The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (30 page)

The next day when the professor came and stood in front of my work he uttered a cry of despair.

“You’ve done just the opposite of what I told you to do, and this is the result!”

To which I answered that I was on the verge of solving the problem. And, taking out a bottle of India-ink and a brush, I began to daub my drawing with pitch black precisely where the model was whitest. My professor, thinking he understood, exclaimed,

“Your idea is to make the negative!”

“My idea,” I answered, “is to paint exactly what I see!”

The professor went off again, shaking his head, saying, “If you think you can finish it with chalk you’re mistaken, because your India-ink won’t take chalk!”

Left to myself I took out a little pen knife and began to scratch my paper with a special stroke, and immediately I saw appear the most dazzling whites that one can obtain in a drawing. In other parts of the drawing where I wanted my whites to emerge more subdued, I would spit directly on the given spot and my rubbing then produced peelings that were more grayish and dirty. The beard of the old beggar who sat as the model emerged from the shadows of my drawing with a paralyzing realism. Soon I mastered the operation of bringing out the pulp of the paper in such a way as really to look like a kind of down, which was made by scratching the paper itself,
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and I almost went to the length of pulling out the fibres of the paper with my fingernails, and curling them to boot. It was, so to speak, the direct imitation of the old man’s beard. My work completed, I lighted my drawing with a slanting light, placed close to the edge of the paper. When Señor Nuñez came to see it he could say nothing, so greatly did his perplexity overflow the habitual frame of his admiration. He came over to me, pressed me hard against his chest with his two robust arms in an embrace which I thought would choke me, and repeated approximately what Martin Villanova had said (on the occasion of my invention of the counter-submarine), “Look at our Daliisn’t he great!” Deeply moved, he patted me on the shoulder. This experiment of scratching the paper with my pen knife made me ponder a great deal upon the peculiarities of light and its possibilities of imitation. My researches in this field lasted a whole year, and I came to the conclusion that only the relief of the color itself, deliberately piled on the canvas, could produce luminous effects satisfying to the eye.

This was the period which my parents and myself baptized “The Stone Period.” I used stones, in fact, to paint with. When I wanted to
obtain a very luminous cloud or an intense brilliance, I would put a small stone on the canvas, which I would thereupon cover with paint. One of the most successful paintings of this kind was a large sunset with scarlet clouds. The sky was filled with stones of every dimension, some of them as large as an apple! This painting was hung for a time in my parents’ dining room, and I remember that during the peaceful family gatherings after the evening meal we would sometimes be startled by the sound of something dropping on the mosaic. My mother would stop sewing for a moment and listen, but my father would always reassure her with the words, “It’s nothing—it’s just another stone that’s dropped from our child’s sky!” Being too heavy and the coat of paint too thin to keep them attached to the canvas, which eventually would crack, these stones which served as kernels to large pieces of clouds illuminated by the setting sun would come tumbling down on the tiled floor with a loud noise. With a worried look, my father would add, “The ideas are good, but who would ever buy a painting which would eventually disappear while their house got cluttered up with stones?”

In the town of Figueras my pictorial researches were a source of constant amusement. The word would go round that “now Dali’s son is putting stones in his pictures!” Nevertheless, at the height of the stone period, I was asked to lend some of my paintings for an exhibition that was to take place in the hall of a musical society. There were represented about thirty local and regional artists, some of them from as far away as Gerona and even Barcelona. My works were among the most noticed, and the two intellectuals of the town who carried the most weight, Carlos Costa and Puig Pujades, declared that without the slightest doubt a brilliant artist’s career lay before me.

This first consecration of my glory produced a powerful impression on my mistress’s amorous imagination, and I took desperate advantage of this to enslave her to me more and more. Above all I did not want her to have any friends, whether girls or boys, children or grown-ups. She had to remain always alone, like myself, and when I wanted to she could see me—me, the only one who had intelligence, who understood everything differently from others, and whom the very newspapers were surrounding with clouds of glory. As soon as I learned that she had made a new acquaintance, or if she spoke to me of someone in a sympathetic way, I immediately tried to deprecate, ruin and annihilate this person in her mind, and I always succeeded. I invariably found just the right observation, the prosaic simile that defined the person with such realism that she could no longer see him in any other manner than the one which I dictated to her. I exacted the subservience of her sentiments in a literal way, and every infraction of my pitiless sentimental inquisition had to be punished by her bitter tears. A contemptuous tone directed at her, slipped as if unintentionally into a casual conversation, was enough to make her feel as though she were dying. She no longer expected me to
be able to love her, but she clutched at my esteem like a drowning woman. Her whole life was concentrated into the half-hour of our walk, which I granted her more and more rarely, for this was all going to end! The temple of the Academy of Fine Arts of Madrid already loomed before me, with all its stairways, all its columns and all its pediments of glory. I would say to my mistress, “Profit while you may; you still have another year.” She spent her life making herself beautiful for our half-hour. She had overcome her sickliness, and she now possessed a violent health which only her tears could make acceptable to me.

