The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (38 page)

The fresh bottle of champagne inspired my friends to a vow which was to join all of us together in a solemn pact. We pledged ourselves on our “word of honor” that whatever happened to us in life, whatever might be our political convictions, and whatever might be the difficulties—even if we should find ourselves in the most distant countries and a long voyage should be required—we pledged ourselves, as I said, to meet in the same spot in exactly fifteen years; and if the hotel had been destroyed, then in the spot which it had occupied. The possibility of
being able to find again the exact spot where we were in case the hotel and its surroundings had by chance suffered an intense bombardment shortly before, or in case this should happen at the very time when, fifteen years later, we were about to appear at our pledged meeting, started a discussion that got endlessly complicated, and I lost all interest in it.

I began to let my glance stray over that elegant jewel-besprinkled flesh that surrounded us and that seemed to clutch at my heart. Was it really this, or a slight urge to vomit, as I had said a while ago to be cynical? With a dubious appetite I ate the chicken leg that someone had saved for me.

Another bottle of champagne proved indispensable to enable us to reach an agreement. There were six of us, and we divided into six parts the card on which the Rector’s Club and the table number were printed (I think I remember that the number was 8, because of a discussion on the symbolic significance of that number), and on each part we wrote the date and other data on one side, and on the other, the six signatures. I called attention to the symbolic significance—since we were talking precisely about symbols—of our signing a pact on a piece of paper that we had immediately before torn up several times. But no one would take this into consideration, and we signed on the six pieces as we had agreed. After which each one of us kept his piece.
⁷

The pact having been religiously signed, a last bottle was absolutely required to enable us to celebrate the happy conclusion of our agreement with due ceremony.

At about the time when the meeting stipulated in our pact was to have taken place, civil war raged in Spain. Imagine the Palace Hotel of Madrid, where we had lived our golden youth, transformed into a blood transfusion hospital and bombed. What a fine subject for Hollywood could be made of the heroic Odyssey of those six friends—separated for so long, separated, too, or united, by irreducible hatreds or the unanimous fervor of their fanatical opinions—repressing for a moment their tumultuous passions, temporarily putting aside their disagreements, in a dramatic, lugubrious and ceremonious meal, as a noble tribute to the honor of a word! I do not know whether this chimerical meal took place or not. All I can tell you, and I whisper this into your ear, is that I was not present.

As all things in the world must have an end, so did our night at the Rector’s Club. But we found yet another
bistrot
which was open till dawn, frequented by carters and night-watchmen and the kind of people who take trains at impossible hours. There we gathered for a last round of
anis del Mono
. Dawn was already pecking, with the crowing of the
first cocks, at the windows of the
bistrot
. Come on! Come on, let’s get some sleep! Enough for today. Tomorrow is another day.

Tomorrow I was going to begin my new Parsifal! My Parsifal of the morrow was as follows. Up at noon. From noon to two o’clock, five vermouths with olives. At two o’clock, a dry Martini with very fine slices of “Serrano” ham and anchovies, for I had to pass the time before the arrival of the group. I have no recollection of the lunch, except that at the end of it I had the whim of drinking several glasses of chartreuse, in memory of the end of certain Sunday dinners at my parents’ in Cadaques—which made me weep.

At five or six o’clock in the afternoon we found ourselves once more seated around a table, this time in a farm on the outskirts of Madrid. It was a small patio with a magnificent view overlooking the Sierra del Guadarrama, spotted with very black oak trees. We decided it was time to have a bite to eat. I had a large plate of cod with tomato sauce. Some carters at an adjoining table were eating it with their knives, and the idea of combining the taste of the metal directly with that of the cod struck me as extremely delicate and aristocratic.

After the cod I asked for a partridge, but there were none at this season. I wanted by all means to eat something succulent. The proprietress suggested either warmed-over rabbit with onions, or a squab. I said I did not want anything warmed-over, and decided on the squab. The proprietress, a little annoyed, called my attention to the fact that sometimes warmed-over things are the best. I hesitated for a moment, but persisted in ordering the squab. The trouble was that it was already so late that in not more than two hours we would have to eat dinner in earnest. We therefore decided that it was better to eat now, and later on, around midnight, we would just have something cold. So I said to the proprietress,

“All right, bring me the rabbit you speak so well about, too.”

