The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (22 page)

I kneeled before her, and looked at her fixedly. Becoming gradually accustomed to the half-light, and holding myself so near her that I could see her face in the tiniest detail, pressed on all sides by blackness, I drew even closer and leaned my head on hers. Dullita opened her eyes and said, “Let’s play at touching each other’s tongues,” and she raised her head slightly, bringing it even a little closer to me, while sticking out the tip of her tongue from her deliciously moist, half-opened mouth. I was paralyzed by a mortal fear, and in spite of my desire to kiss her I pulled back my head and with a brutal gesture of my hand I threw her head back, causing it to strike the laurel crown noisily. I got to my feet again, and my attitude must have struck her as so menacing and resolute that I could feel by her absent look that she was ready to submit to any kind of treatment without offering the slightest resistance. This stoicism in which I felt in addition the presence of a principle of acquiescence on her part accentuated my growing desire to hurt her. With a bound I got behind her; Dullita raised herself up, lifted by the springs of an instinctive fear, but immediately repressing this first gesture of alarm did not turn toward me and remained immobilized in her attitude, proudly seated in the centre of the crown.

At this moment a flash of lightning longer and more penetrating than the others sharply illuminated and pierced through the slits of the closed shutters, and for the space of a second I saw the slim silhouette of Dullita’s back outlined in black against that sudden blinding light. I threw myself on Dullita’s body and I again squeezed her waist with all my might, as I had done in the morning on the pile of flowers. She resisted my brutality feebly and all at once our struggle became slow, for I suddenly began to calculate everything. Dullita interpreted the gentleness which I now imparted to my gestures as a symptom of tenderness, and in turn wound her caressing arms all around my waist.

We lay thus sprawling on the floor, mingled in a more and more indolent embrace. I felt that it would be easy for me to choke the least of her cries, crushing her little face against my chest. But her attitude did not correspond to my fantasy. What I wanted to do was precisely to turn her over completely on her other side, for it was just in the hollow of her back that I wanted to hurt her; I might, for example, have crushed her, just there, with the crown; the leaves of those metallic laurels would have nailed themselves like blades into her smooth skin. I could then have brought progressively heavier objects to keep her pinned down there. And when I finally freed her from this torture I would kiss her on the mouth and on her bruised back, and we would weep together. I therefore continued to feign more and more gentle caresses while I recovered my breath for the coming struggle, and I looked around avidly at the heaviest objects, establishing a quick choice
among those which crowded the half-light of the attic with their phantasmal contours. My eyes were finally caught by an immense decrepit chest of drawers towering above us and slightly tilted forward. But was I capable of budging it? I felt an intense pain clutching me behind my legs, the back of my neck and my calves. A violent gust of wind caused the attic door to bang open, revealing at the other end of the tower stairway another door, likewise open. It stopped raining and a brand new sky appeared, yellow and livid as a dream lemon.

My fantasy of “Dullita’s crushing” instantly melted away in that sky in which I felt the gleams of a delirious sunset flutter.

“Let’s go up to the top of the tower!”

And already I was climbing the stairway. Dullita, probably disappointed at the sudden interruption of our caresses, did not obey me instantly. I was forced to interpret her delay as a refusal, and in a fury I went down again to fetch her. She seemed to want to run away. Then, seized with an all-powerful anger, I felt the blood rise to my head, unleashing the wild beast of my wrath. With my two hands I seized Dullita’s hair and dragged her toward me. She fell on her knees on the edge of one of the steps and uttered a little plaintive cry of pain; pulling her with all my might, I succeeded in raising her and I dragged her up three or four steps. I let go of her hair for a moment to rest, prepared to continue right on pulling her thus. Then, with a determined movement, she got to her feet, ran up the rest of the steps, and disappeared on the terrace of the tower.

Recovering a supernatural calm and poise I continued slowly up the stairs, making this last as long as I could, for now I knew that she could no longer escape me! This long, persevering and fanatical desire that the Dullita of Figueras should come up to my laundry on the rooftop had just been fulfilled by this new Dullita, Galuchka Rediviva, whom I saw with my own eyes at this very moment crossing the threshold of that dizzy summit of the Muli de la Torre! I should have liked my ascension never to end, so that I might prolong and profit by each of the unique hallucinating moments which I felt I was about to live. For my happiness to have been perfect I would only have had to be wearing my king’s crown on my head; for a second I thought of going down to fetch it, but my climb, though deliberately slow, could not be turned aside by anything, not even by death.

I reached the threshold of the door at the top! In the centre of the terrace was standing, slightly leaning toward the right, my rain-soaked crutch which now projected an elongated and sinister shadow on the tiling lighted by red sun-rays. Beside the crutch, my upright diabolo also projected a disturbing shadow strangulated at the centre; across the fine waist of the diabolo a little metal ring shone savagely. At the very top of the sky before me the immense silhouette of a mauve cloud lined with flashing gold was vanishing, resembling an imposing storm-Napoleon; still higher yet, a rainbow cut in two showed in its centre a large piece of Prussian blue sky, which corresponded to the space on the Tower that separated me from Dullita. No longer weeping she was waiting for me, seated on the ramparts of the Tower.

