The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (20 page)

All my life has been made up of caprices of this kind, and I am constantly ready to abandon the most luxurious voyage to the Indies for a little pantomime as childish and innocent as the one I have just described. Yet are these things as simple as they appear? My experience had convinced me of exactly the contrary, and my head was crowded with competing strategic plans by the force, skill, hypocrisy and ruse of which I might perhaps win this preliminary battle against reality which, with victory, would bring me the heroic realization of my fantasy: to touch those breasts with the bifurcation of my crutch. After that, my crutch could again become my kingly sceptre!

The sun was setting, the pyramid of flowers was growing, the moon “mooned,” Dullita lay on the flowers. The fantasy of touching the breasts with my crutch grew sharper, became a desire so strong that I would have preferred to die rather than deny it to myself. In any case the best thing would be to go quickly and put on my kingly disguise; when I was thus clad, my plans always became colored with a new and inspiring audacity. I would come out again in this garb and lie down
beside Dullita on the pile of linden blossoms, and I could then continue to look at the blossom-picker’s breasts. Dullita seeing me thus bedecked, with all the trappings of a king, would feel herself dying of love.

I went quickly up to my room, took the ermine cape out of the closet, placed my crown on my head, with the long white “anti-Faustian” wig falling delicately over my shoulders. Never in my life had I thought myself so handsome as that afternoon. A waxen pallor pierced through my browned skin, and the circles around my eyes had that same enticingly bruised brown color that I had just observed wearilessly for over an hour in the folds of the linden-blossom-picker’s armpit just where three little creases formed each time she lowered her arm. I left my room intending to go down again into the garden, animated with the serene calm that comes with the feeling of being irresistibly handsome.

Just before reaching the main stairway I had to cross a kind of closed vestibule situated on the second floor and overlooking the garden through a small window brightly lighted by the sun. In this window there were three melons in the process of ripening, hanging from the ceiling by strings. I stopped to observe them, and with the rapidity and the blinding luminousness of lightning I had an idea which was going to solve and render possible my new fantasy involving the blossom-picker’s breasts. The vestibule was steeped in semi-darkness, in spite of the strong light from the small window. If the blossom-picker were to set up her ladder close to this window and climb up to a given height, I should be able to see her breasts set in the frame of the window as if altogether isolated from the rest of her body, and I would then be in a position to observe them with all the voracity of my glance without feeling any shame lest my desire be discovered or observed by anyone. While I looked at the breasts I would exercise a caressing pressure by means of my crutch’s bifurcation upon one of the hanging melons, while attempting to have a perfect consciousness of its weight by slightly lifting it. This operation suddenly appeared to me as a hundred times more distracting and desirable than the first version of my fantasy, which simply consisted in directly touching the breasts. Indeed the weight of this hanging melon seemed to me now to have absorbed all the ripening gravity of my desire, and the supposition that this melon must be marvelously sweet and fragrant blended in my imagination in so paradisial a fashion with the turgescence of the blossom-picker’s real breasts that it already seemed to me that by virtue of the subterfuge of my substitution I could now not only press them tenderly with my crutch’s bifurcation, but also and especially I could “eat” them and press from them that sugared and fragrant liquid which they too, like the melons, must have within them.

To bring the blossom-picker close to the window, as much as was necessary for the realization of my stratagem, I went up to the third floor and then out on the balcony. I accomplished the difficult feat of letting my “diabolo” game fall in such a way that its string got caught in a given spot on the rose vine climbing up the front of the house. Where-upon,
using a reed-stalk, I tried to tangle this string as much as possible among the thorny branches in order to make its removal as long and painful as possible. This operation was most successful, and I took all the necessary time. Anyone observing me from the garden might have thought what I was doing was precisely to try to get it free.

Having prepared the bait of my trap, I ran out into the garden. I went over to the ladder on which the blossom-picker with the beautiful breasts was perched, and in a whimpering voice begged her to go and untangle my “diabolo.” And I pointed to it with the tip of my crutch which I had previously unearthed from the pile of flowers where it had been purifying since noon. The blossom-picker stopped her work and looked in the direction where my diabolo was caught. In doing so she assumed an attitude expressing the pleasurable relief that goes with a long awaited rest; she distributed the whole weight of her body between the support of one of her robust elbows and the opposite leg in such a way that her hips were violently arched, in a divinely beautiful pose which was further enhanced by the motions of her free arm which she lifted to tidy her dishevelled hair. Just then a drop of sweat fell from her moist arm pit and struck me right in the middle of my forehead, like one of those large warm raindrops that usher in the great summer storms, a drop of sweat which was “in reality of truth” like the oracle and the harbinger of the storm of nature combined with that of my soul, which destiny held in store for me the next day at about the same hour.

The peasant woman did not have to be asked a second time, for in the domain of the Muli de la Torre it was well known (by the express orders of Señor Pitchot himself) that my slightest whims were to be obeyed on the spot, and that the carrying out of my desires was a law for everyone. After having savored a short rest, during which she abandoned her whole body to the light, like a piece of sculpture, she came down from her ladder and with Dullita’s help dragged it to the foot of the wall beneath the window, which was the place I had chosen. This operation was a rather long one, for the ladder was some distance away and it had to be pushed to the designated spot in short spurts. In addition it was necessary, once it was near the wall, to brace it well before venturing to climb up on it.

