Insel

Insel by Mina Loy Page A

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Authors: Mina Loy
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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 distinctlydiminishing 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 bystifled 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

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