Insel (18 page)

Simultaneously it came back to me how Insel, on his first visit, had taken that photo between his hands to stare at it inordinately as if for reproduction, for a long time, and at length bringing it nearer to his eyes.

“Such beauty as this,” he said, “could scarcely happen more than once in a hundred years.” He himself put it at two thousand, I had laughingly observed.

“Stop it,” I commanded, letting fly a fearful kick at Insel’s brittle shin. As if he were anaesthetized, the kick seemed not to hurt him—he received it with the smile of ultra-intimacy he had for me whenever we met on the unexplored frontiers of consciousness.

“The pet! The lamb!— it does television, too,” I told myself delightedly.

“Insel,” I laughed, enthusiastic over him once more.

“
Seien wir uns wieder gut
—I give you the key—dinner—My man Godfrey—the loan on your picture—you go to the Balkans—you are the living confirmation of my favorite theories.”

As for Insel, he emerged from his “raptness” babbling of Colossus—Colossus as he had himself foretold me having taken on an immortality as an evergrowing myth. Insel claimed him as a kindred spirit with ideas identical with his own.

“How entirely he would have accepted me— my art—We would have been as
one
—”

I argued at length against this sudden conviction. “Do you know,” I asked, “who, for the so-called precursor of surrealism, was the supreme painter?— Rubens—” Only then did Insel’s illusions miserably dissolve.

AFTER THE POWELL FILM, WE INSTINCTIVELY returned to Montparnasse—eating at a chic bar. The barman and Insel behaved as brothers—I vaguely noted a sort of ritual—the passing and repassing between them of half a cigarette. They addressed each other as “du.” “No—for ‘thee’—” Insel would say, placing the stump on a glass shelf as one handles a treasure.

Some days later I saw this barman out of doors wearing one of the richest overcoats I had seen in Paris. Evidently such acquaintances could hand out “leavings” superior to the plain nourishment Insel acquired from the Quakers.

We sat around the Dôme and Insel x-rayed. All the girls, as they giggled along the Boulevard, he disrobed—more precisely, he could not see that they were dressed. As if on an expedition for collecting ivory, he
handed
me their variously molded thighs—weighed them with an indescribable sensitivity of touch.

“This one,” he assured me, “in the summer is firmer—turns to gold—”

Recalling how terribly Mlle Alpha had said he dated, I presumed he was claiming my interest by indulging in what Boulevardiers of the old days called “undressing the
women” in his own unbelievably tangible way. “I don’t
need
them to take off their clothes,” he remarked.

In the Select Insel became actually involved with his watching of a red-haired girl he raved of as
“die Rothaarige”
—her thighs were peculiarly long and agile. “She’s a bit of a Lesbian,” he sighed, filled with some inverted reminiscence of antagonism.

“Look here, Insel—you’re crazy about that girl— and all you do is sit around x-raying her—Get up— go and speak to her—”

“She’d be too expensive—”

“Colossus never had any money.”

“Colossus was beautiful—”

“What about it? You’re looking unearthly. She might get a thrill out of it—try—forget the expense— I’ll back you—Go along.”

But Insel, subsiding in his inexplicable negativism, refused to stir.

“Listen,” I admonished him, “all this is really unwholesome—and sitting boxed up in an attic adoring that canvas Irma all day—you’ll become impotent—”

In a burst of the extravagantly sophisticated laughter I had heard him emit once before, “I only wish I could,” he assured me.

“What a subject,” I reflected, “the virility of the starving man.” But the Select was undergoing change—opening out to aqueous space in darkling shadows of metallic liquidity as in the vision of the Lutetia, that strangely etiolate phallic ghost floated like the stem of a water lily. Before it had terminated in a battlement akin to that of the castle among chessmen; now it was topped with a little crown of thorns.

Through the chill shimmer of this unreal deep— the
hallucinatory blue the Coupole had painted on the backs of dreary houses as a setting for its garden cafe—the blue I would wish the sky to be showed us another dawn.

“Look.”

“There should,” said Insel, extremely worried, “be a lighted lamppost there.”

“There is,” I reassured him, “lower your head—see it was cut off by the blind.”

This was the last of the two or three nights I spent with Insel in Montparnasse.