I would carry with me on my walks numbers of “L’Esprit Nouveau” (The New Spirit) which I received; she would humbly bow her forehead in an attentive attitude over the cubist paintings. At this period I had a passion for what I called Juan Gris’ “Categorical imperative of mysticism.” I remember often speaking to my mistress in enigmatic pronouncements, such as, “Glory is a shiny, pointed, cutting thing, like an open pair of scissors.” She would drink in all my words without understanding them, trying to remember them. . . “What were you saying yesterday about open scissors?”

On our walks we would often see the mass of the Muli de la Torre rising from the dark greenery in the distance. I liked then to sit down to look at it. “You see that white smudge over there? That’s just where Dullita sat.” She would look without seeing what I was pointing at. I would bold one of her breasts in my hand. Since the first time I had met her her breasts had gradually hardened, and now they were like stone. “Show them to me,” I said. She undid her blouse and showed them to me. They were incomparably beautiful and white; their tips looked exactly like raspberries; like them they had a few infinitely fine and minute hairs She was about to button up her blouse again, but I commanded, with a trace of emotion in my voice, “No. Stay the way you are!” She let her hands fall along her body, inclined her head slightly to one side, and lowered her eyes. A violent breathing shook her bosom. Finally I said, “Come on.” She buttoned up her blouse again and got up, smiling feebly. I took her tenderly by the hand and began the walk home. “You know,” I said, “when I go to Madrid I won’t ever write to you again.”
And I walked on another ten steps. I knew that this was exactly the length of time it would take for her to start crying. I was not mistaken. I then kissed her passionately, feeling my cheek burn with her boiling tears, big as hazel-nuts. In the center of my brain glory shone like a pair of open scissors! Work, work, Salvador; for if you were endowed for cruelty, you were also endowed for work.

This capacity for work always inspired everyone with respect, whether I fastened stones to my canvases or worked minutely at my painting for hours on end, or spent my day taking notes to try to untangle a complicated philosophic text. The fact is that from the time I arose, at seven in the morning, my brain did not rest for a single moment in the course of the entire day. Even my idyllic walks I considered a laborious and exacting labor of seduction. My parents would always remark, “He never stops for a second! He never has a good time!” And they would admonish me, “You’re young, you must make the most of your age!” I, however, was always thinking, “Hurry up and grow old—you are horribly ‘green,’ horribly ‘bitter.’ ” How, before I reached maturity, could I rid myself of that dreamy and puerile infirmity of adolescence? I was supremely conscious of one thing—I had to go through cubism in order to get it out of my system once and for all, and during this time perhaps I could at least learn to draw!

But this could not appease my avid desire to do everything. I still had to invent and write a great philosophic work, which I had begun a year before, and which was called, “The Tower of Babel.” I had already written five hundred pages of it, and I was still only on the Prologue! At this period my sexual anxiety disappeared almost completely, and the philosophic theories of my book took up all the room in my psychic activity. The bases of my “Tower of Babel” began with the exposition of the phenomenon of death which was to be found, according to my view, at the inception of every imaginative construction. My theory was anthropomorphic, for I always considered that I was not so much alive as in the process of resuscitating from the “amorphous unintelligence” of my origins and, moreover, I considered a premature old age as the price I would pay for a promise of immortality. That which at the base of the tower was “comprehensible life” for everyone was for me only death and chaos; on the other hand everything on the summit of the tower that was confusion and chaos for everyone else was for me, the anti-Faust, the supreme thaumaturge, only “logos” and resurrection. My life was a constant and furious affirmation of my growing and imperialistic personality, each hour was a new victory of the “ego” over death. On the other hand, I observed around me only continual compromises with this death. Not for me! With death I would never compromise.

My mother’s death supervened, and this was the greatest blow I had experienced in my life. I worshipped her; her image appeared to me unique. I knew that the moral values of her saintly soul were high above
all that is human, and I could not resign myself to the loss of a being on whom I counted to make invisible the unavowable blemishes of my soul—she was so good that I thought that “it would do for me too.” She adored me with a love so whole and so proud that she could not be wrong—my wickedness, too, must be something marvelous! My mother’s death struck me as an affront of destiny—a thing like that could not happen to me—either to her or to me! In the middle of my chest I felt the thousand-year-old cedar of Lebanon of vengeance reach out its gigantic branches. With my teeth clenched with weeping, I swore to myself that I would snatch my mother from death and destiny with the swords of light that some day would savagely gleam around my glorious name!

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Later, in studying the water-colors of Mariano Fortuni, the inventor of “Spanish colorism” and one of the most skilful beings in the world, I realized that he utilizes similar scratchings to obtain his most luminous whites, taking advantage like myself of the relief and irregularity of the whites in question to catch the light in the tiny particles of the surface and thus heighten the effect of stupefying luminousness.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Apprentioeship of Glory Father Consents to Artistic Career Entrance Examination Suspension from the School of Fine Arts of Madrid Dandyism and Prison

The profusion of articles that were beginning to flood the house made my father decide to start a large notebook in which he would collect and paste everything that he had and everything that appeared about me. He wrote a preface to this collection for the benefit of posterity, of which the following is a complete and faithful translation: