The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (25 page)

I had let my hair grow as long as a girl’s, and looking at myself in the mirror I would often adopt the pose and the melancholy look which so fascinated me in Raphael’s self-portrait, and whom I should have liked to resemble as much as possible. I was also waiting impatiently for the down on my face to grow, so that I could shave and have long side-whiskers. As soon as possible I wanted to make myself “look unusual,” to compose a masterpiece with my head; often I would run into my mother’s room—very fast so as not to be caught by surprise—and hurriedly powder my face, after which I would exaggeratedly darken the area around my eyes with a pencil. Out in the street I would bite my lips very hard to make them as red as possible. These vanities became accentuated
after I became aware of the first curious glances directed toward me, glances by which people would attract one another’s attention to me, and which said, “That’s the son of Dali the notary. He’s the one who burned the flag!”

The ideas which had made me into a hero were deeply repugnant to me. To begin with, they were those of most of my schoolmates and because of my irrepressible spirit of contradiction were disqualified by that very fact; besides, the lack of universality of that small and wretched local patriotism appeared unendurably mediocre to my eyes which thirsted for sublimity. At this period I felt myself to be an “integral anarchist,” but it was an anarchy of my own, quite special and anti-sentimental, an anarchy in which I could have reigned as the supreme and capricious disorganizer—an anarchic monarchy,
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with myself at the head as an absolute king; I composed at this time several hymns that could be sung to tunes currently popular, in which the incoherent praises of anarchic and Dalinian monarchy were described in a dithyrambic manner. All my schoolmates knew songs of this kind, and they tried unsuccessfully to imitate them; the idea of influencing my schoolmates began to appeal to me and the “principle of action” gradually awakened in my brain.

On the other hand I was utterly backward in the matter of “solitary pleasure,” which my friends practiced as a regular habit. I heard their conversations sprinkled with allusions, euphemisms and hidden meanings, but in spite of the efforts of my imagination I was unable to understand exactly whereof “it” consisted; I would have died of shame rather than dare to ask how one went about doing “it,” or even to broach the matter indirectly, for I was afraid it might be found out that I did not know all about “it,” and had never done “it.” One day I reached the conclusion that one could do “it” all by oneself, and that “it” could also be done mutually, even by several at a time, to see who could do it fastest. I would sometimes see two of my friends go off after exchanging a look that haunted me for several days. They would disappear to some solitary spot, and when they came back they seemed transfigured—they were more handsome! I meditated for days on what “it” might well be and would lose my way in the labyrinth of false and empty childish theories, all of which constituted a gross anomaly in view of my already advanced adolescence.

I passed all my first year examinations without distinction, but I failed in none—this would have spoiled my summer, for I should have had to prepare to take the examinations over again in the fall. My summers were sacred, and I imposed a painful constraint upon myself in order to keep them free from the blemish of displeasure.

I was waiting frantically for vacation to begin. This was always a little before Saint John’s Day; and since my earliest childhood I remembered having always spent this day in the same place, in a white-washed village on the edge of the Mediterranean, the village of Cadaques! This is the spot which all my life I have adored with a fanatical fidelity which grows with each passing day. I can say without fear of falling into the slightest exaggeration that I know by heart each contour of the rocks and beaches of Cadaques, each geological anomaly of its unique landscape and light, for in the course of my wandering solitudes these outlines of rocks and these flashes of light clinging to the structure and the esthetic substance of the landscape were the unique protagonists on whose mineral impassiveness, day after day, I projected all the accumulated and chronically unsatisfied tension of my erotic and sentimental life. I alone knew the exact itinerary of the shadows as they traced their anguishing course around the bosom of the rocks, whose tops would be reached and submerged by the softly lapping tides of the waxing moon when the moment came. I would leave signals and enigmas along my trail. A black, dried olive placed upright on a piece of old cork served to designate the limit of the setting sun—I placed it on the very tip of a rock pointed like an eagle’s beak. By experimenting I found that this stone beak was the point that received the sun’s last rays and I knew that at a given moment my black olive would stand out alone in the powerful flood of purple light, just as the whole rest of the landscape appeared suddenly submerged in the deep shadow of the mountains.

As soon as this effect of light occurred, I would run and get a drink out of a fountain from which I could still see the olive, and without letting it out of my sight for a second I would slowly swallow the cold water from the spring, quenching my thirst which I had held back until this long anticipated moment in obedience to an abscure personal liturgy which enabled me, as I quenched my thirst, to observe that black olive, poised upon the ultimate point of day, which the blazing sunset rendered for a moment as vivid as an ephemeral twilight cherry! After this I went and fetched my miraculous olive and, inserting it in one of my nostrils, I continued on my way. As I walked, and occasionally broke into a run, I liked to feel my more and more accelerated breathing encounter the resistance of my olive; I would purposely blow harder and harder, stopping up my other nostril until I succeeded in expelling it, with considerable force. Then I would pick it up, carefully brushing off the little grains of dirt and sand which had fastened themselves on its sweating surface, and would even put it in my mouth, sucking its faint taste of rancid oil with delight. Then I would put it back in my nostril and begin all over again the respiratory exercises that were to result in its expulsion. I could not decide which I liked better, the smell of the rancid oil or its taste when I sucked it.
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My summers were wholly taken up with my body, myself and the landscape, and it was the landscape that I liked best. I, who know you so well, Salvador, know that you could not love that landscape of Cadaques so much if in reality it was not the most beautiful landscape in the world—for it is the most beautiful landscape in the world, isn’t it?

