Insel Read online

  “How could I?” I demurred, “the words are scarcely visible—” Reassured, he gave it back to me.

  “You’ve no idea,” he sighed, “the pains I take when I write to you, forcing my hand to form letters big enough for you to read.”

  “Liebe Herr Insel,” I cajoled, “You read it to me.”

  At last he did so.

  It was a beginning.

  “ ‘My sister and I walked along the road. Coming to the town gate we gave it a good thump.’

  “Do you know what a town gate is?” asked Insel professorially. “It’s like a tower.

  “ ‘All the townsfolk came out of the gate, swarming about us to look.’ ”

  As ever, with Insel “to look” was a deadlock, he had written no more.

  I proffered the necessary compliments. Agog with glee, he shimmered with satisfaction. This communication of an actual transcription of a mental process had reinforced his sociability. His contacts ordinarily depending almost entirely on his Strahlen, for the moment our companionship was complete.

  In reading aloud his manuscript he had formed an extra alliance with me—as littérateurs, producing in Insel an enormous self-respect.

  Nevertheless, it was a sympathization going on in some sphere to which I had no access.

  Anything he perceived sufficiently to accept or that thrust itself upon his attention (as in my case) was instantly distilled in his precious essence. Behind his brow a void wraith, glorified, evaporate, dissociated from its originator, myself, to mix with his gaseous cerebration.

  Insel let out a shrill crow. “Es gibt nicht zwei vie Sie—There are not two like you.”

  Sparkling, entranced, he sat on his wooden chair as on the throne of the conquistador, for whatever I contributed to his transcendental enjoyment he was loath to let me go.

  But I was beginning, myself, to feel unnatural. I distinctly detected my voice in ventriloquial emulation echo the wistful, surf-like swooning singing of his— “Sterben—Man mu-u-uss—Man mu-u-uss”—as, worn out with pain, assuring him I must leave because I was tired, I said, “Ich bin so mü-ü-de.”

  Insel, responding to this bemused inflection, or rather, fusing with an ululation so singularly his own it almost obliterated our duality, I witnessed in him an inconceivable reversion of a standard transmutation. The changing of sadism into love. Not gallant love. The indiscriminate love of a savior.

  Suffering, I had so gratified him, satiating his sadism—even to extinction, his gratitude refluent to me, enveloped me.

  At last with a sacrificial decisiveness Insel consented to let me go. “Ja,” he assented, bending over me in solicitude. “Go,” he stretched out one of his thin branches in benediction, “Go and sleep.” “Schlafen.” His word was drowsy—so long drawn out. It did not cut the air as ordinary words do. Agelessly sailing, it passed across me—oblong and idle—spacious as an airship, its narcotic cargo a dream of a slumber unknown to normal man.

  The rays that Insel so busily had been spinning around himself in an immeasurable tenderness released, attained once more to me.

  Instantly all pain vanished. I sprang up elasticized. To an identical rhythm Insel and I, on a buoyancy, were danced toward the door bobbing and smiling good-bye in a mutual appreciation which I felt must be glittering off me as it did off him.

  When I got to the train it was steaming out of the station; casually I skimmed onto it scarcely noticing this, for me, at other times, impossible achievement—I felt so airy. In the car, whenever I thought of Insel, I was shaken with a helpless laughter—a strange mixture of extreme friendliness and, inexplicably, derision.

  The painless buoyancy lasted well into the night when, as I sat calmly at work in my hotel bedroom, I unexpectedly disintegrated. My body, which had hitherto made upon itself the impression of a compact mass, springing a multiplicity of rifts, changed to a fractional covering I can only compare to the spines of a porcupine; or rather vibrant streamers on which my density in plastic undulation was being carried away—perhaps into infinity. A greater dynamism than my own rushed in to fill the interstices. Looking down at myself I could see my sensation. The life-force blasting me apart instead of holding me together. It set up a harrowing excitement in my brain. An atomic despair—so awful— my confines broke down. I lost contour. Once more I found myself in the “impossible situation” in which one cannot remain—from which there is no issue.