I took advantage of the delay to run into my room and strip to the skin. This was the occasion in my life on which I remember thinking myself most handsome as I looked at my reflection in the mirror. I ardently wished at that moment that the whole world could have admired my supreme beauty, or at least that the lovely blossom picker and my new Dullita could have done so. But I could not think of appearing thus all of a sudden, and I covered my nakedness with the ermine cape. In spite of the fact that it was deeply tanned by the sun, my face now revealed a spectral pallor which was due to the greenish light reflected by the linden trees in the garden. I went down into the dark vestibule where the melons hung, and almost as soon as I reached it the body of the
blossom-picker appeared behind the frame of the little window. I had taken good measurements! The lower part of the window intercepted her body just where the thighs began, while her upper part was entirely cut off at the head. By the movements of her shoulders with her arms uplifted I could judge the fruitless and absorbed efforts that she was making to undo the tangled string of my diabolo which I had deliberately entwined in the thorny interlaced branches of wild rose that climbed up the front of the Muli de la Torre.

The woman’s body, as I have just described, filled the entire space of the window and threw the feebly lighted vestibule in which I stood into greater shadow. The heat under my thick ermine cape was stifling. Wringing wet, I let the cape slip to the floor, and a soft warmth barely touched with coolness came over my body and caressed its nakedness. I thought: she cannot see me thus, and the moment she gets ready to come down the ladder I shall know it and be able to dress hurriedly or run and hide against the wall.

For the moment I could give myself over fearlessly to the fantasy of my game. Delicately I placed the bifurcation of my crutch under the lower
part of the hanging melon, pressing it with all the sentimental tenderness of which I was capable. An acute lyricism drowned my eyes with tears. The softness of the melon exceeded all my hopes. It was so ripe that in spite of the gentleness of my pressure my crutch sank into it with a delightful lapping sound. Then I turned my glance upward to glue it to the bosom of the woman who was struggling to untangle the labyrinthian snares of my diabolo. I could not see her breasts very clearly, but their confused mass, seen against the light, only exasperated my unsatisfied libido. I accentuated my proddings while communicating a special rhythm to my crutch. Soon the juice of the melon began to drip on me, sprinkling me with its sticky fluid, at first only in occasional drops, but presently more and more copiously. At this moment I placed my face beneath the melon, opening my mouth and reaching out my tongue, which was thirsty, dry with heat and desire; in this manner I caught the spatterings of the juice, which was prodigiously sweet, but with prickling accents of ammonia interspersed. These few drops, quickly annihilated in my mouth, made me mad with thirst, while my glance ran dizzily from the melon to the window, from the window to the melon, and back again, and so on, in a veritable growing frenzy which soon culminated in a kind of delirium in which the whole consciousness of my acts and movements seemed to become obliterated. To my crutch I imparted gestures of increasing brutality, calculated to dig it in the most effective and deeply anchored way into the melon’s flesh, in order to make the maximum of its life and its juice burst forth from the depths of its bowels. Toward the end the alternate rhythm of my glance became accentuated: Melon, window! Melon, window! Window, melon! . . .

My gestures had by now become so deeply and hysterically tumultuous that suddenly the melon broke loose and fell on my head, almost at the same time that the beautiful blossom-picker, having finally succeeded in untangling my diabolo, began to come down the ladder. I barely had time to throw myself to the floor and get out of her sight when her face appeared. I fell on my ermine cape which lay at my feet, drenched with the melon’s yellow liquid. Panting, weary, trying to hold my breath, I waited for the peasant woman, upon discovering me naked, to climb up again a few rungs to look at me; without needing to turn my head I would be able to tell whether she came up again by the shadow which her body would produce, just as it had a while ago when it intercepted the window-frame.

But this maddening and tensely awaited moment did not come. Instead of the cherished shadow of eclipse, the oblique and orange light of the setting sun slowly penetrated and rose the whole length of the thickly whitewashed wall, on which the shadow of the two intact hanging melons now stood out. But I had no inclination to play with them. My enchantment had passed. This could not be repeated. An extreme weariness took hold of all my muscles, making my movements painful.
The two black shadows of the melons appeared to me as a sinister symbol, and they no longer evoked the beautiful blossom-gatherer’s two breasts, sunny with afternoon. Instead they too now seemed to stir like two dead things rolled into balls, like two putrefied hedgehogs. I shuddered. I went up into my room and slowly put on my clothes again, stopping several times to take a rest, during which I would stretch out on the bed with my eyes shut. Darkness overtook me thus, in my room.

I had to hurry if I still wanted to take advantage of the summit of the tower. I went up, holding my crutch. The sky was all starry and I felt it weigh so heavily on my weariness that I did not have the courage to undertake any of the grandiose reveries which the place usually had the virtue of provoking in my mind. Just in the centre of the terrace of this tower there was a small cement cube provided with a hole which was presumably intended to hold a banner or a weathervane. The base of my crutch was a little too slender to fit it perfectly. Nevertheless I placed it there, upright, slightly leaning toward the right. This attitude of my crutch was much more satisfying to me than a perfect vertical, and I went away, leaving it thus placed. If I should wake up in the night I would immediately think of my crutch, motionless at the top of the tower, and this would fill me with a protective illusion. But would I wake up? A sleep heavy as lead already hummed in my head, after a day so filled with emotions that I no longer wanted to think of anything. I wanted before and above all to sleep!