Insel Read online

  As night drew out—it got draftier and draftier— we removed, as if receding into a lair, from the terrace to further and further inside the cafe, from the open to the enclosed—each time ordering a new consommation from a different waiter—till we reached an inaereate core of the establishment. Here we inexplicably came upon that friend whose hypothetic non-existence insured Insel’s vaunted isolation. One after another the same Germanic wag would shuffle up to our table, each time wearing a different face.

  One—projected that declamatory arm which in a certain condition present at the time falls with a forgetful plop before completing an indication. “Who is Insel,” it challenged, “to monopolize this perfectly fascinating woman?”

  Another—equally appreciative until he discovered the hair in the shadow of my hat to be undeniably white—apologized with a shudder, “I won’t say it doesn’t look all right on you—but I can’t bear the sight. It reminds me that I am old.” He looked less old than Insel— He was one of the many unfortunates who have had nothing to “give off” but the bubbles of adolescence, whereas Insel’s rattling pelvis was trotting the leather seat in the sitting leaps of an exuberant child.

  “They are so surprised,” he chortled repeatedly. “They are accustomed to seeing me all alone—.”

  I ordered supper—got cigarettes at the counter and dumped them on our table on my way downstairs to buy some rouge (probably on a cue my subconscious had taken from my critic). When I returned it looked as if the empty space in our quiet comer had come alive, the leather padding had broken out in a parasitic formation, a double starfish whose radial extremities projected and retracted rapidly at dynamic angles.

  It was Insel all cluttered up with his “private life.” Draped with the bodies of two negresses, spiked with their limbs. They seemed, out of ambush, to have fallen upon him from over the back of the high seat. The waiter had laid a startling oblong of white cloth which knocked the milling muddle of polished black arms and faces round Insel’s pallor into a factitious distance, although he and his mates were actually attached to my supper table.

  The group being occupied it was difficult to know how to greet them. I swept an inclusive smile of welcome across them as I sat down and the waiter brought the food.

  As I watched this virtually prohibited conjunction with a race whose ostracism “debunks” humanity’s ostensible belief in its soul, I scarcely heard the scandalous din they were making; these negresses, with their fingers of twig, were tearing at some object—my scarlet packet of “High-Life”!— rapidly becoming invisible under Insel’s touch—he clung to it with such constrictive tenacity, he might have been squeezing an atom.

  “Maquereau!” “Salaud!” shrieked the dark ladies to stress their pandemonium accounting of benefits bestowed.

  “Insel,” I addressed him authoritatively, not dreaming “pimp” and “skunk” were almost the only French words familiar to the poor dear, “if you could understand what they are calling you—you’d let go!”

  Once more fallen sideways off himself like his own dead leaf in one of those unexpected carvings into profile; a zigzag profile of a jumping jack cut out of paper from an exercise book; shrunken to a strip of introvert concentration blind as a nerve among the women’s volume, clenching his gums in a fearful sort of constipated fervor, as if hammering on an anvil, Insel thumped his closest negress with an immature fist. Every thump drove in my impression—as this black and white flesh glanced off one another—of their being totally unwed—that Insel, whom I often called “Ameise” who was even now like an “ant,” occupied with his problem of a load in another dimension, could never have worked on those polished bodies than with the microscopic function of a termite—unseeing, unknowing of all save an imperative to adhere—to never let go. He clung to my cigarettes conscious of nothing but his comic “tic.”

  There were onlookers peering under the brass rail topping the back-to-back upholstery—three heads left over from the crowded hours. One, the sharp mask of a Jew worn to a rudder with centuries of steering through hostile masses, lowered its pale eyelashes on the neighbors’ insurrection as if closing a shop.

  I paid the waiter, bought some more cigarettes, jumped into a taxi, undressed and went to bed, all with the delicious composure Insel instilled—not questioning the continuity of this “elevation of the pure in heart” even while he in whom it originated was being slapped by inexpensive harlots on their way home from work.

