The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (16 page)

If Dullita had been there I would have made her lean very far over the edge, at the same time holding her back so she would not fall. This would have given her an awful scare.

The following day I determined the methodical distribution of the events of my future days, for with my avidity for all things, resulting from my new and bubbling vitality, I felt that I needed a minimum of order so as not to destroy my enthusiasm in contradictory and simultaneous desires. For I now wanted to take frenzied advantage of everything all at once, to be everywhere at the same moment. I understood very quickly that with the disorder in which I went about wanting to enjoy and bite and touch everything I would in the end not be able to taste or savor anything at all and that the more I clutched at pleasure,
attempting to profit by the gluttonous economy of a single gesture, the more this pleasure would slip and escape from my too avid hands.

The systematic principle which has been the glory of Salvador Dali began thus to manifest itself at this time in the meditated program in which all my impulses were weighed, a jesuitical and meticulous program whereby I traced out for myself in advance the plan not only of the events but also of the kind of emotion I was to derive from them during the whole length of my days to follow that promised to be so substantial. But my systematic principle of action consisted as much in the perverse premeditation of this program as in the rigor and discipline which, once the plan was adopted, I devoted to making its execution strictly and severely exacting.

Already at this age I learned an essential truth, namely, that an inquisition was necessary to give a “form” to the bacchic multiplicity and promiscuity of my desires. This inquisition I invented myself, for the sole use of the discipline of my own spirit. Here in its main outlines, is the program of my auto-inquisitorial days of the Muli de la Torre.

My rising had always to involve an exhibitionistic ritual, inspired by my nakedness. To carry this out I always had to be awake before Julia came into my room to open my window in the morning. This awakening, which I effected by the sheer force of my will, was a torture because of the exhausting events that filled my days. Every morning I was devoured by sleep. I succeeded nevertheless in waking up with great punctuality, that is to say fifteen minutes before Julia came in. I used this interval to savor the erotic emotion which I was going to derive from my act, and especially to invent the pose which varied daily, and which each morning had to correspond to the renewed desire of “showing myself naked,” in the attitude that would appear most troubling to myself and at the same time be capable of producing the greatest effect upon Julia. I tried out my gestures until the last moment when I heard Julia’s approaching footsteps. Then I definitely had to make up my mind, and this last moment of bewilderment was one of the most voluptuous in my incipient exhibitionism. The moment I heard the door open I remained frozen in a tense immobility, simulating peaceful slumber But anyone who had looked at me attentively would readily have noticed my agitation; for my body was seized with such violent trembling that I had to clench my teeth firmly to prevent them from chattering. Julia would open the two shutters of the window, come over to my bed, and cover my nakedness with the sheets which I had let drop to the floor or piled at my feet as if by the restless movements I might have made in the course of my sleep. Having done this she would kiss me on the brow to wake me up. At that age I thought myself ideally beautiful, and the pleasure which I experienced at feeling myself looked at was so vivid that I could not resign myself to getting dressed before this pleasure had been repeated once more. To this end I had to invent a new pretext and I would frantically review in my mind the list of such projects carefully
worked out the previous evening before going to sleep and which constituted the thousand and one manners of my morning exhibitionism. “Julia, these buttons are all gone! Julia, put some iodine here on my upper thigh! Julia!...”

After which came breakfast, which was served on the large table of the dining room, for me alone. Two large pieces of toast drenched with honey and a glass of very hot coffee and milk. The walls of the dining room were entirely covered with oil paintings and colored etchings, most of them originals, by Ramon Pitchot, who at this time lived in Paris, and who was the brother of Pepito Pitchot.

These breakfasts were my discovery of French impressionism, the school of painting which has in fact made the deepest impression on me in my life because it represented my first contact with an anti-academic and revolutionary esthetic theory. I did not have eyes enough to see all that I wanted to see in those thick and formless daubs of paint, which seemed to splash the canvas as if by chance, in the most capricious and nonchalant fashion. Yet as one looked at them from a certain distance and squinting one’s eyes, suddenly there occurred that incomprehensible miracle of vision by virtue of which this musically colored medley became organized, transformed into pure reality. The air, the distances, the instantaneous luminous moment, the entire world of phenomena sprang from the chaos! R. Pitchot’s oldest painting recalled the stylistic and iconographic formulae characteristic of Toulouse-Lautrec. I squeezed from these pictures all the literary residue of 1900, the eroticism of which burned deep in my throat like a drop of Armagnac swallowed the wrong way. I remember especially a dancer of the Bal Tabarin dressing. Her face was perversely naïve and she had red hairs under her arms.

But the paintings that filled me with the greatest wonder were the most recent ones, in which deliquescent impressionism ended in certain canvases by frankly adopting in an almost uniform manner the
pointilliste
formula. The systematic juxtaposition of orange and violet produced in me a kind of illusion and sentimental joy like that which I had always experienced in looking at objects through a prism, which edged them with the colors of the rainbow. There happened to be in the dining room a crystal carafe stopper, through which everything became “impressionistic.” Often I would carry this stopper in my pocket to observe the scene through the crystal and see it “impressionistically.”

