The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (12 page)

Finally Buchaques said to Galuchka, “If you show me Dali’s dwarf monkey I won’t do it any more.” She shuddered and pressed my beloved ball with the handful of medals against her bosom. Buchaques then said, “Let’s play!” “Play what?” I answered. He turned toward me and with a repugnant look of gratitude, assuming from my question that I had forgiven him, said, almost joyously, yet with something of the social climber’s sugar-coated fear, “Let’s all three play robbers and civil guard!” I answered “Yes, let’s!” And while with one hand I pressed his, with the other I pressed the sword’s cold hilt. “Who’ll begin?” asked Buchaques. “The taller one of us.” Buchaques accepted this absurd condition, for he was clearly taller than I. And suddenly he became very weak, with a weakness which continued to grow in direct ratio to my power of domination.

We measured ourselves against the trunk of the plane tree, marking our heights in the bark by means of a notch made with a pebble.

It was he, then, who would have to go; he would walk up the ramp very slowly in order to give Galuchka and myself time to go and hide.

Once he reached the top he would come down full speed on his scooter and I challenged him to do it faster than he had done the previous times, goading the living and congested flesh of his pride with infallible sureness.

I saw Buchaques start off nonchalantly, dragging his scooter behind him and climbing the ramp which was to be fatal to him. At each new furtive glance that I cast in his direction I saw the volume of his buttocks progressively diminishing, with their ungainly movements outlined by his tight-fitting pants. My antipathy toward my former lover grew with each of his awkward steps, in whose beatific and nauseating succession I could read the progressive revival of his good conscience, after the troubled waters of remorse which my hypocritical and perverse reconciliation had just calmed.

In my mind there was present the maxim of Philip II, who said one day to his valet, “Dress me slowly because I’m in a great hurry.”

I hurried without haste in order to give the last indispensable touches to the scrupulous “finish” of the brilliant painting of my imminent sanguinary creation toward which, with exclusive delight, all the representative force of my imperial imagination was converging.

I absorbed myself in a rigorous calculation which called for my utmost powers of dissimulation so that Galuchka would continue to believe me to be imbued with the simulated ecstasy of my contemplation, when in reality I was occupied solely in coldly calculating Buchaques’ stature from the mark of his height in the plane-tree bark, while taking into account the approximate elevation of his scooter, since after all the only thing I wanted to know was the exact location in space of the middle of my rival’s throat, in order to be able to dispose my sword in a fashion adequate to a categorical, Doric and pitiless slitting of his throat.

I had to assure myself also of the resistance of the chairs which were to serve as pillars to the sharp-pointed bridge of my sword. For this I brought together several additional chairs which would serve as reinforcement, thus redoubling the fearful efficacy of my trap.

I said to Galuchka, “Buchaques is coming down!” She came up to me so quickly that I did not have time to accomplish my decisive act. I cast an anxious glance toward the top of the ramp which Buchaques was just reaching, already preparing for his run.

I pressed Galuchka against my chest with a tyrannic will, ordering her not to look. While I profited by her obedience to slip the sword between the bars of two chairs, a last glance reassured me as to my task; almost invisible, the weapon shone feebly in the night with all the cold and inhuman nobility of justice.

We could already hear the din of Buchaques’ scooter launched on its mad descent. We must run! I dragged Galuchka by the hand in a frenzied chase through the crowd; we struggled like blinded butterflies
against the river current of the crowd, which at this moment was slowing its rhythm, obeying the force of the melancholy regret that succeeds the ending of a feast.

A last paso doble, executed without conviction, had come to a close. We stopped for a moment just at the spot where, at sunset, I had seen the horse die. On the asphalt sprawled an enormous blood-stain in the form of a great black bird with outspread wings.

Suddenly it was cold and our perspiration made us shiver. We were indescribably dirty, and our clothes were all torn.

I could feel my heart beat in the burning wound of my raw cheek. I touched my head covered with bumps which procured me a sweet and agreeable pain. Galuchka was livid; the clot of blood on her forehead now appeared surrounded by a mauve aureole.

And Buchaques? Where was
his
blood? I shut my eyes.

¹
José Anselmo Clavé, a Catalan musician, founded choral societies in Barcelona which developed into important musical institutions.

²
A famous anti-anarchist trial.

³
In my family tree my Arab lineage, going back to the time of Cervantes, has been almost definitely established.

⁴
At about the same time in Russia, in the “Lighted Glade,” Tolstoy’s country place, another child, Galuchka, my wife, was seated on the lap of another potato, of another specimen of that kind of earthy, rugged and dreamy old man—Count Leo Tolstoy.

⁵
Picasso one day related to me a similar impression which had greatly struck him. In his chateau near Paris he went down to the fountain and filled a jug with water; there was a magnificent moonlight. During the time the jug was filling, he had the impression of “living several years,” without preserving any precise memory of it.

⁶
These multicolored cupolas which in my false remembrances correspond to Russia or at least to the mirages I had of that country, thanks to Senor Traite’s theatre (unless the latter too is a false remembrance), must in all likelihood be localized in the Guell de Gaudi Park in Barcelona, a spot which consists largely of architecture incrusted with violently multicolored and fairylike tiles. I must have attended an open-air festival there. Or, it is possible that my imagination blended a military celebration that took place at the fortified castle of Figueras with the fantastic setting of Guell Park.

