The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (18 page)

Huppe.

Suddenly I became aware that the afternoon was vanishing in the ritualistic apotheosis of a bloody glow. These philosophic meditations had as their principal virtue that of devouring time, while leaving at
the bottom of its empty bottle the reddish, thick and wine-smelling lees of the setting sun.

Pyxide.

Sunset, the time for running out to the kitchen-garden! The time propitious for pressing out the guilty juices of terrestrial gardens invaded by the evening breezes of original sins. I would bite into everything–sugar beets, peaches, onions tender as a new moon. I was so fearful of becoming satiated, of letting my temptations lose their edge too quickly by the debauched prodigality of my gluttony, that I would only bite the desired fruit with a single impatient crunch of my teeth, and after having extracted from it the strict taste of desire, I would throw away the object of my seduction, the more quickly to grasp the rest of these fruits of the moment, whose taste was for my palate as ephemeral as the fugitive flicker of the fireflies that already began to shine in the deepest shadows of the growing vegetational darkness. At times I would take a fruit and be content to touch it with my lips or press it softly against my burning cheek. I liked to feel on my own skin the serene calm of the temperature of that other taut, cool-steeped skin, especially that of a plum, black and wet like a dog’s nose having the texture of a plum rather than that of a truffle. I had allowed myself the possible prolonging of this whole gustatory and vegetal promiscuity of the kitchen garden until mid-twilight, but I had anticipated exceptions to this. That is to say, I could linger on there a little if the gathering of glow-worms with which I concluded the delights of the kitchen garden promised to be fruitful. I wanted in fact to make a necklace
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of glow-worms strung on a silk thread, which in the prophorescent convulsions of their death agony would produce a singular effect on Julia’s neck. But she would be horrified by this. Perhaps Dullita, then? I could imagine her standing thus adorned, consumed with pride.

When twilight deepened, the Muli de la Torre was already calling me with the whole irresistible attraction of its dizzy height, and I raised my eyes toward the top of this tower with an ardent gaze of promise and fidelity. I said to it in a low voice, “I’m coming!” It was still flushed with a faint rose tinge, even though the sun had long since set. And always above those proud walls three great black birds hovered majestically. My daily twilight visit to the terrace at the top of the Tower was by all means the most eagerly awaited and the most solemn moment of my days. Nevertheless, as the hour of my ascent approached, the impatience which I felt growing within me blended with a kind of indeterminate and infinitely voluptuous fear. On reaching the top of the tower my glance would delight in losing its way as it wandered along the mountain tops, whose successive planes appeared still at this late hour to be etched with the gold and scarlet line of the last glimmer of daylight which by
virtue of the limpidity of the air rendered that prenocturnal landscape precise and stereoscopic.

From the summit of this tower I was able to continue to develop the kinds of grandiose reveries which I had begun previously on the roof of my parents’ house in Figueras. But now my exhausting imaginings assumed a much clearer “social and moral” content, in spite of the persistence of a continually paradoxical ambiguity. My moral ideas in fact constantly plunged from one extreme to the other. Now I would imagine myself set up as a bloody tyrant, reducing all contemporary peoples to slavery for the sole satisfaction of my luxurious and fantastic egocentric caprices; again, on the other hand, I would abase myself to the humble and degrading condition of the pariah, animated by an inextinguishable thirst for cosmic redemption and justice, who would uselessly sacrifice himself in the most romantic of deaths. From the cruel demi-god to the humble worker, passing through the stages of the artist to the total genius, I have always arrived at the savior ... Salvador, Salvador, Salvador! I could repeat my own name tirelessly ... I knew that a sacrifice was inevitable, and with a repugnant cowardice I would look around me in the dark. For of only one thing was I absolutely sure: I was not going to be the one sacrificed!

In the large dining room bathed in a very feeble light, dinner was a kind of gentle convalescence after the great nocturnal eloquence at the top of the Tower. Sleep was there, right close to me, seated in the empty chair at my side; sometimes it would take hold of my foot under the table, and then I would let it rise along the whole length of my body, just as coffee rises in a lump of sugar. One evening, almost asleep at the end of the meal, I heard Señor Pitchot bring up again the subject of the linden blossom picking. It was finally set for the day after the following. This day arrived, and here now is the story that you have been waiting for so impatiently.

The Story of the Linden Blossom Picking and the Crutch

A story filled with burning sun and tempest, a story seething with love and fear, a story full of linden blossoms and a crutch, in which the spectre of death does not leave me, so to speak, for a single moment.

