Insel (8 page)

It was a queer impulse, the idea of making such delicious inquiry of this bald and toothless man whose clothes were stiff with years of wear, yet deodorized by continuous exposure to the all-night air.

His voice, gone dim with a crushed emotion as he held out to me a black passe-partout, was saying, “I want to give you my own drawing; the only one I refuse to sell.” The drawing in the passe-partout, like his atmosphere that clung to him as ours clings to the earth, seemed almost astir with that somnolent arrested motion revealing his nature.

It was so white, the flocking skies of a strangely disturbing purity drifted above vortices of snow-like mist in travail of taking shape, coiling the mind into following the spiral, eventual materialization of blindly virginal elementals.

“This,” he continued, “is the first drawing of a new series—all my future work will be based on it. I intend my technique to become more and more minute, until, the grain becoming entirely invisible, it will look like a photograph. Then, when my monsters do evolve, they will create the illusion that they really exist; that they
have
been photographed.”

The while the drift of his words swept me together with the frozen drawing along a current of quiet reverence, expressing gratitude. As under his conjurative power of projecting images, I felt myself grow to the ruby proportions of a colossal beef steak.

I argued for some time over the idiocy of presents in the very jaws of economic death; proposed sending it to New York to be sold for him; but at length when he inquired sadly, “It doesn’t please you? I will give you another,” I promised to keep it.

“I’M SO UGLY NAKED,” HE TOLD ME MOST unexpectedly, in a tone of intense and anxious confidence. “I can’t go to the public baths because I daren’t walk down to the water.”

“Your face is naked and you walk about with it.”

“Yes,” he assented miserably, “and it frightens the women. I used to be so beautiful. Is it imaginable?” he asked, peering expectantly into my face.

“I’m tired of your tirade as to how hideous you are.”

“All women are terrified of me,” he continued automatically.

“I said tired—not terrified, and I’ll tell you why. I’ve never really seen you. You always give me the impression that you are
not there
. Sometimes you have no inside; sometimes no outside, and never enough of anything to entirely materialize. Like a quicksand, when one looks at you whatever one gets a glimpse of you immediately rush up from your own depths to snatch.
Your
way of being alive is a sequence of disappearances. You’re so afraid of actuality.”

“I can materialize for
you
,” he said raptly, “
forever
—on the corner of this street.”

Somehow we were sitting on the Terrasse of the Hotel Lutetia. It stood behind us dressed in its name of a pagan
Paris. It might very well be actually surviving for our blind backs which, taking no part in the present, are carried around with us as if concrete in the past.

Darting about amazingly in the autumn vapor innumerable metal beetles of various species with which modern man, still unable to create soft-machines and so limited to the construction of heavy plagiarisms that sometimes crush him, had sprinkled the
carrefour
facing us, where gasoline impregnating the dust had begotten a vitiated yet exhilarating up-to-date breath of life.

A distant gnat of a thousand horsepower hummed in the heavens.

“If only we could sit here eternally it would be
wunderbar
—it’s just like sitting in the kitchen.”

“The kitchen?” I exclaimed.

“Ah, yes,” he sighed. “All my youth I ate in the kitchen together with my
Vater und Mutter
and the other five children.” Then, inhaling the effluvia of the streets, “There was lots of steam,” he said invigorated. “All the washing hung up to dry, the muddy boots stood in a row, and on the good hot stove—”

“Die Suppe
,” I joined in, entranced.

“Ja, die Suppe
,” he confirmed ecstatically. “You see, it is not so much a matter of materializing but of being able to speak. Before I found you I had never anyone I could speak to. I should never have been able to tell about all this—”

“All the boots?” I interrupted.

“—to anyone else,” he concluded, his voice trailing off as if calling to me from another world.

“Allein—allein
,” he chanted forsakenly. Something was happening to this man’s voice, the most musical modulations were stealing into it. “Always alone—alone in
Berlin—alone in Paris—” The words floated out of him like wisps of a dream, “more than alone in prison.”

