into the kitchen and gave him whatever food there was left.

  Under my eyes, as he packed it up, it diminished and froze into a Chinese puzzle. The essential, he said, was a minimum bulk. It did not in the least concern me that it would all be thrown away. His tying of the string was the close of a linear symphony.

  Insel left with a farewell flash from his cranium and his forlorn-howl-in-the-wilderness of when shall I see you again— Then he crept back to the doormat and whispered shyly, “I shall explain everything to you next time.”

  16

  ON MY WAY TO THE STATION I CALLED ON MLLE Alpha. In her slacks of rust colored linen—her coppery hair, blown into a fresh sunburn, she appeared to have just sailed in from a lagoon.

  Her eyes like coals, continent, of their fire, were round as the eyes of the wooden negresses supporting the violet draperies of her day-bed. Her lacquered toenails played at hide-and-seek among the meshes of her sandals. Her whole body was impudent with a slightly crass adolescence; it centered in her little tummy, which dared to be round.

  A hard young apple—it was immediately plain to see, how, had one been on the other side of the fence of sex—one would have wanted to bite into it.

  It was Insel who had sponsored our meeting and I gave her his message—that he would keep an appointment at five o’clock.

  “He’s enthusiastic about you,” she said—then, “Would you think me very indiscreet if I asked you what you find to talk to him about for six hours?”

  “Oh!” I explained loyally, “we exchange our little anecdotes. There’s the girl who went off with the Lesbian—it’s stupendous—to halt the endlessness of drama in the mere contemplation of a couple of shots.”

  “So he tells you that one, too?”

  “Look here,” I confessed. “At first I was indignant with you for launching the opinion that Insel is mad—. Now I am not sure—. It occurs to me that I can’t even make out what sanity is.”

  “Well, I find him such an awful bore, I am constantly having to turn him out—”

  “That’s because he’s too surrealistic for the surrealists.”

  But when Mlle Alpha spoke of his work, it was with a profound veneration I could hardly share.

  “I’m not so fond of elementals—I find that strata in the subliminal thin—. I know his work is a technical miracle and I submit to the active hypnosis with which he has the power to infuse dead paint—still—. There! That’s one thing we’re always talking about. His future work. He shows me what he is going to do
. Sometimes I feel he has found a short cut to consummation in defiance of the concrete. That he is filling the galleries of the increate. He seemed so worth helping, I’ve only just begun to notice he never paints. If he ever does paint the things he sees—God knows where—the result will be spectacular.”

  “Why? Haven’t you heard about Insel?” asked Mlle Alpha. “He and the friend with whom he came to Paris took morphine together and two years ago this friend died. His death gave Insel such a jolt, he dropped the drug, and ever since has painted nothing of any account.

  “Why on earth doesn’t he take his old morphine?” she demanded of the universe in general, “and let himself die? At least he would have painted his pictures—while this way—where is the good in his remaining alive?”

  Now drugs meant nothing to me. I had supposed they were a substitute for imagination in the unimaginative. I was prejudiced against the stories afloat of their awful destructiveness, ascribing them to one of those official dodges for preventing an exasperated humanity from having a little fun. Subconsciously, I waived this information. As if my mind were a jury refusing to be influenced by extraneous evidence. Being thus luckily prevented from putting two and two together, I was free to pursue my investigation of Insel in my own reactive way.

  Moreover, was not Insel’s morphinism a thing of the past?

  17

  BEFORE I LEFT MLLE ALPHA TOLD ME THAT STIFF Ussif, the surrealist, had painted a picture I ought to see. Remembering (that under the influence of his feline screech) I had made no appointment with my strange boon companion, I arranged to go to Ussif’s the following week on my return to town.

  “By the way”— I exclaimed, “I forgot—. When Insel wrote to you—did he predict the day and hour when his resistance must give out—?”

  “Nothing of the kind,” she answered. “He wrote as usual, ‘I am starving to death.’ ”

  When the time came for me to return I arrived to find a telephone message from the dressmaker, who was ill. So I hurried off to do some shopping. Afterwards, on my way to the surealist’s studio, I stopped the taxi at my flat to change my gloves.

  As I ran up the one flight of stairs, I had to slow down. Surprisingly, on this warm day, an iciness was creeping up my ankles. I proceeded into a chill draught.

  “Insel!” I realized.

  There was nobody standing at my front door.

  Although well lit by a staircase window, it was hung with a square curtain of black mist.

  Slowly, this mist put forth an abstract sign of concavity, and still more slowly, a transparent diagram of my friend grew on to it.

  Hunching into materialization, as a dead man who should vomit himself back to life, Insel, whose illness was dissolution, moaned to me in the voice of a wraith.

  “I thought you would never come.”

  When I got him inside, we were already laughing—half apologetically—as if we found it absurd, this meeting in no man’s land without explanations to offer.

  “Why didn’t you say you were coming?”

  “But I thought—surely—” with an anguished grin, “Friday is my ‘little afternoon.’ ”

  “Of course it’s your little afternoon, Insel,” I laughed. “Only when you have turned the lady down is just when you have to specify the hour of your return; if she is to expect you—I’ve got an engagement.”

  “My little afternoon,” he raved, collapsing, “I was going to take you to my room to see my picture.”

  18

  WHAT AM I TO DO WITH YOU? THE TAXI METER IS ticking, the surrealist’s waiting. Pull yourself together—quick! I’ll take you along.

