I racked my brain for an explanation of my soaring respect (respect being a sentiment foreign to me) for a loafer who in the light of common sense proved to be actually silly.
Insel, who, so sensible of his essential mystery — communicated that sense of imminent magic inevitably, just when one was in the “thick” of his influence would illustrate his “power” with a story such as how, after dining with married friends, he had predicted to his wife, “That union will not last long.”
“Und Tatsächlich,” he concluded with an expression of awe, “they separated within the year.”
He suffered, it would seem, from the incredible handicap of only being able to mature in the imagination of another. His empty obsession somehow taking form in obsessing the furnished mind of a spectator.
From a distance one remembered him vaguely as an indulgence in a quaint innocuous vice. Still I could scarcely go further with him than dissolution. I decided it would be useless to see him again.
My brain still seemed to be vibrating out of time, when early one evening on leaving a library I wandered into an old church. Somebody up in the organ loft was playing Bach. A sublime repetitive patter of angels’ feet soled with assuagement, giving chase to one another in a variable immobility of eternal arrival, they trod my cerebral vibrations from disarray into tempo once more.
I had not thought of my casual prediction that the whole of Insel’s life would hang upon a key — when on mislaying my own key to my apartment he produced the duplicate I had lent him in the days of his “eviction”— and forgot (the place was still at his disposal) to ask me for it again.
It was a long while before it occurred to me that his girl’s watch was lying at the jeweler’s. By then, all that remained of Insel was a vague impression of trompe l’oeil. I wrote him to call for this love relic, he having assured me that should I have it sent to his address his concierge would seize it towards arrears in rent.
Insel, an eroded scarecrow, greeted me with the somber dignity of a dejected god.
“Why did your girl give you such a rotten watch,” I teased, “the jeweler won’t guarantee it.”
“One takes what one can get,” said Insel with no trace of emotion as I had handed him the erstwhile “Adam and Eve in primeval embrace.” His present concern was for getting back the key. Determined he should not have it, I pretended I was returning to Paris.
Lolling on either end of the great couch, supported by our elbows, our feet on the floor, we were at ease for conversation — the conversation would not begin — Insel being taken up with contracting to some intense concentration that gradually pushed out a sort of pallid ethereal moss to cover his ravaged face.
At last, to my raised eyebrows, “Ah, liebe Frau Jones,” he complained in prayerful peevishness, “it’s not so easy for me — I don’t mean anything to you anymore.”
“I know,” I said contritely, “I get these wild enthusiasms for things — they don’t last.”
“And we might have had such a wonderful time together,” he sighed.
22
I COULD NOT MAKE OUT WHY THIS FANTASTICALLY beautiful creature should have both hands round my throat, when Insel, shrunken to a nerve, his eyes fixed as blinded granite, sat at that distance with his fists so tightly clenched. Fingers of automatic pressure rapped their tonnage of abstract force on my jugular — the blood on my brain surged in a noisy confusion— “You are going to give in — obsessed by my beauty — having no hope — endlessly resigned—”
All the air wheezed in my exploding ears as a last breath, “—suffering — suffering — suffering—choked by a robot!” This was not all that suffocated me — myriads upon myriads of distraught women were being strangled in my esophagus.
I had known exhaustive desperation but no such desperation as this — with its power of a universal conception — of limitless application: being impersonal made it the more overwhelming.
“You — are — going — to — give — in.”
“To whom?” I wondered — my eyes closing. “To Insel? Or this incredibly lovely monster made of dead flesh.”
“Thou art fair my beloved, thou—,” rose from a subconscious abyss.
Not wholly convinced I wrenched my eyelids apart — my cerebral current, flowing an infinitessimal fraction of a second faster than the normal, registered Insel. I caught him at it. Swift as the leaves of the shutter on a camera when a snapshot is taken, there came together upon his concentric face a distinct enlargement of Colossus’ photograph that always stood on the sitting room mantlepiece at the other end of the flat.
Simultaneously it came back to me how Insel, on his first visit, had taken that photo between his hands to stare at it inordinately as if for reproduction, for a long time, and at length bringing it nearer to his eyes.
“Such beauty as this,” he said, “could scarcely happen more than once in a hundred years.” He himself put it at two thousand, I had laughingly observed.
“Stop it,” I commanded, letting fly a fearful kick at Insel’s brittle shin. As if he were anaesthetized, the kick seemed not to hurt him — he received it with the smile of ultra-intimacy he had for me whenever we met on the unexplored frontiers of consciousness.
“The pet! The lamb! — it does television, too,” I told myself delightedly.
“Insel,” I laughed, enthusiastic over him once more.
“Seien wir uns wieder gut—I give you the key — dinner — My man Godfrey — the loan on your picture — you go to the Balkans — you are the living confirmation of my favorite theories.”
As for Insel, he emerged from his “raptness” babbling of Colossus — Colossus as he had himself foretold me having taken on an immortality as an evergrowing myth. Insel claimed him as a kindred spirit with ideas identical with his own.
“How entirely he would have accepted me— my art — We would have been as one—”
I argued at length against this sudden conviction. “Do you know,” I asked, “who, for the so-called precursor of surrealism, was the supreme painter? — Rubens—” Only then did Insel’s illusions miserably dissolve.
23
AFTER THE POWELL FILM, WE INSTINCTIVELY returned to Montparnasse — eating at a chic bar. The barman and Insel behaved as brothers — I vaguely noted a sort of ritual — the passing and repassing between them of half a cigarette. They addressed each other as “du.” “No — for ‘thee’—” Insel would say, placing the stump on a glass shelf as one handles a treasure.
Some days later I saw this barman out of doors wearing one of the richest overcoats I had seen in Paris. Evidently such acquaintances could hand out “leavings” superior to the plain nourishment Insel acquired from the Quakers.
We sat around the Dôme and Insel x-rayed. All the girls, as they giggled along the Boulevard, he disrobed — more precisely, he could not see that they were dressed. As if on an expedition for collecting ivory, he handed me their variously molded thighs — weighed them with an indescribable sensitivity of touch.
“This one,” he assured me, “in the summer is firmer — turns to gold—”
Recalling how terribly Mlle Alpha had said he dated, I presumed he was claiming my interest by indulging in what Boulevardiers of the old days called “undressing the women” in his own unbelievably tangible way. “I don’t need them to take off their clothes,” he remarked.