The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (28 page)

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Catalonian popular dance.

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Martin Villanova is one of the few revolutionaries of “good faith” whom I have known in the course of my life. He was immeasurably naïve, but also immeasurably generous and prepared to make any sacrifice.

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In my intra-uterine memories I have already told about the games which consisted in making my blood go to my head by hanging and swinging it, which eventually provoked certain retinal illusions similar to phosphenes. This new fantasy which occurred just at the end of the war must be related to the same kind of intra-uterine fantasy. Not only the fact that I had my head down, but also that I passed it through a hole, as well as everything that follows, are exemplary in this regard. The “frustrated acts,” the “unsuccessful holes,” made with great expenditure of effort and means, clearly revealed the principle of displeasure provoked by real mechanical obstacles. Also the fear of the external world incarnated in the people participating in the celebration who were looking forward to seeing my poster, which I knew could not be finished in time, provoked in me the need to seek refuge in the prenatal world of sleep. But the fear of death assailed me, unconsciously evoking for me the traumatism of birth by the agreeable symbolism of the hanging parachute simulacrum of my counter-submarine!

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Narciso Monturiol is the inventor of the first submarine that ever navigated under water. An illustrious son of Figueras, he has his monument in the town and for as long as I can remember I have felt a strong jealousy toward him, for my ambition was to make a great invention of this kind, too.

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A walk.

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A Catalonian popular dance.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“It” Philosophic Studies Unassuaged Love Technical Experiments My “Stone Period” End of Love Affair Mother’s Death

I was growing. On Señor Pitchot’s property, at Cadaques, there was a cypress planted in the middle of the courtyard; it too was growing. I now wore sideburns that reached below the middle of my cheek. I liked dark suits, preferably of very soft black velvet, and on my walks I would smoke a meerschaum pipe of my father’s on which was carved the head of a grinning Arab showing all his teeth. On my father’s excursion to the Greek ruins of Ampurias the curator of the museum made him a present of a silver coin with the profile of a Greek woman. I liked to imagine that she was Helen of Troy. I had it mounted into a tie-pin which I always wore, just as I always carried a cane. I have had several famous canes, but the most beautiful one had a gold handle in the shape of a two-headed eagle—an imperial symbol whose morphology adapted itself in a happy way to the possessive grip of my ever-dissatisfied hand.

I was growing, and so was my hand. “It” finally happened to me one evening in the outhouse of the institute; I was disappointed, and a violent guilt-feeling immediately followed. I had thought “it” was something else! But in spite of my disappointment, overshadowed by the delights of remorse, I always went back to doing “it,” saying to myself, this is the last, last, last time! After three days the temptation to do “it” once more took hold of me again, and I could never struggle more than one day and one night against my desire to do it again, and I did “it,” “it,” “it,” “it” again all the time.

“It” was not everything. . . I was learning to draw, and I put into this other activity the maximum of my effort, of my attention and of my fervor. Guilt at having done “it” augmented the unflagging rigor
of my work on my drawings. Every evening I went to the official drawing school. Selior Nuriez was a very good draftsman and a particularly good engraver. He had received the Prix de Rome for engraving; he was truly devoured by an authentic passion for the Fine Arts. From the beginning he singled me out among the hundred students in the class, and invited me to his house, where he would explain to me the mysteries of chiaroscuro and of the “savage strokes” (this was his expression) of an original engraving by Rembrandt which he owned; he had a very special manner of holding this engraving, almost without touching it, which showed the profound veneration with which it inspired him. I would always come away from Señor Nuñez’ home stimulated to the highest degree, my cheeks flushed with the greatest artistic ambitions. Imbued with a growing and almost religious respect for Art, I would come home with my head full of Rembrandt, go and shut myself up in the toilet and do “it.” “It” became better and better, and I was beginning to find a psychic technique of retardation which enabled me to do “it” at less frequent intervals. For now I no longer said, “This is the last time.” I knew by experience that it was no longer possible for me to stop. What I would do was to promise myself to do “it” on Sunday, and then “occasionally on Sunday.” The idea that this pleasure was in store for me calmed my erotic yearnings and anxieties, and I reached the point of finding a real voluptuous pleasure in the fact of waiting before doing it. Now that I no longer denied it to myself in the same categorical way, and knew that the longer I waited the better “it” would be when it came, I could look forward to this moment with more and more agreeable and welcome vertigoes and agonies.

My studies at the institute continued to progress in a mediocre way, and everyone advised my father to let me become a painter, especially Señor Nuñez, who had complete faith in my artistic talent; my father refused to make a decision—my artistic future frightened him, and he would have preferred anything to that. Nevertheless he did everything to complete my artistic education, buying me books, all kinds of reviews, all the documents, all the tools I needed, and even things that constituted only a pure and fugitive caprice. My father kept repeating, “When he has passed his baccalaureate we shall see!”

