Insel (15 page)

When the time came for me to return I arrived to find a telephone message from the dressmaker, who was ill. So I hurried off to do some shopping. Afterwards, on my way to the surealist’s studio, I stopped the taxi at my flat to change my gloves.

As I ran up the one flight of stairs, I had to slow down. Surprisingly, on this warm day, an iciness was creeping up my ankles. I proceeded into a chill draught.

“Insel!” I realized.

There was nobody standing at my front door.

Although well lit by a staircase window, it was hung with a square curtain of black mist.

Slowly, this mist put forth an abstract sign of concavity, and still more slowly, a transparent diagram of my friend grew on to it.

Hunching into materialization, as a dead man who should vomit himself back to life, Insel, whose illness was dissolution, moaned to me in the voice of a wraith.

“I thought you would never come.”

When I got him inside, we were already laughing—half apologetically—as if we found it absurd, this meeting in no man’s land without explanations to offer.

“Why didn’t you say you were coming?”

“But I thought—surely—” with an anguished grin, “Friday is my ‘little afternoon.’ ”

“Of course it’s your little afternoon, Insel,” I laughed. “Only when you have turned the lady down is just when you have to specify the hour of your return; if she is to expect you—I’ve got an engagement.”

“My little afternoon,” he raved, collapsing, “I was going to take you to my room to see my picture.”

WHAT AM I TO DO WITH YOU? THE TAXI METER IS ticking, the surrealist’s waiting. Pull yourself together—quick! I’ll take you along.

“However did you get that hole in your trousers, it’s new—” I demanded, detecting, as we got into the taxi, a perfect round of perforation letting out a tiny light from his thigh. I suspected him of replenishing his beggar’s capital.

“It was there before,” said Insel sanctimoniously, as if referring to a halo earned by excessive martyrdom.

“You might as well come up and see Ussif with me,” I suggested.

“No,” said Insel, “none of the surrealists will have anything to do with me. They know only too well, if they did, I should try to borrow money.”

“I should have thought you’d be
worth
a little money to a surrealist. He might learn what supereality is about—you are organically surreal—”

“I don’t do it on purpose,” said Insel dejected.

“I know you don’t,” I assured him warmly. “You only ‘do’ Kafka on purpose—you’re
so
much better in the original.”

I kept my promise of going to his room on my way back. Strangely—the very name of the street he lived in had the sound of a ghostly exhaustion. His attic was on the seventh story.

Along the narrow open passage with its bare iron railing the
Chambres de Bonnes
moved past me as I looked for his name on the doors, when, coming to a closed iron shutter fleeced with dust and cobwebs growing in patches like a moss of soot or hanging in gray festoons about its slits, I felt the liveness of the air decrease, and “Insel” written in the archaic hand of some automatic writings drew up my eyes—. To that darkened crack which outlines the magical versatility of a barrier measuring a yard across and with merely the touch of a hand diminishing to a strip three inches wide. That cover of a living book whose history may come to an end before you can get it open; or cut short your personal adventure by remaining shut; out of this oblong outline of Entrance and Exit there leaked a perceptible seepage of Insel’s torpor.

Noiselessly, indolently, the door vanished. I walked into its chasm and Insel led me to his painting set in the pacific light of a large attic window.

“Das ist die Irma?”
he said with the secretive in-looking twinkle that lit up his eyes with recurrent delights. And suddenly it dawned upon me that one thing about this man that made him so different to other people was that contrary to our outrunning holding-up-the-mirror self-consciousness, his was constantly turning its back on the world and tiptoe with expectancy, peeping inquisitively into its own mischievous eyes. Or, in some cerebral acrobatic recoil, that being who is, in us, both outlooker and window, in him, astonishingly, was craning back to look
in
at the
out
looking window of himself, as if there were something there he might forget, some treasure as to whose existence he wished to remain assured, some lovely illusion inside him, he
must
re-see to insure its continued projection.

“
Die Irma
,” he repeated lovingly to introduce her to me, and the magnetic bond uniting her painted body to his emaciated stature—as if she were of an ectoplasm proceeding from him—was so apparent one felt as if one were surprising an insane liaison at almost too intimate a moment. He was glittering with a pleasure as dynamically compressed as the carbon of a diamond.