“In prison,” I responded, “where there is no one,
no one
you can convince of your not being there. You might try it on the warden, but the moment he began to suspect would be the very moment he assured himself of your presence—I mean—let’s leave that and have something more to eat!”

In sitting so close to Insel at the small terrace table all the filaments of what has been called the astral body, that network of vibrational force, were being drawn out of me towards a terrific magnet, while I sat unmoved beside the half-rotten looking man of flesh. My astral inclination, withheld by a counteractive physical repulsion, could not gain its presumable end of flying onto that magnet— It was as though he had achieved an impossible confusion of his positive and negative polarity— Out of a dim past echoed the din of a music hall refrain I had heard in Berlin: “
Du musst herüber—You
must come over.”

THE LESS HE SEEMED TO BE “THERE,” THE MORE HE spilled into the unknown, the more clearly I apprehended him, whereas Insel himself seemed ever to be seeking a reduction of focus through which to penetrate into the real world.

Suddenly he bowed his head over me in a wracking attentiveness. He had found such a focus. Darting, his constricted fingers cleaved to a white hair of my head which had fallen on my coat, he made a ritual of offering it to my eyes.

“Je suis la ruine féerique
,” I trilled in vanity.

“Ah, yes,” sighed Insel, as I translated, churning me with his eyes into the colorless vapors of his creation.

The cloth of my coat, a
FANTAISIE
, was sewn with lacquered red setae—wisps, scarcely attached, which caught the light, and all through the evening unusual manifestations of consciousness occurring outside the Lutetia were punctuated by Insel’s staccato spoliation of that hairy cloth. He could not desist. Like an adult elf insanely delousing a mortal, whenever I laughingly reprimanded him for ruining my coat, with an acrid cluck of refutation he would show me what he had instantly plucked from the cloth—it
was always a
white
hair— He did not trouble to contradict me—the evidence was clinching— But in the end the side of my coat sitting next to him was bare of all its fancy setae.

In accordance with the rules of sympathetic magic, so long concealing my one fallen hair in his palm augmented Insel’s influence over me. An influence which, rather than having submitted to it, I purposely invaded, so urgent was my premonition of some treasure he contained. His voice now setting in a glowing duskiness haunted me with wonder as to where I had heard it before—

“Black as was the stain on my name—,” I listened to Insel intoning as if he were celebrating mass, “even so white would I wash it in glory—.”

Rising for a moment from the fantastic shallows of his cerebral proximity to my normal level, “This man is
fearfully
banal,” I said to myself, discerning in his confidences the prim hypocrisy of a wastrel bamboozling the patroness of some charitable institution. Any such patroness would have cried for help should she receive him as he was at present plunged in the depths of a subverted exaltation, so awesomely he stressed his lonely agony, his long starvation, the incidentless introspection of that enjailed jewel, his artist spirit. As for me, the fundamental lacuna in my experience was being “stopped up” with his moral man. The pattern held out to my early ethical life. The man who stones. He who unsuspectingly lingers in the world subconscious.

I did not care whom he bamboozled. Slipping back into his sensitized zone, I swallowed his platitudes gratefully. So seldom had I come across
anything
sufficiently
condensed
to satisfy my craving for “potted absolute.” This man sufficed me as representing all the hungry errantry of the human race.

“What are you trying to be anyhow?” I asked bemused.
“La faim qui rode autour des palaces?”

A sound of anguish was hovering above us but I scarcely registered it listening to his quiet soliloquy in reverence for the buried aspiration whence sprung the weedy heroism of his pretence.

“Dolefully trite in his insincerity,” my common sense intervened.

“Inflexible is his moral will,” countered the underside of my mentality which drawing comparisons to sociologists’ deceptions in criminal reform preferred to remain impressed.

“
Der edler Mensch
,” it breathed devoutly, “The noble creature.”

Still looking so extraordinarily distinguished, Insel was illustrating a society by means of an empty plate, a diaphragm reducing the world to a white spot.

