Insel (13 page)

I told him I had for some while been conceiving a ballet.

“It is the story of a maiden seeing her life in a crystal— It
would look exactly as it does here, everything translucent.” I waved to Insel— “Yet as in the days when there were maidens they had no ‘life,’ what she sees is her future spouse sowing his ‘wild oats.’

“All dancers are terribly ponderable after Nijinsky—yet once I came across one who possessed a dual
equipoise
which threw him into a huddle with himself. That is how my youth would dance, with the wild oats springing up to the moon around him, whichever way he turned— But I should have to do maquettes—animated maquettes of the choreography—and
I
can’t make
anything
grow out of the floor,” I said deferentially.

“Of course he makes love to everything. A cocotte’s eye. The woman in the litmus petticoat forecasting the weather. A rainbow,” I continued, seeing Insel entranced. “The Queen of Fairyland— Mermaids and Medusae.” Envy was stealing into Insel.

“I dance divinely,” he said and I could see him crossing a ballroom floor propelled as if on invisible casters, as truly initiate acolytes, in reception and remittance of the Holy Book before the high altar.

“Always at the crucial moment the youth is intercepted. There comes floating in between him and the object of his concupiscence, a—” I stopped, as Insel, seemingly relieved by the frustration of a rival, closed his eyes, and waited till he came to. “Over and again I drop the idea in despair. Over and over again I find a solution so simple it constantly slips my mind. I have only to make some little people about five inches high and tell them what to dance.” Insel nodded comprehendingly. “Yet whenever I get to work I come upon some fundamental obstacle. It takes me
hours
,” I complained to Insel, “to remember it cannot be done. It is
as if at the back of that memory stands another memory of having had the power to create whatever I pleased.”

Insel’s eyes enlarged in a ruminative stare. The stealthy oncreep of his visual lichen had reached the walls. We had no longer need of larynxes to converse. Insel
thought at me
. More precisely— vaguely conceived before me.

“To make things grow,” he conveyed on his silence, “you would have to begin with the invisible dynamo of growth; it has the dimension of naught and the Power of Nature. As a rule it will only grow if planted in a woman— But
my brain
is a more exquisite manure. In that time in which I exist alone, I recover the Oceanic grain of life to let it run through my fingers, multiple as sand.”

Then the silence of Insel took on voice once more—A voice which as if returning from diffusion among the mists—might be coming from “anywhere,” resumed his ever recurrent cries of horror on behalf of women who could no longer love him.

“For God’s sake,” I implored, for Insel returned to his “normal” state, I followed suit— “stop agonizing— Go to sleep— To negresses
every
white man looks—white.”

“It’s the teeth,” he groaned—
“Die Mädchen—”

At least you’d have more chance with the girls if you got Bebelle to clean your suit—

“I’ll tell you what,” I said, overcome by my inherent conviction of personal blame for
anyone
not being able to get
anything
they want—. And in Insel it seemed his need was for something so sublime that over all his aspirations hovered crowns of glory—
Mädchen
—something entirely outside my zone of attraction, in his regret for them, took on enchanting attributes—even those in a mountain village
who ate such quantities of garlic it breathed from the pores of their skin—so much so that Insel, with the heartiest will in the world, had found it impossible to “hug them close enough.”

“You’d better get
into
that couch and leave your suit in the hall—when I come home I’ll throw it into a bath of gasoline.”

Insel was horrified. “I don’t want anybody to see the dirt in that suit—let alone you—I’ve worn it for five years.”

“All I shall see is the gasoline go dark—it would seem just as dark if I were cleaning something that had only been worn six months.”

But Insel was actually writhing in a bitter determination to protect his own.

“Are you afraid,” I asked, in a sudden concern for his “rays,” “that it would interfere with your
Strahlen?
—I’m not going to wash it. You can’t short-circuit.”

On the contrary—I anticipated him distinctly renewed in an intenser radiance—

“Please,” I begged—enraptured as a nun seeking permission to lay fresh lilies before a shrine.
“
Ich bitte Sie
.”