As for myself, I had already made up my mind. I turned to silence, and began to read with real frenzy and without order of any kind. At the end of two years there was not a single book left for me to read in my father’s voluminous library. The work which had the greatest effect on me was Voltaire’s
Philosophical Dictionary.
Nietzsche’s
Thus Spake Zarathustra,
on the other hand, gave me at all times the feeling that I could do better in this vein myself. But my favorite reading was Kant. I understood almost nothing of what I read, and this in itself filled me with pride and satisfaction. I adored to lose myself in the labyrinth of reasonings which resounded in the forming crystals of my young intelligence
like authentic celestial music. I felt that a man like Kant, who wrote such important and useless books, must be a real angel! My eagerness to read what I did not understand, stronger than my will, must have obeyed a violent necessity for the spiritual nourishment of my soul, and just as a calcium deficiency in certain weakened organisms of children causes them blindly and irresistibly to break off and eat the lime and plaster on walls, so my spirit must have needed that categorical imperative, which I chewed and rechewed for two consecutive years without succeeding in swallowing it. But one day I did swallow it. In a short time I actually made unbelievable progress in understanding the great philosophical problems. From Kant I passed on to Spinoza, for whose way of thinking I nourished a real passion at this time. Descartes came considerably later, and him I used to build the methodical and logical foundations of my own later original researches. I had begun to read the philosophers almost as a joke, and I ended by weeping over them. I who have never wept over a novel or over a play, no matter how dramatic or heart-rending, wept on reading a definition of “identity” by one of these philosophers, I don’t remember which. And even today, when I am interested in philosophy only incidentally, each time I find myself in the presence of an example of man’s speculative intelligence, I feel tears irresistibly spring to my eyes.

One of the younger professors at the institute had organized a supplementary course in philosophy, which was completely outside the curriculum, and which met in the evening, from seven to eight. I immediately enrolled in this course, which was to be devoted specially to Plato. It was spring, late spring, when these sessions began, and the night air was balmy. We brought our chairs out-of-doors and sat around a well overgrown with ivy, with a bright moon shining overhead. There were several girls among us whom I did not know and whom I found very beautiful. Immediately I chose one of them with a single glance—she had just done the same with me. This was so apparent to both of us that we both stood up almost at the same moment, our attitudes exactly expressing, “Let’s leave! Let’s leave!” And we left. When we got outside the institute our emotion was so great that neither one of us could utter a word. So we began to run, holding each other by the hand. The institute was situated near the outskirts of town, and we had only to climb a few blocks of poor unlighted streets to be right out in the country; with one mind we turned our steps toward the most solitary spot, a little road between two fields of wheat that already grew very high. It was completely deserted and auspicious at this hour. . .

The girl looked into my eyes with a fiery and provocative sweetness; she would laugh from time to time and start off again at a run. But if I had been at a loss for words to begin with, I was even more so now. I thought I should never be able to utter a word again. I tried, and
nothing came. I attributed this phenomenon now more to my paroxysmal fatigue than to my emotional state. She was trembling with every breath, which made her doubly, triply desirable to me. Pointing with my finger to a slight hollow in the field of wheat, I said with a supreme effort, “There!” She ran to the spot and when she reached it lay down, disappearing completely in the wheat. I arrived there in turn; there the girl lay, stretched out full length, appearing much taller than she had before. I saw then that she was very blonde, and had extremely beautiful breasts which I felt wriggling under her blouse like fish caught in my hands. We kissed each other on the mouth for a long time. At times she would half open her mouth, and I would press my lips against her teeth, kissing them till it hurt me.

She had a severe cold and she held a little handkerchief in her hand, with which she vainly tried to blow her nose, as the handkerchief was already completely soaked. I had no handkerchief of my own to offer her, and I did not know what to do. . . She was constantly sniffing up her mucus, but it was so copious that it would immediately reappear. Finally she turned her head away in shame and blew her nose with the edge of her skirt. I hastened to kiss her again, to prove to her that I was not disgusted by her mucus, which was indeed the case, for it was so fluid, colorless and runny that it rather resembled tears. Moreover, her bosom was continually quivering with her breathing which gave me the illusion that she was weeping. Then I looked at her hard. “I don’t love you!” I said. “And I shall never love any woman. I shall always live alone!” And as I spoke I could feel the skin on my cheek contract with the beautiful girl’s drying mucus. A complete calm possessed my mind, and again I was working out my plans in the minutest detail, with such calculating coldness that I felt my own soul grow chill.