A narrow canvas, nigger-black, whose quality of shining obscurity was the effect of minutely painting in oil on some tempera ground,
die Irma
stood knee-deep on an easel.

To her livid brow, rounded like a half-moon, clung a peculiarly clammy algaeic or fungoid substitute for hair. Beneath it a transparent mask of horizontal shadow was penetrated by the eyes of an hypnosis; flat disks of smoked mirror, having the selfsame semblance of looking into and out of oneself as her creator.

Perhaps in a superfine analysis, this is what all men really do, but as a natural interplay; whereas Insel and his picture were doing it with alternating intent. Indeed the great thin uninscribed coins of her gunmetal pupils, returning his fascinated gaze, were tilted at such an angle as to give a dimly illuminated reflection of an inner and outer darkness.

Her hands, as if nailed to her hips like crossed swords, jutted out from her body which seemed to be composed of rippling lava that here and there hardened to indentations like holly leaves growing from her sternum—her male hands that hardly made a pair, for the one had the bones of the back marked all of equal length and the other, one finger too long with an unmodeled edge which curved like paper against the background.

He hung over
die Irma
like a tall insect and outside the
window in the rotten rose of an asphyxiated sunset the skeleton phallus of the Eiffel Tower reared in the distance as slim as himself.

Beside the picture I noticed that the gutter of his upper lip was interrupted by a seam, a fine thread of flesh running from the base of the nose to his mouth that accentuated the compression of his lips in their continual retention of the one remaining tooth which, so thin as to be atavistic in an adult, was like a stump forgotten in a croquet ground, left over from the Game of Life. An incipience or reparation of harelip? And Irma? In this very same spot she puffed to a swollen convergence.

“But Insel,” I asked, “her upper lip is about to burst with some inavowable disease. You have formed her of pus. Her body has already melted.”

“Exactly,” he answered with mysterious satisfaction.

“I don’t care for it,” I decided.

“And I,” said Insel, with the reverent intonement with which he accompanied his tacitly implied admittance of myself to his holy-of-holies, “thought that
this
picture would be just the one that you would like.”

Time hovered, suspended in the attic air as the powders of life in the noxious mist of the exhausted city below. When suddenly the soporific lure he sowed in his magnetic field—shattered. Insel was snatching at the emptied flesh on his face in the recurrent anxiety inspiring his wilder gestures.

“She ought not to be,” he cried out, “if you don’t like her, I am going to destroy her.”

His cerebral excitement seemed to inflate his head, rather as a balloon from which his wasted body hung in slight levitation.

“Come down to the floor, for God’s sake,” I said peremptorily. “What does my opinion matter?
I’m
not the museum.”

“But you’re right,” he insisted. “I have been going in the wrong direction.
Die Irma’s out
.”

“And don’t use me as a sop for your terror of working.”

“It’s really not that—but a technical question.
Die Irma ist nass
.”

“She isn’t, she’s bone dry. I felt her.”

“I assure you, underneath—”

“Every time I’ve come to Paris you’ve said the same thing. Pull yourself together Insel, you’ve got to finish this for the museum. For you it’s work or death. Can’t you figure it out?” I urged helpfully— “When you have money and can eat you paint a picture so as to have more money— when you haven’t any more money.”

“It’s more complicated than that,” he objected again, “
die Irma
is wet—”

I was getting exasperated— When the balls of our eyes caught each other, we both began to laugh.

“If you had heard the Lesbian’s synopsis of Frank Harris’s confessions, you wouldn’t even trouble to mention it—.”

“I shouldn’t care to read this Lesbian’s confessions—it is a Lesbian who has taken the love of my life away from me.”

“Well now, I wouldn’t mention that either. Of course, it does not matter with me—anybody can tell
me
anything— you know what I mean—when you surrender your arms, chuck them onto neutral territory. I know it’s a touch that modernizes your romanticism; all the same, I’d advise you never to make that particular confidence to a woman
‘ou connait ça
.’ ”

But Insel was past advice. With a look of dogged emptiness he recited for the nth time the story of those
Mädchen
“who shut themselves into the house for a fortnight for fear he would shoot them.”

