As Insel consecrated our spontaneous comradeship with his tom-tom reiterations of how he delighted to talk to me, and I, nonplussed, would hazily inquire, “What about?” I kept on naming him to myself.
“Die nackte Seele,” and again, “Die nackte Seele.”
It seemed quite fortuitous that sitting beside him I should feel I was up against “the naked soul.” Practically anything might substitute in my consciousness for a man, who, however long I looked at him I could never entirely “put together.”
We had been sitting outside the Lutetia for six hours.
“Now,” laughed Insel, “Man Ray should pass again.”
“To conclude, we have no use for time.”
“That is not what I mean—”
“You mean that eternity spins round and round?”
We arose. But our legs become paralyzed from sitting so long on the hard little chairs, we barely saved ourselves from toppling over and staggered across the pavement. Suddenly the Metro opened at my feet. In the midst of a sentence I dropped from sight as if impelled to conform with Insel’s concepts by flickering out. One seldom took leave of him; (walking along with him one would unexpectedly drift sideways into a cab) as Insel, in an electric sputter, softly mumbled “schade.”
So now I descended the stairway — Insel leaned over it in his disgraceful grace, “When shall I see you again?” he implored, clutching his concave breast. An awesome lunar reflection lit up his face from within.
9
ON ONE OF MY VISITS TO TOWN INSEL DID NOT turn up, but when I left home to dine with friends I met him drifting round the corner with the wild concern of having too lately thrown off an unguessable inertia.
He greeted me with the relief of an object which, having fallen apart, should chance upon its other half again. His discomforting friable surface had slightly embodied; he even — I felt, but was not sure — took my arm: a brittle elbowing into the prelude of some danse macabre.
With a kind of epileptic cajolery he beseeched me to break my appointment. Finding this ghostly courtesy agreeable as any other, I decided to give him half an hour. I would drive to my friends instead of walking. So down we sat to suffuse another stray cafe with the ineffable haze of his contagion.
Insel, leaning back against his chair in a tall recline of felicity, groped in his pocket and took out something I could not see for he held it like a conjuror. Signing for me to hold out my hand he placed his over it as a cupola showering so discreet a sensitiveness my hand responded as a plot of invisible grasses grazed by an imperceptible breath.
“The girl,” he whispered, and the grasses parted under a couple of atomies cupped in my palm; Insel and his girl embracing — or were they Adam and Eve? “The girl gave me this,” he said, puckering his face in helpless incomprehension. “And it won’t go.”
I looked at what he had dropped in my hand — a sordid silver watch on a worn leather strap.
“Will you take it to be mended?” he wooed me. “You can speak French.”
As soon as I was seated beside him I had reached the extremity of optimism. The landscape of a spattered hoarding across the street was too lovely to look at. I had to lower my eyelids. Insel already had lowered his on a face falling lower and lower into the excavation of his breast.
He started up, elated to impart what he had found there. Evidently a death warrant.
“I am to die,” he rejoiced. “And will you weep one little tear for me?” he asked flirtatiously.
“Yum, yum,” I jibed, intent on the beauty of the silver rivers he had loosened in the veins of the ugly marble table top. “Does ums want to be pitied? — you’ve struck a hunk of granite.”
“You won’t weep?” he implored from a gust of sad laughter.
“Not a drop.”
Insel tried again. “Sterben,” he sighed in the voice of a weary archangel, an incommemorable voice burying the endlessness of death in two syllables. I was disturbed — if he should peter out on that annihilating refrain I would never know what was so weirdly, so wonderfully the matter with this exquisite scarecrow.
“Insel,” I shook him gently, “you’re much more likely to make people weep by remaining alive.”
But Insel, passionately in love with Death, raved in a soft, a sublime sibilance, “Sterben — man muss — man — mu — uss.” This fair decease in which he infinitely delighted, vaster and more dimly distant than the lesser deaths of his usual aberrations, sailed with Insel on its wings to heights of a stratospheric purity.
At once the hoarding became abominable, the marble of the table the color of nausea, the whole of the world depressing, and Insel, a dilapidated suicide, hung aloft from a terrifyingly rusty nail together with all his unpainted pictures—. This was a recollection of the somber ambition which stirred him whensoever he became aware of his real life. It looked pretty bad — real life — so carelessly repaired by hand — that obscene, that relentless hoarding. Insel, his eyes closed upon it, induced by Death the absolute decoy, examined an integral vision lining the degeneracy of his brain.
His dirge still hummed on the air—.
Life without world, how starkly lovely, stripped of despair. The soul, inhabiting the body of an ethic, ascended to the sapphire in the attic. Here was no need for salvage. If he preferred to attain perfection, I would let Insel loose to die as he pleased. But my unconscious, with an inkling of what perfection was like after sharing to some degree in his increate Eden, squirmed with envy.
If Insel committed suicide — I could share in that, too. My envy at once supplanted by a flowering peace — filling with fragrance — space. Through a break in the cool white blot of its branches — I perceived the cafe clock. On that uncompromising dial all things converged to normal. I was a tout for a friend’s art gallery, feeding a cagey genius in the hope of production. Insel’s melodious ravings, an irritating whine— It was ten to eight.
Nevertheless, as Insel was going to sterben—the word now sounded flatly banal — I promised to meet him at the Dôme after the cinema. “Take this,” I said. “Be sure you eat a wholesome meal,” with my usual mental ejection of the obvious man, to whom I was definitely averse.
This unreasonable nonchalant faith in Insel’s alter ego was about to be greatly rewarded. After my amusing dinner and a good film which, when we came out, proved to have lasted much longer than usual, on our return in my friends’ car the lightning hand of pain unexpectedly grabbed my internal organs and, twisting them in a grim convulsion, wrung out of them as from a dishrag a deathly inner perspiration — as if one were about to retch a nothingness poisoned with anguish. I was in for it, this being the preliminary to invasion by the tenacious rodent which would not cease from me for days.
It was one o’clock and Insel might have waited since half past eleven. He had. When my friends in some concern dropped me at the Dôme I could see him sitting outside.
Insel seemed unconscious of having waited for me for an hour and a half. After all it was ridiculous stopping to apologize to one who lived in that other time and space. My reflection immediately complicated, “When was he here? When was he there? Was he in a wavering way existing in both dimensions at once?” The distant aristo went about his simple social life with sufficient consecutiveness, save for long delays excused with mysterious illness and misplaced sleep, he visited anyone who would have him on the right day.
During my absence he had changed.