  I was falling into blissful sleep when a hopeless S.O.S. vibrated on the air—an S.O.S. that sounded like a sobbing “sterben.” I started up in horror of my selfishness. What could I have been thinking of to leave that delicate soul to his longing for suicide on the contemptible grounds that I was sick of the racket he had been causing.

  What would he do, on emerging from a dimension where a packet of ten cigarettes encompassed a universe, to find that I, his very means of expression, had deserted him. With an aereal ease I must have “caught” from Insel, I threw on my clothes and more or less floating into the street together with the presage of dawn, the hoses of the street cleaners slushing my ankles, hounded by my ever growing obsession that Insel held a treasure to be saved at all costs. Damp and heroic I arrived at the Dôme. The piebald mix-up had disappeared.

  “What happened to that skeleton I had with me an hour ago?” I asked the majordomo. “He got into a tangle with some negresses— Was he all right?”

  “Oh, perfectly,” he protested as if within his reach nothing could possibly go wrong. “You see, madame,” confidentially, “the fellow lives off these women of the Dôme; there’s bound to be a scrap every now and then!”

  10

  “—ONE WHO HAS GREATLY SUFFERED,” I WAS astounded to hear myself telling the man—like a nice old maid with illusions—in precisely the somber tones of Insel’s “patroness drive.” Equally astounded, he shrugged his shoulders.

  “You’ll find him in one of the little bars round here—he won’t be far, madame.”

  I knew better. I had my own vision of him—it was the rustiness of that nail that haunted me. Or would I reach his attic only after an ebony vampire had sucked the last drop of blood from his corrupted carcass?

  Nevertheless, on my swift passage I caught sidelong sight of Insel standing disproportionately at the end of a row of little men before a “zinc,” his head, appearing enormous, shone with a muted gleam.

  Without stopping I raised my hand. Insel, although he had his back to me, rushed into the street—he seemed to be continuing to run around.

  In his gesture I could see a conclusion of distressful searching in which he had circled during my absence—beating his breast. “Warum, warum, ist diese frau davon gegangen?—Why did this woman go away? I have not ceased to ask myself.” Insel complained again and again in miserable bewilderment. “You went away— Why did you go away?”

  “Only to fetch something I left at the other café.”

  Tenderly confidential he bent his neck—a gnarl in a stricken tree—I was about to learn what urgent anxiety had drawn me out of bed.

  “There was a waiter,” he whispered hoarsely into my hat, “who wouldn’t let me out of the Dôme until I had paid for two cafés fines.” (They had forgotten to include them when I paid for the supper.) “It isn’t that I want you to pay me back,” he protested with his so distinguished courtesy—.”

  I always had to order the same drinks for myself as for Insel, or he would not have taken anything— but I made him drink my fine. It would, I felt, have superfluous results were I to even sip alcohol in the company of this weirdly intoxicating creature. At the same time in accordance with my mission as a lifesaver, I begged him to take café au lait—which roused a piteous opposition.

  As if wound up he went on beating a mea culpa on his absent breast.

  I caught him by the arm.

  Instantaneously he displaced to a distance. I was left with my own arm articulated at a right angle, holding in my hand a few inches of gray bone. It had c
ome away with a bit of his sleeve, acutely decorated with the jagged edge of torn black cloth. At the same time, Insel laying his hand on my shoulder, the rag and the bone did a “fade-out.”

  “Promise me to stay here,” he whispered, “while I go to the bar. These people would not like it if I did not pay.”

  Insel, who seemed to remember our pact, wanted to go back to the Dôme. But I refused.

  “It’s time for you to sleep,” I commanded. That persistent teeter in my mind which was always tipping Insel up in a stiff horizontal straight line, his immovable eyes glued to infinity, was laying him out in state on no bed under an awesome canopy of poverty.

