I was not unfamiliar with it. That different light I had seen etherealize the heavy features of Signora Machiabene an hour before she was stricken to death. That very essence of light I had begun to perceive during the prolonged moment when a dislocated vertebra had thrown me beyond the circumscription of bodily life.
There is no saying in what bliss consists, yet I could see it incorporated with Insel’s face, bathed in that different light, as he lay under his only blanket, his limp hands clasped behind his head.
“I see through the wall,” he said, his voice at peace. “I can lie here hour-long watching my neighbors live their dear little lives. Sometimes they play a gramophone and on its way to me the music has become miraculous.”
“You have never known ennui,” I laughed, forgetting as completely as he evidently had, if indeed he had ever been conscious of, the tortured glowworm of the Boulevard night, the inarticulate confidences of one cut off from mankind; the sleepless seeker after an unmentionable salvation who, blinded by his own unnatural glitter, was so wounded by the dawn; that distracted man who, terrified of isolation, hung onto my hand while he flopped and darted like a fish on the end of a line, stung by a mystifying despair.
“Never,” he assented, beatified. “I am eternally content. My happiness is infinite. All the desires of the earth are consummated within myself.”
“Aside from that — what are the people in the next room doing?”
“Just being — I ask no more of anyone. Being in itself is sufficient for us all,” he answered enraptured.
Seeing I had taken up one of his drawings, he instantly arose. Always — there was something of the depths of the sea about him and his work, also of eventual evolution as in the drawing I was looking at where to a rock of lava a pale subaqueous weed clung in the process of becoming a small limp hand. The tips of its fingers were stealing into pink.
Insel himself had fearsome hands, narrow, and pallid like his face, with a hard, square ossification towards the base of the back, and then so tapering as if compressed in driving an instrument against some great resistance.
“You were a lithographer, not an engraver?” I had once asked him, puzzled by what his hands looked as if they must have been in the habit of doing, and we concluded this conformation could be an inheritance from the Schlosser’s driving power. But out of this atavistic base his fingers grew into the new sensibility of a younger generation, in his case excessive; his fingers clung together like a kind of pulpoid antennae, seemingly inert in their superfine sensibility, being aquiver with such minuscule vibrations they scarcely needed to move — fingers almost alarmingly fresh and pink for extremities of that bloodless carcass, the idle digits of some pampered daughter; and their fresh tips huddled together in collective instinct to more and more microscopically focus his infinitesimal touch. All the same, there was something unpleasantly embryonic about them. I had never seen anything that gave this impression of the cruel difficulty of coming apart since, in my babyhood, I had watched the freak in Bamum’s circus unjoin the ominous limpness of the legs of his undeveloped twin.
“Let’s have a look at your feet,” I said as he came weightlessly towards me. He drew off his slippers, padding over the bare boards on the drained Gothic feet of a dying ivory Christ.
“What’s this?” I teased, pointing to a lurid patch on his instep, “a chancre?”
“No, it’s only where my shoe rubs me. I bought new shoes when I sold that picture and they hurt me,” he explained, frowning helplessly.
“Why not try pouring water into them and wearing them till they ‘adapt’? It often works.”
A strange bruise. It shone with the eerie azure of a neon light. But once within range of Insel, nothing seemed unaccountable, as though he submitted to an unknown law enforcing itself through him. Each item of his furnishing, he having touched it, had undergone the precious transformation of the packet he had folded in my home. His hand, in passing over them, must have caused their simple structure to obtrude upon the sight in advance of their banal identity.
A row of powdered-soap cartons, set upon a shelf, he had stood up to the significant erectness of sentinels, their impressive uniforms consisting in the sufficiency of their sheer sides. He showed me they were empty. Altogether his place had an uncommon dignity. Within a stockade of right angles he had domesticated the steady spirit of geometry.
The room, with its two tiny matchboard tables, its curtains of washed-out cotton across an alcove, full of its supplementary radiance, had an air of illogical grandeur beyond commercial price.
20
EVERY NOW AND THEN THE SHARP OF HIS FLICKERING sadism, a needle occasionally picking up the dropped thread of memory, would prick through his frayed conversation, woven of disjointed themes like an inconsistent lace eked out with stocking darnings.
He recalled my promise — to demonstrate unfortunate love whenever a twinge of pain contracted my features. He peered enthralled at the havoc pain played with me. His delirious peace expanded to full blossom in the smile of Buddha. One felt his utter joy at sight of my disablement had leapt to such a blaze he must melt off it, his fragile person dissolve in his delight, were it not for some mysterious source within him replenishing the exaggeration of his unabating intensity.
“Gestatten Sie?” I inquired ceremoniously, unable to hold out any longer against the pathological rat gnawing at my entrails. And I subsided on his couch. Above a certain degree of agony, one is willing to subside anywhere. However, my slight repulsion dispersed as I lay down. Indeed, like the saints whose dead bodies did not decompose, Insel’s electric exudation in some process of infinitesimal friction seemed to cleanse him of his grubbiness of the poor, to free him of any accretion natural to normal man. His couch was almost fragrant with that faint half-holy purity that hung about him.
“What color was this once?” I asked, as I drew up his gray blanket.
“White,” said Insel.
It was incredible. That twilight sheer duration lowers upon all pale fabrics had so penetrated the thick wool, one could only believe with difficulty it had not been dyed — a perfect job at that — no spot, no smirch, no variation in tone disturbed the unity of its spread surface. For a moment I entertained the idea that Insel had worked all over it with the microscopic point of his lead pencil, for it seemed no earthly dust could defer to such patient order. Anyhow, I decided everything in the place is bewitched, and let it go at that.
Insel, intently keeping watch, had moved his stool some distance away as if to find his range for an inverted “Aim of Withdrawal.” Spinning himself into a shimmering cocoon of his magnetic rays, introvert, incomparably aloof, “They’re mine,” he exulted as clearly as if he were crying aloud.
Too simple to fully imagine the effect of these rays, he had, it would seem, only an instinctive mesmeric use for them. He might even feel them as a sort of bodily loss compensated perhaps by rare encounters with one able to tune in.
“I shall make you some tea,” said Insel affectionately, and hushed as a nurse, he began swimming about from his little sink to his wooden shelf — or as a panther softly pacing before a vanquished prey—. I noticed now, as always, whenever one encountered Insel at an angle of meals at home, there was appropriately just enough dust of tea leaves left at the bottom of a packet for brewing the last cup — he would open the door to you holding precisely the fag end of a loaf for the last bite. But today he served a minute carton from an automatic machine in the Metro. Out of it he rolled into my palm a bonbon, virulent green, less than a pea in size.