Insel Read online

  “Whose pictures are these?” asked Insel, immediately collected, and staring at each in turn with entire attention. “Who could have done these?”

  “They are mine.”

  “You are an extraordinarily gifted woman,” he said, still staring at them. “Oh, how I wish I could read your book.”

  “It’s not like those pictures,” I laughed and told him their brief history.

  “ ‘Those’ are my ‘last exhibition’ cancelled the moment the dealer set eyes on them.”

  “Good God,” muttered Insel under his breath.

  “I felt, if I were to go back, begin a universe all over again, forget all form I am familiar with, evoking a chaos from which I could draw forth incipient form, that at last the female brain might achieve an act of creation.”

  I did not know this as yet, but the man seated before me holding a photo in his somewhat invalid hand had done this very thing—visualized the mists of chaos curdling into shape. But with a male difference.

  Well, it turned out that the blue paper was a summons for rent involving the evacuation of his studio.

  Insel’s system in such emergency was this:

  Never to pay. To work himself into an individualistic kind of epilepsy whenever served with a summons or notified to appear in court to explain why the money was not forthcoming. Computing illusory accounts to find the exact sum he could promise to pay by a certain date, knowing full well he would not be able to pay anything at all, in order to scare himself into fits awaiting the fatal appointment.

  Now one could watch him following the path of pursuit at an easy canter, having proved he had something definite to flee from.

  His role was helplessness personified. So here he was without a roof. In spite of the ceiling a pitiless rain seemed to be falling upon him already.

  Whenever I have seen poor people asleep on stone seats in the snow, like complementary colors in the eyes, there arise in my mind unused ballrooms and vacationers’ apartments whose central heating warms a swarming absence. To the pure logician this association of ideas might suggest a possible trans-occupation of cubic space, while mere experience will prove that the least of being alive is transacted in space, so much does sheer individuality exceed it; that providing a refuge for a single castaway brings results more catastrophic than a state of siege.

  So I kept saying to myself, “Remember, you don’t care a damn what happens to this thin man.” While what he did was to fill the room with all men who are over-lean. And the room fell open, extending to space—as such—to remind me of my futile superposition of stone benches on ballrooms. My lips opened automatically. “Don’t be fools,” I admonished them. “Keep out of this. You’ll get me into an unnecessary jam.” In the end I must have given in, for I heard myself telling him, to my despair, he could live in my flat when I had gone to the country. “If that’s any help,” I added dubiously. “It solves half my problem,” he thanked me with appreciative warmth.

  The result of this lapse of protective selfishness was days of agony. I had intended to run off to the country at once. But now—I sat looking at that apartment obsessed with the necessity of disencumbering it of personalia. The onus of trying to make up one’s mind where to begin overpowered me.

  The psychic effort of retracting oneself from the creative dimension where one can remain indefinitely—like a conscious rock—immovable—in intellectual transmutation of long since absorbed actualities, while the present actuality is let to go hang—was devastating.

  The contemplation of a bureau whose drawers must be emptied—the idea of some sort of classification of manuscript notes and miscellaneous papers— that in habitual jumble are easily selectable by the remembrance of their subconscious “arrangement,” the effort to concentrate on something in which one takes no interest, which is the major degradation of women, gives pain so acute that, in magnifying a plausible task to an inextricable infinity of deadly detail, the mind disintegrates. The only thing to do is to rush out of the house and forget it all. So disliking to leave one’s work in favor of some practical imperative, in begrudging the time to undertake, one wastes triple the time in being averse to thinking.

  Something would have to be done about it. Fortunately, after more than a week of this paralyzing resistance, I came across a long painting overall. Its amplitude made something click in my brain. I at once became animated with that operative frenzy which succeeds to such periods of unproductive strain. Sewing up its neck and sleeves on the Singer, I obtained a corpse-like sack, and stuffing it full of scribbles I tied it up, and, throwing it into a superfluous room, locked the door on it with a sigh of relief. I was once more myself.

  In the meanwhile Insel had come to take me to see one of his rare paintings in the possession of a friend who was liable to feed him at crucial moments.