  “No,” I decided, “I shall put you back in your box—my pet clochard is going to lie in a row—under a bridge.”

  11

  WE WANDERED OFF IN SEARCH OF THE SEINE— IT was dawn.

  Perhaps this showcase hung outside a librairie was a prison and we, therefore, suspecting an isolation, dissolved its wire caging with the crafty focus of sight to set the content free.

  We saw the primeval steam (whose last wisp straying endlessly had wreathed itself round Insel’s brain) condense to stone in a frayed torso.

  In the darkness it was blind. As the sky broke open, its outline entered the morning gently with the eyes of an animal. As daylight warmed the lids widened to the vision of a pagan.

  In conception vast enough to absorb the centuries it survived, now in defiance of time to surpass it—the eternal Thing was looking at us with the fullness of the future. All we had ever understood that was less than itself peeled like spoiled armor.

  What enormous foreboding, Insel, in his simplicity, I, in my complexity, recognized in its ideal expression, I cannot say. It was a recognition of something known which, in spite of life, we would know again. Insel, without speaking, turned to me staring at the re-impression of an impression on a book spread out for the passerby we had both, I could see, in identical silence found one significance in an early Greek fragment—I do not remember which.

  I have heard that some philosophers assume reality to be absent without an audience. In empty streets the sun had a terrible excessive existence for ourselves alone. We walked together, yet repeatedly, as if having veered in an arc it took no time to describe, Insel would be coming towards me from far away.

  “Go back!” he cried in gaunt derangement, “if it disgusts you to look at me.” Shining uselessly, as an electric bulb “left on” by day, his face, unshaven, was partially clouded.

  We came to a Raoul Dufy in a dealer’s window; his charming “crook’s technique” disintegrated my meticulous companion. I feared that, the shock reinforcing his perpetual cerebral fit, he was about to throw a physical one. Instead he became covered with verdigris.

  We had to relapse at another cafe. Insel disappeared for quite a while.

  “Have you been sick?” I asked solicitously. He was looking less green.

  “Dufy,” he explained.

  I put down the money for the coffee and a twenty-five centime piece rolled to the ground.

  “Would you pick that up?” I begged. Insel began pulling himself together but did nothing about it, so I picked it up myself.

  “Oh, dear,” he wailed forlornly. “I thought you pointed to me. For God’s sake throw it down again—or I shall never forgive myself,” he pled and pled—.

  Nothing would induce me to. I foresaw him distinctly diminishing through the hole in the center of that tiny disc and I had to get him to the Seine.

  At length we arrived at the gleaming water bearing so lightly its lazy barges with their drag of dancing diamonds. Whatever had been an “under-the-bridge” was all boxed in and the sun had crawled so far into the sky it was needless to look for another.

  After that we seemed to be wandering in an aimless delight round and round the Orangerie. Insel’s boots were hurting. His pain was impersonal; it might have been following him, snapping at his legs.

  With some effort, having breakfasted all night, we conceived the idea of going to “lunch.” Insel, who was on the point of allowing the air to lift him from the railed-in terrace of the Tuileries and set him down in the Rue de la Paix, appraised by normal standards, although it was just this “beauty of horror” I was sure should be worth such a lot of money to him, looked really terrifying. His being unshaven became a smoke screen. Always his self-illumination cast its own shadow. In shining he dragged an individual darkness into the world. I felt sure that as the thoroughfares refilled we would run less risk of being arrested for disturbing the public peace on the Left Bank.

  “My friend we are not dressed for going into town,” I insisted, heading him off in another direction.

  “Why?” asked Insel in bewildered politeness. “You look as lovely as you always do.”

  With a bizarre instinct for scenic effect the hazard presiding our senseless excursion drove us into the Gare d’Orléans.

  In the almost gelatinous gloom of the great hall the enclosure before the Buffet Restaurant, its boundaries set by stifled shrubs, offered a stage for Insel to unroll his increate existence to the fitting applause of a dead echo, the countless scurry of departing feet.

