“Come down to the floor, for God’s sake,” I said peremptorily. “What does my opinion matter? I’m not the museum.”
“But you’re right,” he insisted. “I have been going in the wrong direction. Die Irma’s out.”
“And don’t use me as a sop for your terror of working.”
“It’s really not that — but a technical question. Die Irma ist nass.”
“She isn’t, she’s bone dry. I felt her.”
“I assure you, underneath—”
“Every time I’ve come to Paris you’ve said the same thing. Pull yourself together Insel, you’ve got to finish this for the museum. For you it’s work or death. Can’t you figure it out?” I urged helpfully— “When you have money and can eat you paint a picture so as to have more money— when you haven’t any more money.”
“It’s more complicated than that,” he objected again, “die Irma is wet—”
I was getting exasperated— When the balls of our eyes caught each other, we both began to laugh.
“If you had heard the Lesbian’s synopsis of Frank Harris’s confessions, you wouldn’t even trouble to mention it—.”
“I shouldn’t care to read this Lesbian’s confessions — it is a Lesbian who has taken the love of my life away from me.”
“Well now, I wouldn’t mention that either. Of course, it does not matter with me — anybody can tell me anything— you know what I mean — when you surrender your arms, chuck them onto neutral territory. I know it’s a touch that modernizes your romanticism; all the same, I’d advise you never to make that particular confidence to a woman ‘ou connait ça.’ ”
But Insel was past advice. With a look of dogged emptiness he recited for the nth time the story of those Mädchen “who shut themselves into the house for a fortnight for fear he would shoot them.”
Mostly when speaking of his loves of the past he became quite normal; subnormal really, for his adventures in the actual world had been of an excruciating banality.
As I was also engaged for dinner, I asked the time. Insel who was sitting on a wooden stool stretched out his arm — it reached much further than its actual length would warrant.
Behind the curtain in the corner, carefully secreted under empty boxes, neatly stacked, was his wristwatch. He did not bring it out — his arm seemed in some Einsteinian contraction to shorten the necessary distance for focusing the hands.
It was seven o’clock. I took my leave. Insel, astonished as if this were the first break in a timeless conversation, snapped in half; or at least bowed like a poplar in a sudden gale; his dessicated limbs the branches.
Staring vainly towards the door I was opening — he choked in the voice of a Robot, “Morgen komm ich im Gericht. Tomorrow I go to court — I am going mad!”
“Then don’t forget your little afternoon,” I reminded him— “I dote on madmen.”
As I was leaving, he seized his palette and dripping an enormous brush into a pile of ebony pigment painted with a heinous neigh of victory, “Die Irma—Out!”
19
MY INTERMITTENT INTRUSTIONS ON INSEL’S inexplicable Eden of mischief had set their mark upon me. Some of his secretive twinkle had seeped into my eyes and lingered there, eliciting comments from my friends. I became more popular.
Insel, however, did not like it at all — as if I were a thief, a stark sternness shot with flashes of sadism replaced his usual intonations of abased tenderness while, awkwardly enough, I continued to feel myself elfin.
One day when I had returned from a lunch he came in to fetch his “Kafka.” I had a good time and prattled to him sociably, “Alceste — the duchess— everyone was intrigued to know why I am so jolly.”
“So lustig,” Insel hissed — a maniac sadism flaring up in his eyes, and for the first time I saw him as dangerous. “So lustig,” his hiss growing shriller and I could feel his hatred twining round my throat as he took a step towards me. But a step no longer the airy step of the hallucinated — it was the pounding tread of the infuriated male. “Lustig,” he squeaked, his hiss exhausted.
He approached no nearer. Probably my absorbed interest in examining his insane pupils dominated him. Anyway, although it now surprises me — it seemed I could not be afraid of him — our “entente” in the visionary lethargy of that primeval chaos we were able to share was fundamental and secure. Confronted with his surface vagaries, I felt at once collected — as if I might have been his “keeper” since the dawn of creation.
“Insel,” I said placatingly, “if it would improve your health were I to suffer a hopeless love for you, I’m quite willing. Not today — I have a cocktail party — but some other time, I promise” (thinking of my bouts with the grand sympathique), “—you shall see me suffer horridly.”
Insel, unconvinced, let out a low growl which sounded like one more lustig—while that strange bloom, as if he were growing feathers, spread over his face. He turned into a sugar dove. It flew about the sitting room, dropping from under its wings a three-ring circus. In one ring echoed the cracks of a whip; in one ring rotated an insane steed of mist; and in the other ring Insel’s spirit astride an elemental Pegasus—.
“Horror,” said Insel and I jumped. “Would I have to grow a beard in order to make myself attractive to you?”
The grand sympathique (which eventually turned out to be a duodenal ulcer) must inevitably go on the rampage again. Very soon it did. There was no resource to Insel’s healing Strahlen. Since his screech of a vanquishing cat he had, as far as I was concerned, subconsciously thrown them into reverse.
For a while I was helpless; then one day when the pain calmed down somewhat, I crawled up to Insel’s — still trusting he would finish die Irma for America — to give him a hundred francs. That is, I never gave him anything. I am not generous. The few billets necessary to keep him going were fully covered by the valuable drawing he had forced me to accept. It would be easy to sell if I needed the money.
It did not occur yet to me how unsuccessfully I had succored him, for when first I met him he had been merely a surrealist — his biography was coherent — steadily since I had “interfered” in his affairs he had grown hallucinatory.
“It’s all very well,” Frau Feirlein argued with me, “I was here when you advanced him five hundred francs for the Gallery — the very next day he hadn’t a sou.”
To me it appeared fitting Insel’s finances should flicker in and out like himself. For the present no power on earth could dislodge from my mind that luminous effigy of generic hunger — or shake my serene unquestioning insistence on its preservation. Something unknowable had entered into a game with my intuition.
He let me in and returned straight to his needy couch, teetering on the end of his spine in a double triangle as he drew up his knees to replace his feet under cover. I was overcome by a rush of nervous sublimity carried by the air.
“If this is madness,” I said to myself, breathing his atmosphere exquisite almost to sanctification, “madness is something very beautiful.”
My relinquished conviction of his unutterable value returned as I looked up in the bare swept room. An especial clarity of the light I had noticed before to be associated with his presence was this evening so accentuated I could actually dissect it. Its softly bedazzling quality was not of any extra brightness, but of a penetrant purity that uplifted my eyes. I could discern among the unified flood of customary light an infiltration of rays as a rule imperceptible, filaments infinitessimally finer than the gossamer halo round a lamp in the fog — a white candescence that made the air look shinier, with the same soothing shimmer as candles at mass in sacred houses, only indescribably acute.