  I cognized this situation as Insel’s. A maddening with desire for a thing I did not know—a thing that, while being the agent of his—my—dematerialization alone could bring him together again. A desire of which one was “dead” and yet still alive—radial starfish underpattern of his life, it had communicated itself to me. I was being impelled to the pitiable serial choreography of Insel when in the closed cab he had chased himself along the incalculable itinerary of his dissolution.

  In a darting anguish consciousness in pulverization peered from the ends of incontrollable antennae for something unattainable.

  I had more space than had Insel in his cab, yet the in-slanting facade of my room under the eaves with the red glow of its wall paper got “in my way.” Having no idea of what was happening to me, I seemed to have also unsuspected reserves of will power. I put up a pretty good fight against this incredible dematerialization—it took me hours to weave myself together—but at last, exhausted yet once more intact, I fell upon my bed and slept.

  Next morning my face looked “destroyed” like Insel’s.

  Although I was all of a piece, my very bones were weak. I had to walk carefully. I found out why, when climbing slowly up the hill to the station to buy a newspaper, I was cleft in half. Like the witch’s cat when cut apart running in opposite directions, suddenly my left leg began to dance off on its own. Thoroughly frightened at this bisectional automatism, I somehow hopped to the fence on my right and clung to it in an absurd discouragement.

  The day after that I thought I was normal. Walking serenely at my habitual pace, I went to a shop in the village before keeping an appointment for lunch.

  Without association (as usual) the idea of Insel rose in my mind. Quite different to thinking about someone. I was overcome with that imbecilic self-satisfied laughter, that Parnassian guffaw. It had nothing to do with any humor known to the intellect; being a sort of blank camouflage for all intellection. With me it was always filtered with a faint derision. But even this derision I took for granted. Brought to a halt under the full force of my mental hilarity, I felt constrained to continue to share if—with what?— with whom? To do so I turned sideways. Whenever this idea of Insel occurred I could not go straight ahead—I had to turn to it—as when I had tried to sum him up on the Boulevard.

  My feet remembered that lightness, that skimming of the pavement—I was engrossed in a merriment beyond existence. When this merriment ceased, I found myself in a part of the country I had never seen before.

  I had kept track of the time to avoid being late— as that gust of laughter caught me it had been twenty to one. I walked into an open yard where a man was washing a car. He informed me it was twenty to one and that it would take me half an hour to get back to the place where by all the laws of possibility I should still have been. He allowed me to telephone my friends, to begin lunch without me, that I had got lost—at the other end of the wire it was twenty to one.

  All this was comparable to an incident that occurred when I made friends with a little girl whose intelligence was like a jewel in a case too tightly closed. A backward child, one of those partial imbeciles, who, not being “all there,” showing only half their human nature, are either angelic or diabolic. Probably their own halves are all they respond to in other people, for Fifi, when she said “Bonjour” with a smile of benediction, would discover, “Madame, you are as sweet as a rose.”— “Monsieur, you are bright as gold.” Her being subnormal lent an elfin prestige to her slow serenity among her associates, offspring of peasants and small tradesmen, who attended the informal court she held in the p
arlor behind her parents’ shop.

  Rigid as bygone queens in her orthopedic corset, she accepted the offering of every conceivable kind of toy duck from her wondering courtiers, with a lunar giggle that never precisely applied to anything. Her passion, her concretion of sublimity, took the form of a duck. “God is playing hide-and-seek,” she would announce, “so the Virgin Mary has married a duck and they live in the top story of the Riviera.” And once when I found her watching some live water fowl by a pond in a farmyard— “Why do you love the duck?” I asked her. “Il dort dans son dos,” she perfectly replied.

  A fearful future opened before her if she could never keep shop, and the medical specialists consulted on her behalf promised she would become like average children should they graft a bit of the bone in her leg as a wedge into her spine, thus rectifying her crookedness and relieving the pain. But this operation, successful they said in many other cases, failed with this half-wit angel, who, incidentally, had predicted the year of her own death.

