Insel (7 page)

Curiosity he constrained to stand off to take his measure, mentality, to pivot him for noting whether there were any creases in his aural suit. As those who are of the body, whom other bodies have traffic with, slap each other on the back, with Insel intercourse depended on putting out feelers among the loose matter of psychologic nebulae.

“You walk so weirdly,” I said. “Are you one of those surrealists who have taken up black magic?”

Totally bewildered, he exclaimed, “Whatever is that?” Yet, like all who have to do with any form of magic, he apparently had lost some of his specific gravity.

He was passing over the light-reflecting pavement in his shabby black as if a rigid crow, although with folded wings should skim.

“Aera,” I said, “sends dreams across the Atlantic.”

“He could not,” protested Insel, off his guard. “He has not got the
power
.”

There is a way of speaking that word peculiar to those alone who have wielded it—that way was his.

And he glided on, turning towards me his face hung with deflated muscles one felt could be blown about by the wind.

“You cannot glide,” it defied me, and I noticed how I was keeping my distance in my effort to “get at him.”

He had for the moment the stick-fast aloofness of an evil presentiment—the air of a priest of some criminal cult. All the same, this slight impression of criminality he gave off at intervals I did not receive as a direct impress on my own mind, but as a glimpse of a conviction he hid within himself.

“Aren’t you rather bad?” I laughingly inquired.

“Everybody imagines I am the devil, and,” he answered forlornly shrugging his shoulders, “there’s no harm in me at all.”

When we fell into line once more, he resumed the uniformity of all people making for a cafe.

I finally gave Insel the key. His mimicry of salvation convinced me my distress, after all, had not been in vain.

But, oh horror! On arriving at the country, I suddenly
seemed
to remember the charwoman pouring some Normanol from an antique bottle I had told her to clean into an empty gin bottle. Normanol, being a dissolvent for rhodoid very much stronger than cutex which dissolves the cuticle around the fingernails, I had a shocking vision of Insel’s diaphanous intestines entirely disappearing should he, as would be only natural, mistake it for a graceful token of absentee hospitality—and of myself arraigned for manslaughter.

“For God’s sake, don’t drink anything out of any kind of bottle in that flat,” I wrote him immediately. “It might kill you.”

“Dear Mrs. Jones: However do you think I am comporting myself in your home,” Insel answered. “Were there thirty bottles of the finest schnapps I should not touch them. Rest assured you will find your apartment
exactly
as you left it.”

He sounded quite comfortably settled. I had also written him to get my charwoman to clean his suit with odorless gasoline at my expense, and inquired how much money he had left.

“Your suggestion for my suit is most kind—however, I am convinced that it is only on account of the dirt in it that it still holds together.”

He had, he said, enough money to last him for a “little” week.

We had agreed that I should come every few days for a dressmaker’s fitting at the further end of the flat where it would not disturb him. When I did go, a bewildered concierge informed me, “Madame, the artist who was to live in your apartment never came.”

“That only means he has not yet been ‘turned out,’ ” I explained to her, while to myself I reflected, “You will find your apartment exactly … the monkey!”

I felt that the end of his little week was no longer my concern, and I forgot all about him.

I would run into Paris for the dressmaker, a tea, a dinner and back to my little hotel in St. Cloud again, until at last the time drew near for exporting pictures—among them were to be included some of Insel’s.

“Pictures, drawings, three o’clock,” I wired him. At a quarter past, he had not arrived and I went to tea with a friend who hailed me from the courtyard, leaving a note on the door, “Will be back shortly.”

When I returned the place was different—in the smoothed out air there was a suspicion of a collapse in time. As if by a magnet, I was drawn into the studio and up to the dark oak table. Upon it lay a flat packet. I could have sworn it emitted a faint phosphorescence that advanced
from all the rest of the room. The wrapping paper was so strikingly creaseless it looked unusual. It had in some inexplicable manner become precious as ivory; its squareness was instinctively exact as the hexagons of wasps.

“He has left the drawings,” I supposed, almost reluctantly undoing this magnetic focus of an uncanny precision. But once unfolded, I found it contained only a shabby block of writing paper that had been left lying there and from which I had torn the note I left for him.

