Mina Loy - Insel

“Madame,” she said in a hushed warning, “in there it is dark at noon. Terrible clothes have clotted on the floor — Never before have I seen what was lying on the bed.”

Insel at last must have been evicted and at some unknown hour crept into the flat.

SOMEONE WAS LIVING THERE.

On my throwing open a window, he hooked his arm round his neck, rubbing the mastoid. “I have lain here for two whole days,” he said, ferocious with dignity. “I have a stiff neck.”

A hard-eyed, low class German, his very existence an insolence, wearing a shirt from a cheap shop — Insel must have thrown himself away with his old black sweater above which his former face had risen like a worn, pocked moon.

Unquestionably, I had cured him. Here was the “normal” man. An Insel unobsessed. Someone “replacing himself,” his mesmeric, melodic voice exchanged for a hostile creak.

This culminating phase of my eerie experience — Insel’s residence —remains confused, as I was busy directing packers.

Cavilling and bilious, whenever he caught sight of me he hardly refrained from spitting. Our relative positions entirely reversed, I had become for him a strange specimen, to whose slightest gesture he pinned an attention like that of a vindictive psychiatrist.

“Ha-ha!” he neighed irately, “I find little ‘still life’ in this flat. It would surely be of the greatest interest to Freud.”

We had, in our “timeless conversation,” with Insel’s concurrence in my “wonderful ideas,” superseded Freud. I must always have known he had never the slightest idea of what I was talking about — yet only now did this fact appear as negatory.

The still life that intrigued him was a pattern of a “detail” to be strewn about the surface of clear lamp shades. Through equidistant holes punched in a crystalline square, I had carefully urged in extension, a still celluloid coil of the color that Schiaparelli has since called shocking pink. Made to be worn round pigeon’s ankles for identification, I had picked it up in the Bon Marché.

Out of this harmless even pretty object an ignorant bully had constructed for me, according to his own conceptions, a libido threaded with some viciousness impossible to construe.

I was astounded.

It would be only natural that my jerky vibrational currents (which behave so much like a “poltergeist” that things when I touch them are apt to vanish, adding a superhuman difficulty to my work) should impinge on Insel’s abnormal precision with the force of a shock, although in the hallucinatory dimension it was this very extreme of antithesis that must set up the telepathic, televisionary machinery of our reciprocity.

“What do you suppose,” hissed my horrid guest, who somehow behaved like an alienated husband, “would happen to me if I were to lose anything?”

“Oh, I suppose,” I countered rudely, “I’d buy you another.”

Being the intrinsic complement of Insel’s enmity, logically my loathing for the real man was unconcealed, while he must actually hold himself in check not to assassinate me, for no crueller abhorrence could ever issue from the human heart than Insel’s for me.

There were brief abatements of his fantastic normality as when on coming up from the telephone I encountered only a creature of pathos in the hall.

“You would not notice, would you,” wistfully, “that I have polished everything in the flat.”

“No,” I concurred, “I would not have noticed that.”

Insel was long in swallowing his disappointment, then cryptically, “ Gut ,” he snapped, “and I am always amorous when drunk.”

And again, for fear I might forget the loan, Insel went limp as he had to the air raid siren. That unaccountable bloom he put forth when passing from one condition to another made his features appear to be of crumpled velvet.

Sitting on a chair of average height, he seemed to have sunk to bottomless depths, at the same time his imploring face peered at me — from the floor.

Craven to a degree that rendered his cowering august, of that meekness befitting a supplicant at the door of heaven, Insel was knowing an alibi so sublime — I again lost all knowledge of who he was.

“Here,” I hailed the will-o’-the-wisp, “after all I will give you the little box.” This box he desired, it was black, was a small object by the American surrealist, Joseph Cornell, the delicious head of a girl in slumber afloat with a night light flame on the surface of water in a tumbler, of bits cut from early Ladies’ Journals (technically in pupilage to Max Ernst) in loveliness, unique, in Surrealism— the tidal lines of engraving cooled its static peace. Under the glass lid a slim silver slipper and a silver ball and one of witch’s blue came raining down on the gray somnolence when one lifted it up.

I should have preferred to keep it myself had I not suddenly realized she belonged in those idle hands to which the unreal Insel intermittently returned.

I only went twice to the flat while Insel was living there, but I flitted in and out so busily — those hours retain no sequence. As part of his loan I had arranged for a strictly non-negotiable ticket and brought him a first thousand to speed the acquisition of that overcoat.

Insel was completely cured of his obsession. I have never known any man to catch so many women. He seemed to be somehow barricaded with women. All my indulgence for human misdemeanors (which are so commendable when aesthetically good — such as the stellar combine of Insel and his ebony wives, his ivory eroticism in appraising thighs) was unavailing, confronted with this blatant lubricity of the normal Insel which, as he boasted, although in proper decency of word, seemed as did once an astral Venus to flow in his very veins: The dregs of all the secret gutters that carry off the unavowable residue of popular conceptions of physical life—

When I arrived with the rest of the loan, anxious to clear him out, my once luminous clochard had composed himself in the kitchen holding his usual insignia, the heel of pumpernickel, this time one in either hand — extreme oval ends — unbitten — of an absent loaf. He looked forbidding as had they been bone.

“Did you get the overcoat,” I inquired amiably.

“I may as well tell you,” he snarled, “that I don’t care for all this supervision — I had not the time. You understand — the last nights in Paris,” he raved ecstatically. “ Es ist so schön das Leben, wenn mann so leben kann — It is so beautiful living, when one can so live.”

His emaciation no longer of flesh had become an exteriorized act of the flesh in which the last ooze of the spermatic juices might have been, in some fearful enervation, spent. Instead of being suffused with that liquidity of relief following upon embrace, his eyes, in some ultimate heat, were boiled to the creamy, soiled putrescence of stale oysters in a stew.

I did not reflect that this enormity of sensuous filth was probably as unreal as his nervous aromatics distilled from his astral collusions with a goddess. It was a mental impossibility to associate these opposite phenomena. Had I recalled the earlier iridescent Insel, it could only have been as a figment of my insanity.

An alarming presentiment occurred to me. “Insel,” I gasped, “you’ve blown that thousand francs.”

“What are you?” he sneered venomously, “an inquisitor?”

“He has notions as to how white women should be handled, too,” I laughed to myself as I hurried down the corridor to the dressmaker.

I was determined to take conventional leave of a guest who would be gone when I returned to Paris. It would put me to great pains, I supposed, breaking through animosity so unaccountable it left nothing intact but surprise. Still, it was pretty bad if I could not prevent the “epidemic quarrel with me” from spreading to even this lunatic whose essential void I had found so soothing.