“I’M SO UGLY NAKED,” HE TOLD ME MOST unexpectedly, in a tone of intense and anxious confidence. “I can’t go to the public baths because I daren’t walk down to the water.”
“Your face is naked and you walk about with it.”
“Yes,” he assented miserably, “and it frightens the women. I used to be so beautiful. Is it imaginable?” he asked, peering expectantly into my face.
“I’m tired of your tirade as to how hideous you are.”
“All women are terrified of me,” he continued automatically.
“I said tired—not terrified, and I’ll tell you why. I’ve never really seen you. You always give me the impression that you are not there. Sometimes you have no inside; sometimes no outside, and never enough of anything to entirely materialize. Like a quicksand, when one looks at you whatever one gets a glimpse of you immediately rush up from your own depths to snatch. Your way of being alive is a sequence of disappearances. You’re so afraid of actuality.”
“I can materialize for you,” he said raptly, “forever—on the corner of this street.”
Somehow we were sitting on the Terrasse of the Hotel Lutetia. It stood behind us dressed in its name of a pagan Paris. It might very well be actually surviving for our blind backs which, taking no part in the present, are carried around with us as if concrete in the past.
Darting about amazingly in the autumn vapor innumerable metal beetles of various species with which modern man, still unable to create soft-machines and so limited to the construction of heavy plagiarisms that sometimes crush him, had sprinkled the carrefour facing us, where gasoline impregnating the dust had begotten a vitiated yet exhilarating up-to-date breath of life.
A distant gnat of a thousand horsepower hummed in the heavens.
“If only we could sit here eternally it would be wunderbar—it’s just like sitting in the kitchen.”
“The kitchen?” I exclaimed.
“Ah, yes,” he sighed. “All my youth I ate in the kitchen together with my Vater und Mutter and the other five children.” Then, inhaling the effluvia of the streets, “There was lots of steam,” he said invigorated. “All the washing hung up to dry, the muddy boots stood in a row, and on the good hot stove—”
“Die Suppe,” I joined in, entranced.
“Ja, die Suppe,” he confirmed ecstatically. “You see, it is not so much a matter of materializing but of being able to speak. Before I found you I had never anyone I could speak to. I should never have been able to tell about all this—”
“All the boots?” I interrupted.
“—to anyone else,” he concluded, his voice trailing off as if calling to me from another world.
“Allein—allein,” he chanted forsakenly. Something was happening to this man’s voice, the most musical modulations were stealing into it. “Always alone—alone in Berlin—alone in Paris—” The words floated out of him like wisps of a dream, “more than alone in prison.”
“In prison,” I responded, “where there is no one, no one you can convince of your not being there. You might try it on the warden, but the moment he began to suspect would be the very moment he assured himself of your presence—I mean—let’s leave that and have something more to eat!”
In sitting so close to Insel at the small terrace table all the filaments of what has been called the astral body, that network of vibrational force, were being drawn out of me towards a terrific magnet, while I sat unmoved beside the half-rotten looking man of flesh. My astral inclination, withheld by a counteractive physical repulsion, could not gain its presumable end of flying onto that magnet— It was as though he had achieved an impossible confusion of his positive and negative polarity— Out of a dim past echoed the din of a music hall refrain I had heard in Berlin: “Du musst herüber—You must come over.”