Insel (10 page)

Insel tried again.
“
Sterben
,” he sighed in the voice of a weary archangel, an incommemorable voice burying the endlessness of death in two syllables. I was disturbed—if he should peter out on that annihilating refrain I would never know what was so weirdly, so wonderfully the matter with this exquisite scarecrow.

“Insel,” I shook him gently, “you’re much more likely to make people weep by remaining alive.”

But Insel, passionately in love with Death, raved in a
soft, a sublime sibilance,
“Sterben—man muss—man—mu—uss.”
This fair decease in which he infinitely delighted, vaster and more dimly distant than the lesser deaths of his usual aberrations, sailed with Insel on its wings to heights of a stratospheric purity.

At once the hoarding became abominable, the marble of the table the color of nausea, the whole of the world depressing, and Insel, a dilapidated suicide, hung aloft from a terrifyingly rusty nail together with all his unpainted pictures—. This was a recollection of the somber ambition which stirred him whensoever he became aware of his real life. It looked pretty bad—real life—so carelessly repaired by hand—that obscene, that relentless hoarding. Insel, his eyes closed upon it, induced by Death the absolute decoy, examined an integral vision lining the degeneracy of his brain.

His dirge still hummed on the air—.

Life without world, how starkly lovely, stripped of despair. The soul, inhabiting the body of an ethic, ascended to the sapphire in the attic. Here was no need for salvage. If he preferred to attain perfection, I would let Insel loose to die as he pleased. But my unconscious, with an inkling of what perfection was like after sharing to some degree in his increate Eden, squirmed with envy.

If Insel committed suicide—I could share in that, too. My envy at once supplanted by a flowering peace—filling with fragrance—space. Through a break in the cool white blot of its branches—I perceived the cafe clock. On that uncompromising dial all things converged to normal. I was a tout for a friend’s art gallery, feeding a cagey genius
in the hope of production. Insel’s melodious ravings, an irritating whine— It was ten to eight.

Nevertheless, as Insel was going to
sterben
—the word now sounded flatly banal—I promised to meet him at the Dôme after the cinema. “Take this,” I said. “Be sure you eat a wholesome meal,” with my usual mental ejection of the obvious man, to whom I was definitely averse.

This unreasonable nonchalant faith in Insel’s alter ego was about to be greatly rewarded. After my amusing dinner and a good film which, when we came out, proved to have lasted much longer than usual, on our return in my friends’ car
the lightning hand of pain unexpectedly grabbed my internal organs and, twisting them in a grim convulsion, wrung out of them as from a dishrag a deathly inner perspiration—as if one were about to retch a nothingness poisoned with anguish. I was in for it, this being the preliminary to invasion by the tenacious rodent which would not cease from me for days.

It was one o’clock and Insel might have waited since half past eleven. He had. When my friends in some concern dropped me at the Dôme I could see him sitting outside.

Insel seemed unconscious of having waited for me for an hour and a half. After all it was ridiculous stopping to apologize to one who lived in that other time and space. My reflection immediately complicated, “When was he here? When was he there? Was he in a wavering way existing in both dimensions at once?” The distant aristo went about his simple social life with sufficient consecutiveness, save for long delays excused with mysterious illness and misplaced sleep, he visited anyone who would have him on the right day.

During my absence he had changed.

I had never seen him like this before—human—actually gay! As I tried to explain why I must go home, Insel, in
laughing over something he wanted to tell me, laid a fluttering hand on my shoulder— the torture of my body ceased.

It was not only an interruption of pain. I was regalvanized. Straightening from top to toe, I inhaled a limpid air—the neon tubes caressed my eyes.

I looked at Insel amazed. In what unheard of parasitism had I drawn this vitality out of a creature half-disintegrated?

Evidently he was in good form. The sparks he seemed to emit in turn gave off smaller ones; an added superficial illumination induced by a few drinks, having much the same effect as the perspective confusion of traffic lights among electric signs.

Out of all this an intimate twinkle approached me. “Promise to sit here with me till seven o’clock tomorrow evening,” Insel entreated.

“Naturally,” I acquiesced.

There is no field of fantasy so rich as the financial promoting of failures. Weaving in and out of our conversation was a shuttle of money-making devices for Insel’s relief, the most practical being to star him in a horror film. It is a poor horror which has to grime its face—the only face on the films that has true horror in it is Jouvet’s—and that only an inkling—and so discreet.

Insel said he had been offered such a role. But again he had not been able, or wishful, to pursue anything that carried him into the future—a future that ebbed from him as from others the past.
He would look forward with one eagerly—always at a certain point he reverted—turned his blind back on the forward direction—.

He said, “I have worn myself out tramping the city on fruitless quests—to show my good will.”

Now I had found another profession for him— magnetic
healer. Suddenly I foresaw the fear my physician would inspire nullifying his therapeutic value, and I did not suggest it to Insel.

In his unusual liveliness, words, like roomy cupboards, dipped into the reservoir of excited honey and flapping their open doors spilled it all over the place as they passed.

“
Unglaublich
,” said Insel. “With you alone am I able to express myself. You tell me exactly what I am thinking. No one else has understood what we understand.

“You have such marvelous ideas—”

“But Insel,” I protested conscientiously, “I have touched on my ideas so lightly— If I knew your language well enough to convey the subtlest shades of meaning—.”

We decided to get a first-class dictionary. Henceforth
nothing
was to be lost!

Summing it up, this unspecific converse whose savor lay in its impress of endlessness has left me an ineradicable visual definition of Insel with his whittled exterior jerking in tics of joy a pate too loosely attached and almost worn down to the skull—and myself expansive in some secondary glow from that icy conflagration strewing gray ashes over his face as it burnt itself out. Always at an instinctive interval of shoulder from shoulder, as two aloft on the same telegraph wire exchange a titter of godforsaken sparrows.

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!”

“—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—.”