Insel Read online

“She isn’t, she’s bone dry. I felt her.”

  “I assure you, underneath—”

  “Every time I’ve come to Paris you’ve said the same thing. Pull yourself together Insel, you’ve got to finish this for the museum. For you it’s work or death. Can’t you figure it out?” I urged helpfully— “When you have money and can eat you paint a picture so as to have more money— when you haven’t any more money.”

  “It’s more complicated than that,” he objected again, “die Irma is wet—”

  I was getting exasperated— When the balls of our eyes caught each other, we both began to laugh.

  “If you had heard the Lesbian’s synopsis of Frank Harris’s confessions, you wouldn’t even trouble to mention it—.”

  “I shouldn’t care to read this Lesbian’s confessions—it is a Lesbian who has taken the love of my life away from me.”

  “Well now, I wouldn’t mention that either. Of course, it does not matter with me—anybody can tell me anything— you know what I mean—when you surrender your arms, chuck them onto neutral territory. I know it’s a touch that modernizes your romanticism; all the same, I’d advise you never to make that particular confidence to a woman ‘ou connait ça.’ ”

  But Insel was past advice. With a look of dogged emptiness he recited for the nth time the story of those Mädchen “who shut themselves into the house for a fortnight for fear he would shoot them.”

  Mostly when speaking of his loves of the past he became quite normal; subnormal really, for his adventures in the actual world had been of an excruciating banality.

  As I was also engaged for dinner, I asked the time. Insel who was sitting on a wooden stool stretched out his arm—it reached much further than its actual length would warrant.

  Behind the curtain in the corner, carefully secreted under empty boxes, neatly stacked, was his wristwatch. He did not bring it out—his arm seemed in some Einsteinian contraction to shorten the necessary distance for focusing the hands.

  It was seven o’clock. I took my leave. Insel, astonished as if this were the first break in a timeless conversation, snapped in half; or at least bowed like a poplar in a sudden gale; his dessicated limbs the branches.

  Staring vainly towards the door I was opening—he choked in the voice of a Robot, “Morgen komm ich im Gericht. Tomorrow I go to court—I am going mad!”

  “Then don’t forget your little afternoon,” I reminded him— “I dote on madmen.”

  As I was leaving, he seized his palette and dripping an enormous brush into a pile of ebony pigment painted with a heinous neigh of victory, “Die Irma—Out!”

  19

  MY INTERMITTENT INTRUSTIONS ON INSEL’S inexplicable Eden of mischief had set their mark upon me. Some of his secretive twinkle had seeped into my eyes and lingered there, eliciting comments from my friends. I became more popular.

  Insel, however, did not like it at all—as if I were a thief, a stark sternness shot with flashes of sadism replaced his usual intonations of abased tenderness while, awkwardly enough, I continued to feel myself elfin.

  One day when I had returned from a lunch he came in to fetch his “Kafka.” I had a good time and prattled to him sociably, “Alceste—the duchess— everyone was intrigued to know why I am so jolly.”

  “So lustig,” Insel hissed—a maniac sadism flaring up in his eyes, and for the first time I saw him as dangerous. “So lustig,” his hiss growing shriller and I could feel his hatred twining round my throat as he took a step towards me. But a step no longer the airy step of the hallucinated—it was the pounding tread of the infuriated male. “Lustig,” he squeaked, his hiss exhausted.

  He approached no nearer. Probably my absorbed interest in examining his insane pupils dominated him. Anyway, although it now surprises me—it seemed I could not be afraid of him—our “entente” in the visionary lethargy of that primeval chaos we were able to share was fundamental and secure. Confronted with his surface vagaries, I felt at once collected—as if I might have been his “keeper” since the dawn of creation.

  “Insel,” I said placatingly, “if it would improve your health were I to suffer a hopeless love for you, I’m quite willing. Not today—I have a cocktail party—but some other time, I promise” (thinking of my bouts with the grand sympathique), “—you shall see me suffer horridly.”

