The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (15 page)

Grenouille.

Since then I never again repeated this experiment; but my long sessions within the laundry tray were enhanced by that sensation of dizziness which I felt localized just above my head and from which the laundry ceiling protected me while at the same time reinforcing in a royal fashion the vertiginous awareness of the height of my cement throne which I felt to be even higher above everything since my experience with dizziness.

And what is the high? The high is exactly the contrary of the low: and there you have a fine definition of dizziness! What is the low? The low is: chaos, the mass, the collective, promiscuity, the child, the common fund of the obscure folly of humanity, anarchy; the low is the left. To the right, above, one finds monarchy, the cupola, hierarchy, architecture and the angel. All poets have sought one single thing: the angel. But their vice of congenital negativism has confused and perverted their taste and turned them to evil angels, and if it is true that it is always the spirit of evil that animates the Rimbaudian and Maldororian angels this is due to the sole and unique fact of the inadaptation to reality that is consubstantial with poets. Painters, on the other hand, having their feet much more securely on the ground, do not need to grope blindly and, possessing a means of inspiration far superior to that of poets—namely the eye—do not need to have recourse to the viscous confusion of the mental collapse into which poets must inevitably fall. This is why only painters are and will be able to show you true angels and true gods, as Raphael did with so much reality and good sense from the height of his imperial Olympus of divine genius. As for me, the more delirious I became the more alert was my eye.

Thus, to summarize what I have said, there I was at the beginning of my ninth year, I, a solitary child, a King, seated within the tray and frequently bleeding from the nose, at the top of the roof, on the summit! Below, all the rest, all that cannon-flesh composed of biology devoid of anguish, all the nose-hairs, the mayonnaise, the spinning tops, the souls of purgatory, the imbecile children that learned anything you please, boiled fish, etc. etc. I would never again go down into the street of the spirit to learn anything whatever. For that matter, I too was mad ages ago, and even this confounded spelling, why learn it again when I already forgot it at least two thousand years ago!
⁸

I was persevering and I still am. My mania for solitude grew, with pathological flashes, my eagerness to climb up to the roof became so
intense that before the end of the meals, unable to remain in my seat any longer, I would have to run out several times and lock myself in the toilet on the pretext that I had a stomach-ache. My sole object in doing this was to remain a few moments alone, which lightened the torture of having to wait until dinner was over and I was allowed to rush upstairs and shut myself up in the laundry.

In school my state of mind became aggressive toward anything or anyone who deliberately or otherwise challenged my solitude. The children who ventured to come near me—growing progressively fewer to be sure—I received with a look and an attitude so hateful that I was safe from intrusion during the long recreation periods from then on, plunged in an intact and untroubled world of my own. But it so happened that the immaculate purity of this world was destroyed with a single stroke, and this came about, as might easily have been foreseen, by the intervention of that feminine image which is always there to demolish every cerebral construction from which one tries, at nightfall, to spirit away the anguishing presence of the soft and smiling butterfly of the flesh because of which man begins to fear death and by virtue of which he will end by believing in the Catholic myth
par excellence
of the triumphant resurrection of his own body.

It was a little girl whom I saw one day from behind, walking in front of me the whole length of the street, on my way home from school. She had a waist so slender and so fragile that it seemed to separate her body into two independent parts and her extremely arched manner of walking threatened to break her in two; she wore a very tight silver belt. This little girl was accompanied by two girl friends, one on each side, who had their arms around her waist while they caressed and cajoled her with the most seductive smiles that they were capable of offering her. The two girls turned their heads several times to look back. I walked very close to them and was able to pick up the remnants of those smiles, that were slow to vanish from their faces. The one in the middle did not turn round and I knew, though seeing her only from behind, walking so proudly, that she was different from all other girls in the world, that she was a queen. The same sentiment of never-extinguished love that I had had for Galuchka was born anew; her name was Dullita, for that is what her two fervent and adoring friends called her ceaselessly and in every tone of tenderness and passion. I returned home without having seen her face and without its having occurred to me to look at it. It was indeed she—Dullita, Dullita! Galuchka “Rediviva”!

I went directly up to my rooftop, feeling my aching ears tightly imprisoned in my sailor cap as if ready to catch on fire; I released them and the cool twilight air came and caressed them delightfully; I felt the whole invincible power of love take hold of me anew, and this time it began with my ears.

Since this encounter I had but one single desire, which was that Dullita should come and find me up there in my laundry, that Dullita
should come up to me on the roof! And I knew that this must inevitably happen—but how? And when? Nothing would appease my mad impatience and the boiled potatoes became a torture to swallow. One afternoon I had such a violent nosebleed that the doctor was called and I remained several hours with my head down, looking up toward the ceiling, with napkins dipped in vinegar, the shutters drawn. At the beginning of my hemorrhage the maid placed a large cold key at the nape of my neck, and now it dug into my flesh, causing me great pain; but I was so exhausted that I did not even try to lift myself up.