We crossed again to the Dôme to have breakfast. Sitting beside him, I could see a man in white armor conduct a ballet. Serried rows of mustard pots drew up before him, their porcelain bellies burdened with amber. They moved to and fro as with a wooden spatula he lifted off their stale crust of night, filled and leveled them, and set each one down to be armed with a clean bone spoon.

“Woher kommt diese halbe Mücke?”
Insel grumbled, insanely hacking with his knife at a tiny aeronaut shade circling an inviolate orbit, because he could not make out “Where this half a fly comes from.” I knew it was only a baby fly, yet all the same it loomed above him hugely as an insectile cherubim cut off from its entrails in a like unanatomical constipation to Insel’s monsters.

The rest of the day till two o’clock when Insel, as usual, it seemed must “appear in court,” we spent in an incredibly concentrated and somehow heartrending arithmetic, reckoning up whether Insel, out of the three thousand francs loaned on his picture, could possibly afford a new pair of boots. We had already decided he must have a warm overcoat when, although it was not particularly chilly, little muscles in the side of Insel’s nose, self-animated, leapt up
and shivered. “You are freezing,” I discovered in startled concern, scanning his fragile flimsy features.

“I hardly feel it—I am used to it,” said Insel, dolefully heroic. “It is only discomforting to those who are with me.”

But I teased him a bit when we said good-bye, alluding to a lunch with the Alpha when to our mutual hilarity we had made out how only two hours after leaving my studio after that utter collapse, he had stumbled into hers.

“He looked
ghastly
,” she told me. “He had not eaten, he had not slept—his heart had ceased to beat!”

Insel, whom I had seen so sly, had been vainly hoping to get his beefsteak fresher.

“How on earth,” I inquired, “do you compose your
Totenkopf in
so short a time? Pretending to Mlle Alpha—”

“Why,” Insel answered pat, with the queerest inflection of intimacy, as if I were some virgin he had raped, “I thought you would not
like
me to tell her I had
been with
you.”

“It’s marvellous,” I assured him in amused admiration, “your knack of dying on doorsteps. At will! At any moment! You might make a good thing out of it. Perhaps you do. Insel, I believe you put
lots
of money in the bank!”

I could feel a distinct change in his aural temperature, but I was laughing too much to pay attention. An impression of a sacred stronghold “blowing up,” that shadow-tower of iron rag the
clochard-deity
Insel had built, like an ant of his wasted tissue, was so very, very faint—In view of America, I was constantly on the hop—busy with buyers of furniture—packers littering the place with straw.

Arriving for some appointment, I was unprepared to run into an Uneasiness in the vicinity of my home, although
it remained closely sealed in its shutters and nothing by day ever went in or came out.
Les concierges
, their aides and cronies, the grocers at the corner, all were under the apprehension of the place being haunted. Even Bebelle, whom I came across in the street, had, on going there to clean, turned and fled.

“Madame,” she said in a hushed warning, “in there it is dark at noon. Terrible clothes have clotted on the floor—Never before have I seen what was lying on the bed.”

Insel at last must have been evicted and at some unknown hour crept into the flat.

SOMEONE WAS LIVING THERE.

On my throwing open a window, he hooked his arm round his neck, rubbing the mastoid. “I have lain here for two whole days,” he said, ferocious with dignity. “I have a stiff neck.”

A hard-eyed, low class German, his very existence an insolence, wearing a shirt from a cheap shop—Insel must have thrown himself away with his old black sweater above which his former face had risen like a worn, pocked moon.

Unquestionably, I had cured him. Here was the “normal” man. An Insel unobsessed. Someone “replacing himself,” his mesmeric, melodic voice exchanged for a hostile creak.

This culminating phase of my eerie experience —Insel’s
residence
—remains confused, as I was busy directing packers.

Cavilling and bilious, whenever he caught sight of me he hardly refrained from spitting. Our relative positions entirely reversed, I had become for him a strange specimen, to whose slightest gesture he pinned an attention like that of a vindictive psychiatrist.

“Ha-ha!” he neighed irately, “I find little ‘still life’ in this flat. It would surely be of the greatest interest to Freud.”