  “However did you get that hole in your trousers, it’s new—” I demanded, detecting, as we got into the taxi, a perfect round of perforation letting out a tiny light from his thigh. I suspected him of replenishing his beggar’s capital.

  “It was there before,” said Insel sanctimoniously, as if referring to a halo earned by excessive martyrdom.

  “You might as well come up and see Ussif with me,” I suggested.

  “No,” said Insel, “none of the surrealists will have anything to do with me. They know only too well, if they did, I should try to borrow money.”

  “I should have thought you’d be worth a little money to a surrealist. He might learn what supereality is about—you are organically surreal—”

  “I don’t do it on purpose,” said Insel dejected.

  “I know you don’t,” I assured him warmly. “You only ‘do’ Kafka on purpose—you’re so much better in the original.”

  I kept my promise of going to his room on my way back. Strangely—the very name of the street he lived in had the sound of a ghostly exhaustion. His attic was on the seventh story.

  Along the narrow open passage with its bare iron railing the Chambres de Bonnes moved past me as I looked for his name on the doors, when, coming to a closed iron shutter fleeced with dust and cobwebs growing in patches like a moss of soot or hanging in gray festoons about its slits, I felt the liveness of the air decrease, and “Insel” written in the archaic hand of some automatic writings drew up my eyes—. To that darkened crack which outlines the magical versatility of a barrier measuring a yard across and with merely the touch of a hand diminishing to a strip three inches wide. That cover of a living book whose history may come to an end before you can get it open; or cut short your personal adventure by remaining shut; out of this oblong outline of Entrance and Exit there leaked a perceptible seepage of Insel’s torpor.

  Noiselessly, indolently, the door vanished. I walked into its chasm and Insel led me to his painting set in the pacific light of a large attic window.

  “Das ist die Irma?” he said with the secretive in-looking twinkle that lit up his eyes with recurrent delights. And suddenly it dawned upon me that one thing about this man that made him so different to other people was that contrary to our outrunning holding-up-the-mirror self-consciousness, his was constantly turning its back on the world and tiptoe with expectancy, peeping inquisitively into its own mischievous eyes. Or, in some cerebral acrobatic recoil, that being who is, in us, both outlooker and window, in him, astonishingly, was craning back to look in at the outlooking window of himself, as if there were something there he might forget, some treasure as to whose existence he wished to remain assured, some lovely illusion inside him, he must re-see to insure its continued projection.

  “Die Irma,” he repeated lovingly to introduce her to me, and the magnetic bond uniting her painted body to his emaciated stature—as if she were of an ectoplasm proceeding from him—was so apparent one felt as if one were surprising an insane liaison at almost too intimate a moment. He was glittering with a pleasure as dynamically compressed as the carbon of a diamond.

  A narrow canvas, nigger-black, whose quality of shining obscurity was the effect of minutely painting in oil on some tempera ground, die Irma stood knee-deep on an easel.

  To her livid brow, rounded like a half-moon, clung a peculiarly clammy algaeic or fungoid substitute for hair. Beneath it a transparent mask of horizontal shadow was penetrated by the eyes of an hypnosis; flat disks of smoked mirror, having the selfsame semblance of looking into and out of oneself as her creator.

  Perhaps in a superfine analysis, this is what all men really do, but as a natural interplay; whereas Insel and his picture were doing it with alternating intent. Indeed the great thin uninscribed coins of her gunmetal pupils, returning his fascinated gaze, were tilted at such an angle as to give a dimly illuminated reflection of an inner and outer darkness.

  Her hands, as if nailed to her hips like crossed swords, jutted out from her body which seemed to be composed of rippling lava that here and there hardened to indentations like holly leaves growing from her sternum—her male hands that hardly made a pair, for the one had the bones of the back marked all of equal length and the other, one finger too long with an unmodeled edge which curved like paper against the background.

  He hung over die Irma like a tall insect and out
side the window in the rotten rose of an asphyxiated sunset the skeleton phallus of the Eiffel Tower reared in the distance as slim as himself.

  Beside the picture I noticed that the gutter of his upper lip was interrupted by a seam, a fine thread of flesh running from the base of the nose to his mouth that accentuated the compression of his lips in their continual retention of the one remaining tooth which, so thin as to be atavistic in an adult, was like a stump forgotten in a croquet ground, left over from the Game of Life. An incipience or reparation of harelip? And Irma? In this very same spot she puffed to a swollen convergence.

  “But Insel,” I asked, “her upper lip is about to burst with some inavowable disease. You have formed her of pus. Her body has already melted.”

  “Exactly,” he answered with mysterious satisfaction.

  “I don’t care for it,” I decided.

  “And I,” said Insel, with the reverent intonement with which he accompanied his tacitly implied admittance of myself to his holy-of-holies, “thought that this picture would be just the one that you would like.”

  Time hovered, suspended in the attic air as the powders of life in the noxious mist of the exhausted city below. When suddenly the soporific lure he sowed in his magnetic field—shattered. Insel was snatching at the emptied flesh on his face in the recurrent anxiety inspiring his wilder gestures.

  “She ought not to be,” he cried out, “if you don’t like her, I am going to destroy her.”

  His cerebral excitement seemed to inflate his head, rather as a balloon from which his wasted body hung in slight levitation.

  “Come down to the floor, for God’s sake,” I said peremptorily. “What does my opinion matter? I’m not the museum.”

  “But you’re right,” he insisted. “I have been going in the wrong direction. Die Irma’s out.”

  “And don’t use me as a sop for your terror of working.”

  “It’s really not that—but a technical question. Die Irma ist nass.”