  Insel, unconvinced, let out a low growl which sounded like one more lustig—while that strange bloom, as if he were growing feathers, spread over his face. He turned into a sugar dove. It flew about the sitting room, dropping from under its wings a three-ring circus. In one ring echoed the cracks of a whip; in one ring rotated an insane steed of mist; and in the other ring Insel’s spirit astride an elemental Pegasus—.

  “Horror,” said Insel and I jumped. “Would I have to grow a beard in order to make myself attractive to you?”

  The grand sympathique (which eventually turned out to be a duodenal ulcer) must inevitably go on the rampage again. Very soon it did. There was no resource to Insel’s healing Strahlen. Since his screech of a vanquishing cat he had, as far as I was concerned, subconsciously thrown them into reverse.

  For a while I was helpless; then one day when the pain calmed down somewhat, I crawled up to Insel’s—still trusting he would finish die Irma for America—to give him a hundred francs. That is, I never gave him anything. I am not generous. The few billets necessary to keep him going were fully covered by the valuable drawing he had forced me to accept. It would be easy to sell if I needed the money.

  It did not occur yet to me how unsuccessfully I had succored him, for when first I met him he had been merely a surrealist—his biography was coherent—steadily since I had “interfered” in his affairs he had grown hallucinatory.

  “It’s all very well,” Frau Feirlein argued with me, “I was here when you advanced him five hundred francs for the Gallery—the very next day he hadn’t a sou.”

  To me it appeared fitting Insel’s finances should flicker in and out like himself. For the present no power on earth could dislodge from my mind that luminous effigy of generic hunger—or shake my serene unquestioning insistence on its preservation. Something unknowable had entered into a game with my intuition.

  He let me in and returned straight to his needy couch, teetering on the end of his spine in a double triangle as he drew up his knees to replace his feet under cover. I was overcome by a rush of nervous sublimity carried by the air.

  “If this is madness,” I said to myself, breathing his atmosphere exquisite almost to sanctification, “madness is something very beautiful.”

  My relinquished conviction of his unutterable value returned as I looked up in the bare swept room. An especial clarity of the light I had noticed before to be associated with his presence was this evening so accentuated I could actually dissect it. Its softly bedazzling quality was not of any extra brightness, but of a penetrant purity that uplifted my eyes. I could discern among the unified flood of customary light an infiltration of rays as a rule imperceptible, filaments infinitessimally finer than the gossamer halo round a lamp in the fog—a white candescence that made the air look shinier, with the same soothing shimmer as candles at mass in sacred houses, only indescribably acute.

  I was not unfamiliar with it. That different light I had seen etherealize the heavy features of Signora Machiabene an hour before she was stricken to death. That very essence of light I had begun to perceive during the prolonged moment when a dislocated vertebra had thrown me beyond the circumscription of bodily life.

  There is no saying in what bliss consists, yet I could see it incorporated with Insel’s face, bathed in that different light, as he lay under his only blanket, his limp hands clasped behind his head.

  “I see through the wall,” he said, his voice at peace. “I can lie here hour-long watching my neighbors live their dear little lives. Sometimes they play a gramophone and on its way to me the music has become miraculous.”

  “You have never known ennui,” I laughed, forgetting as completel
y as he evidently had, if indeed he had ever been conscious of, the tortured glowworm of the Boulevard night, the inarticulate confidences of one cut off from mankind; the sleepless seeker after an unmentionable salvation who, blinded by his own unnatural glitter, was so wounded by the dawn; that distracted man who, terrified of isolation, hung onto my hand while he flopped and darted like a fish on the end of a line, stung by a mystifying despair.

  “Never,” he assented, beatified. “I am eternally content. My happiness is infinite. All the desires of the earth are consummated within myself.”

  “Aside from that—what are the people in the next room doing?”

  “Just being—I ask no more of anyone. Being in itself is sufficient for us all,” he answered enraptured.

  Seeing I had taken up one of his drawings, he instantly arose. Always—there was something of the depths of the sea about him and his work, also of eventual evolution as in the drawing I was looking at where to a rock of lava a pale subaqueous weed clung in the process of becoming a small limp hand. The tips of its fingers were stealing into pink.