Shortly after dawn, having got up earlier than usual, I went up with Julia and two men to the Tower attic to fetch the ladders needed for the linden blossom picking. This attic was immense and dark, cluttered with miscellaneous objects. It had been locked before this, so that I entered it now for the first time. I immediately discovered two objects which stood out with a surprising personality from the indifferent and anonymous pile of the remaining things. One was a heavy crown
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of
golden laurel that stood as high as my head, and from which hung two immense faded silk ribbons on which were embroidered inscriptions in a language and characters unknown to me. The second object, which struck me as being terribly personal and overshadowing everything else, was a crutch! It was the first time in my life that I saw a crutch, or at least I thought it was. Its aspect appeared to me at once as something extremely untoward and prodigiously striking.

Béquilles.

I immediately took possession of the crutch, and I felt that I should never again in my life be able to separate myself from it, such was the fetishistic fanaticism which seized me at the very first without my being able to explain it. The superb crutch! Already it appeared to me as the object possessing the height of authority and solemnity. It immediately replaced the old mattress beater with leather fringes which I had adopted a long time ago as a scepter and which I had lost one day on dropping it behind a wall out of my reach. The upper bifurcated part of the crutch intended for the armpit was covered by a kind of felt cloth, extremely fine, worn, brown-stained, in whose suave curve I would by turns pleasurably place my caressing cheek and drop my pensive brow. Then I victoriously descended into the garden, hobbling solemnly with my crutch in one hand. This object communicated to me an assurance, an arrogance even, which I had never been capable of until then.

They had just set up the double ladders under the tall linden trees growing in the centre of the garden. At their bases large white sheets had been stretched out to receive the flowers that were to be gathered and on which a few blossom-laden branches were already beginning to drop. Three ladders had been set up, and on each one stood an unknown woman, two of whom were very beautiful and greatly resembled each other. One of these had large breasts, extremely beautiful and turgescent, of which the eye could follow the slightest details beneath her white knitted wool sweater that was perfectly molded to their curves. The third girl was ugly. Her teeth were the color of mayonnaise and so large that they overflowed from her tumefied gums, making her look as though she were constantly laughing. There was also a fourth person with one foot on the ground, her back arched on one of her hips. This was a little girl of twelve, who stood looking up and motioning to her mother, who was precisely the one with the beautiful breasts. This girl had also come to help with the gathering. I fell in love with her instantly, and I think that the view of her from behind, reminding me of Dullita, was very favorable to this first impulse of my heart. Besides, never having seen Dullita face to face, it was extremely easy for me to blend these two beings, just as I had already once done with Galuchka, of my false memories, and Dullita Rediviva! With my crutch I imperceptibly touched the girl’s back. She quickly turned round, and I then said to her, with a sureness and a force of conviction that came close to rage, “You shall be Dullita!”

The condensed images of Galuchka and of Dullita had just become
incorporated and fused by the force of my desire for this new child whose sun-blackened but angelically beautiful face I had just discovered. This face instantly took the place of Dullita’s, which I had never seen, so that the three images of my delirium mingled in the indestructible amalgam of a single and unique love-being. My passion charged the enhanced reality of the reincarnated image of my love with a new potential, more irresistible than ever. And my libidinous anxiety, stored up in the course of several years of solitary and anxious waiting, now became crystallized into a kind of precious stone, transparent, homogeneous and hard, cut into a tetrahedron, and in whose facets I saw the virginal splendor of my three unassuaged loves sparkling beneath the sun of the most radiant day of the year.

Besides, was I quite sure that she was not Dullita herself in reality? I tried to find in this country girl’s calcinated face the vestiges of Galuchka’s former pallor, whose face seemed to begin to resemble hers from minute to minute. I struck a violent blow with my crutch on the ground and repeated to her in a hoarse voice choking with emotion at the very start, “You shall be Dullita.” She drew back, startled by the uncouthness of my emotional state, and did not answer. The exteriorization of my first urge toward her must indeed have betrayed such tyrannical intentions that I understood it would be difficult for me now to regain the child’s confidence. I drew one step nearer to her. But she, dominated by an almost animal-like fear, climbed as if for protection
up two rungs of the ladder on which her mother was perched, and did this with such lightness and agility that I did not have time gently to touch her head with the tip of my crutch as I had intended to do to calm her fear, and to prove to her the gentleness of my sentiments.

But my beautiful Dullita was quite right in being afraid of me. She would realize it only too well later, for all this had but just begun! I myself at that age already felt the clutch of a vague presentiment of the danger that was involved in the more and more pronounced features of my impulsive character. How many times, walking peaceably in the country, lulled by the nostalgic weaving back and forth of my reveries, had I suddenly felt the irresistible desire to jump from the top of a wall or a rock whose height was too great for me; but knowing that nothing could prevent this impulse I would shut my eyes and throw myself into the void.
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I would often remain half stunned, but with a calmed heart I said to myself, “The danger is past for today,” and this would give me a new and frenzied taste for the most trivial surrounding realities.