Suddenly I would realize that I had exceeded the time allotted to breakfast, and my contemplation would always end with a “shock of violent remorse” which caused me to swallow my last mouthful of coffeeand-milk the wrong way, and it would spill down my neck and wet my chest inside my clothes. I found a singular pleasure in feeling this hot coffee dry on my skin, cooling slowly and leaving a slight sticky and agreeable moisture. I became so fond of this moisture that I finally purposely produced it. With a quick glance I would assure myself that Julia was not looking, and then just before she went out I would pour directly
from the cup a sufficient quantity of coffee-and-milk, which would wet me down to my belly. One day I was caught red-handed doing this, and for years the story was told by Señor and Señora Pitchot as one of the thousand bizarre anecdotes relating to my alarming personality which they adored to collect. They would always begin by asking, “Do you know what Salvador has done now?” Everyone would prick up his ears, prepared to hear about one of those strange fantasies which were utterly incomprehensible, but always had the power to make everyone laugh till the tears rolled. The sole exception was my father, who by his worried smile could not but betray the anguish of menacing doubts about my future.

After the honey and the cafe-au-lait poured inside my shirt I would run over to a large white-washed room where ears of corn and rows of sacks filled with grains of corn were drying on the floor. This room was my studio, and it was Sefior Pitchot himself who had decided this, because, he said, “the sun came in the whole morning.” I had set up a big box of oil colors on a large table where each day a pile of drawings would accumulate. The walls too, before long, were soon filled with my paintings which I put up with thumb tacks as soon as they were finished.

One day when I had finished my roll of canvas I decided to do something with a large unmounted old door which was not in use. I placed it horizontally on two chairs, against the wall. It was made of very handsome old wood, and I decided to paint only the panel so that the doorframe would serve as the frame for my picture. On it I started to paint a picture which had obsessed me for several days—a still life of an immense pile of cherries. I spilled out a whole basket of them on my table to use as a model. The sun, streaming through the window, struck the cherries, exalting my inspiration with all the fire of their tantalizing uniformity. I set to work, and this is how I proceeded: I decided to paint the whole picture solely with three colors, which I would apply by squeezing them directly from the tube. For this I placed between the fingers of my left hand a tube of vermilion intended for the lighted side of the cherries, and another tube of carmine for their shade. In my right hand I held a tube of white just for the highlight on each cherry.

Thus armed I began the attack on my picture, the assault on the cherries. Each cherry—three touches of color! Tock, tock, tock—bright, shade, highlight, bright, shade, highlight...Almost immediately I adjusted the rhythm of my work to that of the sound of the mill—tock, tock, tock tock, tock, tock tock, tock, tock ...My picture became a fascinating game of skill, in which the aim was to succeed better at each “tock, tock, tock,” that is to say with each new cherry. My progress became so sensational, and I felt myself at each “tock” becoming master and sorcerer in the almost identical imitation of this tempting cherry. Growing quickly accustomed to my increasing skill, I tried to complicate my game, inwardly repeating to myself the circus phrase, “Now something even more difficult.”

And so, instead of piling my cherries one on top of another as I had done so far, I began to make isolated cherries, as far separated from one another as possible, now in one corner, now in the most distant opposite
corner. But as the severe rules of my new experiment required that I continue to follow the same rhythm of the sound of the mill, I was forced to rush from one spot to another with such agility and rapidity of gestures that one would have thought that, instead of painting a picture I was being carried away by the most disconcerting kind of dancing incantation, making agile leaps for the cherries above and falling back on my knees for the cherries below; “tock” here, “tock” there, “tock” here...tock, tock, tock, tock, tock, tock. And I kept lighting up the old door which served as my canvas with the new and fresh fires of my painted cherries which were joyously born at each monotonous “tock” of the mill as if by an art of enchantment of which “in reality of truth” I was the sole master, lord and inventor.

This picture really astonished everyone who saw it, and Señor Pitchot bitterly regretted that it was painted on an object so cumbersome, so heavy and difficult to transport as a door, and which moreover was riddled with wormholes in certain places.

All the peasants came and stared in open-mouthed admiration at my monumental still life, in which the cherries stood out in such relief that it seemed as though one could pluck them. But it was pointed out to me that I had forgotten to paint the stems of the cherries. This was true—I had not painted a single one. Suddenly I had an idea. I took a handful of cherries and began to eat them. As soon as one of them was swallowed I would glue the stem directly to my painting in the appropriate place. This gluing on of cherry stems produced an unforeseen effect of startling “finish” which chance was once more to heighten with a delirious effect of realism. I have already said that the door on which I painted my picture was riddled with worms. The holes these had made in the wood now looked as though they belonged to the painted pictures of the cherries. The cherries, the real ones, which I had used as models, were also filled with worm-infested holes! This suggested an idea which still today strikes me as unbelievably refined: armed with a limitless patience, I began the minute operation (with the aid of a hairpin which I used as tweezers) of picking the worms out of the door—that is to say, the worms of the painted cherries—and putting them into the holes of the true cherries and vice versa.

I had already effected four or five of these bizarre and mad transmutations, when I was surprised by the presence of Señor Pitchot, who must have been there behind me for some time, silently observing what I was doing. The effect of the cherry stems must have struck him as quite astonishing, but I understood immediately that it was my manipulations with the worms that kept him standing there so motionless and absorbed. This time he did not laugh, as he usually did about my things; after what appeared to be an intense reflection, I remember that he finally muttered between his teeth, and as if to himself, “That shows genius,” and left.

I sat down on the floor on a pile of ears of corn, feeling very hot in
the sun and thinking over Señor Pitchot’s words, which remained deeply engraved in my heart. I was convinced that I could really achieve “extraordinary” things, much more extraordinary than “that.” I was determined to achieve them, and I would, at no matter what cost! One day everyone would be astonished by my art! And you, too, Dullita, Galuchka Rediviva, even more than all the rest!