Insel Page 14

  Recalling how terribly Mlle Alpha had said he dated, I presumed he was claiming my interest by indulging in what Boulevardiers of the old days called “undressing the women” in his own unbelievably tangible way. “I don’t need them to take off their clothes,” he remarked.

  In the Select Insel became actually involved with his watching of a red-haired girl he raved of as “die Rothaarige”—her thighs were peculiarly long and agile. “She’s a bit of a Lesbian,” he sighed, filled with some inverted reminiscence of antagonism.

  “Look here, Insel—you’re crazy about that girl— and all you do is sit around x-raying her—Get up— go and speak to her—”

  “She’d be too expensive—”

  “Colossus never had any money.”

  “Colossus was beautiful—”

  “What about it? You’re looking unearthly. She might get a thrill out of it—try—forget the expense— I’ll back you—Go along.”

  But Insel, subsiding in his inexplicable negativism, refused to stir.

  “Listen,” I admonished him, “all this is really unwholesome—and sitting boxed up in an attic adoring that canvas Irma all day—you’ll become impotent—”

  In a burst of the extravagantly sophisticated laughter I had heard him emit once before, “I only wish I could,” he assured me.

  “What a subject,” I reflected, “the virility of the starving man.” But the Select was undergoing change—opening out to aqueous space in darkling shadows of metallic liquidity as in the vision of the Lutetia, that strangely etiolate phallic ghost floated like the stem of a water lily. Before it had terminated in a battlement akin to that of the castle among chessmen; now it was topped with a little crown of thorns.

  Through the chill shimmer of this unreal deep— the hallucinatory blue the Coupole had painted on the backs of dreary houses as a setting for its garden cafe—the blue I would wish the sky to be showed us another dawn.

  “Look.”

  “There should,” said Insel, extremely worried, “be a lighted lamppost there.”

  “There is,” I reassured him, “lower your head—see it was cut off by the blind.”

  This was the last of the two or three nights I spent with Insel in Montparnasse.

  We crossed again to the Dôme to have breakfast. Sitting beside him, I could see a man in white armor conduct a ballet. Serried rows of mustard pots drew up before him, their porcelain bellies burdened with amber. They moved to and fro as with a wooden spatula he lifted off their stale crust of night, filled and leveled them, and set each one down to be armed with a clean bone spoon.

  “Woher kommt diese halbe Mücke?” Insel grumbled, insanely hacking with his knife at a tiny aeronaut shade circling an inviolate orbit, because he could not make out “Where this half a fly comes from.” I knew it was only a baby fly, yet all the same it loomed above him hugely as an insectile cherubim cut off from its entrails in a like unanatomical constipation to Insel’s monsters.

  The rest of the day till two o’clock when Insel, as usual, it seemed must “appear in court,” we spent in an incredibly concentrated and somehow heartrending arithmetic, reckoning up whether Insel, out of the three thousand francs loaned on his picture, could possibly afford a new pair of boots. We had already decided he must have a warm overcoat when, although it was not particularly chilly, little muscles in the side of Insel’s nose, self-animated, leapt up and shivered. “You are freezing,” I discovered in startled concern, scanning his fragile flimsy features.

  “I hardly feel it—I am used to it,” said Insel, dolefully heroic. “It is only discomforting to those who are with me.”

  But I teased him a bit when we said good-bye, alluding to a lunch with the Alpha when to our mutual hilarity we had made out how only two hours after leaving my studio after that utter collapse, he had stumbled into hers.

  “He looked ghastly,” she told me. “He had not eaten, he had not slept—his heart had ceased to beat!”

  Insel, whom I had seen so sly, had been vainly hoping to get his beefsteak fresher.

  “How on earth,” I inquired, “do you compose your Totenkopf in so short a time? Pretending to Mlle Alpha—”

  “Why,” Insel answered pat, with the queerest inflection of intimacy, as if I were some virgin he had raped, “I thought you would not like me to tell her I had been with you.”

