The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (43 page)

The shooting of the scene of the rotten donkeys and the pianos was a rather fine sight, I must say. I “made up” the putrefaction of the donkeys with great pots of sticky glue which I poured over them. Also I emptied their eye-sockets and made them larger by hacking them out with scissors. In the same way I furiously cut their mouths open to make the white rows of their teeth show to better advantage, and I added several jaws to each mouth so that it would appear that although the donkeys were already rotting they were still vomiting up a little more of their own death, above those other rows of teeth formed by the keys of the black pianos. The whole effect was as lugubrious as fifty coffins piled into a single room.

The
Chien Andalou
distracted me from my society career to which Juan Miro would have liked to initiate me.

“I prefer to begin with rotten donkeys,” I told him. “This is the most urgent; the other things will come by themselves.”

I was not mistaken.

Meanwhile I met Robert Desnos one evening at the Coupole, and afterwards he invited me up to his place. I always carried a painting under my arm as a sample. He wanted to buy the one I had, but he had no money. He certainly understood the originality of my painting, which was called
The First Day of Spring
, and in which libidinous pleasure was described in symbols of a surprising objectivity. He said, “It’s like nothing that is being done in Paris.” After which he began to talk endlessly about Robespierre with a nightmarish and automatic nervousness, a tense, inexhaustible lyricism. It gave me an irresistible desire to go away and sleep.

It is a curious thing that each time I heard people talk too long about the French Revolution I fell ill the following day. I did in fact fall ill the following day with a violent inflammation of my tonsils, which was followed by angina. I spent this period of illness alone in my hotel room, utterly dejected, accustomed as I was to being always cared for with the most exaggerated ritual. I began to find the hotel where I was abominable, and its cleanliness more than dubious.

The day before I was going to get up from my bed for the first time I discovered two or three insects on the ceiling. Were they small cockroaches
or lice? The ceiling was high, and I tossed cushions up to try to bring them down. But my efforts, in view of my state of extreme feebleness, made my head begin to spin, and I dropped back heavily on my bed, where I fell asleep, all the while knowing that those little insects were there above me sticking to the ceiling. When I awoke, the first thing I did was to look up at that ceiling. There was only one insect. The other one had probably dropped on me during the night. The thought of this gave me a sickening feeling, and I began to look all over myself and shake all the sheets. Suddenly I made a discovery that congealed me with horror. In passing my hands all over my naked body on a tour of inspection I had just felt something caught on my back, just at a point that the tips of my fingers could barely reach. I tried to pull it loose, but it resisted, as though clinging to my body all the harder.

Then I made one leap from my bed over to the wardrobe mirror and looked. There could be no further doubt. The insect, the cockroach, was there, stuck, clutching my flesh pitilessly, and I could see its rounded, smooth back, swollen with my very own blood. This insect must belong to the foul family of ticks which, when they attach themselves to the ear of a dog, cannot be pulled out without drawing blood. I shut my eyes, I gritted my teeth, prepared to endure anything if only I could get rid of that minute nightmare which was paralyzing me. I took the tick between my thumb and forefinger and squeezed the point where it joined my skin with the cutting pincer of my fingernails. I squeezed furiously without paying any attention to the pain, and pulled. The tick was so solidly attached to me that I did not succeed in loosening it even a little. It was as if it was formed of my own flesh, as if it constituted an inherent and already inseparable part of my own body; as if, suddenly, instead of an insect it had become a terrifying germ of a tiny embryo of a Siamese twin-brother that was in the process of growing out of my back, like the most apocalyptic and infernal disease.

I made a drastic decision, and with a savagery proportionate to my frantic condition and my horror I seized a razor blade, held the tick tightly imprisoned between my nails and began to cut the interstice between the tick and the skin, which offered an unbelievable resistance. But in a frenzy I cut and cut and cut, blinded by the blood which was already streaming. The tick finally yielded, and half-fainting, I fell to the floor in my own blood. The pool of blood grew terrifyingly. I had just provoked a violent hemorrhage, which seemed to be merely beginning. I dragged myself across on the floor as far as to the bell to call the chambermaid. When I turned round I saw that I had left behind me a solid trail of blood. I was alarmed to see the large pool that had formed by the wardrobe.