“Did you find anything?” he asked when, later having resuscitated from the moribund state in which he preferred to arrive, he was able to articulate.

“Yes. What on earth—?”

“I wrapped it up,” said Insel—an enormous intention fixed in his eyes.

It was at this moment that, for me, Insel, from a seedy man, dissolved into a strange mirage, the only thing in the world at that time to stir my curiosity.

On his arrival with the pictures he had appeared the phantom of himself as I had seen him last. He had so weakened, become so transparent.

Deeply bowed, he clutched his feeble fist in the emptiness where his stomach should have been. From this profound concavity arose a dying whimper of, “Water—
aspirine
,” as out of the abdominal void rode the unclenching fist—his tremulous fingers, hovering over the bureau, grasped a cigarette.

“Well, you’re in a nice state,” I taunted him to cover my alarmed compassion. “Why didn’t you write?”

He gulped his
aspirine
as if to alleviate a death rattle. “I did write.”

“Yes, a comic strip. I found my flat
exactly
as I left it.”

“I know,” said Insel, gently abashed. “I ought to have told you ‘I am not here.’ ”

“Even the least of philanthropists,” I laughed, “has sensibilities—I thought I had been intrusive. You see, Insel, any possible gesture in the face of poverty must inevitably be insolent, its very necessity—in not being outs—makes poverty so aloof.”

“And I thought you were
angry
because I mentioned money.”

“I had
told
you to mention money. But all my sympathy for you was buried under that bunch of cheap flowers I put here to welcome the lonely
clochard
.”

“But, after all, I have been here nearly every day,” he almost sobbed, “to look for you. I could never find you. I knew when you had been here for where you trod there lay little fragments of stuff. I could trace your movements by the pins you shed on the floor. Think what it was like—to seek after a woman, a vanishing woman, and in her stead, to find nothing but pins,” he implored. Then brightening, “I picked them all up. Look,” said Insel, hurriedly reversing the lapel of his jacket. On the underside stuck in rows as precise as in packages from the factory, were my dressmaker’s fallen pins. He dropped the lapel into place again as if too long he had bared this precious hoard of his compelling exactitude.

With an interminable cautiousness Insel had revived. “
Ich bin nicht fromm
—I am not pious,” he mused, deeply introspective. “And yet how I have prayed, I prayed,” he burst out, a blind agony falling upon his eyes, “I prayed that you would come back!”

“You seem to have been thinking about me a good deal—hadn’t you any steak?”

“I never
cease
thinking of you,” he muttered, as if fearful I should overhear—and aloud, “None,” he answered flatly yet without reproach.

As mediums on becoming professional, obliged to continuate an intermittent condition, lapse to the most lamentable dupery, Insel would actually plagiarize his innate mediumistic quality of which he appeared to be but partially conscious.

It would seem unnecessary after the intrinsic wizardry of his simple packet to resort to the untenable mystery of a lie. Yet he did.

Awestricken, solemn, he recounted to me that while I had, as it were, struck myself off his menu, Mlle Alpha had sent him a card to know how he was getting on.

“The world is populated with people anxious to know how I am getting on. But when I tell them— the world immediately depopulates! I wrote her in answer, ‘Am starving to death except for a miracle—three o’clock Tuesday afternoon will be the end.’ —And then your telegram! for three o’clock. Today is Tuesday.

“Of course she did not answer,” he commented, “I had rather thought she might be good for fifty francs. Nobody ever sends one fifty francs,” he ended despondently.

“Oh,
what’s
the matter with you, Insel? That girl has more sex appeal than almost anyone in Paris. And all your reaction is that she might be good for fifty francs. I never could interpret, until I saw her, the French,
Elle n’a pas froid aux yeux
—the Alpha’s eyes are volcanic. All the men are in love with her.”

“Not I,” he boasted.

“No-o? I should say that clochards were hardly in her line.”

“Grade—exactly,” Insel concurred as if relieved of a responsibility.