  Insel himself had fearsome hands, narrow, and pallid like his face, with a hard, square ossification towards the base of the back, and then so tapering as if compressed in driving an instrument against some great resistance.

  “You were a lithographer, not an engraver?” I had once asked him, puzzled by what his hands looked as if they must have been in the habit of doing, and we concluded this conformation could be an inheritance from the Schlosser’s driving power. But out of this atavistic base his fingers grew into the new sensibility of a younger generation, in his case excessive; his fingers clung together like a kind of pulpoid antennae, seemingly inert in their superfine sensibility, being aquiver with such minuscule vibrations they scarcely needed to move—fingers almost alarmingly fresh and pink for extremities of that bloodless carcass, the idle digits of some pampered daughter; and their fresh tips huddled together in collective instinct to more and more microscopically focus his infinitesimal touch. All the same, there was something unpleasantly embryonic about them. I had never seen anything that gave this impression of the cruel difficulty of coming apart since, in my babyhood, I had watched the freak in Bamum’s circus unjoin the ominous limpness of the legs of his undeveloped twin.

  “Let’s have a look at your feet,” I said as he came weightlessly towards me. He drew off his slippers, padding over the bare boards on the drained Gothic feet of a dying ivory Christ.

  “What’s this?” I teased, pointing to a lurid patch on his instep, “a chancre?”

  “No, it’s only where my shoe rubs me. I bought new shoes when I sold that picture and they hurt me,” he explained, frowning helplessly.

  “Why not try pouring water into them and wearing them till they ‘adapt’? It often works.”

  A strange bruise. It shone with the eerie azure of a neon light. But once within range of Insel, nothing seemed unaccountable, as though he submitted to an unknown law enforcing itself through him. Each item of his furnishing, he having touched it, had undergone the precious transformation of the packet he had folded in my home. His hand, in passing over them, must have caused their simple structure to obtrude upon the sight in advance of their banal identity.

  A row of powdered-soap cartons, set upon a shelf, he had stood up to the significant erectness of sentinels, their impressive uniforms consisting in the sufficiency of their sheer sides. He showed me they were empty. Altogether his place had an uncommon dignity. Within a stockade of right angles he had domesticated the steady spirit of geometry.

  The room, with its two tiny matchboard tables, its curtains of washed-out cotton across an alcove, full of its supplementary radiance, had an air of illogical grandeur beyond commercial price.

  20

  EVERY NOW AND THEN THE SHARP OF HIS FLICKERING sadism, a needle occasionally picking up the dropped thread of memory, would prick through his frayed conversation, woven of disjointed themes like an inconsistent lace eked out with stocking darnings.

  He recalled my promise—to demonstrate unfortunate love whenever a twinge of pain contracted my features. He peered enthralled at the havoc pain played with me. His delirious peace expanded to full blossom in the smile of Buddha. One felt his utter joy at sight of my disablement had leapt to such a blaze he must melt off it, his fragile person dissolve in his delight, were it not for some mysterious source within him replenishing the exaggeration of his unabating intensity.

  “Gestatten Sie?” I inquired ceremoniously, unable to hold out any longer against the pathological rat gnawing at my entrails. And I subsided on his couch. Above a certain degree of agony, one is willing to subside anywhere. However, my slight repulsion dispersed as I lay down. Indeed, like the saints whose dead bodies did not decompose, Insel’s electric exudation in some process of infinitesimal friction seemed to cleanse him of his grubbiness of the poor, to free him of any accretion natural to normal man. His couch was almost fragrant with that faint half-holy purity that hung about him.

  “What color was this once?” I asked, as I drew up his gray blanket.

  “White,” said Insel.

  It was incredible. That twilight sheer duration lowers upon all pale fabrics had so penetrated the thick wool, one could only believe with difficulty it had not been dyed—a perfect job at that—no spot, no smirch, no variation in tone disturbed the unity of its spread surface. For a moment I entertained the idea that Insel had worked all over it with the microscopic point of his lead pencil, for it seemed no earthly dust could defer to such patient order. Anyhow, I decided everything in the place is bewitched, and let it go at that.

