The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (39 page)

The breasts are of absolutely no importance in an elegant woman. They do not count. If they are good, so much the better; if they are bad, so much the worse! In the rest of her body I exact only one thing for her to be able to attain this category of elegance which we are considering—this single thing is a special conformation of the hip bones, which absolutely must be very prominent—pointed, so to speak—so that one knows they are there, under no matter what dress: present and aggressive. You think that the line of the shoulders is of prime importance? This is not true. I grant all freedom to this line, and no matter how much or in what way it might disconcert me, I should be grateful to it.

The expression of the eyes, yes—very, very important; it must be very, very intelligent, or look as if it were. An elegant woman with a stupid expression is inconceivable; on the other hand, nothing is more appropriate to a perfect beauty than a stupid expression. The
Venus of Milo
is the most obvious example of this.

The mouth of the elegant woman should by preference be “disagreeable” and antipathetic. But suddenly and as if by miracle, either at the approach of ecstacy or as it half-opens in response to a choice and infrequent impulse of her soul, it must be capable of acquiring an angelic expression which makes her momentarily unrecognizable to you.

The elegant woman’s nose ... Elegant women have no noses! It is beautiful women who have noses. The hair of the elegant woman must be healthy; it is the only thing about the elegant woman that must be healthy. The elegant woman, morever, must be totally tyrannized by her elegance, and her dresses and her jewels, while they are her chief
raison d’être
, must also constitute the chief reason for her exhaustion and her wasting away.

This is why the elegant woman is hard in her sentimental passions and only faintly aroused in her loves, this is precisely why bold, avid, refined and unsentimental eroticism is the only kind of eroticism to cling with luxury to her luxury, just as the luxury of her dresses and her jewels clings exhaustingly to the luxurious body which is made only to mistreat them and to wear them with the supreme luxury of disdain.

And this is what I was getting at—blasé, rich and luxurious disdain; for in order to carry through my “Parsifal” I had to find, this very evening, exactly six disdainful elegant women, who could obey me to the letter without losing their glacial manners and without letting the mists or erotic emotion come and befog the continual luxury of their faces, six faces capable of experiencing pleasure ferociously, but with disdain.

With my eyes open, my pupils dilated, I looked around me impatiently without being able to attach my attention to anything decisive, for there was not a single really elegant woman present, and far too many beautiful ones. I was becoming impatient. But understanding that I could not count too much on people’s continuing to arrive in any considerable number, since the
boîte
was already crowded, I began to make concessions and to establish comparisons in order to make a choice among possibilities. For this first time I could always content myself with an “approximate” Parsifal. But I knew at the same time that there is nothing worse than the “approximately elegant.” Does it even exist? It is as if someone tells you, to encourage you to take medicine, that it’s “almost” a sweet! Suddenly two elegant women came in together, and by good fortune they sat down all by themselves at a table not far from mine that had just been left vacant. They were just what I wanted. I was still lacking four! But not finding them, I returned to the observation of my two protagonists. The only thing I could not judge was their feet, which could not but be divine, unless there were an absence of conformity about their anatomies which struck me as inconceivable. Their hands rivalled one another in beauty and all four of them were interlaced in a tangled knot which their owners had formed with a cynical coldness that made me shudder.

My second bottle of champagne had just made me moderately drunk, and my thoughts skipped beyond the grooves that I had laid out with my plan and into which I vainly tried to force them back and make them stay. Revolted by my own mental dispersion which was beginning to vex my sense of order and continuity, I said to myself,

“Look here! Either you are Dali or you are not Dali. Come! Be serious. You risk spoiling your ‘Parsifal.’ Look over there. Is that an elegant wrist? Yes, but it would be necessary to combine it with a different mouth. There it is! A mouth you would like to match it to. Wrist, mouth, mouth, wrist...if one could put beings together in this way—as a matter of fact, one
could
put them together... Why don’t you try! Choose carefully before you begin. Pull yourself together. Let’s see how you’ll like it. You’ve already found three elegant armpits. Look at them well, at all three successively, and after that, without looking at anything else, you run with your glance and you pounce on that cold expression; then on the mouth, on the more contemptuous of the two I have already chosen...

“Let’s proceed in order: have an armpit, another armpit, now quickly the mouth—but you’ve forgotten the second armpit, so start over again and pay attention... You see it clearly, don’t you, the armpit?...Oh yes, how elegant and fine it is! Here, then, is the armpit, the armpit, the fine armpit. Now look at the expression—expression...mouth... Now go back again, more slowly—mouth, expression, armpit, armpit...once more, and dwell longer on the expression—armpit, expression, expression, expression, expression, expression, go back to the armpit, go back to the expression... A little longer on the armpit this time, and now faster...
Armpit, expression, expression, armpit, armpit, armpit, armpit, armpit, expression, mouth, expression, mouth, expression, expression, mouth, expression, mouth, expression, mouth, expression, mouth...”