How right she was! With the sensual intelligence that I possess in the sacred tabernacle of the palate I understood in a moment the mysteries and the secrets of the warmed-over dish. The sauce had attained a suggestion of elasticity peculiar to the warmed-over dish which made it adhere delicately to the inside of the mouth, seeming to distribute the taste uniformly and making one click one’s tongue. And believe me, that prosaic sound, which so much resembles the horror of hearing a cork pop, is the very sound of that thing so rarely understood—even more rarely understood when it is not accompanied by this sound—“satisfaction.” In short, that modest rabbit gave me a great deal of satisfaction.

We left, and at this moment I realized that we had come in two luxurious cars. No sooner had we returned to Madrid than our plan for a small cold supper at midnight vanished, and once more the spectre of food placed itself before us with its terrible and inevitable reality.

“Let’s begin by drinking something,” I suggested. “We are not in a hurry. After that we will see.”

This was necessary and reasonable, for the wine at the farm was poor, and I had eaten my rabbit to the sole accompaniment of water. I had three Martinis, and toward the end of the third I distinctly felt that my Parsifal was about to begin.

I had my plan. I got up, on the pretext of having to go to the toilet, and quietly left by another door. Breathing deeply the air of freedom, which was for me that of the entire sky, I was stirred by the joyful thrill of feeling myself suddenly alone once more. I had a fantastic plan for this night, and this plan I called my “Parsifal.” I took a taxi that brought me to the Students’ Residence, and had it wait. It would take me just an hour. My “Parsifal” required that I make myself very handsome. I took a long shower, gave myself a very close shave, glued down my hair as much as possible, putting paint-varnish on it again! I knew the serious inconveniences of this, and even that it would spoil my hair a little, but my Parsifal was worth this sacrifice, and more! I applied powdered lead around my eyes; this made me look particularly devastating in the “Argentine tango” manner. Rudolph Valentino seemed to me at that time to be the prototype of masculine beauty. I put on very pale cream-colored trousers, and an oxford-gray coat. As for the shirt, I had an idea that appeared to me to put the definitive touch of elegance to my outfit. The shirt was of écru silk, a silk fine as onion-skin and so transparent that on looking attentively one could see through it the rather well-defined black imperial eagle of the hair in the middle of my chest. But the outline was too clear. So I took off the shirt, which had been freshly ironed, and squeezed it between my two hands, folding and pressing it into a bunch between my closed fists. I put this bundle of wrinkled silk under my trunk and got on top of it so as to crush it even more. The crumpled effect that resulted was ravishing, especially when I put it on and fastened a stiff smooth collar of immaculate whiteness to it.

Having finished dressing I jumped into the taxi again, stopped to buy a gardenia which the florist pinned to my lapel, and then gave the driver the address of the Florida, a fashionable ball-room where I had never yet been, but which I knew was patronized by the most exclusive crowd in Madrid. I intended to have supper there all alone, and to choose with scrupulous care the necessary feminine material among the most beautiful, the most luxuriously dressed women, in order to carry out, come what may, that mad, irresistible thing, that thing almost without sensation and yet oppressive with pent-up eroticism, that maddening thing which since the day before I had named my Parsifal!

I had no idea where the Florida was, and each time the taxi slowed down, I thought I had arrived, and my anxiety grew so anguishing that it made me shut my eyes. I sang Parsifal at the top of my lungs. Good heavens, what a night it was going to be! I knew it. It was going to age me by ten years.

