Mina Loy - Insel

I always had to order the same drinks for myself as for Insel, or he would not have taken anything— but I made him drink my fine . It would, I felt, have superfluous results were I to even sip alcohol in the company of this weirdly intoxicating creature. At the same time in accordance with my mission as a lifesaver, I begged him to take café au lait —which roused a piteous opposition.

As if wound up he went on beating a mea culpa on his absent breast.

I caught him by the arm.

Instantaneously he displaced to a distance. I was left with my own arm articulated at a right angle, holding in my hand a few inches of gray bone. It had come away with a bit of his sleeve, acutely decorated with the jagged edge of torn black cloth. At the same time, Insel laying his hand on my shoulder, the rag and the bone did a “fade-out.”

“Promise me to stay here,” he whispered, “while I go to the bar. These people would not like it if I did not pay.”

Insel, who seemed to remember our pact, wanted to go back to the Dôme. But I refused.

“It’s time for you to sleep,” I commanded. That persistent teeter in my mind which was always tipping Insel up in a stiff horizontal straight line, his immovable eyes glued to infinity, was laying him out in state on no bed under an awesome canopy of poverty.

“No,” I decided, “I shall put you back in your box — my pet clochard is going to lie in a row — under a bridge.”

WE WANDERED OFF IN SEARCH OF THE SEINE— IT was dawn.

Perhaps this showcase hung outside a librairie was a prison and we, therefore, suspecting an isolation, dissolved its wire caging with the crafty focus of sight to set the content free.

We saw the primeval steam (whose last wisp straying endlessly had wreathed itself round Insel’s brain) condense to stone in a frayed torso.

In the darkness it was blind. As the sky broke open, its outline entered the morning gently with the eyes of an animal. As daylight warmed the lids widened to the vision of a pagan.

In conception vast enough to absorb the centuries it survived, now in defiance of time to surpass it — the eternal Thing was looking at us with the fullness of the future. All we had ever understood that was less than itself peeled like spoiled armor.

What enormous foreboding, Insel, in his simplicity, I, in my complexity, recognized in its ideal expression, I cannot say. It was a recognition of something known which, in spite of life, we would know again. Insel, without speaking, turned to me staring at the re-impression of an impression on a book spread out for the passerby we had both, I could see, in identical silence found one significance in an early Greek fragment — I do not remember which.

I have heard that some philosophers assume reality to be absent without an audience. In empty streets the sun had a terrible excessive existence for ourselves alone. We walked together, yet repeatedly, as if having veered in an arc it took no time to describe, Insel would be coming towards me from far away.

“Go back!” he cried in gaunt derangement, “if it disgusts you to look at me.” Shining uselessly, as an electric bulb “left on” by day, his face, unshaven, was partially clouded.

We came to a Raoul Dufy in a dealer’s window; his charming “crook’s technique” disintegrated my meticulous companion. I feared that, the shock reinforcing his perpetual cerebral fit, he was about to throw a physical one. Instead he became covered with verdigris.

We had to relapse at another cafe. Insel disappeared for quite a while.

“Have you been sick?” I asked solicitously. He was looking less green.

“Dufy,” he explained.

I put down the money for the coffee and a twenty-five centime piece rolled to the ground.

“Would you pick that up?” I begged. Insel began pulling himself together but did nothing about it, so I picked it up myself.

“Oh, dear,” he wailed forlornly. “I thought you pointed to me. For God’s sake throw it down again — or I shall never forgive myself,” he pled and pled—.

Nothing would induce me to. I foresaw him distinctly diminishing through the hole in the center of that tiny disc and I had to get him to the Seine.

At length we arrived at the gleaming water bearing so lightly its lazy barges with their drag of dancing diamonds. Whatever had been an “under-the-bridge” was all boxed in and the sun had crawled so far into the sky it was needless to look for another.

After that we seemed to be wandering in an aimless delight round and round the Orangerie. Insel’s boots were hurting. His pain was impersonal; it might have been following him, snapping at his legs.

With some effort, having breakfasted all night, we conceived the idea of going to “lunch.” Insel, who was on the point of allowing the air to lift him from the railed-in terrace of the Tuileries and set him down in the Rue de la Paix, appraised by normal standards, although it was just this “beauty of horror” I was sure should be worth such a lot of money to him, looked really terrifying. His being unshaven became a smoke screen. Always his self-illumination cast its own shadow. In shining he dragged an individual darkness into the world. I felt sure that as the thoroughfares refilled we would run less risk of being arrested for disturbing the public peace on the Left Bank.

“My friend we are not dressed for going into town,” I insisted, heading him off in another direction.

“Why?” asked Insel in bewildered politeness. “You look as lovely as you always do.”

With a bizarre instinct for scenic effect the hazard presiding our senseless excursion drove us into the Gare d’Orléans.

In the almost gelatinous gloom of the great hall the enclosure before the Buffet Restaurant, its boundaries set by stifled shrubs, offered a stage for Insel to unroll his increate existence to the fitting applause of a dead echo, the countless scurry of departing feet.

This station, as he entered it, became the anteroom of dissolution, where the only constructions left of a real world were avalanches of newspapers, and even these aligned in a dusty perspective like ghosts of overgrown toys.

The place seemed deserted. There was no one to see Insel lay out hocus-pocus negresses on the table in apologetic sacrifice.

“They were all wrong ,” he brooded, as if he were a puritan with an ailing conscience. “I was going in the wrong direction! — I renounce,” he sobbed hurling off the negresses, who, bashed against the dingy windows of the Gare, melted and dripped like black tears into limbo down a morbid adit leading to underground platforms — there to mingle with the inquietude of departure to be borne away on a hearse of the living throbbing along an iron rail which must be a solidified sweep of the Styx.

“The only thing wrong with those negresses was your beating one of them up!”

Insel denied this vehemently, and reproached me. I had, he said, inflamed their rebellion by smiling at them. That was no way to handle negresses.

“What? You can sleep with them, but I can’t smile at them. How do you work that out?”

This muddled Insel, the theme of whose half-conscious theatricals must either be that his beefsteak shared jealous passions with less conclusively slaughtered meat or that prostitutes lay far beyond a patroness’s permissions.

“Colored people are not—,” he began, looking very Simon Legree.

“But Insel in your relationship she is entitled—”

“I only slept with her three times—”

“If she had slept with you half a time I consider she has a right to everything you possess.”

Insel, who had a fanciful ingenuity in extricating himself from any situation he felt to be awkward without very well understanding why, instructed me, “You know nothing of the etiquette of my underworld — its laws . The rights of such women extend only to the level of the tabletop.