He was obdurate—it would seem, in shame. It did not occur to me that in cleaning him up one would be cutting a slice from his “beggar’s capital.”

“It’s not distinguished to be ashamed—”

Insel, in a way, gave in—.

“You try it,” he warned me. “Before your eyes the suit will turn white.”

“It won’t, or if it does, I’ll turn it black again.”

“You may clean it forever,” he intoned ominously— “the while it grows whiter—and whiter.”

“Mädchen,”
I reminded him for bait— “or at least,” as for an instant Insel’s ravaged features showed through his ennobling aura— “better negresses.”

Insel was pacified. But he did not go to sleep. He evaporated.

I recognized a vapor whose drifting suspension of invisible myriads he copied so passionately with the overfine point of his pencil.

When it cleared off it had left him again an effigy straightened as the level of water.

The world of the Lutetia had materialized. An infiltration of half-light softly bursting the dark, a thin cascade, the ferns dripping into a green gloom. Here, where dawn and noon and midnight were all so dim and Insel lay sensitive to clarity as a creature of the deep sea; the closely shuttered studio with its row of glass doors was a real replica of the irreal “aquarium.”

Because I found the place somewhat chilly when sunless—I had thrown a great white blanket over my thin dress. This was due to no obsession for Insel’s white miracles. Simply, everything being put away in naphthalene, this had returned from the cleaners and the
femme de ménage
had not yet locked it up.

Fairly inflexible—it curved around me loosely, encaving me—its stiff corner trailing off like a sail.

I sat on the edge of the couch at the feet of that rigid flotsam—in a huge white shell.

Again I received a strictly lateral invitation to wholly exist in a region imposing a supine inhabitance. A region whose architecture, being parallel to Paradise, is only visible to a horizontal gaze. Should one stand up to it, it must disappear.

Somehow, unable to dissolve into mist, and thus too dense to enter a mirage, the nearest I could conform to the arid aquatic was in becoming crustacean.

Being an outsider did not interfere with my participation in the ebullient calm behind Insel’s eyelids, where cerebral rays of imprecision, lengthening across an area of perfectibility, were intercepted by resonant images audible to the eye, visible to the ear; where even ultimate distance was brought within reach, tangible as a caress.

As all this “lasted forever” it seemed incompatible that Insel should slump back into a larva. Yet there he was—extinguished again in unregenerative sleep.

I turned to go. A scatter of objects on the table attracted my attention. Among some weary sous and tiny strangulated worms—broken shoe laces—lay evidently the bone of some prehistoric fish. A white comb shrill with the accumulated phosphorus of the ages. Insel had emptied out his pockets.

I went about my cleaning. Ordering several
bidons
of gasoline, I poured them into an enamel tub, and suspending the suit by a wooden pincers, I dipped it in.

The sun was shining, the kitchen blazing white. Before the open windows that which seemed most substantial about Insel, like a corpse let down from a gallows, fell to its knees in the volatile fluid.

Then the ghastly thing began to turn pale. I set upon it in opposition and that white contorted outgrowth of a brain almost tangled in the whisk-brush—.

Had he really intended as much in his challenge—or did this Polar region of a mania— these maps of Himalayan anthills with their scabs of pure vegetation embossed upon the backdrop of his clothes, depend for their pictorial
clarity on some accord between his cerebral vibrations and mine?

Being tired and bored, I went in to see if in exchange for some more food, I could make terms with Insel.

He appeared uneasy. Rolling his eyes like runaway wheels spoked with interrogations. His expression was such as I had never seen. Terror solidified.

“I am a prisoner here!”

It did not recur to me that his classic complaint is an echo in the corridors of asylums.

Tearing my visionary trappings of meat and such from me with his flippant accusation, Insel did not at all want to know, “When shall I see you again?”— He had never seen me before.

My everyday self shuddered— “Blackmail! Almost as awkward as dead tramps.” I reflected, but I had become so nicely attuned to Insel’s moods that my parasitic clairvoyance, of its very nature, being constrained to see eye to eye with him, immediately veered to his viewpoint, I concluded I must in a temporary aberration have kidnapped this gaunt guest whose snarl was unsociable.

