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.
Getting in touch with Insel was the whole itinerary of Good and Evil.
In the passing away of a miasma Insel awakened. Although never much the better for food, his temperament having relieved itself of some disproportionate impulse in that monomaniac gape, he now seemed normalized.
It was a serene creature who began to breakfast. Whatever introspective conflict usually engaged him, it had ceased.
“You really look rather well now. Why don’t you just stay and have that rest cure here. I’ll hire Bebelle to feed you — do everything for you while you lie down and drowse till you’re quite fit. I must get back to Saint-Cloud.”
“Impossible,” moaned Insel, instantly sagging, “I have to return to my troubles. You do not understand. They are my life. It waits for me.”
“Nonsense, you spent the night in Montparnasse in one incessant gurgle of laughter.”
“It was a hollow laughter,” he intercepted, sepulchrally. Insel had resumed his “line” which seemed so inadequate.
Should I risk an attempt to reveal to Insel those real-essences in Insel? Real-essences to a slight degree rationalized for my mind, they might be either the very symptoms of the so-called madness in him, or precisely the incognizable cause of his befuddlement.
“Insel,” I set out determinedly. “You must get over your ugliness — it’s an obsession! That’s not all there is to you — you have some intrinsic quality I have never found in anyone else. It’s difficult to tell you about it because I have no idea what it is. But it’s something so valuable it’s one’s duty to keep you alive to discover its nature.”
“Several alienists have offered to examine me— regularly—” said Insel, with self-complacence, “twice a week!”
“It’s not pathological — only unprecedented. A kind of radio-activity you give off—. Insel,” I asked puzzled, “how does the world look to you? Like an Aquarium?”
Insel looking no less puzzled than myself, I was taken aback. But I went on in the hope of striking common ground.
“It was the evening outside the Lutetia I experienced its effects. A sort of doubling of space where different selves lived different ways in different dimensions at once. Sitting on the sidewalk — floating in an Atlantic Ocean full of skyscrapers and ethereal cars. That was not particularly important— the wonder was the sense of timeless peace — of perfect happiness—”
15
INSEL SAT BOLT UPRIGHT IN HIS COUCH AND LET out a thin screech like a mad cat; looking exactly as if he had caught a mouse he had watched for a long time.
“No.” He wagged his poor bald head judiciously, “It cannot be—I can only love forever.”
I gave one gasp — then as always when taken unawares, my mother reproved me from my subconscious — a sophisticated middle-aged woman making immodest impressions on an innocent Schlosser’s son.
“You misunderstand. I had thought of you as a ‘Will-o’-the-Wisp.’ ”
Insel took no heed, he was practically licking his chops. Quite as if it were an impulse habitual to me, I decided to slug him.
Then he began moaning again — of suffering, which one moment, he could allow me to share, and another, he refused to cause me.
“It would be too fearful for you — the Parting,” he pointed out. “You see,” he confided affectionately as if promising me a present, “I am going to get her back—”
A spiral craftiness wormed into his eyes as I asked, “Where is she?”
“In South Africa,” he answered with some impatience, as if I should have remembered.
This girl in her role of “only beloved” was almost as unsettled as Insel himself. Only yesterday she lived with her Lesbian in Berlin — and now, “Since she left me she has married twice and borne four children.” Before very long she actually split in two—
“Es war eine Schwartze und eine Blonde—”
“When was she black and blond?” I exclaimed, intrigued.
“Last night, outside the Select — I saw at once they had fallen for me,” said Insel, ignoring he had been fast asleep.
“But Insel,” I laughed, “can’t you remember how terribly miserable you are because you frighten the women?”
“All that is changed now,” said Insel looking me over with sadistic compassion.
Quite forgetting my determination to slug him — I glowed with the satisfaction of a successful psychiatrist—“I have cured him of his fixed idea—” I congratulated myself—
Then with his lightning variability of mood, his eyes diluting in a difficult introspection,
“Outside the Lutetia,” he pondered wonderingly. “That’s funny. I had exactly the same experience.”
“You couldn’t,” I was about to retort, “it’s not in Kafka,” but checked myself, wishing to keep him on the subject of his radiation.
“That’s why I adore talking to you — why I cannot allow you to suffer for me. I know too well what suffering is,”—and suddenly he threw up his head. The almost mummified chords of his throat vibrating in an ecstasy.
“Die Liebe — wie schön — wie sch-ö öö — n—Love— the one beauty of Life.” He gloated with the same singing inflection with which he had been wont to celebrate steak. There is nothing else, he concluded. Evidently he was sane as any man in his therapeutic measures for saving woman from vain regret.
Without transition his fixed enchantment turned to a staggering stare. “Die Liebe? — It’s the Strahlen!” he hooted across to me in the haunted voice of the obsessed.
“Insel,” I urged, bewildered, “don’t look like that. Your Strahlen are evidence of something in you — something noble.”
“So edel—” I trilled in remembrance of my contact with that flawless spirit. But as if leaping out of himself for once to take stock of an Insel I did not know and as if what he saw was horrible, Insel took that clear, that soaring word and wrapping it in bitterness, hurled it at himself.
“So edel,” he echoed, infinitely disabused.
“At all events,” I said as a pleasant jolt— “I am going to bring you your suit. You’re going to look so fine.”
As I passed the table I missed the phosphorescent bone.
“Hadn’t you a comb?”
“It’s here,” said Insel — stretching out a skeletal arm toward the floor — there stood his shoes. In one was stored the white comb. The other was stuffed with a huge white handkerchief. They were his wardrobe.
A warm appreciation stole around my heart for that adorable domesticity of the tramp, which first attracted me, when in my childhood, a clown, taking off his tattered overcoat displayed a wash-hand stand built into the lining.
At that moment my friend Insel was very dear to me.
Then in a sudden I realized how always, and inevitably in attempting to follow it, I must run off the track of Insel’s mind — himself unaware that nothing about him could ever stir from a so-mysteriously-appointed place, Insel had retrieved his comb pour se faire une beauté, awaiting my arrival with his breakfast!