Mina Loy - Insel

A narrow canvas, nigger-black, whose quality of shining obscurity was the effect of minutely painting in oil on some tempera ground, die Irma stood knee-deep on an easel.

To her livid brow, rounded like a half-moon, clung a peculiarly clammy algaeic or fungoid substitute for hair. Beneath it a transparent mask of horizontal shadow was penetrated by the eyes of an hypnosis; flat disks of smoked mirror, having the selfsame semblance of looking into and out of oneself as her creator.

Perhaps in a superfine analysis, this is what all men really do, but as a natural interplay; whereas Insel and his picture were doing it with alternating intent. Indeed the great thin uninscribed coins of her gunmetal pupils, returning his fascinated gaze, were tilted at such an angle as to give a dimly illuminated reflection of an inner and outer darkness.

Her hands, as if nailed to her hips like crossed swords, jutted out from her body which seemed to be composed of rippling lava that here and there hardened to indentations like holly leaves growing from her sternum — her male hands that hardly made a pair, for the one had the bones of the back marked all of equal length and the other, one finger too long with an unmodeled edge which curved like paper against the background.

He hung over die Irma like a tall insect and outside the window in the rotten rose of an asphyxiated sunset the skeleton phallus of the Eiffel Tower reared in the distance as slim as himself.

Beside the picture I noticed that the gutter of his upper lip was interrupted by a seam, a fine thread of flesh running from the base of the nose to his mouth that accentuated the compression of his lips in their continual retention of the one remaining tooth which, so thin as to be atavistic in an adult, was like a stump forgotten in a croquet ground, left over from the Game of Life. An incipience or reparation of harelip? And Irma? In this very same spot she puffed to a swollen convergence.

“But Insel,” I asked, “her upper lip is about to burst with some inavowable disease. You have formed her of pus. Her body has already melted.”

“Exactly,” he answered with mysterious satisfaction.

“I don’t care for it,” I decided.

“And I,” said Insel, with the reverent intonement with which he accompanied his tacitly implied admittance of myself to his holy-of-holies, “thought that this picture would be just the one that you would like.”

Time hovered, suspended in the attic air as the powders of life in the noxious mist of the exhausted city below. When suddenly the soporific lure he sowed in his magnetic field — shattered. Insel was snatching at the emptied flesh on his face in the recurrent anxiety inspiring his wilder gestures.

“She ought not to be,” he cried out, “if you don’t like her, I am going to destroy her.”

His cerebral excitement seemed to inflate his head, rather as a balloon from which his wasted body hung in slight levitation.

“Come down to the floor, for God’s sake,” I said peremptorily. “What does my opinion matter? I’m not the museum.”

“But you’re right,” he insisted. “I have been going in the wrong direction. Die Irma’s out .”

“And don’t use me as a sop for your terror of working.”

“It’s really not that — but a technical question. Die Irma ist nass .”

“She isn’t, she’s bone dry. I felt her.”

“I assure you, underneath—”

“Every time I’ve come to Paris you’ve said the same thing. Pull yourself together Insel, you’ve got to finish this for the museum. For you it’s work or death. Can’t you figure it out?” I urged helpfully— “When you have money and can eat you paint a picture so as to have more money— when you haven’t any more money.”

“It’s more complicated than that,” he objected again, “ die Irma is wet—”

I was getting exasperated— When the balls of our eyes caught each other, we both began to laugh.

“If you had heard the Lesbian’s synopsis of Frank Harris’s confessions, you wouldn’t even trouble to mention it—.”

“I shouldn’t care to read this Lesbian’s confessions — it is a Lesbian who has taken the love of my life away from me.”

“Well now, I wouldn’t mention that either. Of course, it does not matter with me — anybody can tell me anything— you know what I mean — when you surrender your arms, chuck them onto neutral territory. I know it’s a touch that modernizes your romanticism; all the same, I’d advise you never to make that particular confidence to a woman ‘ou connait ça .’ ”

But Insel was past advice. With a look of dogged emptiness he recited for the nth time the story of those Mädchen “who shut themselves into the house for a fortnight for fear he would shoot them.”

Mostly when speaking of his loves of the past he became quite normal; subnormal really, for his adventures in the actual world had been of an excruciating banality.

As I was also engaged for dinner, I asked the time. Insel who was sitting on a wooden stool stretched out his arm — it reached much further than its actual length would warrant.

Behind the curtain in the corner, carefully secreted under empty boxes, neatly stacked, was his wristwatch. He did not bring it out — his arm seemed in some Einsteinian contraction to shorten the necessary distance for focusing the hands.

It was seven o’clock. I took my leave. Insel, astonished as if this were the first break in a timeless conversation, snapped in half; or at least bowed like a poplar in a sudden gale; his dessicated limbs the branches.

Staring vainly towards the door I was opening — he choked in the voice of a Robot, “ Morgen komm ich im Gericht . Tomorrow I go to court — I am going mad!”

“Then don’t forget your little afternoon,” I reminded him— “I dote on madmen.”

As I was leaving, he seized his palette and dripping an enormous brush into a pile of ebony pigment painted with a heinous neigh of victory, “ Die Irma —Out!”

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.”