  “It’s marvellous,” I assured him in amused admiration, “your knack of dying on doorsteps. At will! At any moment! You might make a good thing out of it. Perhaps you do. Insel, I believe you put lots of money in the bank!”

  I could feel a distinct change in his aural temperature, but I was laughing too much to pay attention. An impression of a sacred stronghold “blowing up,” that shadow-tower of iron rag the clochard-deity Insel had built, like an ant of his wasted tissue, was so very, very faint—In view of America, I was constantly on the hop—busy with buyers of furniture—packers littering the place with straw.

  Arriving for some appointment, I was unprepared to run into an Uneasiness in the vicinity of my home, although it remained closely sealed in its shutters and nothing by day ever went in or came out. Les concierges, their aides and cronies, the grocers at the corner, all were under the apprehension of the place being haunted. Even Bebelle, whom I came across in the street, had, on going there to clean, turned and fled.

  “Madame,” she said in a hushed warning, “in there it is dark at noon. Terrible clothes have clotted on the floor—Never before have I seen what was lying on the bed.”

  Insel at last must have been evicted and at some unknown hour crept into the flat.

  24

  SOMEONE WAS LIVING THERE.

  On my throwing open a window, he hooked his arm round his neck, rubbing the mastoid. “I have lain here for two whole days,” he said, ferocious with dignity. “I have a stiff neck.”

  A hard-eyed, low class German, his very existence an insolence, wearing a shirt from a cheap shop—Insel must have thrown himself away with his old black sweater above which his former face had risen like a worn, pocked moon.

  Unquestionably, I had cured him. Here was the “normal” man. An Insel unobsessed. Someone “replacing himself,” his mesmeric, melodic voice exchanged for a hostile creak.

  This culminating phase of my eerie experience —Insel’s residence—remains confused, as I was busy directing packers.

  Cavilling and bilious, whenever he caught sight of me he hardly refrained from spitting. Our relative positions entirely reversed, I had become for him a strange specimen, to whose slightest gesture he pinned an attention like that of a vindictive psychiatrist.

  “Ha-ha!” he neighed irately, “I find little ‘still life’ in this flat. It would surely be of the greatest interest to Freud.”

  We had, in our “timeless conversation,” with Insel’s concurrence in my “wonderful ideas,” superseded Freud. I must always have known he had never the slightest idea of what I was talking about—yet only now did this fact appear as negatory.

  The still life that intrigued him was a pattern of a “detail” to be strewn about the surface of clear lamp shades. Through equidistant holes punched in a crystalline square, I had carefully urged in extension, a still celluloid coil of the color that Schiaparelli has since called shocking pink. Made to be worn round pigeon’s ankles for identification, I had picked it up in the Bon Marché.

  Out of this harmless even pretty object an ignorant bully had constructed for me, according to his own conceptions, a libido threaded with some viciousness impossible to construe.

  I was astounded.

  It would be only natural that my jerky vibrational currents (which behave so much like a “poltergeist” that things when I touch them are apt to vanish, adding a superhuman difficulty to my work) should impinge on Insel’s abnormal precision with the force of a shock, although in the hallucinatory dimension it was this very extreme of antithesis that must set up the telepathic, televisionary machinery of our reciprocity.

  “What
do you suppose,” hissed my horrid guest, who somehow behaved like an alienated husband, “would happen to me if I were to lose anything?”

  “Oh, I suppose,” I countered rudely, “I’d buy you another.”

  Being the intrinsic complement of Insel’s enmity, logically my loathing for the real man was unconcealed, while he must actually hold himself in check not to assassinate me, for no crueller abhorrence could ever issue from the human heart than Insel’s for me.

  There were brief abatements of his fantastic normality as when on coming up from the telephone I encountered only a creature of pathos in the hall.

  “You would not notice, would you,” wistfully, “that I have polished everything in the flat.”

  “No,” I concurred, “I would not have noticed that.”

  Insel was long in swallowing his disappointment, then cryptically, “Gut,” he snapped, “and I am always amorous when drunk.”

  And again, for fear I might forget the loan, Insel went limp as he had to the air raid siren. That unaccountable bloom he put forth when passing from one condition to another made his features appear to be of crumpled velvet.