  In the taxi I inquired, “Was haben Sie schönes erlebt since I saw you?”

  “I had two negresses at once,” he answered, all aglitter.

  “Two,” I echoed anxiously. “I hope you didn’t have to pay them.”

  “Oh, no,” he assured me.

  “So they liked the look of you,” I teased with friendly disdain.

  “Yes,” he concurred apologetically.

  “And—was it nice?”

  “Well,” he reflected, “I thought it was going to be nice. And now the trouble is to get rid of them. And what have you erlebt?” he commented.

  “Not quite so much—anyhow.”

  I saw the picture. Its various forms, at once embryonic and precocious, being half-evolved and of degenerate purpose, were overgrown with a hair that never grew anywhere else—it was so fine. And when our host had gone out of the room Insel stared at it amazed. His face became rigid with incredulity. “I cannot believe I ever painted anything so wonderful,” he murmured. “How did I do it?” he begged himself to explain.

  When we got out on the street again I walked some paces off parallel to him in order to observe him. Adverse remarks with ordinary men it is politic to keep to oneself, while to withhold one’s comments from Insel would have appeared impolite. His very personality taking the form of a question mark, it would have shown a lack of perspicacity when intentionally confronted with a self-composed conundrum, not to attempt unobserved, the intriguer, underrated.

  Curiosity he constrained to stand off to take his measure, mentality, to pivot him for noting whether there were any creases in his aural suit. As those who are of the body, whom other bodies have traffic with, slap each other on the back, with Insel intercourse depended on putting out feelers among the loose matter of psychologic nebulae.

  “You walk so weirdly,” I said. “Are you one of those surrealists who have taken up black magic?”

  Totally bewildered, he exclaimed, “Whatever is that?” Yet, like all who have to do with any form of magic, he apparently had lost some of his specific gravity.

  He was passing over the light-reflecting pavement in his shabby black as if a rigid crow, although with folded wings should skim.

  “Aera,” I said, “sends dreams across the Atlantic.”

  “He could not,” protested Insel, off his guard. “He has not got the power.”

  There is a way of speaking that word peculiar to those alone who have wielded it—that way was his.

  And he glided on, turning towards me his face hung with deflated muscles one felt could be blown about by the wind.

  “You cannot glide,” it defied me, and I noticed how I was keeping my distance in my effort to “get at him.”

  He had for the moment the stick-fast aloofness of an evil presentiment—the air of a priest of some criminal cult. All the same, this slight impression of criminality he gave off at intervals I did not receive as a direct impress on my own mind, but as a glimpse of a conviction he hid within himself.

  “Aren’t you rather bad?” I laughingly inquired.

  “Everybody imagines I am the devil, and,” he answered forlornly shrugging his shoulders, “there’s no harm
in me at all.”

  When we fell into line once more, he resumed the uniformity of all people making for a cafe.

  I finally gave Insel the key. His mimicry of salvation convinced me my distress, after all, had not been in vain.

  But, oh horror! On arriving at the country, I suddenly seemed to remember the charwoman pouring some Normanol from an antique bottle I had told her to clean into an empty gin bottle. Normanol, being a dissolvent for rhodoid very much stronger than cutex which dissolves the cuticle around the fingernails, I had a shocking vision of Insel’s diaphanous intestines entirely disappearing should he, as would be only natural, mistake it for a graceful token of absentee hospitality—and of myself arraigned for manslaughter.

  “For God’s sake, don’t drink anything out of any kind of bottle in that flat,” I wrote him immediately. “It might kill you.”

  “Dear Mrs. Jones: However do you think I am comporting myself in your home,” Insel answered. “Were there thirty bottles of the finest schnapps I should not touch them. Rest assured you will find your apartment exactly as you left it.”

  He sounded quite comfortably settled. I had also written him to get my charwoman to clean his suit with odorless gasoline at my expense, and inquired how much money he had left.

  “Your suggestion for my suit is most kind—however, I am convinced that it is only on account of the dirt in it that it still holds together.”

  He had, he said, enough money to last him for a “little” week.