Mostly when speaking of his loves of the past he became quite normal; subnormal really, for his adventures in the actual world had been of an excruciating banality.

As I was also engaged for dinner, I asked the time.
Insel who was sitting on a wooden stool stretched out his arm—it reached much further than its actual length would warrant.

Behind the curtain in the corner, carefully secreted under empty boxes, neatly stacked, was his wristwatch. He did not
bring
it out—his arm seemed in some Einsteinian contraction to shorten the necessary distance for focusing the hands.

It was seven o’clock. I took my leave. Insel, astonished as if this were the first break in a timeless conversation, snapped in half; or at least bowed like a poplar in a sudden gale; his dessicated limbs the branches.

Staring vainly towards the door I was opening—he choked in the voice of a Robot, “
Morgen komm ich im Gericht
. Tomorrow I go to court—I am going mad!”

“Then don’t forget your little afternoon,” I reminded him— “I dote on madmen.”

As I was leaving, he seized his palette and dripping an enormous brush into a pile of ebony pigment painted with a heinous neigh of victory, “
Die Irma
—Out!”

MY INTERMITTENT INTRUSTIONS ON INSEL’S inexplicable Eden of mischief had set their mark upon me. Some of his secretive twinkle had seeped into my eyes and lingered there, eliciting comments from my friends. I became more popular.

Insel, however, did not like it at all—as if I were a thief, a stark sternness shot with flashes of sadism replaced his usual intonations of abased tenderness while, awkwardly enough, I continued to feel myself elfin.

One day when I had returned from a lunch he came in to fetch his “Kafka.” I had a good time and prattled to him sociably, “Alceste—the duchess— everyone was intrigued to know why I am so jolly.”

“
So lustig
,” Insel hissed—a maniac sadism flaring up in his eyes, and for the first time I saw him as dangerous. “
So lustig
,” his hiss growing shriller and I could feel his hatred twining round my throat as he took a step towards me. But a step no longer the airy step of the hallucinated—it was the pounding tread of the infuriated male. “
Lustig
,” he squeaked, his hiss exhausted.

He approached no nearer. Probably my absorbed interest in examining his insane pupils dominated him. Anyway, although it now surprises me—it seemed I could not be afraid of him—our “entente” in the visionary lethargy of
that primeval chaos we were able to share was fundamental and secure. Confronted with his surface vagaries, I felt at once collected—as if I might have been his “keeper” since the dawn of creation.

“Insel,” I said placatingly, “if it would improve your health were I to suffer a hopeless love for you, I’m quite willing. Not today—I have a cocktail party—but some other time, I promise” (thinking of my bouts with the
grand sympathique
), “—you shall see me suffer horridly.”

Insel, unconvinced, let out a low growl which sounded like one more
lustig
—while that strange bloom, as if he were growing feathers, spread over his face. He turned into a sugar dove. It flew about the sitting room, dropping from under its wings a three-ring circus. In one ring echoed the cracks of a whip; in one ring rotated an insane steed of mist; and in the other ring Insel’s spirit astride an elemental Pegasus—.

“Horror,” said Insel and I jumped. “Would I have to grow a
beard
in order to make myself attractive to you?”

The
grand sympathique
(which eventually turned
out to be a duodenal ulcer) must inevitably go on the rampage again. Very soon it did. There was no resource to Insel’s healing
Strahlen
. Since his screech of a vanquishing cat he had, as far as I was concerned, subconsciously thrown them into reverse.

For a while I was helpless; then one day when the pain calmed down somewhat, I crawled up to Insel’s—still trusting he would finish
die Irma
for America—to give him a hundred francs. That is, I never gave him anything. I am not generous. The few
billets
necessary to keep him going were fully covered by the valuable drawing he had forced me to accept. It would be easy to sell if I needed the money.

It did not occur yet to me how unsuccessfully I had succored him, for when first I met him he had been merely a surrealist—his biography was coherent—steadily since I had “interfered” in his affairs he had grown hallucinatory.