Insel (11 page)

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 come 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.”

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 t
able—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.

“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.

“Well, do you think he’s mad?” I asked her.

“He looks so funny,” she giggled. “He looks ‘in love.’ ”

She was right, he had the air of being amorous of anything or everything in general which left him so rapt and gentle, or, taking an “inner” view, his astral Venus flowed in his veins. This was why, when he met a woman, Mme
Feirlein or any other, he had an approach of continent rape, as if he were persuading her bemused, “See! It must be the more lovely for being already consummate.”

For a moment I wondered if his unstaid mind had re-conceived in some unguessable aspect I assumed for him, its eerie durable passion in general—for myself. But apart from the likelihood of his having no idea as to whom he alternately bewailed and beamed upon, I remembered the only emotion I aroused in creative men was an impulse of “knock-out” (that any intuited opposition of the future stirs in the subconscious) which of course was
impossible
with this delicate soul swimming so docilely along his astral stream under the thunder and lightnings of his distraction like a confiding duck as I scattered crumbs.

At the same time a worn down record of old-fashioned inflection clattered out of Insel’s head:

“In spite of all—”

A lesson? A suggestion? A refrain to be taken up?

Instantly I knew this to be a touch-word on which some spring must snap, some wheel fly wild. That, as I watched, something horrible, in anguish, was
wanting to happen
—a dangerous inertia waiting to be acted upon by some external irritant.

Our lake of peace was draining as Insel gathered himself together for some voluntary magnetic onslaught “in spite of all” had swollen on the air—

Shafts from his eyes became so penetrating I could feel myself dissolve to a transparent target, they pierced me, and, travelling to the further side, stared through my back on their return to his irises.

He seemed to collect electricity from the air (in the afternoon there was a violent storm). This crackling electricity
flashed so nearby without attaining to me. It was as if I were
almost
leaning up against a lightning conductor. I remembered his girl’s watch was still in my handbag—it lay beside me—a kind of self-focus in his magnetic field.

He had always something about him of a lithe tree struck by its own lightning.

These magnetic tides would rise and ebb as we sat in felicity around an enormous
plat anglais
, which I could not touch for my absorption in Insel and of which, as Insel ate of it, the rosy meats seemed to drop uselessly into void. And all the while Insel spasmodically kept up his bum’s charade pleading for variable salvations. With his floppy pathos he implored me to take pity on him, to take him in—I would see how I would work with Insel keeping house for me with that precision he exercised in his own dimension—to put him in a nursing home and surround him with angelic choirs of pretty nurses “only to look at,” he exclaimed—persuasive or timorous.

I had seen the actor Moisse by the light of a little candle remember some human tie in a prison cell; the humble flame drawing him into itself spread his reminiscent spirit over the callous walls to warm them. Such a candle was burning behind Insel’s eyes as if he were his own narrow room. Yet the lines of its rays shining to infinite remoteness—a state of consciousness closing out the world—laid their ethereal carpets along the ceaseless levels of annihilation.

No rock, no root, no accident of Nature varied a virgin plain that had conceived no landscape, and I saw Insel reduced to the proportion he would have in the eye of a God—setting out—unaccompanied, unorientated, for here where nothing existed, no sound, no sun, reigned an unimaginable atmosphere he longed to breathe. I could see
this, because he was seeing this, as still hanging back, he writhed to its lure. Although I promised solicitously to send him to a nursing home, we knew I could not come to his aid—. He had never told me
where he was
. His torment tantalized pity.