  We had agreed that I should come every few days for a dressmaker’s fitting at the further end of the flat where it would not disturb him. When I did go, a bewildered concierge informed me, “Madame, the artist who was to live in your apartment never came.”

  “That only means he has not yet been ‘turned out,’ ” I explained to her, while to myself I reflected, “You will find your apartment exactly … the monkey!”

  I felt that the end of his little week was no longer my concern, and I forgot all about him.

  I would run into Paris for the dressmaker, a tea, a dinner and back to my little hotel in St. Cloud again, until at last the time drew near for exporting pictures—among them were to be included some of Insel’s.

  “Pictures, drawings, three o’clock,” I wired him. At a quarter past, he had not arrived and I went to tea with a friend who hailed me from the courtyard, leaving a note on the door, “Will be back shortly.”

  When I returned the place was different—in the smoothed out air there was a suspicion of a collapse in time. As if by a magnet, I was drawn into the studio and up to the dark oak table. Upon it lay a flat packet. I could have sworn it emitted a faint phosphorescence that advanced from all the rest of the room. The wrapping paper was so strikingly creaseless it looked unusual. It had in some inexplicable manner become precious as ivory; its squareness was instinctively exact as the hexagons of wasps.

  “He has left the drawings,” I supposed, almost reluctantly undoing this magnetic focus of an uncanny precision. But once unfolded, I found it contained only a shabby block of writing paper that had been left lying there and from which I had torn the note I left for him.

  “Did you find anything?” he asked when, later having resuscitated from the moribund state in which he preferred to arrive, he was able to articulate.

  “Yes. What on earth—?”

  “I wrapped it up,” said Insel—an enormous intention fixed in his eyes.

  It was at this moment that, for me, Insel, from a seedy man, dissolved into a strange mirage, the only thing in the world at that time to stir my curiosity.

  On his arrival with the pictures he had appeared the phantom of himself as I had seen him last. He had so weakened, become so transparent.

  Deeply bowed, he clutched his feeble fist in the emptiness where his stomach should have been. From this profound concavity arose a dying whimper of, “Water—aspirine,” as out of the abdominal void rode the unclenching fist—his tremulous fingers, hovering over the bureau, grasped a cigarette.

  “Well, you’re in a nice state,” I taunted him to cover my alarmed compassion. “Why didn’t you write?”

  He gulped his aspirine as if to alleviate a death rattle. “I did write.”

  “Yes, a comic strip. I found my flat exactly as I left it.”

  “I know,” said Insel, gently abashed. “I ought to have told you ‘I am not here.’ ”

  “Even the least of philanthropists,” I laughed, “has sensibilities—I thought I had been intrusive. You see, Insel, any possible gesture in the face of poverty must inevitably be insolent, its very necessity—in not being outs—makes poverty so aloof.”

  “And I thought you were angry because I mentioned money.”

  “I had told you to mention money. But all my sympathy for you was buried under that bunch of cheap flowers I put here to welcome the lonely clochard.”

  “But, after all, I have been here nearly every day,” he almost sobbed, “to look for you. I could never find you. I knew when you had been here for where you trod there lay little fragments of stuff. I could trace your movements by the pins you shed on the floor. Think what it was like—to seek after a woman, a vanishing woman, and in her stead, to find nothing but pins,” he implored. Then brightening, “I picked them all up. Look,” said Insel, hurriedly reversing the lapel of his jacket. On the underside stuck in rows as precise as in packages from the factory, were my dressmaker’s fallen pins. He dropped the lapel into place again as if too long he had bared this precious hoard of his compelling exactitude.

  With an interminable cautiousness Insel had revived. “Ich bin nicht fromm—I am not pious,” he mused, deeply introspective. “And yet how I have prayed, I prayed,” he burst out, a blind agony falling upon his eyes, “I prayed that you would come back!”

  “You seem to have been thinking about me a good deal—hadn’t you any steak?”

  “I never cease thinking of you,” he muttered, as if fearful I should overhear—and aloud, “None,” he answered flatly yet without reproach.