My head was reeling and a desire to vomit which this time could no longer be confused with the delicate and uncertain sensation of “feeling oneself fall in love” made me get up with a disciplined sequence of movements. I politely asked a cigarette girl dressed as a Louis XIV page where the dressing room was. She made me a sign which I did not see, and I went into a room where there was a desk covered with letters and typewritten sheets of paper. I braced myself with the palms of both hands on this table and vomited copiously. After this I had a breathing spell, knowing that it was not over with, that my almost liturgical labor of “throwing up everything” had just begun. The cigarette girl dressed as a Louis XIV page who had followed me remained motionless in the doorway watching me. I turned to her and, putting fifty pesetas in her cigarette tray, said to her beseechingly, “Let me finish!” And locking the door behind me I turned toward the table with the solemn and resolute step of one who is about to commit hara-kiri, and again placing my two palms on its surface in an attitude identical to that of a while ago, I vomited again with an increased intensity. I was half conscious, and all the tastes of my soul, mingled with all those of my entrails, were coming out of my mouth.

During the time that this lasted, I relived the experience of these two days of orgy, only backwards and all scrambled together, as though I had begun these two days over again but in reverse, experiencing in a practical way the Christian maxim, that “the last shall be first.” Everything was there: the warmed-over rabbit, the two delicate armpits, the wrists, the Patinir clouds, and again a piece of delicate armpit, and again a piece of chicken leg, and the cold expression, and again the warmed-over rabbit, expression, cold expression, warmed-over rabbit, delicate armpit,
warmed-over rabbit, mushrooms, olives, monarchy, anarchy, anchovy, spaghetti, chartreuse, spaghetti, warmed-over clams, warmed-over rabbit, chartreuse, warmed-over clams, chartreuse, warmed-over rabbit, clams, armpits, spaghetti, vermouth, warmed-over, vermouth, warmed-over warmed-over vermouth, vermouth, bile, warmed-over, vermouth, bile, warmed-over, vermouth, bile, bile, clams, bile, clams, warmed-over, bile, warmed-over, bile, warmed-over, bile, bile, bile, bile, bile, warmed-over rabbit, warmed-over rabbit, bile, bile, bile, bile, bile, bile, bile, warmed-over rabbit, vermouth, bile, bile, bile, spaghetti, bile, clams, bile! Warmed-over rabbit, bile! Bile, bile, clams, bile!

I wiped the sweat from my brow and the tears that I shed without weeping, and that flowed down my cheeks—everything had come up. Everything from the absolute anarchic monarchy to the last propellers of my nostalgic, sublime and lamented “Parsifal.”

I spent the next day in bed drinking lemon-juice, and the day after I went to the Academy of Fine Arts at the usual hour, only to be expelled from school the following afternoon. When I arrived I found a group of students gesticulating and shouting, and I was seized with a feeling of impending disaster. If I could have remembered the scene of the burning of the flag in Figueras I should have been suspicious of the turn matters took, for I was once more to be the victim of the myth that spread its halo around me. Indeed the attentive reader of this book, who seeks to draw analytical conclusions from it, will have noticed what I myself have often had forced upon my attention only in writing it—namely, that as the development of my mind and character can always be summarized in a few essential myths that are peculiar to me, so the events of my life repeat themselves and develop a few rather limited, but terribly characteristic and unmistakable themes. Whenever in my life something happens to me with a cherry, or with a crutch, you can be sure that it will not stop there. Incidents, ever new, more or less truculent, mediocre or sublime, will occur in connection with cherries and with crutches my whole life long until I die.

If I had known this I could have foreseen, the very first time I was expelled from school, that it would not be a simple and vulgar isolated incident as would have been the case for spirits who, lacking paranoiac inspiration, escape without grief or glory the systematic principles which must govern every destiny worthy of greatness. But to return to the insurgent group that I ran into in the yard of the Academy of Fine Arts—this very group, when it saw me coming, surrounded me and took me automatically as witness, partisan and flag of its rebellion.

What was the occasion of this rebellion? I had already been informed that there was to be an examination to fill the vacant post of teacher of painting at the Academy, and that several renowned painters were coming to compete in it, this being one of the most important classes. The paintings that constituted the practical part of the examination had just been exhibited, each participant having had to execute one painting on
a subject of his own choice and one on a prescribed theme. It appeared that all the paintings were utterly mediocre, with the exception of those of Daniel Vásquez Díaz, which corresponded exactly to what was at that time called “post-impressionism.” The seed which I had nonchalantly let drop among the students of the School was in germination and a minority of them—the most active and the most gifted—had suddenly become enthusiastic over Vásquez Díaz, who without having gone as far as cubism was influenced by it, so that through him people were able to swallow what they would not even consider when it came from me.

Thus, according to the insurgents, I must of necessity be a partisan of Vásquez Díaz, and my friends were aroused because they were sure that an injustice was about to be committed and influence and intrigue used to give the post to someone who in no way deserved it. I went with my fellow-students to look at the exhibition, and for once I agreed with them. Doubt was impossible, even though in my heart I should have wanted none of these as professor of painting. I should have preferred a real old academician. But this was a category of people that had disappeared, that had been totally exterminated. Since I had to choose, I gave my vote to Vásquez Díaz without any reservations.

That afternoon, after each of the competitors had briefly expounded his pedagogical ideas (the only intelligent one being Vásquez Díaz) the academicians retired to deliberate. When they reconvened on the platform, and when they pronounced the verdict that we had been expecting, thus consummating one of the thousand injustices and unedifying episodes of which the tapestry of this period of Spanish history was woven, I rose in sign of protest and without saying a word I left the hall before the President of the tribunal, one of the most eminent of the academicians, had finished his closing speech. I was awaited by my group in a gathering of republican writers that was held every afternoon at the Café-Bar Regina, and that was more or less under the influence of Manuel Azaña, who a few years later was to become the President of the Spanish Republic.