I can already see the sceptical though kindly smile of most of my readers. Nothing can put me into such a rage as that smile! The reader thinks: the world is so big, there are so many beautiful and varied landscapes everywhere, on every continent, in every latitude. Why does Dali try to convince us by a mere gratuitous statement that he cannot prove (except on the subjective ground of his own taste)? For this would require an experiment, which is humanly impossible, especially for Dali who, not having travelled very extensively, is and will continue to be ignorant of considerable areas of the terrestrial globe, and cannot judge and deliver an opinion of such unqualified finality.

I am sorry for anyone who reasons in this way, giving flagrant proof of his esthetic and philosophic shortsightedness. Take a potato in your hands, examine it carefully. It may have a spot that has rotted, and if you bring your nose close to it it has a different smell. Imagine for a moment that this spot of decomposition is the landscape—then on this potato that I have just respectfully offered you to hold between your fingers there would be one landscape, a single one and not thirty-six. Now on the other hand imagine that there are no moldy spots at all on the potato in question—then, if we continue to assume that the above-mentioned spot is the equivalent of the landscape, there will result the fact that the potato now has no landscape at all. This may very well happen! And this has happened to planets like the moon, where I assure you there is not a single landscape worth seeing—and I can affirm this, even though I have never been there, and even though the moon is not exactly a potato.

Just as on a human head, which is more or less round, there is only one nose, and not hundreds of noses growing in all directions and on all its surfaces, so on the terrestrial globe that phenomenal thing which a few of the most cultivated and discriminating minds in this world have agreed to call a “landscape,” knowing exactly what they mean by this word, is so rare that innumerable miraculous and imponderable circumstances—a combination of geological mold and of the mold of civilization—must conspire to produce it. That thing, then—and I repeat it once again—that thing which is called and which I call a “landscape,” exists uniquely on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea and not elsewhere. But the most curious of all is that where this landscape becomes best, most beautiful, most excellent and most intelligent is precisely in the vicinity of Cadaques, which by my great good fortune (I am the first to recognize it) is the exact spot where Salvador Dali since his earliest childhood was periodically and successively to pass the “esthetic courses” of all his summers

And what are the primordial beauty and excellence of that miraculously
beautiful landscape of Cadaques? The “structure,” and that alone! Each hill, each rocky contour might have been drawn by Leonardo himself! Aside from the structure there is practically nothing. The vegetation is almost nonexistent. Only the olive-trees, very tiny, whose yellow-tinged silver, like graying and venerable hair, crowns the philosophic brows of the hills, wrinkled with dried-up hollows and rudimentary trails half effaced by thistles. Before the discovery of America this was a land of vines. Then the American insect, the phyloxera, came and devastated them, contributing by its ravages to make the structure of the soil emerge again even more clearly, with the lines formed by the retaining walls that terraced the vines accentuating and shading it, having esthetically the function of geodetic lines marking, giving emphasis and architectonic compass to the splendor of that shore, which seems to descend in multiple and irregular stairways adapted to the soil; serpentine or rectilinear tiers, hard and structural reflections of the splendor of the soul of the earth itself; tiers of civilization encrusted on the back of the landscape; tiers now smiling, now taciturn, now excited by Dionysian sentiments on the bruised summits of divine nostalgias; Raphaelesque or chivalric tiers which, descending from the warm and silvery Olympuses of slate, burst into bloom on the water’s fringe in the svelte and classic song of stone, of every kind of stone down to the granite of the last retaining walls of that unfertilized and solitary earth (its teeming vines having long since disappeared) and on whose dry and elegiac roughness, even today, rest the two bare colossal feet of that grandiose phantom, silent, serene, vertical and pungent, which incarnates and personifies all the different bloods and all the absent wines of antiquity.

When you are thinking of it least, the grasshopper springs! Horror of horrors! And it was always thus. At the heightened moment of my most ecstatic contemplations and visualizations, the grasshopper would spring! Heavy, unconscious, anguishing, its frightfully paralyzing leap reflected in a start of terror that shook my whole being to its depths. Grasshopper—loathsome insect! Horror, nightmare, martyrizer and hallucinating folly of Salvador Dali’s life.

I am thirty-seven years old, and the fright which grasshoppers cause me has not diminished since my adolescence. On the contrary. If possible I should say it has perhaps become still greater. Even today, if I were on the edge of a precipice and a large grasshopper sprang upon me and fastened itself to my face, I should prefer to fling myself over the edge rather than endure this frightful “thing.”

The story of this terror remains for me one of the great enigmas of my life. When I was very small I actually adored grasshoppers. With my aunt and my sister I would chase them with eager delight. I would unfold their wings, which seemed to me to have graduated colors like the pink, mauve and blue-tinted twilight skies that crowned the end of the hot days in Cadaques.

One morning I had caught a very slimy little fish, called a “slobberer” because of this. I pressed it very hard in my hand so as to be able to hold it without its slipping away, and only its small head emerged from my hand. I brought it close to my face to get a good look at it, but immediately I uttered a shrill cry of terror, and threw the fish far away, while tears welled into my eyes. My father, who was sitting on a rock nearby, came and consoled me, trying to understand what had upset me so. “I have just looked at the face of the ‘slobberer,’ ” I told him, in a voice broken by sobs, “and it was exactly the same as a grasshopper’s!” Since I found this association between the two faces, the fish’s and the grasshopper’s, the latter became a thing of horror to me, and the sudden and unexpected sight of one was likely to throw me into such a spectacular nervous fit that my parents absolutely forbade the other children to throw grasshoppers at me, as they were constantly trying to do in order to enjoy my terror. My parents, however, often said, “What a strange thing! He loved them so much before!”