  Sitting on a chair of average height, he seemed to have sunk to bottomless depths, at the same time his imploring face peered at me—from the floor.

  Craven to a degree that rendered his cowering august, of that meekness befitting a supplicant at the door of heaven, Insel was knowing an alibi so sublime—I again lost all knowledge of who he was.

  “Here,” I hailed the will-o’-the-wisp, “after all I will give you the little box.” This box he desired, it was black, was a small object by the American surrealist, Joseph Cornell, the delicious head of a girl in slumber afloat with a night light flame on the surface of water in a tumbler, of bits cut from early Ladies’ Journals (technically in pupilage to Max Ernst) in loveliness, unique, in Surrealism— the tidal lines of engraving cooled its static peace. Under the glass lid a slim silver slipper and a silver ball and one of witch’s blue came raining down on the gray somnolence when one lifted it up.

  I should have preferred to keep it myself had I not suddenly realized she belonged in those idle hands to which the unreal Insel intermittently returned.

  I only went twice to the flat while Insel was living there, but I flitted in and out so busily—those hours retain no sequence. As part of his loan I had arranged for a strictly non-negotiable ticket and brought him a first thousand to speed the acquisition of that overcoat.

  Insel was completely cured of his obsession. I have never known any man to catch so many women. He seemed to be somehow barricaded with women. All my indulgence for human misdemeanors (which are so commendable when aesthetically good—such as the stellar combine of Insel and his ebony wives, his ivory eroticism in appraising thighs) was unavailing, confronted with this blatant lubricity of the normal Insel which, as he boasted, although in proper decency of word, seemed as did once an astral Venus to flow in his very veins: The dregs of all the secret gutters that carry off the unavowable residue of popular conceptions of physical life—

  When I arrived with the rest of the loan, anxious to clear him out, my once luminous clochard had composed himself in the kitchen holding his usual insignia, the heel of pumpernickel, this time one in either hand—extreme oval ends—unbitten—of an absent loaf. He looked forbidding as had they been bone.

  “Did you get the overcoat,” I inquired amiably.

  “I may as well tell you,” he snarled, “that I don’t care for all this supervision—I had not the time. You understand—the last nights in Paris,” he raved ecstatically. “Es ist so schön das Leben, wenn mann so leben kann— It is so beautiful living, when one can so live.”

  His emaciation no longer of flesh had become an exteriorized act of the flesh in which the last ooze of the spermatic juices might have been, in some fearful enervation, spent. Instead of being suffused with that liquidity of relief following upon embrace, his eyes, in some ultimate heat, were boiled to the creamy, soiled putrescence of stale oysters in a stew.

  I did not reflect that this enormity of sensuous filth was probably as unreal as his nervous aromatics distilled from his astral collusions with a goddess. It was a mental impossibility to associate these opposite phenomena. Had I recalled the earlier iridescent Insel, it could only have been as a figment of my insanity.

  An alarming presentiment occurred to me. “Insel,” I gasped, “you’ve blown that thousand francs.”

  “What are you?” he sneered venomously, “an inquisitor?”

  “He has notions as to how white women should be handled, too,” I laughed to myself as I hurried down the corridor to the dressmaker.

  I was determined to take conventional leave of a guest who would be gone when I returned to Paris. It would put me to great pains, I supposed, breaking through animosity so unaccountable it left nothing intact but surprise. Still, it was pretty bad if I could not prevent the “epidemic quarrel with me” from spreading to even this lunatic whose essential void I had found so soothing.

  After my fitting I invited him to come down to the cafe, intent on buttering him up, on bluffing him into forgetfulness of having allowed me to discover his awful alter ego (in cases of the sane, this alter ego seldom got to work until out of my sight), curious to see if we could part on good terms.

  As we stood face to face with nothing in common, the last people on earth likely to become acquainted, I saw him force back his loathing, to accept. Our mutual distaste was noxious on the palate. We each had a pressing engagement for dinner.

