Mina Loy - Insel

As night drew out — it got draftier and draftier— we removed, as if receding into a lair, from the terrace to further and further inside the cafe, from the open to the enclosed — each time ordering a new consommation from a different waiter — till we reached an inaereate core of the establishment. Here we inexplicably came upon that friend whose hypothetic non-existence insured Insel’s vaunted isolation. One after another the same Germanic wag would shuffle up to our table, each time wearing a different face.

One — projected that declamatory arm which in a certain condition present at the time falls with a forgetful plop before completing an indication. “Who is Insel,” it challenged, “to monopolize this perfectly fascinating woman?”

Another — equally appreciative until he discovered the hair in the shadow of my hat to be undeniably white — apologized with a shudder, “I won’t say it doesn’t look all right on you — but I can’t bear the sight. It reminds me that I am old.” He looked less old than Insel— He was one of the many unfortunates who have had nothing to “give off” but the bubbles of adolescence, whereas Insel’s rattling pelvis was trotting the leather seat in the sitting leaps of an exuberant child.

“They are so surprised,” he chortled repeatedly. “They are accustomed to seeing me all alone —.”

I ordered supper — got cigarettes at the counter and dumped them on our table on my way downstairs to buy some rouge (probably on a cue my subconscious had taken from my critic). When I returned it looked as if the empty space in our quiet comer had come alive, the leather padding had broken out in a parasitic formation, a double starfish whose radial extremities projected and retracted rapidly at dynamic angles.

It was Insel all cluttered up with his “private life.” Draped with the bodies of two negresses, spiked with their limbs. They seemed, out of ambush, to have fallen upon him from over the back of the high seat. The waiter had laid a startling oblong of white cloth which knocked the milling muddle of polished black arms and faces round Insel’s pallor into a factitious distance, although he and his mates were actually attached to my supper table.

The group being occupied it was difficult to know how to greet them. I swept an inclusive smile of welcome across them as I sat down and the waiter brought the food.

As I watched this virtually prohibited conjunction with a race whose ostracism “debunks” humanity’s ostensible belief in its soul, I scarcely heard the scandalous din they were making; these negresses, with their fingers of twig, were tearing at some object — my scarlet packet of “High-Life”!— rapidly becoming invisible under Insel’s touch — he clung to it with such constrictive tenacity, he might have been squeezing an atom.

“Maquereau!” “Salaud!” shrieked the dark ladies to stress their pandemonium accounting of benefits bestowed.

“Insel,” I addressed him authoritatively, not dreaming “pimp” and “skunk” were almost the only French words familiar to the poor dear, “if you could understand what they are calling you — you’d let go!”

Once more fallen sideways off himself like his own dead leaf in one of those unexpected carvings into profile; a zigzag profile of a jumping jack cut out of paper from an exercise book; shrunken to a strip of introvert concentration blind as a nerve among the women’s volume, clenching his gums in a fearful sort of constipated fervor, as if hammering on an anvil, Insel thumped his closest negress with an immature fist. Every thump drove in my impression — as this black and white flesh glanced off one another — of their being totally unwed — that Insel, whom I often called “Ameise” who was even now like an “ant,” occupied with his problem of a load in another dimension, could never have worked on those polished bodies than with the microscopic function of a termite — unseeing, unknowing of all save an imperative to adhere — to never let go. He clung to my cigarettes conscious of nothing but his comic “tic.”

There were onlookers peering under the brass rail topping the back-to-back upholstery — three heads left over from the crowded hours. One, the sharp mask of a Jew worn to a rudder with centuries of steering through hostile masses, lowered its pale eyelashes on the neighbors’ insurrection as if closing a shop.

I paid the waiter, bought some more cigarettes, jumped into a taxi, undressed and went to bed, all with the delicious composure Insel instilled — not questioning the continuity of this “elevation of the pure in heart” even while he in whom it originated was being slapped by inexpensive harlots on their way home from work.

I was falling into blissful sleep when a hopeless S.O.S. vibrated on the air — an S.O.S. that sounded like a sobbing “ sterben .” I started up in horror of my selfishness. What could I have been thinking of to leave that delicate soul to his longing for suicide on the contemptible grounds that I was sick of the racket he had been causing.

What would he do, on emerging from a dimension where a packet of ten cigarettes encompassed a universe, to find that I, his very means of expression, had deserted him. With an aereal ease I must have “caught” from Insel, I threw on my clothes and more or less floating into the street together with the presage of dawn, the hoses of the street cleaners slushing my ankles, hounded by my ever growing obsession that Insel held a treasure to be saved at all costs. Damp and heroic I arrived at the Dôme. The piebald mix-up had disappeared.

“What happened to that skeleton I had with me an hour ago?” I asked the majordomo. “He got into a tangle with some negresses— Was he all right?”

“Oh, perfectly,” he protested as if within his reach nothing could possibly go wrong. “You see, madame,” confidentially, “the fellow lives off these women of the Dôme; there’s bound to be a scrap every now and then!”

“—ONE WHO HAS GREATLY SUFFERED,” I WAS astounded to hear myself telling the man — like a nice old maid with illusions — in precisely the somber tones of Insel’s “patroness drive.” Equally astounded, he shrugged his shoulders.

“You’ll find him in one of the little bars round here — he won’t be far, madame.”

I knew better. I had my own vision of him — it was the rustiness of that nail that haunted me. Or would I reach his attic only after an ebony vampire had sucked the last drop of blood from his corrupted carcass?

Nevertheless, on my swift passage I caught sidelong sight of Insel standing disproportionately at the end of a row of little men before a “zinc,” his head, appearing enormous, shone with a muted gleam.

Without stopping I raised my hand. Insel, although he had his back to me, rushed into the street — he seemed to be continuing to run around.

In his gesture I could see a conclusion of distressful searching in which he had circled during my absence — beating his breast. “ Warum, warum, ist diese frau davon gegangen? — Why did this woman go away? I have not ceased to ask myself.” Insel complained again and again in miserable bewilderment. “You went away— Why did you go away?”

“Only to fetch something I left at the other café.”

Tenderly confidential he bent his neck — a gnarl in a stricken tree — I was about to learn what urgent anxiety had drawn me out of bed.

“There was a waiter,” he whispered hoarsely into my hat, “who wouldn’t let me out of the Dôme until I had paid for two cafés fines .” (They had forgotten to include them when I paid for the supper.) “It isn’t that I want you to pay me back,” he protested with his so distinguished courtesy—.”