⁷
At the time when I chose the
delirious fetish
of my plane ball, Galuchka in Moscow projected her whole passion on another fetish, but of a different type; it was a small box of wax matches on the back of which could be seen a glossy picture in color representing the cathedral in Florence where Galuchka had once been on a short voyage with her father.

Each time she wished to console herself for her hyperesthetic desire to return to Italy, she would light one of her precious matches.

CHAPTER FIVE

True Childhood Memories

I shut my eyes and I turn my mind to my most distant memories in order to see the image that will appear to me most spontaneously, with the greatest visual vividness, in order to evoke it as the first and inaugural image of my true remembrances. I see ...

I see two cypresses, two large cypresses of almost equal height. The one on the left is the smaller, and its top leans slightly toward the one on the right which is impressively vertical; I see these two cypresses through the window of classroom 1 of the Christian Brothers’ School of Figueras, the school which immediately followed my supposedly harmful pedagogical experience at Senor Traite’s. The window which served as a frame to my vision was opened only in the afternoon, but from then on I would absorb myself entirely in the contemplation of the changes of light on the two cypresses, along which the slightly sinuous shadow of the rectilinear architecture of our school would slowly rise; at a given moment, just before sunset, the pointed tip of the cypress on the right would appear strongly illuminated with a dark red, as though it had been dipped in wine, while the one on the left, already completely in the shadow, appeared to me to be a deep black. Then we heard the chiming of the Angelus, and the whole class would stand up and we would repeat in chorus the prayer recited with bowed head and folded hands by the superior.

The two cypresses outside, which during the whole afternoon seemed to be consumed and to burn in the sky like two dark flames were for me the infallible clock by which I became in a sense aware of the monotonous rhythm of the events of the class; for as had been the case at Senor Traite’s, I was likewise completely absent from this new class, where far from being allowed to enjoy the advantages of my first teacher Senor Traite’s blessed sleep to my heart’s content, I had now every moment to overcome the resistance which the Brothers of the Christian School with unequalled zeal, and resorting to the cruellest ruses and stratagems, vainly exerted to attract and solicit my attention. But these
only accentuated my capacity for annihilating my outer world: I did not want anyone to touch me, to talk to me, to “disturb” what was going on within my head. I lived the reveries begun at Senor Traite’s with heightened intensity, but feeling these now to be in peril I clutched at them even more dramatically, digging my nails into them as into a rescue plank.

After the Angelus the two cypresses became almost obliterated in the dark. But if their outlines finally disappeared completely in the night, the immobile presence of their invisible personalities remained firmly localized and their spatial situation, drawing me like a magnet, would force my little dream-filled head to turn from time to time to look in their exact direction even though I could not see them. After the Angelus and almost at the same moment that the window became black with night, the corridor leading to the classroom would be lighted, and then through the glass-paneled door I could observe the oil paintings which decorated this corridor, wholly covering its walls. From my seat I could see only two of them distinctly: one represented a fox’s head emerging from a cavern, carrying a dead goose dangling from its jaws; the other was a copy of Millet’s
Angelus
.
¹
This painting produced in me an obscure anguish, so poignant that the memory of those two motionless silhouettes pursued me for several years with the constant uneasiness provoked by their continual and ambiguous presence. But this uneasiness was not “all”. In spite of these feelings that the
Angelus
aroused in me I had a sense of being somewhat under their protection and a secret and refined pleasure shone in the depth of my fear like a little silvery knife blade gleaming in the sunlight.

During those long winter evenings, while I waited for the bell to announce that the school day was about to come to a close, my imagination was in fact constantly guarded by five sentinels, faithful, frightful and sublime: outside to my left, the two cypresses; to my right the two silhouettes of the
Angelus;
in front of me, God in the person of Jesus Christ—yellow, nailed to a black wooden cross standing on the brother’s table. The Redeemer had two horrible wounds, one on each knee, wonderfully imitated by means of a very shiny enamel which revealed the bone through the flesh. The feet of the Christ were dirty with a sickening gray produced by the daily contact of the children’s fingers, for after having kissed our superior’s hairy hand and before crossing ourselves as
we left, each one of us had to touch the pierced feet of the Christ with his ink-blackened fingers.

The brothers of the Christian School noticed the absorption with which I would sit and look out; I was the only child in the class upon whom the window exercised such an absolutist power of fascination. They therefore changed my seat, thus depriving me of the view of my two cypresses; but I continued stubbornly to look in their direction, sensing exactly the spot where they were located! And as if the intensity of my will had endowed my eyes with the power of seeing right through the walls, I was eventually able in my imaginative effort to reconstruct everything according to the hour of the day, which I now had to gauge by what went on in class. I would say to myself, “Now we’re about to begin the catechism, so that the shadow on the right-hand cypress must have reached that burnt hole with a dry branch coming out of it, from which hangs a bit of white rag; the mountains of the Pyrenees must be mauve, and it is also at this moment, as I noticed several days ago, that a window must be shining in the distant village of Villa Bertran!” And this flash of light would suddenly sparkle with the reality of a fiery diamond in the annihilating darkness produced in my brain by the torture of not being allowed to see that beloved plain of Ampardán, whose unique geology with its utter vigor was later to fashion the entire esthetic of the philosophy of the Dalinian Landscape.