We had, in our “timeless conversation,” with Insel’s concurrence in my “wonderful ideas,” superseded Freud. I must always have known he had never the slightest idea of what I was talking about—yet only now did this fact appear as negatory.

The still life that intrigued him was a pattern of a “detail” to be strewn about the surface of clear lamp shades. Through equidistant holes punched in a crystalline square, I had carefully urged in extension, a still celluloid coil of the color that Schiaparelli has since called
shocking
pink. Made to be worn round pigeon’s ankles for identification, I had picked it up in the Bon Marché.

Out of this harmless even pretty object an ignorant bully had constructed for me, according to his own conceptions, a libido threaded with some viciousness impossible to construe.

I was astounded.

It would be only natural that my jerky vibrational currents (which behave so much like a “poltergeist” that things when I touch them are apt to vanish, adding a superhuman difficulty to my work) should impinge on Insel’s abnormal precision with the force of a shock, although in the hallucinatory dimension it was this very extreme of antithesis that must set up the telepathic, televisionary machinery of our reciprocity.

“What do you suppose,” hissed my horrid guest, who somehow behaved like an alienated husband, “would happen to me if I were to lose anything?”

“Oh, I suppose,” I countered rudely, “I’d buy you another.”

Being the intrinsic complement of Insel’s enmity, logically my loathing for the real man was unconcealed, while
he must actually hold himself in check not to assassinate me, for no crueller abhorrence could ever issue from the human heart than Insel’s for me.

There were brief abatements of his fantastic normality as when on coming up from the telephone I encountered only a creature of pathos in the hall.

“You would not notice, would you,” wistfully, “that I have polished everything in the flat.”

“No,” I concurred, “I would not have noticed that.”

Insel was long in swallowing his disappointment, then cryptically, “
Gut
,” he snapped, “and I am always amorous when drunk.”

And again, for fear I might forget the loan, Insel went limp as he had to the air raid siren. That unaccountable bloom he put forth when passing from one condition to another made his features appear to be of crumpled velvet.

Sitting on a chair of average height, he seemed to have sunk to bottomless depths, at the same time his imploring face peered at me—from the floor.

Craven to a degree that rendered his cowering august, of that meekness befitting a supplicant at the door of heaven, Insel was knowing an alibi so sublime—I again lost all knowledge of who he was.

“Here,” I hailed the will-o’-the-wisp, “after all I will give you the little box.” This box he desired, it was black, was a small object by the American surrealist, Joseph Cornell,
the delicious head of a girl in slumber afloat with a night light flame on the surface of water in a tumbler, of bits cut from early
Ladies’ Journals
(technically in pupilage to Max Ernst) in loveliness, unique, in Surrealism— the tidal lines of engraving cooled its static peace. Under the glass lid a slim silver slipper and a silver ball and one of witch’s blue
came raining down on the gray somnolence when one lifted it up.

I should have preferred to keep it myself had I not suddenly realized she belonged in those idle hands to which the unreal Insel intermittently returned.

I only went twice to the flat while Insel was living there, but I flitted in and out so busily—those hours retain no sequence. As part of his loan I had arranged for a strictly non-negotiable ticket and brought him a first thousand to speed the acquisition of that overcoat.

Insel was completely cured of his obsession. I have never known any man to catch so many women. He seemed to be somehow barricaded with women. All my indulgence for human misdemeanors (which are so commendable when aesthetically good—such as the stellar combine of Insel and his ebony wives, his ivory eroticism in appraising thighs) was unavailing, confronted with this blatant lubricity of the normal Insel which, as he boasted, although in proper decency of word, seemed as did once an astral Venus to flow in his very veins: The dregs of all the secret gutters that carry off the unavowable residue of popular conceptions of physical life—

When I arrived with the rest of the loan, anxious to clear him out, my once luminous
clochard
had composed himself in the kitchen holding his usual insignia, the heel of pumpernickel, this time one in either hand—extreme oval ends—unbitten—of an absent loaf. He looked forbidding as had they been bone.

“Did you get the overcoat,” I inquired amiably.

“I may as well tell you,” he snarled, “that I don’t care for all this supervision—I had not the time. You understand—the last nights in Paris,” he raved ecstatically. “
Es ist so schön
das Leben, wenn mann so leben kann
— It is so beautiful living, when one
can
so live.”