With an inspired hypocrisy, which never fails me in the supreme moments of my life, I said to her,

“I shall make you a present of my diabolo on condition that you don’t lean over the edge of the Tower any more, for you might fall.”

She immediately came and picked up the diabolo, after which she went back and once more leaned over the edge, exclaiming,

“Oh, how pretty it is!” She turned her face toward me and looked at me with a mocking smile, thinking I had finally become gentle and dominated by her recent tears. I made a gesture of terror and hid my face, as though unable to stand seeing her lean over in this way. This stimulated her coquettishness, as I had foreseen, and straddling the ramparts of the Tower, she let her two legs hang over the edge. I said to her then,

“Wait a minute and I’ll go and get you another present!”

And taking my crutch with me I pretended to leave. But I immediately came up again on tip-toe the few steps I had just gone down. My emotion reached its climax. I said to myself, “Now it’s up to me!” On all fours I began to crawl toward her, without making any noise, preceded by my crutch which I held by its tip. There was Dullita, still seated with her back to me, her legs over the drop, the palms of her hands resting on the rampart, and completely absorbed in the contemplation
of the clouds, torn by the rain, broken up into fantastic fragments of the great vertical Napoleon of a while ago, now transformed into a kind of immense and horizontal sanguinary crocodile.

Sablier.

Soon it would be dark. With infinite precautions I advanced the bifurcation of my crutch toward just the slenderest part of Dullita’s waist; I effected this operation with such attention that as I approached I bit my lower lip hard, and a tiny trickle of blood began to flow down my chin. What was I going to do? As though sensing in advance the contact of my crutch, Dullita turned toward me, in no wise frightened, and of her own accord leaned her back against my crutch. At this moment her face was the face of the most beautiful angel in heaven, and then I felt the rainbow of her smile form a bridge to me across the whole distance by which the crutch separated us. I lowered my eyes and pretended to prop the end of my crutch in the space between two paving-tiles. Rising abruptly, with my eyes full of tears, I approached Dullita, tore the diabolo from her hand and screamed with a hoarse tear-choked voice,

“Neither for you nor for me!”

And I hurled our diabolo into empty space.

The sacrifice was at last accomplished!
¹⁶
And since then that anonymous crutch was and will remain for me, till the end of my days, the “symbol of death” and the “symbol of resurrection!”

¹
This painting which made such a deep impression upon me as a child disappeared completely, sc to speak, from my imagination for years. its image ceasing to have the same effect upon me. But suddenly in 1929, upon seeing a reproduction of the
Angelus
again, I was violently seized by the same uneasiness and the original emotional upset. I undertook the systematic analysis of a series
of
the “phenomena” that began to occur around the image referred to, which assumed for me
a
clearly obsessive character; and after having utilized this image of the
Angelus
in the most diverse forms, such as objects, paintings, poems, etc., I finally wrote an essay of paranoiac interpretation called
The Tragic Myth of Millet’s Angelus
, a book soon to be published and which consider one of the fundamental documents of the Dalinian philosophy.

²
A religious picture representing the martyrdom of the Maccabees.

³
Mimesis: a resemblance which certain living beings assume, either to the environment in which they find themselves, or to the better protected species or to those at whose expense they live.

⁴
The invisible image of Voltaire may be compared in every respect to the mimesis of the leaf-insect rendered invisible by the resemblance and the confusion established between Figure and Background.

⁵
This name in Catalonian has a highly pornographic meaning, impossible to translate. It designates a part of the female pudenda and is used by fishermen and peasants to refer to someone or something prodigiously cunning and sly.

⁶
Helen was to be the name of my wife.

⁷
Subsequently I have realized that in all my lectures I would seat myself in such a way as to have my foot so uncomfortably twisted that it hurt and that this pain could be accentuated at will. One day when this characteristic contraction coincided with my wearing of shoes that were painfully tight my eloquence reached its height. In my own case physical pain certainly augments eloquence; thus a tooth-ache often releases in me an oratorical outburst.

⁸
Mr. Dali’s manuscript, as to handwriting, spelling and syntax, is probably one of the most fantastically indecipherable documents ever to have come from the pen of a person having a real feeling for the value and the weight of words, for verbal images, for style. The manuscript is written on yellow foolscap in a well-nigh illegible hand-writing, almost without punctuation, without paragraphing, in a deliriously fanciful spelling that would bring beads of perspiration to a lexicographer’s brow. Gala is the only one who does not get lost in the labyrinthian chaos of this manuscript.
—Translator’s Note
.

⁹
I had on other occasions observed and reproduced at will this phenomenon due to small boles in the shutters which made my room act as a photographic camera.