The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (13 page)

It was soon realized that moving me to a seat out of sight of the window had not been so effective as might have been expected. Quite to the contrary, my inattention remained so incorruptibly anchored to my pleasure that they began to despair of my case.

One day at dinner, my father created a general consternation by
reading aloud a report from my teachers. They alluded to my exemplary discipline and gentleness; they mentioned approvingly that I would spend my recreation periods far from the noisy games, lost in the contemptation of a colored picture (I knew which one)
²
found in a chocolate wrapping. But they concluded by saying that “I was dominated by a kind of mental laziness so deeply rooted that it made it almost impossible for me to achieve any progress in my studies.” I remember that my mother wept that evening. The truth is that after almost a whole additional year of school I had not even learned one-fifth of what all my schoolmates had already devoured during this time. I was forced to remain indefinitely in the same class while the others scurried ahead with the gluttonous frenzy of competition to seize new rungs on the slippery and viscous ladder of hierarchy. My isolation became such a systematic fixed idea that I pretended not to know even the things which, in spite of myself, eventually and little by little became incorporated in my mind. For instance, I still wrote nonchalantly, with thousands of blots and characters of bewildering irregularity. This was done on purpose, for I really knew how to do it well.

One day when I was given a notebook with very silky paper I suddenly discovered the pleasure of writing properly. With a pounding heart, after wetting the new pen-point with my saliva for several minutes, I began, and proceeded to execute a marvel of regularity and elegance, winning the prize in penmanship, and my page was framed and put under glass.

The astonishment which the sudden, miraculous change in my handwriting produced encouraged me in the path of mystification and simulation, which were my first methods of “social contact.” In order to avoid a recitation when I felt that the Brother would inevitably question me during the lesson, I would leap up and fling away my book which for the past hour I had been pretending to study with the deepest attention, though I really had not read a single line.

After this act which appeared to proceed from an unshakable decision, I would stand up on the bench, then get down again as if seized with panic and while protecting myself with my arms extended before me from some invisible danger, I would fall back on my desk, my head pressed between my hands, seemingly shaken with fright. This pantomime won me the permission to go out all by myself and walk in the garden. When I returned to the classroom I was given a drink of hot herb tea with highly aromatic drops that smelled of pine oil. My parents, who had apparently been informed of this false hallucinatory phenomenon, must have recommended to the superiors of the school redoubled and very special attentions to my person. Thus a more and more exceptional atmosphere surrounded my school days and finally the superiors ceased altogether to attempt to teach me anything.

I was, moreover, frequently taken to the doctor’s (the same one whose glasses I had broken several years before when he was about to pierce my sister’s ears). At this time I was subject to real dizzy spells after having run up or down the stairs too fast. Also I had frequent nosebleeds, and was periodically confined to my bed with angina. This always took the same course: one day of fever and a week of convalescence with slightly abnormal temperatures. During this time I would perform my natural functions in my room, after which a purple-colored Armenian paper redolent of incense would be burned to remove the bad smell; sometimes the Armenian paper ran out and then they would burn sugar, which was even more delicious. I loved to have angina! I would look forward impatiently to its recurrence—what paradises those convalescences were! Llucia, my old nurse, would come and keep me company every afternoon, and my grandmother would come and settle down to her knitting near the window of my room: my mother herself would also sometimes have her visiting acquaintances sent into my room, and I would listen with one ear to Llucia’s stories while with the other I would follow the more measured background of the murmurs and conversations of the “grown-ups,” continuous as a well-fed fire. And if the fever rose a little all this would mingle in a kind of foggy reality which merely lulled my heart and benumbed my head within which that white-winged Angel in silvery robes who, according to Llucia’s song, was none other than the angel of sleep began to gleam with a tired splendor.

Llucia and my grandmother were two of the neatest old women, with the whitest hair and the most delicate and wrinkled skin I have ever seen. The first was immense in stature and looked like a pope. The second was tiny and resembled a small spool of white thread. I adored old age! What a contrast between these two “fairy-tale” creatures, between that parchment-like flesh on which the effaced and complete manuscripts of their life were written and that other crude, brand new and apathetically unconscious flesh of my schoolmates, who no longer even remembered that they too had already been old a while ago when they were embryos; old people, on the other hand, had learned how to become old again by their own experience and, moreover, they also remembered having been children.

