With a kick of tiny annoyance at a toe of his wardrobe, “Personally, I do not admit the power of the microbe, but if you do — I fear you’ll be poisoned,” I warned him.
Then I gave him his suit.
When I came in again, Insel was pacing the studio in stealthy meditation. His mischievous assurance was so much his axis and at once so exteriorized that his whole implication seemed to have contracted to the finger of old fashioned comedians pressed to a nose under a crafty eyelid — Insel was feeling so sly— Then, going into reverse — as it was time for him to leave, he began fiddling abstractedly with a gratitude he did not know what to do with. “You have been very good to me,” he mumbled shamefacedly. “There is nothing I would not do for you — if ever,” inspired, “you have a pair of boots which need cleaning.”
“Insel,” I exclaimed encouragingly, “you needn’t say things like that about yourself.”
With a jerk he pulled himself out of an underlying complex.
“That was a figure of speech.” And inclining towards the couch with the bowing, palm-of-the-hand-drooping invitation with which saints in primitive pictures lead the eye to some sacred center, “Now you be ill, and go to bed so I can nurse you,” he pleaded adoringly.
I had to refuse. As I came to think of it, I wouldn’t know how to be nursed when ill.
So Insel, as if in prison or barracks, began folding up his sheets and blankets, I took a seat. With the stuff of my cape draping the chair, I felt like an emperor taking pride in a supreme buffoon.
There is no grace on earth to compare with a willowy man afflicted with levitation.
“It’s pure selfishness my allowing you to do this. It’s up to Bebelle — only I do so enormously enjoy your plastic geometry,” I observed to Insel, who, as if fitting a label to perfection, swayed his dreary silhouette of aereal bones, against a lifted sheet bleached in the reflection of his phosphorescence.
“If you want to make a fortune,” I advised him, “you should go on the Music Halls— Have you ever heard of Baggesson — one of the geniuses of the century? He broke white plates.
“You are even more wonderful folding white things up—”
“It would be utterly useless,” Insel protested. “Nobody ever sees in me what you see in me—”
“Well, you frighten the ‘people’ out of their wits, that ought to give you a hold on your audience. Of course, you’d need to rehearse— Have someone sit in the back of the theater and tell you where you get your effects. You should ‘come on’ in the fearful chatter of an earthquake and then all you’d have to do would be to leisurely tidy it up— I assure you you’d have the whole theater hallucinated.”
When he had stacked up his covers like a deck of cards, there was still one ceremony to perform, I took him into the kitchen and gave him whatever food there was left.
Under my eyes, as he packed it up, it diminished and froze into a Chinese puzzle. The essential, he said, was a minimum bulk. It did not in the least concern me that it would all be thrown away. His tying of the string was the close of a linear symphony.
Insel left with a farewell flash from his cranium and his forlorn-howl-in-the-wilderness of when shall I see you again— Then he crept back to the doormat and whispered shyly, “I shall explain everything to you next time.”
16
ON MY WAY TO THE STATION I CALLED ON MLLE Alpha. In her slacks of rust colored linen — her coppery hair, blown into a fresh sunburn, she appeared to have just sailed in from a lagoon.
Her eyes like coals, continent, of their fire, were round as the eyes of the wooden negresses supporting the violet draperies of her day-bed. Her lacquered toenails played at hide-and-seek among the meshes of her sandals. Her whole body was impudent with a slightly crass adolescence; it centered in her little tummy, which dared to be round.
A hard young apple — it was immediately plain to see, how, had one been on the other side of the fence of sex — one would have wanted to bite into it.
It was Insel who had sponsored our meeting and I gave her his message — that he would keep an appointment at five o’clock.
“He’s enthusiastic about you,” she said — then, “Would you think me very indiscreet if I asked you what you find to talk to him about for six hours?”
“Oh!” I explained loyally, “we exchange our little anecdotes. There’s the girl who went off with the Lesbian — it’s stupendous — to halt the endlessness of drama in the mere contemplation of a couple of shots.”
“So he tells you that one, too?”
“Look here,” I confessed. “At first I was indignant with you for launching the opinion that Insel is mad—. Now I am not sure—. It occurs to me that I can’t even make out what sanity is.”
“Well, I find him such an awful bore, I am constantly having to turn him out—”
“That’s because he’s too surrealistic for the surrealists.”
But when Mlle Alpha spoke of his work, it was with a profound veneration I could hardly share.
“I’m not so fond of elementals — I find that strata in the subliminal thin—. I know his work is a technical miracle and I submit to the active hypnosis with which he has the power to infuse dead paint — still—. There! That’s one thing we’re always talking about. His future work. He shows me what he is going to do. Sometimes I feel he has found a short cut to consummation in defiance of the concrete. That he is filling the galleries of the increate. He seemed so worth helping, I’ve only just begun to notice he never paints. If he ever does paint the things he sees — God knows where—the result will be spectacular.”
“Why? Haven’t you heard about Insel?” asked Mlle Alpha. “He and the friend with whom he came to Paris took morphine together and two years ago this friend died. His death gave Insel such a jolt, he dropped the drug, and ever since has painted nothing of any account.
“Why on earth doesn’t he take his old morphine?” she demanded of the universe in general, “and let himself die? At least he would have painted his pictures — while this way — where is the good in his remaining alive?”
Now drugs meant nothing to me. I had supposed they were a substitute for imagination in the unimaginative. I was prejudiced against the stories afloat of their awful destructiveness, ascribing them to one of those official dodges for preventing an exasperated humanity from having a little fun. Subconsciously, I waived this information. As if my mind were a jury refusing to be influenced by extraneous evidence. Being thus luckily prevented from putting two and two together, I was free to pursue my investigation of Insel in my own reactive way.
Moreover, was not Insel’s morphinism a thing of the past?
17
BEFORE I LEFT MLLE ALPHA TOLD ME THAT STIFF Ussif, the surrealist, had painted a picture I ought to see. Remembering (that under the influence of his feline screech) I had made no appointment with my strange boon companion, I arranged to go to Ussif’s the following week on my return to town.
“By the way”— I exclaimed, “I forgot—. When Insel wrote to you — did he predict the day and hour when his resistance must give out—?”
“Nothing of the kind,” she answered. “He wrote as usual, ‘I am starving to death.’ ”
When the time came for me to return I arrived to find a telephone message from the dressmaker, who was ill. So I hurried off to do some shopping. Afterwards, on my way to the surealist’s studio, I stopped the taxi at my flat to change my gloves.