Characteristically, after swearing he would ask her for his card as proof of a miraculous coincidence with his usual unconcern in breaking up his plots it was Insel who insisted on my meeting Mlle Alpha whom I knew only slightly.

“FLEISCH OHNE KNOCHEN,” INSEL ESPECIALLY hollow-voiced begged me when I took him to dine. This insistence on boneless pieces of meat was habitual with him.

“Do I look any fatter?” he inquired after he had eaten, as if consulting his doctor.

I thought it best to reply in the affirmative. As a matter of fact the disquieting thing about Insel was that however much food you sunk in him it no more seemed to amalgamate with him than would a concrete mass with a gaseous compound.

From now on Insel turned up regularly as soon as my fitting by the dressmaker was over.

Whenever I let him in he would halt on the threshold drawing the whole of his luminous life up into his smile. It radiated round his face and formed a halo hovering above the rod of his rigid body. He looked like a lamppost alight. Perhaps in that moment before the door opened he recreated himself out of a nothingness into which he must relapse when being alone his magnetism had no one to contact.

“I’ve brought ‘it,’ ” his illusive grin seemed to be announcing, as if his visible person were a mannequin he operated on occasion. “Make what you can of it—you may
wonder if I am sure of its nature myself—let us not be too precise as to what I am.”

I led him down the corridor, feeling that he, so recently non-existent, was all-surprised at finding himself to be anything at all.

He shut the door, an act I have heard an authoress describe as so banal it is unfit for publication. But shutting the door, like all automatism we take for granted, is stupendous in its implications.

As the ancients built temples as isolators for the power of the Almighty, which their ritual focused on the altar, a force so dynamic that officiating priests, having evoked it, were constrained to descend the altar steps backwards without ceasing to face it; for the limitless capacity of the eyes could absorb such power, whereas if the blind back were turned upon it they would receive a shock that flung them to the ground.

So the shutting of doors is a concentration of our radiations in rectangular containers, to economize the essences of our being we dispense to those with whom we communicate.

Thus, when Insel shut the door infinitesimal currents ran out of him into the atmosphere as if he were growing a soft invisible fur that, when reciprocal conditions were sufficiently suave, grew longer and longer as the hair of the dead, it is maintained, will leisurely fill a coffin until it seemed with its measured infiltration even to interfere with Time. The mesmeric rhythm of a film slowed down conducted the tempo of thought and sentience in response to his half-petrified tepidity, for he moved within an outer circle of partial decease—a ring of death surrounding
him—that reminded one of those magically animated corpses described by William Seabrook. Even before he came into one’s presence, one received a draughty intimation of his frosty approach. He chilled the air, flattened the hour, faded color.

But if one could crash through this necrophilous aura, its consistency dissolved, one came to an inner circle where serial things floated in a semi-existent aquarium. Or, at times he, himself, would overflood it, as now when his coming close to me affected acclimatization, turning an irreal ice into a tenuous warmth.

“I was so terribly afraid I should miss you. I got to bed at seven this morning— (quite exceptional,” he added hurriedly as if wishing to efface a bad impression, “I shall not do it again), and when I woke up my watch said twenty past six. I was convinced you would be gone, but—is it not astounding—a moment later it said half past four.”

To these teeny nothings that marked out his life (as momentous events are the milestones of others) he imparted an interest peculiarly visual. You saw the watch in hallucinatory transformation, its dial advancing the gray diamonds of his eyes out of a murk more mysterious than darkness instead of correcting the eyes’ mistake. He possessed some mental conjury enabling him to infuse an actual detail with the magical contrariness surrealism merely portrays. Perhaps it was the operation of this weird power that necessitated his speaking with such drilling intensity.

He had brought me a present— As he bowed his head over what he held in his hands, all the sweet-stuffs of the earth exuded from his nerves, in an exquisite music of a silence that is alive. He seemed to be sodden with some
ineffable satisfaction, as if emerged drenched from some luxuriance requiring little tangible for its consummation. I had to hold myself in check. My charmed curiosity wanted to cry, “From what enchanted bed of love have you so lately arisen? What astral Venus has just receded from your embrace?”