  This station, as he entered it, became the anteroom of dissolution, where the only constructions left of a real world were avalanches of newspapers, and even these aligned in a dusty perspective like ghosts of overgrown toys.

  The place seemed deserted. There was no one to see Insel lay out hocus-pocus negresses on the table in apologetic sacrifice.

  “They were all wrong,” he brooded, as if he were a puritan with an ailing conscience. “I was going in the wrong direction!— I renounce,” he sobbed hurling off the negresses, who, bashed against the dingy windows of the Gare, melted and dripped like black tears into limbo down a morbid adit leading to underground platforms—there to mingle with the inquietude of departure to be borne away on a hearse of the living throbbing along an iron rail which must be a solidified sweep of the Styx.

  “The only thing wrong with those negresses was your beating one of them up!”

  Insel denied this vehemently, and reproached me. I had, he said, inflamed their rebellion by smiling at them. That was no way to handle negresses.

  “What? You can sleep with them, but I can’t smile at them. How do you work that out?”

  This muddled Insel, the theme of whose half-conscious theatricals must either be that his beefsteak shared jealous passions with less conclusively slaughtered meat or that prostitutes lay far beyond a patroness’s permissions.

  “Colored people are not—,” he began, looking very Simon Legree.

  “But Insel in your relationship she is entitled—”

  “I only slept with her three times—”

  “If she had slept with you half a time I consider she has a right to everything you possess.”

  Insel, who had a fanciful ingenuity in extricating himself from any situation he felt to be awkward without very well understanding why, instructed me, “You know nothing of the etiquette of my underworld—its laws. The rights of such women extend only to the level of the tabletop.

  “It’s like this—I am sitting at the Dôme—she comes along—”

  “She dropped on you,” I corrected— It was fun teasing him. Like tickling a dazed gnome with a spider’s silk.

  Ignoring my interruption, he continued, “She may take anything under the table—she can grab a thousand francs from my pocket—it is hers. But to lift anything off the table—ausgeschlossen!— impermissible!”

  So exactly the logic on behalf of woman in the normal world that I squeaked, “You haven’t got a thousand francs in your pocket.”

  What matter if we were trivial. We must find some excuse for our unending hazy laughter. Speech was an afterthought to that humorous peace as it fused with our incomparable exaltation. It was ridiculous to find ourselves, alone, in well-being so wide there was room for innumerable populations.

  Insel harped back to not having beaten the negress.r />
  “Well,” I temporized, relenting, “you thumped her—You did like this,” clinching every nerve in my body I tried to imitate that excruciation which in him took the place of a sense of touch— But my fingers closed on an absence—incipience of all volume, Insel’s volume. “Didn’t you know?”

  All he could remember was her stealing my cigarettes.

  “Stealing,” I exclaimed, “the waiter told me they support you—.”

  “Everybody,” Insel reflected drearily, “thinks I am such an awful maquereau. I only had three meals with them.”

  “You don’t have to exonerate yourself,” I said dryly, overcome with compassion. “It’s quite a feat—being a pimp and starving to death.” Then laughing, “Whoever heard of a maquereau without any money!” It made such a gorgeous sound when they were shouting—almost macrusallo. Like crucified mackerel—

  “They stole my sheets,” Insel interrupted sternly, “my six white sheets.”

  “Six sheets against three meals or three embraces! Whichever way you put it your honor is clear,” I consoled him, “All the same, I shall not call you clochard any more, but macrusallo.”

  Insel’s luminous duality peculiar to this one night seemed to be forming a more domestic hallucination, an elfin attempt at flirtation, miraculously coy, which played all to itself against the greater glow and measure of his basic disarray—a tacit assumption of our having mutually renounced an inferior world in spite of his repulsiveness being, as he wailed, greater than I could bear.

  I had once, to get a simple opinion, asked my dressmaker to take a look at him.