I became, I was and I continue to be the living incarnation of the Anti-Faust. As a child I adored that noble prestige of old people, and I would have given all my body to become like them, to grow old immediately! I was the Anti-Faust. Wretched was he who, having acquired the supreme science of old age, sold his soul to unwrinkle his brow and recapture the unconscious youth of his flesh! Let the labyrinth of wrinkles be furrowed in my brow with the red-hot iron of my own life, let my hair whiten and my step become vacillating, on condition that I can save the intelligence of my soul—let my unformed childhood soul, as it ages, assume the rational and esthetic forms of an architecture, let me learn just everything that others cannot teach me,
what only life would be capable of marking deeply in my skin! The smooth-skinned animal of my childhood was repugnant to me and I should have liked to crush it with my own feet provided with little bluish metallic heels. For in my mind desire and science were but one single and unique thing and I already knew that only the wear and decline of the flesh could bring me illuminations of resurrection. In each of Llucia’s or my grandmother’s wrinkles I read this force of intuitive knowledge brought to the surface by the painful sum of experienced pleasures and which was already the force of those germs of premature old age that crumples the embryo, an unfathomable force, a subterranean and Bacchic force of Minerva, a force that twists the hundreds of tendrils of the shoots of old age on the young vine-stalk and that soon effaces the strident laughter of the ageless and retarded face of the child of genius.

To be sure, I did not advance in that painful upward climb of arithmetic, I did not succeed in the sickly and exhausting calculation of multiplications. On the other hand I, Salvador Dali, at the age of nine, discovered not only the phenomenon of mimesis,
³
but also a general and complete theory to explain it!

At Cadaques that summer I had observed a species of plant that grows in great profusion along the seashore. These plants when seen at close range are composed of small, very irregular leaves supported on stems so fine that the slightest breath of air animates them in a kind of constant quivering. One day, however, some of these leaves struck me as moving independently of the rest, and what was not my stupor when
I perceived that they walked! Thereupon I isolated that curious and tiny leaf-insect from the rest to observe it at leisure and examine it minutely. Seen from behind it was impossible to distinguish from the other leaves among which it lived, but if one turned it over its abdomen appeared no different from that of any other beetle, except for its legs which were perhaps unusually delicate and were in any case invisible in their normal position. The discovery of this insect made an inordinate impression on me for I believed I had just discovered one of the most mysterious and magic secrets of nature.
⁴
And there is no shadow of a doubt that this sensational discovery of mimesis influenced from then on the crystallization of the invisible and paranoiac images which people most of my present paintings with their phantasmal presence. Proud, haughty, ecstatic even over my discovery, I immediately utilized it for purposes of mystification. I proceeded to claim that by virtue of my personal magic I had acquired the ability to animate the inanimate. I would tear a leaf from a mass of these plants, I would substitute my leaf-insect for the leaf by a sleight-of-hand and, placing it on the dining-room table, I would begin to strike violently all around it with a rounded stone which I presented as the object endowed with magic virtue which was going to bring the leaf to life.

At the beginning of my performance everyone thought the little leaf moved solely because of the agitation which I created around it. But then I would begin to diminish the intensity of my blows until I reduced them to such feeble taps that they could no longer account for the movements of the little leaf-insect which were already clearly independent and differentiated.

At this moment I completely stopped knocking the table and people then uttered a cry of admiration and general stupefaction upon seeing the leaf really walk. I kept repeating my experiment, especially before fishermen. Everyone was familiar with the plant in question, but no one had ever noticed the phenomenon discovered by me, in spite of the fact that this kind of leaf-insect is to be found in profusion on the plant. When, much later, at the outbreak of the war of 1914, I saw the first camouflaged ships cross the horizon of Cadaques, I jotted down in my notebook of personal impressions and reminiscences something like the following—“Today I found the explanation of my ‘morros de con’
⁵
, [for this was what I called my leaf-insect] when I saw a melancholy convoy of camouflaged ships pass by. Against what was my insect protecting himself in adopting this camouflage, this disguise?”

Disguise was one of my strongest passions as a child. Just as there had
been a snowfall on the day when I wished so hard that the landscape of Figueras would be transformed into that of Russia, so on the day when I intensely longed to grow old quickly I received (as if by chance) a gift from one of my uncles in Barcelona—a gift which consisted of a king’s ermine cape, a gold sceptre and a crown from which hung a solemn and abundant white wig.

That evening I looked at myself in the mirror, wearing my crown, the cape just draped over my shoulders, and the rest of my body completely naked. Then I pushed my sexual parts back out of sight and squeezed them between my thighs so as to look as much as possible like a girl. Already at this period I adored three things: weakness, old age and luxury. But above these three representations of the “ego”, the “imperialist sentiment of utter solitude” held sway, more and more powerful, and always accompanied by that other sentiment which was to serve as its frame, its ritual, so to speak—the sentiment of “height,” of the “summit.”

For some time my mother had been asking me, “Sweetheart, what do you wish? Sweetheart, what do you want?” I knew what I wanted. I wanted one of the two laundry rooms located on the roof of our house, which opened on the terrace and which, as they were no longer being used, merely served as storage rooms. And one day I got it, and was allowed to use it as a studio. The maids went up and took out all the things, putting them in a nearby chicken-coop. And the following day I was able to take possession of the little laundry room which was so small that the cement tray took up almost all the space except for the area strictly indispensable for the woman who washed the clothes to stand in. But the extremely restricted proportions of my first studio corresponded perfectly to those reminiscences of the intra-uterine pleasures which I have already described in my memories of this period.