  As mediums on becoming professional, obliged to continuate an intermittent condition, lapse to the most lamentable dupery, Insel would actually plagiarize his innate mediumistic quality of which he appeared to be but partially conscious.

  It would seem unnecessary after the intrinsic wizardry of his simple packet to resort to the untenable mystery of a lie. Yet he did.

  Awestricken, solemn, he recounted to me that while I had, as it were, struck myself off his menu, Mlle Alpha had sent him a card to know how he was getting on.

  “The world is populated with people anxious to know how I am getting on. But when I tell them— the world immediately depopulates! I wrote her in answer, ‘Am starving to death except for a miracle—three o’clock Tuesday afternoon will be the end.’ —And then your telegram! for three o’clock. Today is Tuesday.

  “Of course she did not answer,” he commented, “I had rather thought she might be good for fifty francs. Nobody ever sends one fifty francs,” he ended despondently.

  “Oh, what’s the matter with you, Insel? That girl has more sex appeal than almost anyone in Paris. And all your reaction is that she might be good for fifty francs. I never could interpret, until I saw her, the French, Elle n’a pas froid aux yeux—the Alpha’s eyes are volcanic. All the men are in love with her.”

  “Not I,” he boasted.

  “No-o? I should say that clochards were hardly in her line.”

  “Grade—exactly,” Insel concurred as if relieved of a responsibility.

  Characteristically, after swearing he would ask her for his card as proof of a miraculous coincidence with his usual unconcern in breaking up his plots it was Insel who insisted on my meeting Mlle Alpha whom I knew only slightly.

  5

  “FLEISCH OHNE KNOCHEN,” INSEL ESPECIALLY hollow-voiced begged me when I took him to dine. This insistence on boneless pieces of meat was habitual with him.

  “Do I look any fatter?” he inquired after he had eaten, as
if consulting his doctor.

  I thought it best to reply in the affirmative. As a matter of fact the disquieting thing about Insel was that however much food you sunk in him it no more seemed to amalgamate with him than would a concrete mass with a gaseous compound.

  From now on Insel turned up regularly as soon as my fitting by the dressmaker was over.

  Whenever I let him in he would halt on the threshold drawing the whole of his luminous life up into his smile. It radiated round his face and formed a halo hovering above the rod of his rigid body. He looked like a lamppost alight. Perhaps in that moment before the door opened he recreated himself out of a nothingness into which he must relapse when being alone his magnetism had no one to contact.

  “I’ve brought ‘it,’ ” his illusive grin seemed to be announcing, as if his visible person were a mannequin he operated on occasion. “Make what you can of it—you may wonder if I am sure of its nature myself—let us not be too precise as to what I am.”

  I led him down the corridor, feeling that he, so recently non-existent, was all-surprised at finding himself to be anything at all.

  He shut the door, an act I have heard an authoress describe as so banal it is unfit for publication. But shutting the door, like all automatism we take for granted, is stupendous in its implications.

  As the ancients built temples as isolators for the power of the Almighty, which their ritual focused on the altar, a force so dynamic that officiating priests, having evoked it, were constrained to descend the altar steps backwards without ceasing to face it; for the limitless capacity of the eyes could absorb such power, whereas if the blind back were turned upon it they would receive a shock that flung them to the ground.

  So the shutting of doors is a concentration of our radiations in rectangular containers, to economize the essences of our being we dispense to those with whom we communicate.

  Thus, when Insel shut the door infinitesimal currents ran out of him into the atmosphere as if he were growing a soft invisible fur that, when reciprocal conditions were sufficiently suave, grew longer and longer as the hair of the dead, it is maintained, will leisurely fill a coffin until it seemed with its measured infiltration even to interfere with Time. The mesmeric rhythm of a film slowed down conducted the tempo of thought and sentience in response to his half-petrified tepidity, for he moved within an outer circle of partial decease—a ring of death surrounding him—that reminded one of those magically animated corpses described by William Seabrook. Even before he came into one’s presence, one received a draughty intimation of his frosty approach. He chilled the air, flattened the hour, faded color.