  So Fifi died most uncomfortably, lying very much like a trussed duck, only on her tummy—her leg being bent up behind her for the grafting and bound to her back—screaming in a nursing home until she had no more breath.

  Only once, in talking to this little girl, had I seen her unhappy. An unhappiness intense as it was brief. A drip of anguished words revealing how she received as an awful animosity her mother’s solicitous efforts to get her to “make sense.”

  While undressing to go to bed that night, as if a flash of sympathetic insight “put me in her place,” I suddenly found myself imprisoned in Fifi’s mind.

  Strangely enough, it was analagous to my sensation of utter helplessness when dislocating my cervical vertebra, I had found myself without any instrument with which to contact the universe.

  But now I was at the mercy of an imperfect instrument. The antennae of the contact with the world in some way crippled for their function seemed—like the umbilical cord in abnormal birth—to be wound round my brain in a fearful constriction, implacable as iron barriers.

  My brain, like a bird in ceaseless hurt, beat its wings for the conscious liberation against a cage—or rather, a sort of immature sieve, which would spring a hole intermittently; here and there letting a glimpse of phenomena through—phenomena fitful and unrelated.

  Caught in a horror of active impotence, I struggled in terror—unlike Fifi, I could get out.

  This gratuitous experience was as nothing to that of disintegration when, on the contrary, one became aware of forces inherent to phenomena, which, being beyond the range of registration by the normal instrument—the conscious organism as it exists in our present stage of evolution—resulted in a super-sensibility so acute it shattered itself to splinters.

  The intuitional self is incapable of surprise, but my everyday self was amazed. I felt that for dabbling in the profane mysteries I had got more than was coming to me.

  Less than anything on earth did I require a face destroyed as Insel’s; for some while I should walk with misgivings—.

  I racked my brain for an explanation of my soaring respect (respect being a sentiment foreign to me) for a loafer who in the light of common sense proved to be actually silly.

  Insel, who, so sensible of his essential mystery—communicated that sense of imminent magic inevitably, just when one was in the “thick” of his influence would illustrate his “power” with a story such as how, after dining with married friends, he had predicted to his wife, “That union will not last long.”

  “Und Tatsächlich,” he concluded with an expression of awe, “they separated within the year.”

  He suffered, it would seem, from the incredible handicap of only being able to mature in the imagination of another. His empty obsession somehow taking form in obsessing the furnished mind of a spectator.

  From a distance one remembered him vaguely as an indulgence in a quaint innocuous vice. Still I could scarcely go further with him than dissolution. I decided it would be useless to see him again.

  My brain still seemed to be vibrating out of time, when early one evening on leaving a library I wandered into an old church. Somebody up in the organ loft was playing Bach. A sublime repetitive patter of angels’ feet soled with assuagement, giving chase to one another in a variable immobility of eternal arrival, they trod my cerebral vibrations from disarray into tempo once more.

  I had not thought of my casual prediction that the whole of Insel’s life would hang upon a key—when on mislaying my own key to my apartment he produced the duplicate I had lent him in the days of his “eviction”— and forgot (the place was still at his disposal) to ask me for it again.

  It was a long while before it occurred to me that his girl’s watch was lying at the jeweler’s. By then, all that remained of Insel was a vague impression of trompe l’oeil. I wrote him to call for this love relic, he having assured me that should I have it sent to his address his concierge would seize it towards arrears in rent.

  Insel, an eroded scarecrow, greeted me with the somber dignity of a dejected god.

  “Why did your girl give you such a rotten watch,” I teased, “the jeweler won’t guarantee it.”

  “One takes what one can get,” said Insel with no trace of emotion as I had handed him the erstwhile “Adam and Eve in primeval embrace.” His present concern was for getting back the key. Determined he should not have it, I pretended I was returning to Paris.

  Lolling on either end of the great couch, supported by our elbows, our feet on the floor, we were at ease for conversation—the conversation would not begin—Insel being taken up with contracting to some intense concentration that gradually pushed out a sort of pallid ethereal moss to cover his ravaged face.