The effect of the three Martinis had totally vanished, and my brain was turning toward grave and severe thoughts. My wickedness was losing
its edge with the alcohol, which I was already theoretically “against.” Alcohol confuses everything, gives free rein to the most pitiful subjectivism and sentimentalism. And afterwards one remembers nothing—and if one does, it is worse! Everything that one thinks while in a state of intoxication appears to one to have the touch of genius: and afterwards one is ashamed of it. Drunkenness equalizes, makes uniform, and depersonalizes. Only beings composed of nothingness and mediocrity are capable of elevating themselves a little with alcohol. The man of evil and of genius bears the alcohol of his old age already absorbed in his own brain.

I hesitated. Was I going to excute my Parsifal with or without alcohol? The pre-nocturnal sky of Madrid knows clouds of a fantastic and poisoned mineral blue that can be found only in the paintings of Patinir, and to the warmed-over rabbit that I had eaten at the farm was now added the venom of that delicately blue-tinged color of depilated armpits toward which I was going to direct my activity that evening, with very definite ideas on the subject in the back of my head. I took advantage of the little clearings which intoxication left for brief moments in my mind to organize the details that would enable me to execute this sublime and absolutely original erotic fantasy which made my heart beat like hammer blows every time I thought about it.

To realize satisfactorily what I wanted to do (and what nothing would prevent me from doing), to realize my Parsifal, I needed five very elegant women and a sixth who would help us with everything. None of them needed to get undressed, and neither did I. It would even be desirable to have these women keep their hats on. The important thing was for all but two of them to have depilated armpits. I had brought a considerable amount of money even though I believed my powers of seduction already to be considerable.

I arrived at the Florida—arrived there much too early. I settled myself before a table, and looked around. I was well placed to see everything, and had my back to a wall, which was indispensable.
⁸
I came back immediately to the same question: did I have to get drunk or not to carry out my adventure? For all the practical preliminaries—establishing contact with the women, putting them at ease with one another, finding “where” the thing was to take place (perhaps inviting a couple of them into, a private room and having them take charge of everything, as well-remunerated accomplices?)—for all these preliminary steps alcohol would obviously be a precious means of overcoming the timidity of the first moments. But afterwards—afterwards it would be exactly the contrary. What I would need afterwards was a sharp eye to see everything at once. Afterwards, from the moment my Parsifal began, no lucidity would be
too great, no inquisitor’s glance sufficiently severe and perfidious to judge condemn and decide between the hell and the glory of the scenes and situations, verging on disgust and yet so desired, so beautiful, so frightfully humiliating for the seven protagonists of the Parsifal that I was going to direct (and how!) before the cocks of dawn, with the agonized and rusty notes of their first crowing, were capable of raising the festooned, red and abominable cockscomb of remorse in our seven imaginations exhausted from the acutest pleasures.

The head waiter was standing in front of me, waiting for me to end my day-dreaming.

“What will the Señor have?”

Without a moment’s hesitation I answered, “Bring me a rabbit with onions—warmed-over!”

But instead of warmed-over rabbit I simply ate a quarter of a chicken, infinitely sad and insipid, accompanied by a bottle of champagne, which was followed by a second one. While I was eating the chicken wing people began to arrive. Until then the large
boite de nuit
had been empty except for myself, the waiters, the orchestra and a couple of professional dancers who as they danced were putting on an act of quarreling. With a quick glance I eliminated the possibility of using this dancing girl, recognizing that she did not offer the slightest interest for me. She was out of the question for the “Parsifal”: she was too beautiful, terribly and disagreeably healthy, and totally devoid of “elegance.”

I have never in my life met a very beautiful woman who was at the same time very elegant, these two things excluding each other by definition. In the elegant woman there is always a studied compromise between her ugliness, which must be moderate, and her beauty which must be “evident,” but simply evident and without going beyond this exact measure. The elegant woman can and must get along without that beauty of face whose continuous flashing is like a persistent trumpet-call. On the other hand, if the elegant woman’s face must possess its exact quota of the stigmas of ugliness, fatigue and disequilibrium (which with the arrogance of her “elegance” will acquire the intriguing and imposing category of carnal cynicism), the elegant woman will necessarily and inevitably have to have hands, arms, feet and under-arms of an exaggerated beauty and as exhibitionistic as possible.