  Insel, intently keeping watch, had moved his stool some distance away as if to find his range for an inverted “Aim of Withdrawal.” Spinning himself into a shimmering cocoon of his magnetic rays, introvert, incomparably aloof, “They’re mine,” he exulted as clearly as if he were crying aloud.

  Too simple to fully imagine the effect of these rays, he had, it would seem, only an instinctive mesmeric use for them. He might even feel them as a sort of bodily loss compensated perhaps by rare encounters with one able to tune in.

  “I shall make you some tea,” said Insel affectionately, and hushed as a nurse, he began swimming about from his little sink to his wooden shelf—or as a panther softly pacing before a vanquished prey—. I noticed now, as always, whenever one encountered Insel at an angle of meals at home, there was appropriately just enough dust of tea leaves left at the bottom of a packet for brewing the last cup—he would open the door to you holding precisely the fag end of a loaf for the last bite. But today he served a minute carton from an automatic machine in the Metro. Out of it he rolled into my palm a bonbon, virulent green, less than a pea in size.

  “Aren’t you having any?” I invited, convivial as a gourmet, for in his dimension this was a spread feast and the hot unsavory tea had eased my pain. The very teenyness of his sweetstuff made it more seductive than a giant Christmas cake. But he shook his head impishly in abnegation. I looked inside the carton. There was nothing left.

  In the concentrated one-sided luxuriance of our party he evoked his dazzling future—the work he no longer seemed able to do waxed so sublime in his visions (and also in mine as I watched all possible loveliness evolve from his elemental mists, and the creeping to maturity of the almost invisible herbage left from under the withdrawn tide of his hovering waves).

  His fame was to be fabulous, his wealth extravagant—so that at last the great Insel would (with a gleam of furtive cruelty for me) marry, as far as I could make out, so increasingly incorporeal he grew in his grand exaltation, my daughter’s photograph.

  “That will be really nice,” I responded genially. “As I come to think of it a son-in-law—.”

  “Exactly,” he burst out wildly. “You and I, we could have such a wonderful time together.”

  “—a son-in-law with rays—” I brought up short, “—and what would my daughter be doing?” Then hurriedly, thinking to pr
ofit him by the occasion, I urged, “You must paint those pictures—otherwise, you will grow to be too old to marry her.”

  “Ah, well,” he waived, with that sudden doleful look he had of gazing into an abyss when confronted with whatever imperative of whatever consummation. “No matter! It would suffice me just to know her, to have the joy of watching her evolve. It would be a very wonderful thing indeed to take part in the Entwicklung of a young creature.” And I realized there was nothing, nothing, in all the world elementary enough to serve as object for such simplified observation as his. Everything must henceforth for him drowse in an impotence of arrested development.

  This very word, Entwicklung, was so much Insel’s word; its sound seemed to me onomatopoeic of his intellectual graph. For my alien ear it had a turn of the ridiculous as though a vast process had got twisted in a knot of tiny twigs, haply to unravel and root, and branch against the heavens.

  21

  I REMEMBERED THOSE STACKS OF MANUSCRIPT HE had assured me were at my disposal in the days of “biography.” “You promised to show me your notes,” I reminded him. “May I not see them now?”

  He was coy about his literature, sidling alongside himself in a sort of dual fidget impossible to describe, as if doing sentry duty before his own secrecy.

  After a long persuasion he brought out a blotter, the kind for écoliers sold in bazaars. Covered in black, stamped with a golden sailing ship, its funereal hue intended for neutralizing ink drops in a kindergarten, this unassuming blotter, the one thing in the place having any tradition, had a decorative air of intruding from a frivolous society. It contained a single sheet of paper which he handed me with great precaution. Very few lines were written upon it. They formed a square block in the center of the page covering little more than the area of a postage stamp.

  Hardly had I caught a glimpse, when, “Can you see it?” he inquired suspiciously and snatched it away.