The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (11 page)

Galuchka walked away from me, went and sat down on the ground near a plane-tree, making believe she was caressing my ball with gestures in which malice mingled with the purest maternal cajoleries.

Cretinized, exhausted by so many moving events, I remained leaning on my elbow against a chair copiously piled with clothes and accessories belonging to two very beautiful ladies sitting beside me, who were laughing gaily and chatting with a soldier who was obviously paying court to one of them. On the same chair there was also, folded several times, the soldier’s bright red cape, under which his sword lay flat, partially emerging from the heterogeneous pile of materials, exposing its glittering hilt which in spite of myself insistently drew my attention.

An atrocious idea of vengeance instantly dawned in my brain, appearing with such force that I immediately felt nothing in the world would henceforth be able to prevent the execution of my abominable act; possessed by the unperturbed coolness characteristic of irrevocable verdicts and without the slightest trace of visible emotion, I calmly turned my head toward the top of the ramp to look at Buchaques who had just reached it, painfully dragging his scooter behind him.

At the same moment I slipped my hand on to the hilt of the sword, trying imperceptibly to unsheathe it. The sword slid gently out from its sheath in obedience to my movement; with a furtive glance I saw a piece of its sharp blade glisten. It would work! Buchaques would be horribly punished! !

To succeed in realizing my design it would be necessary to act with an economy of gesture and a dissimulation so monstrous that only my passion for vengeance mingled with the controlled tumult of jealousy could make it possible. To accomplish this frightful chastisement with the maximum of rigor I had to unsheathe the sword entirely without being seen and afterward conceal its naked blade under the clothes. This preliminary operation would have to be performed without being perceived, especially by Galuchka who would have been horrified to discover my plan; she was the last person to whom I should have wanted to reveal the least of my intentions regarding my cruel decision, and this was all the more difficult as she did not avert her eyes from me for a single moment.

Even when I should succeed in holding this bare weapon in readiness, I would still have to take advantage of a favorable moment just before Buchaques’ swift onrush to slip the sword between two chairs in such a way that he would be horribly and irremediably wounded. It was already night, so that Buchaques, with the accelerating speed of his descent and the prevailing darkness, would not be aware of my criminal obstacle. Even if he should catch a momentary glimpse of the shining sword in the dark he would not be able to stop at the last moment. It would be too late!

But I realized that in order to carry through my bloody plan systematically I would first have to distract the attention of Galuchka, who was too much absorbed in looking at me and who could not fail to perceive my slightest move. I therefore got down again, walking on all fours, as though bent on seizing my ball at all costs.

Surprised by my resolute attitude, Galuchka hastily interposed a chair between us. This obstacle rekindled my true desires. I introduced my head and torso between the bars of the chair, pretending that I was going to pass between them, but immediately I felt myself a prisoner in this kind of skeleton shield, which had suddenly become a real and painful trap.

Nevertheless this idyll in the heightened darkness under the chairs appeared to me more and more pleasurable in spite of the growing discomfort of my imprisonment, and I would have been willing to live the rest of my days in this dangerous and confused labyrinth that exasperated my desire to such a point. I had a growing horror of the moment when our unsatisfied romance might come to an end.

Galuchka, visible and invisible, vague in detail but precise in her expression as a whole and tinged more and more with troubling demoniac gleams, became almost immaterial because of the effacement of all the
details which presented her to me as if each dimple of her smile, of her elbows or her knees had already been devoured by the supreme softness of the nocturnal shadows in whose depths, through the accents of the dwindling music, I heard the insistent and solitary hooting of an owl. During the intervals in the music both of us suddenly grew more timid. We would then listen to the lazy sound of the footsteps dragging on the wet sand, which became more deafening than the most lyric and strident instrumental sighs which, in turn, inaugurating the ever fresh melancholy of new melodies, would dissolve our shame in the more and more violent audacities of our progressively unequivocal exhibitionist efforts. Galuchka, on the pretext of showing and hiding my ball, ended by entirely unbuttoning her blouse, and her hair, dishevelled by the disorder of her jerky gestures, masked her face where I could half-imagine the gleaming saliva in a mouth deliciously half-opened by the breathing which her bizarre emotional state accelerated from second to second. As for me, my efforts to approach Galuchka finally brought me forward a few centimetres between the bars as I dragged the chair in her direction. The bars painfully squeezed my sides, bared by the pulling up of my sailor blouse.

Galuchka, who with an exquisite tenderness had reached out the beloved ball till it brushed against my lips suddenly pulled it back cautiously as I made another painful effort to edge forward a little, and a burning pain now bit me to the blood in the hip-bone; my lips were already about to reach my ball once more, but Galuchka pulled it back imperceptibly once more with a gesture so parsimoniously cruel that my eyes drowned in large tears. She remained fixed at that moment in an almost absolute immobility; only the grin of her malicious smile did not vanish from her mouth, but on the contrary it seemed to settle there permanently, assuming a place of honor in the divine oval of her adored face.