“Beefsteak,” I quavered, as if enticing a surly hound.

Insel, completely jammed between infinite walls, was not having any steak.

I must dislodge his attention.

Seemingly at hazard my dilemma linked up with one of the kind of infantile anecdotes Insel always greeted with glee.

“Have you heard about the Hungarian immigrant lost in London?” I inquired as engagingly as I could. “He wanted to find his consulate and could not understand why the
policeman only shrugged his shoulders when he explained he was ‘Hungry.’ ”

Strange how unerringly the unconscious picks its way. I had “found” Insel for himself again. To the Titan of Hunger—the policeman’s shoulders heaved in the shrug of all humanity ignoring Insel. This recognition shook him with the most sophisticated laughter I have ever heard in my life.

“Your suit has turned white,” I announced.

A gleam of crafty assurance stole into his transparent eyes.

“You will never ‘get out’ while your suit is white,” I threatened, “all
die Mädchen
are on the other side of the
wall
—”

“Oh,” said Insel with a conciliatory smile, “I only want them to look at.”

“Well, they won’t look at you until your suit is black; and as we’re about it you’d better let me clean your shirt.”

His shirt was of a dark gray design rather mellow. When I suggested renovation he clutched it by the open throat.

“See,” he said, lifting it with a cautious yet ostentatiously offhand gesture, “the neckband is worn ragged inside—it’s not worth it.” He was cowering in some apprehension that constricted him, that even devitalized his hand. Become as the hand of a victim of infantile paralysis, it flopped over with the edge of the stuff. He had an air of shifting—just so far—the bandage of a wound.

Not for the first time, with Insel, I received a subliminal flash of an apostate Saint Sebastian writhing with arrows—in such privacy, it would be indelicate to intrude upon it with whatever assistance.

On looking back, it seems inconsistent, that once the
elation he inspired in me died down— I should have continued in my obsession of conserving something very precious with an Insel changing to an incubus, playing his silly psychic tricks on his clothes—raving of imprisonment and the gnawing of
Knochen
. It had left me with the solicitude one might have for a valued friend with whom one has been on some glorious drinking bout, when he shows up next day at a disadvantage in a particularly nasty hangover.

One last struggle with the suit—and it turned black again. Insel must have forgotten about it.

“BREAKFAST,” I ANNOUNCED.

This time Insel did not stir.

His head, although returned to normal volume scarcely indented the pillow. He was set in the perfect quadrates of a couch, having no rumple anywhere. As he lay upon it without taking contact with it, the comfortable bulges of covers tucked under a mattress sharpened to corners of trigonometric exactitude.

The smoothing systemizing vibrations that straightened his surroundings, obviously did not issue from his frame, which had half-died for contributing vitality to some focus of force.

Perhaps they were transmitted by his hair. I have always presumed that hair with its electric properties will not remain unutilized in a future evolution of the brain.

His hair—what little was left—was so fine, that without amalgamating, it had the unity of surface of the horny plate with which hair furnishes the extremities in its aggregate form of a nail.

Tentatively—I touched that hair, repeating “Breakfast” on a cheerful note—to appear as if I were patting his head to wake him up.

In a decreased microscopic degree, my fingers encountered the same onslaught as had my whole person in the corridor. A sharp crackle of inconceivably minuscule machine guns carried to some psychic center of my ear.

The effect was astonishing as when I had tapped him on the arm. Insel did not awaken—he turned his head as if he were pushing it up into strata of delight above him. Which on contact melted upon his face in a slow smile.

He was smiling as if the tip of the wing of an angel had fanned him.

Again, as I watched, I had the sensation of “breaking point,” an expectance of a spring flying loose to whirr insanely.

His face, like stale bread smeared with his private honey, stood still.

Then it broke.

With the unforeseen ugliness opening up suddenly emerging hippopotami
the gums
in their hideous defenselessness
observed
me—an obscene enjoyment of ill-will pleated his clamped lids.

His teeth had not decayed. They were
worn
down.

Der Totenkopf
hung in my tract of vision like the last of
Alice in Wonderland’s
Cheshire cat.