  I remembered Geronimo taunting me that I was “no psychologist.” “You just walk into a man’s brain, seat yourself comfortably in an armchair to take a look around—afterwards, you write down all you have found there,” he had said. Then what the hell in Insel had I “walked into”? His complaint was true. Nobody saw in him what I saw in him. A kind of consciousness unconscious of its own potency. Even now he was disgusting to the point of revelation.

  Insel had also the idea of bluffing a conformative wind-up to our illusory alliance. Resorting to his earlier priggish decency, once we were in the back of the cafe, he hung his head, apparently poisoning it with spurious shame, and mumbled:—

  “The bad thing about me is that every now and then I come to a blind alley in my life—where somebody has to help me.”

  “Now look here, Insel,” I persuaded him with stimulant hypocrisy, “if it were not for that basic something in you—no help would be forthcoming. That which is valuable one does not help, one responds to a cosmic imperative.”

  He began to look as if he had been overdoing the shame.

  “There was some mention,” I added offhandedly authoritative, “of you busting a thousand francs. You seemed on the defensive. But why? The artist requires color in his life.” This fallacious insight melted Insel’s imitation shame, disclosing the very really wounded face of a child who has long been sulking for being misjudged.

  “You told me,” he burst out unhappily, writhing with reproach, “that I put lots of money in the bank.”

  So that was it. Insel, with his organic magnifications, had become a foul lout, because he was feeling—cross.

  “I didn’t,” I fibbed, striking the suitable note. “I said you hid it under the carpet.” Neither of us had a carpet—we immediately floated off as if on the magical mat of Baghdad, talking on—.

  I could feel any word I was saying fit into Insel’s brain appeasing as a missing piece in a jigsaw puzzle.

  At once—it was growing late—he clamored for me to stay with him; for that period in which alone he seemed to recognize duration—forever.

  Probably I was the collaborative audience to his finest act, the giving off of that calm equation that always reduced me to a hushed respect. He grew in power in his silent “role” in ratio to my reaction. The ultimate self, august in certainty, put forth a soporific bloom that covered his damaged face.

  Only now I remarked that on the emergence of this ultimate self in
its intangible armor of nobility depended that prolongation of time I so often experienced in the company of Insel, for at present there was no aquarium diffusion, none of that virtually giggling attainment to Nirvana. No x-ray excursion nor any fractionation. His medium-ship concentrated in a sole manifestation. This interference with time.

  I could not make out whether the cause was a shift in the relative tempos of a cosmic and microcosmic “pulsation,” whether my instant—the instant of a reductive perceiver—passed through some preponderant magnifier and enlarged, or whether a concept (become gnarled in one’s brain through restriction to the brain’s capacity) unwinding at leisure, was drawing my perception—infinitely soothed—along with it. For again this novel aspect of time seemed, like light, to arrive in rays focusing on the brain at a minimum akin to images on retinas; and the further one projected one’s being to meet it, the broader one found it to be. Anyway, it was useless trying to analyze it. This alone was certain. It was absolutely engrossing to the mind, although nothing brief enough for us to cognize happened in this longer time, which occurred commensurately with the bit of lingering I was wedging in for Insel between contiguous hours in defiance of occupational time.

  Rarely, at intervals of aeons, Insel and I would look up at each other in an utter yet somehow communicative impersonality, the final relationship of distinct similars confronting the same phenomenon.

  25

  INTIMATELY CONFIDENTIAL ONCE MORE, INSEL was trying to disentangle before me the thousand directions. He had shown them to me previously, in answer to my asking him why he did not work although I had left him materials in my studio.

  “So often at dusk I come here to stare at that white canvas,” he had told me dreamingly. “I see all the worlds I could paint upon it. But um Himmels Willen! Which one? I can create everything. Then what thing? A thousand directions are open to me, to take whichever I decide—I cannot decide.”

  I had long ago worn down in contemplation of that multiplicity of direction. How far my mind had traveled; never to come to the beginning of any route. Surely, for Insel it should have been different—starting with the spectral spermatozoa that seeped from his brain through his gardening hands.