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.
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.