However, in spite of her apparent expressive immobility, one would have said that it was rapidly becoming corruptible and without anything external coming to trouble her look of cynical assurance I saw the persistent smile of triumph fade with a rapidity which can only be compared to a reversed and speeded up motion picture of the ephemeral unfolding of a flower.

Galuchka remained thus with the ball dangling from her hand; she was not going to withdraw it, nor was she going to make the slightest movement to bring it closer to me. I knew it. In her fixed glance I read the sureness of a promise, but for this I had to advance still further.

I stretched forward furiously, mad with desire, and by dint of a supreme convulsion I finally succeeded in biting the handful of medals among which my ball was hanging.

At this moment I felt Galuchka’s little hand clench like a little bird’s tightening claw, enfolding the precious cluster and this time pressing it violently, ferociously even, against my avid mouth in which, mingled
with the knife-taste of the medals, I immediately felt the beginning of that other strong metallic savor, bitter and bloody, of my own wounded gums.

Suddenly a new jolt, more brutal and unforeseen than the preceding ones—for the paroxysm of my sentiments had completely deafened me to Buchaques’ arrival—dashed my head to the ground with a bang; my cheek was chafed raw on the sand, my body caught between the bars of the chair seemed to break in two, I uttered a cry of pain and I furiously raised my head toward Buchaques whose purple-stained face, almost on top of me now, was illuminated by jealousy, and had attained the congested ugliness of a cockscomb.

He backed away from me and was about to climb the ramp once more when suddenly, retracing his steps, he sent a contemptuous kick in my direction, raising a clod of earth which struck me and blinded me for a moment. Then he again started off. Galuchka, too, had received a blow from my chair and had been thrown a metre away from me.

There was a bloody smudge in the exact centre of her brow. She was wholly given over to feeling this painful spot, dazed by the recent commotion; the abandoned attitude of her half-open legs no longer knew any modesty, and I discovered then for the first time that she was not wearing any pants.

A shadow soft as a dream submerged the upper end of her thighs which were obliterated in the absolute black beneath her little white skirt and in spite of the darkness in which her anatomy completely vanished I felt that she was naked underneath.

She smiled at me, and I got up; this time my vengeance was decided.

I went and sat down on the chair near the one where the sword lay buried between the soldier’s cape and the other accessories belonging to the two ladies with whom he continued to chat while he kept looking deep into the eyes of one of them. The other lady, pretending not to take any interest, was directing her attention elsewhere, intervening in the conversation with quick, disconnected remarks. She wore an imperceptible smile of malicious complicity which seemed to me very troubling; from time to time and without apparent reason she would drop back her head heavy with hair, and would then smile with all her teeth at the soldier who at the same moment cast her a polite glance of gratitude, as brief as possible.

I took advantage of the distraction of this absorbing sentimental game that kept these three beings chained to one another to work my way, without being seen by them, by a series of little sliding moves, toward the chair where the sword reposed.

Épées.

I had to do this in order to reach it from where I was, for I could not change my position without the risk of losing sight of Galuchka who would then be intercepted from me by the plane tree. This tree in turn hid the manipulations full of wile and of sudden skill which I was effecting with my left hand and thanks to which I slowly and by successive
stages unsheathed the weapon of my vengeance destined for Buchaques’ impending and frightful martyrdom.

I took the precaution of wrapping a handkerchief around my hand so as not to wound myself. I hid the sword behind my back with a slight trembling which did not exclude sureness in my movements, and I used my cap to prevent Galuchka from seeing the hilt project from the other side of my body.

After the success of this first operation, which enabled me to unsheathe the sword without being seen by anyone, I cautiously slipped it back under the materials, but with the blade now bare and pointed in the right direction. All I had left to do was to push it as I wished so that at the right moment the sword would intercept Buchaques’ descent.

But my preparations were not yet absolutely completed. A dizzying fever of calculation and of ceremonial in the minutest details took hold of my brain as I felt the irremediable moment approaching. I redoubled the intensity of my amorous gaze in Galuchka’s direction to keep her rooted to her place; after the blow she had received in the forehead she remained crouching in a posture of such chilled weariness that my fervent glance, reinforced by the sway which the voluptuous approach of my cruel act gave it, succeeded in maintaining my Galuchka in a kind of paralysis of which I felt myself the more and more absolute master as the moments passed.

Without moving my sword one millimetre I waited for Buchaques’ imminent descent. Against all anticipations, though he came at the same dizzying speed as usual, he did not come crashing against me this time, but got off his scooter and, going over to the plane tree without
daring to look at me, asked me, “Where is she?” I did not answer. He knew perfectly well. He went behind the plane tree and for a long time stood stupidly looking at Galuchka.

Without changing her posture, her eyes riveted to mine, she seemed not to see him.