The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (29 page)

How had I been able in such a short time to become master of myself again? The girl, on the other hand, felt more and more embarrassed. Obviously her cold had a good deal to do with this. I held her enveloped in my two arms, which had suddenly become sure of their movements, keeping her enfolded in a strictly friendly pose. I suddenly felt the contractions of the dry mucus on my cheek pricking me in an irresistible way. But instead of scratching myself with one of my hands, I lowered my head and pretended to caress my mistress’s shoulder with concentrated tenderness, my nose happening to strike just the level of the fold of her armpit. She had perspired profusely during our running about, and I was thus calmly able to breathe in a sublime fragrance compounded of heliotrope and lamb, to which a few burnt coffee-beans might have been added. I raised my head. She looked at me, bitterly disenchanted, and with a vexed, contemptuous smile, said,

“Then you won’t want to come back again tomorrow evening?”

“Tomorrow evening, yes,” I answered, ceremoniously helping her up, “and for another five years, but not a day longer!” I had my plan—it was my five-year plan!

And so she was my mistress for five years, not counting the summers, which I spent in Cadaques. During this time she remained faithful to me to the point of mysticism. I never saw her except at different times during the twilight hours; on the days when I wished to remain alone I communicated this fact to her by a little note which I sent her by a street urchin. Otherwise we would meet in the open countryside as if by chance. In order to do this she had to resort to a thousand ruses, even to bringing some of her girl friends along, who in turn were sometimes accompanied by boys. But I disliked this, and on most of our walks we were alone.

It was in the course of this five-year romance that I put into play all the resources of my sentimental perversity. I had succeeded in creating in her such a need of me, I had so cynically graduated the frequency of our meetings, the kinds of subjects I would talk about, the sensational lies about supposed inventions, which I had not made at all, and which for the most part were improvised on the spur of the moment, that I could see the sway of my influence growing day by day. It was a methodical, encircling, annihilating, mortal fascination. A time came when I considered my girl “ripe,” and I began to demand that she perform acts, sacrifices for me—had she not often told me she was ready to give her life, to die for me? Well, then! I would see about that! We still had—how much time? Four years? I have to mention—in order that the ever-growing passion which I unleashed in this woman’s soul may be better understood and not solely attributed to my gifts as a Don Juan—that nothing more occurred between us two, in an erotic way, than has been described on the first day: we kissed each other on the mouth, we looked into each other’s eyes, I caressed her breasts, and that was all. I think also that the sense of inferiority which she felt the day we met, because of her cold and her lack of a dry handkerchief, created in her mind such a dissatisfaction, such a violent continued desire to rehabilitate herself in my eyes, that in the sequel of our relationship, never being able to obtain more from me in the way of passion than what I had shown her on that occasion—rather less on the contrary (for the simulation of coldness was one of my most formidable weapons)—her own constantly prodding love undoubtedly contributed to maintaining that state of growing amorous tension which, far from suffering the decline that goes with satiated sentiments, each day grew with alarming, dangerous and unhealthy wishes, more and more sublimated, more and more unreal, and at the same time more and more vulnerable to the terribly material crises of crime, suicide, or nervous collapse.

Unconsummated love has appeared to me since this experience to be one of the most hallucinatory themes of sentimental mythology. Tristan and Isolde are the prototypes of one of those tragedies of unconsummated love which in the realm of the sentiments are as ferociously cannibalistic as that of the praying mantis actually devouring its male on their wedding day, during the very act of love. But the keystone of this cupola
of moral torture which I was building to protect the unconsummated love of my mistress was without doubt the fully shared realization that I did not love her. Indeed I knew and she knew that I did not love her; I knew that she knew I did not love her; she knew that I knew that she knew that I did not love her. Not loving her, I kept my solitude intact, being free to exercise my “principles of sentimental action” on a very beautiful creature, hence on an eminently esthetic and experimental form. I knew that to love, as I should have adored my Galuchka, my Dullita Rediviva, was something altogether different, calling for the annihilation of the ego in an omnipotent confusion of all sentiments, in which all conscious discrimination, all methodical choice of action perpetually threatened to break down, in the most paradoxically unforeseeable fashion. Here, on the contrary, my mistress became the constant target of my trials of skill, which I knew were going to “serve” me later. I was quite aware that love is receiving the arrow, not shooting it; and I tried out upon her flesh that Saint Sebastian whom I bore in a latent state in my own skin, which I should have liked to shuffle off as a serpent does. Knowing that I did not love her, I could continue at the same time to adore my Dullitas, my Galuchkas, and my Redivivas with a love more idealized, absolute and pre-Raphaelitic, since now I had a mistress of flesh and blood, with breasts and saliva, whom I cretinized with love for me, whom I pressed violently against my flesh, not loving her. . . Knowing that I did not love her I would not have with her, either, that always unsatisfied yearning to mount to the summit of a tower! She was earthy, real, and the more her thirsty desire devoured her flesh, and the more sickly she looked—the less she appeared to me to be fit to mount my tower; I would have liked her to croak!