  At last, to my raised eyebrows, “Ah, liebe Frau Jones,” he complained in prayerful peevishness, “it’s not so easy for me—I don’t mean anything to you anymore.”

  “I know,” I said contritely, “I get these wild enthusiasms for things—they don’t last.”

  “And we might have had such a wonderful time together,” he sighed.

  22

  I COULD NOT MAKE OUT WHY THIS FANTASTICALLY beautiful creature should have both hands round my throat, when Insel, shrunken to a nerve, his eyes fixed as blinded granite, sat at that distance with his fists so tightly clenched. Fingers of automatic pressure rapped their tonnage of abstract force on my jugular—the blood on my brain surged in a noisy confusion— “You are going to give in—obsessed by my beauty—having no hope—endlessly resigned—”

  All the air wheezed in my exploding ears as a last breath, “—suffering—suffering—suffering—choked by a robot!” This was not all that suffocated me—myriads upon myriads of distraught women were being strangled in my esophagus.

  I had known exhaustive desperation but no such desperation as this—with its power of a universal conception—of limitless application: being impersonal made it the more overwhelming.

  “You—are—going—to—give—in.”

  “To whom?” I wondered—my eyes closing. “To Insel? Or this incredibly lovely monster made of dead flesh.”

  “Thou art fair my beloved, thou—,” rose from a subconscious abyss.

  Not wholly convinced I wrenched my eyelids apart—my cerebral current, flowing an infinitessimal fraction of a second faster than the normal, registered Insel. I caught him at it. Swift as the leaves of the shutter on a camera when a snapshot is taken, there came together upon his concentric face a distinct enlargement of Colossus’ photograph that always stood on the sitting room mantlepiece at the other end of the flat.

  Simultaneously it came back to me how Insel, on his first visit, had taken that photo between his hands to stare at it inordinately as if for reproduction, for a long time, and at length bringing it nearer to his eyes.

  “Such beauty as this,” he said, “could scarcely happen more than once in a hundred years.” He himself put it at two thousand, I had laughingly observed.

  “Stop it,” I commanded, lettin
g fly a fearful kick at Insel’s brittle shin. As if he were anaesthetized, the kick seemed not to hurt him—he received it with the smile of ultra-intimacy he had for me whenever we met on the unexplored frontiers of consciousness.

  “The pet! The lamb!— it does television, too,” I told myself delightedly.

  “Insel,” I laughed, enthusiastic over him once more.

  “Seien wir uns wieder gut—I give you the key—dinner—My man Godfrey—the loan on your picture—you go to the Balkans—you are the living confirmation of my favorite theories.”

  As for Insel, he emerged from his “raptness” babbling of Colossus—Colossus as he had himself foretold me having taken on an immortality as an evergrowing myth. Insel claimed him as a kindred spirit with ideas identical with his own.

  “How entirely he would have accepted me— my art—We would have been as one—”

  I argued at length against this sudden conviction. “Do you know,” I asked, “who, for the so-called precursor of surrealism, was the supreme painter?— Rubens—” Only then did Insel’s illusions miserably dissolve.

  23

  AFTER THE POWELL FILM, WE INSTINCTIVELY returned to Montparnasse—eating at a chic bar. The barman and Insel behaved as brothers—I vaguely noted a sort of ritual—the passing and repassing between them of half a cigarette. They addressed each other as “du.” “No—for ‘thee’—” Insel would say, placing the stump on a glass shelf as one handles a treasure.

  Some days later I saw this barman out of doors wearing one of the richest overcoats I had seen in Paris. Evidently such acquaintances could hand out “leavings” superior to the plain nourishment Insel acquired from the Quakers.

  We sat around the Dôme and Insel x-rayed. All the girls, as they giggled along the Boulevard, he disrobed—more precisely, he could not see that they were dressed. As if on an expedition for collecting ivory, he handed me their variously molded thighs—weighed them with an indescribable sensitivity of touch.

  “This one,” he assured me, “in the summer is firmer—turns to gold—”