I saw reduced images pass back and forth—carts and people walking along the street—projected upside down on the ceiling,
⁹
and I knew that these images corresponded to real people who were in the street in the bright glare of the sun. But in my weak state these distorted figures which came into focus only for a moment all appeared to me to be real
angels. I then thought: if Dullita with her two friends should happen to pass by I would see her on my ceiling. This, however, was very unlikely, for she always or almost always came home from school by way of the street running parallel to ours; but even the slightest glimmer of the possibility that she might pass by deeply stirred me by the most contradictory representations, in which displeasure, expectation, hope, pride and illusion dimly mingled in an agony of uneasiness. Two thoughts stronger than the rest came to light, nevertheless, in the chaos of my anxiety:

1. If she should happen to pass across the ceiling I would be the one to be below.

2. If her head was down she would fall down into empty space.

I always saw her from behind, with her delicate waist, fall back into the black void, where she would break in two, like a white porcelain eggcup. She deserved this, for not having been willing to come up to my roof top, but at the last moment I wanted to save her. I stirred on my bed, torn by a frightful remorse, and I then felt the burning pain of the key of torture incrusted with all the force of my weight in the bones of my neck, and I then felt my love for Dullita, for Galuchka Rediviva, once more become localized there, just where I felt the pain!

The following day my parents decided to send me to the country for a rest; I was to visit the Pitchot family
¹⁰
who had a property situated in the plain, two hours from Figueras. The property was called “El Muli de la Torre” (The Tower Mill). I had never yet been there, but this name struck me as wonderful. I accordingly consented to go, with a stoic resignation in which the image of the Tower, one of my favorite myths, played a tempting role.

Also my departure for the Muli de la Torre would serve me as a means of vengeance against Dullita, since she did not come up to my roof as I had hoped, and as I still expected her to every evening; at the same time my trip would enable me to soften my rancor, while encouraging my hope of recovering with all my former fanaticism that beloved solitude which had just been shaken and compromised by the encounter with Dullita in a way so disconcerting to my spirit.

I started off in a cart with Señor and Señora Pitchot and Julia, their adopted daughter of sixteen, who had long black hair. Señor Pitchot
drove the cart himself. He was one of the handsomest men I have ever seen, with an ebony beard and moustache and long curly hair. To enliven the horse at the moment when the latter seemed about to sink into laziness, he had merely to produce a curious sound with his tongue, and for this he had to keep his teeth pressed together while at the same time opening and distending his lips as much as possible with a grimacing contraction of his cheeks.

The sun glistened on his perfect white teeth as on petrified gardenias moistened with saliva. The horse, responsive to the noise Señor Pitchot made with his mouth, would start off again at a gentle gallop, giving a new note to the monotonous tinkling of the bells. We arrived just after sunset. The Muli de la Torre
¹¹
impressed me as a magic spot, it was “made on purpose” for the continuation of my waking fantasies and dreams.
¹²
I felt as if I had miraculously recovered my health in a single instant, and nothing remained of my anxious and melancholy lassitude of the preceding days. On the contrary, a delirious joy unpredictably and repeatedly took hold of me. The boiled potato, well sprinkled with olive oil and a rapid pinch of salt, made my mouth water, and a sentiment of uninterrupted satisfaction gave me a constant thrill of well-being that each of the minute events inherent in the progressive adaptation to and discovery of the place only accentuated, with the marinated red pimento that this kind of small surprise always constitutes when the place to which you have arrived gives you the certainty that it is “for you” and that reciprocally, for your part, your loyalty toward it, from the first decisive contact of the threshold, can never henceforth know any limits.

The next day the sun rose, the countryside was deafening with greenery and the song of insects. The month of May beat in my temples the “caressing and fluorescent drums” of nuptial palpitations. My love for Dullita, while it grew, mingled with the frenzied pantheism of the landscape and became impregnated with that viscous and digestive sap which is the very same that lifts toward the summer sky the slow and convulsed
stalk of the plant, forming a transparent drop upon its uttermost tip, tense with the glorious pain of growth.

My love for Dullita (whose face I had not yet seen) spread over all things and became a sentiment so general that the idea of the slightest possibility of her real presence would have horrified and disappointed me; I would adore her, and at the same time remain more alone, more ferociously alone than ever!

The mechanical side of the Mill interested me very little, but its monotonous noise quickly became assimilated to my imagination, and I immediately considered it as the continual presence of the memory of something absent serving, with its majestic recall, to protect the solemn side of my solitude. The tower, on the other hand, as the reader of this book already initiated to my tastes will readily understand, became the sacred spot, the tabernacle, the “mansion of sacrifice”—and it was, in fact, up in the tower that I perpetrated the sacrifice!

This will be recounted minutely and as well as my own emotion will allow me, at the exact end of this chapter. I had to wait two days before I was able to climb “up there.” Someone was always going to bring the key. Finally on the third day they opened the door which gave access to the upper terrace of the tower, and from this moment the clear and rotting water of my impatience could flow tumultuously, just as cascades of dizziness succeed stagnant emotions, long contained by the dam of censorship which regulates the melancholy course of the majestic canal of life. The height of the summit of the tower where I found myself exceeded everything I had imagined; I leaned over the edge and spat; I saw my spittle become smaller and disappear in a mass of dark vegetation from which emerged the remnants of an old chicken-coop. Beyond one saw the slow course of a little stream running into the mill-dam; still farther on began the limits of those earthly paradises of kitchen gardens which served as foreground and were like garlands to a whole theory of landscape which was crowned by the successive planes of the mountains, whose Leonardoesque geology rivaled in rigor of structure the hard analytical silhouettes of the admirably drawn clouds of the Catalonian sky.