“There are
you
—” pointing the tip of his nose toward the center—a comical almost four-cornered tip of a nose with the sudden sharpness of a (square tool, the name of which I have forgotten), “and here am I—on the outside—peeping over the edge at you,” he said as he crept his fingers in their incipient movement up from under the rim.

I was disappointed. One thing about Insel that had struck me was this sporadic distinction I had often been “accused” of which I had always been eager to discover in anyone else who, like myself, had “popped up” from nowhere at all—as if all my life I had lacked a crony of my “own class.”

I could not point this out. It would upset Insel’s self-abasement which gave him some mysterious satisfaction—as of an Olympian in masquerade—

That sound above, once it hooked up with perception, became a squirling wail—soaring over the driving racket of the street corner.

“Do you hear?” asked Insel, “it’s been going on for quite a while—in an aerial invasion people would sit on at their cafe tables just as we have done. Air raids,” he shuddered, shrinking into himself, “and the French so proud of their Maginot Line. They have forgotten
their
Stavisky was mixed up with it—Sugar,” beamed Insel, a gentle delirium stealing into his eyes, “tons and tons of sugar poured into the foundations of the Maginot Line.”

“Sugar’s rather expensive,” I ventured.

“Nevertheless,” averred Insel, and I felt it might be perilous to contradict him.

His chuckle petered out as the siren insinuating to his brain the menace of a war which would cut off any chuckling, transformed it to a shudder.

Insel trembled with the cowardice of those whose instinct being to create even an iota, appear to slink into a corner before the heroic of destructive intent. This man, who, when he turned his face full on you, looked into your eyes with the great intensity of the hypnotist but with a force of concentration reaching inward and outward as if he must first subject himself to his own mysterious influence, this man in his terror had dropped from his own magnetic “line” soft as a larva. He cowered against the air. Inasmuch as it concerned him, war was not only imminent—he was already ripped open by its plough of anguish. Actually, he was in a fix—for, in the “event” being a German, here he was an enemy, whereas if he could return to Germany, there he was
Kultur Bolshewik
.

Man Ray came up and sat with us and went away. Tables
filled and emptied. The dust grew denser and then lay down before the oncoming night.

I once heard somebody express surprise that instead of following it onward one should not take a cut across Time to secure a moment which, stretching out in line with oneself, would last indefinitely.

Time that evening lightly came to rest—an unburdened nomad let its three faces linger; the future and the past were with me at present: the whole of time—there was no more pursuing it, losing it, regretting it—while I sat almost shoulder to shoulder with this virtual stranger living the longest period of my life.

It is almost impossible to recover the sequence or the veritable simultaneity of the states of consciousness one experienced in the company of this uncommon derelict. It was so very much as if consciousness was performing stunts. Always in his vicinity one had the impression of living in or rather of being surrounded by an arid aquarium—filled with, not water, but a dim transparency: the procreational chaotic vapor in which all things may begin to grow.

Either he had a peculiar power of projecting his visualizations or some leak in his psyche enabled you to tap the half formulated concepts that drifted through his mind: glaucous shades dissolved and deepened into the unreal tides of an ocean without waves. Where in the bottom of slumber an immobile oncome of elementals formed of a submarine snow, and some aflicker, like drowned diamonds blew out their rudimentary bellies—almost protruded foetal arms over all an aimless baton of inaudible orchestra—a colorless water-plant growing the stumpy battlements of a castle in a game of chess waved in and out of perceptibility its vaguely phallic reminder—.

Projected effigies of Insel and myself insorcellated flotsam—never having left any land—never to arrive at any shore—static in an unsuspected magnitude of being alive in the “light of the eye” dilated to an all enclosing halo of unanalyzable insight, where wonder is its own revelation.

Even in the world of reality Insel’s ideation was an introvert exploration of a brilliancy beneath his skull, an ever-crescent clarity which in the form of inspiration ripens creative fruit. But in him by reason of some interference I could not define, aborted as the introduction to an idea.

“I can see right into these people,” he asserted, indicating the crowd gathered around the Hotel. “I know exactly what they are; I know what they do.”