I would sometimes say to her, as we lay somewhere out in the fields, “Make believe you are dead.” And she would cross her two hands on her chest and stop breathing. Her two little nostrils became so motionless, she would stop breathing so long that sometimes, becoming frantic, I would pat her cheeks, believing her to be really inanimate. She derived an unmistakable pleasure from her growing pallor, which I guided with bridles of delicate anguish like an exhausted moon-white horse with a dishevelled mane.

“Now we’ll run together without stopping, as far as to the cypress tree.” She was afraid of my anger and would obey me, dropping at the foot of the cypress at the end of the race, almost fainting with fatigue. “You want me to die,” she would often say, knowing that I liked her to say this, and that I would reward her by kissing her on the mouth.

Summer came, and I left for Cadaques. Señor Pitchot announced that the cypress planted in the centre of the patio had grown another two feet. I made a very detailed drawing of this cypress from life. I had observed its seed balls and been struck by their resemblance to skulls, especially because of the jagged sutures between the two parietal bones.

The letters that I received from my mistress were more exalted in tone than ever, and I answered her only rarely, always with a barb of venom which I knew could not fail to poison her and make her yellow as wax.

At the end of the summer it rained for a whole day. We were one of the last families to leave, and on the last day I went for a walk around the property of the Pitchots, which was already deserted. I picked up my jacket which had been left out in the rain and was soaked; exploring the pockets, I pulled out a sheaf of letters from my mistress, which I used to keep and take with me on my walks. They were all drenched, and the bright blue handwriting on them was almost effaced. I sat down before my cypress, thinking of her. Mechanically I began to squeeze and compress the letters between my hands, so that they became like paste, and soon I made a kind of ball by rolling together several wads of these wet papers. I suddenly realized that in doing so I was involuntarily imitating the cypress balls, for mine was exactly the same size, and similarly made up of several sections joined by lines like the sutures between the parietal bones. I went over to the cypress and replaced one of its balls by the white conglomerate ball of my letters, and with the rest of these I made a second ball which I placed symmetrically in relation to the first. After which I continued on my walk, becoming absorbed in meditation upon the most varied subjects. I remained seated for more than an hour on the extreme point of a rock so close to the breaking waves that when I left my face and hair were all wet; the taste of sea salt which was on my lips evoked in my mind the myth of incorruptibility, of immortality,
so obsessing to me at the time. Night had come, and I no longer saw where I was walking. Suddenly I shuddered and put my hand on my heart, where I felt a twinge as though something had just bitten it—in passing I had been startled by the two motionless white balls which I had left in the cypress tree and which loomed out of the dark as I came almost close enough to touch them. A lightning presentiment flashed through my mind: is she dead? I broke into a cold sweat, which did not leave me till I got to the house where a letter from my mistress awaited me, which she concluded by saying, “I am getting fatter, and everyone thinks I look very well. But I am only interested in what you will think of me when you see me again. A thousand kisses, and again, I could never forget you, etc. etc.”. . . The idiot!

I was preparing myself. My father was beginning to yield, and I knew that after my six years of the baccalaureate I was going to be a painter! This would not be before three more years, but there was already talk of the School of Fine Arts of Madrid, and perhaps, if I won prizes, I would go and complete my studies in Rome. The thought of attending “official courses” again, even if these were courses in painting, deeply revolted me at first, for I should have liked to be given full freedom of action, without anyone’s being able to interfere with what went on inside my head. I was already planning a desperate struggle, a struggle to the death, with my professors. What I intended to do had to happen “without witnesses.” Besides, the sole present witness of my artistic inventions, Señor Nunez, no longer had any peace with me. Each day I flabbergasted him, and each day he had to acknowledge that I was right.

I was making my first technical discoveries, and they all had the same origin: I would start out by doing exactly the contrary of what my professor told me. Once we were drawing an old man, a beggar, who had a beard of very curly, fine hair—almost like down, and absolutely white. After looking at my drawing Señor Nufiez told me that it was too much worked over with pencil strokes to make it possible to get the effect of that very delicate white down; I must do two things—begin again with an absolutely clean sheet of paper, and respect its “whiteness,” which I could then utilize; and also, in order to get the effect of the extremely fine down of his hair I would have to use a very soft pencil, and make strokes that would barely brush the paper. When my professor had left, I naturally began to do the opposite of what he had just advised, and continued to work away with my pencil with extreme violence, using the blackest and heaviest pencils. I put such passion into my work that all the pupils gathered around to watch me work. I was eventually able, by the cleverness of my contrasts, to create an illusion suggestive of the model. But still dissatisfied, I continued to blacken my drawing still more, and soon it was but an incoherent mass of blackish smudges which became more and more homogeneous, and finally covered the whole paper with a uniform dark tone.