I climbed back into bed and tried to make a bandage with the sheets, but the blood immediately oozed through it, like the impetuous waters of a growing flood that nothing can stem. Then I lunged toward the washstand, but by this time I felt so feeble that I had to brace myself
against the wall. Thus, terribly unsteady and faint, I stumbled in the direction of the washstand, which immediately became red with my blood. It was as if the water that I poured on my wound only intensified the bleeding. I decided to ring once more, but the moment I turned round the sight of the room made me shudder. The bed was completely bespattered with blood, and the wall covered with smears from the clawing of my hands. On the floor the blood had spread under the wardrobe. I seized the bell and did not stop ringing till the chamber-maid arrived.

She opened the door, and on seeing the room covered with blood she let out a scream and shut the door again. After a few minutes I heard a hurried shuffling of many feet out in the hallway. A queer assortment of people, with the hotel manager in the lead, broke into my room and all looked at me breathlessly, expecting at the very least to learn that I had been the victim of a murderous assault.

“It’s nothing,” was all I said to them. “It’s a... It’s a...” I could not think of the word for “tick” in French.

The manager gave me a prompting glance, as if to reassure me, conveying that he was a fellow-human, that they were prepared to hear the worst.

“It’s a bedbug that has just bitten me.”

The doctor arrived. But everything had become clear to me before he came. It was neither a bedbug nor a tick nor a cockroach nor a Siamese-twin that had been stuck to my skin—all this had existed only in my imagination. It was simply a small birthmark that I had seen a hundred times before. The doctor told me that it was very dangerous to perform such an operation, and that it was revolting madness for me to have done it on myself. I explained that I had thought it was a bedbug that had fastened itself on me which I could not wait to get rid of. He did not believe a word of this.

“I can understand,” he said, wiping his glasses, “someone wanting to get rid of such a blemish when it happens to be in an awkward place on the face—and even so it’s absurd to touch it. But on the back!” And he puffed with indignation.

This orgy of blood, my confinement to this room which evoked the painful memories of my recent illness, and an extreme feebleness made everything begin to look black to me.
Le Chien Andalou
, which had not yet been performed publicly, now seemed to me to be a complete failure, and if I had owned it and had had it in my possession at this moment I would have suppressed it without a moment’s hesitation. It seemed to me that it needed at least half a dozen more rotten donkeys, that the roles of the actors were lamentable, and that the scenario itself was full of poetic weaknesses.

Aside from the making of this film, what had I done? The few times I had gone out into society had remained isolated episodes, completely useless. My timidity had prevented me from “shining” in these circles, so that each occasion had left me with a disagreeable feeling of dissatisfaction.
Camille Goemans, the art dealer, had promised me a contract, to be sure, but this contract kept being put off from day to day, and was evaporating into very vague promises conditioned upon the work I would do the following summer at Cadaques.

I had not succeeded in finding an elegant woman to take an interest in my erotic fantasies—even any kind of woman, elegant or not elegant! I had walked the streets like a dog, “seeking,” dead with desire, but I had never been able to find anything, and if for a second the miracle occurred, my timidity prevented me from approaching the woman I should have liked to know. How many afternoons I spent running about, going up and down the boulevards, sitting at the terraces of cafés to give the glad eye to the right woman if I saw her! It seemed to me so natural that all women should rush out into the street every afternoon with their brain tormented by the same idea, by the same erotic fantasies as mine. But no! Sometimes, just to try myself out, when I was in the depths of discouragement, I would undertake the persecution of an ugly woman. I would flash on her my most passionate glances, not averting my eyes from her for a second, I would follow her in the street, get into the same streetcar and sit down opposite or beside her, and try with the utmost gentleness and prudent politeness to press her knee. She would always get up with a dignified air and change places. I would get off the streetcar and watch the throng of women (for I saw only them) flow past me along the hostile boulevard, shimmering and inaccessible, utterly ignoring me.

“Well,” I asked myself, my throat parched with unsatisfied desire, “where is that bag you were going to put ‘all Paris’ into? You miserable creature! You see, not even the ugly ones will have anything to do with you!”

And coming back to my immeasurably prosaic hotel room, my legs aching with fatigue from my fruitless comings and goings, I felt the bitterness of frustration fill my heart. Mortification at not having been able to attain the inaccessible beings whom I had grazed with my glance filled my imagination. With my hand, before my wardrobe mirror, I accomplished the rhythmic and solitary sacrifice in which I was going to prolong as much as possible the incipient pleasure looked forward to and contained in all the feminine forms I had looked at longingly that afternoon, whose images, now commanded by the magic of my gesture, reappeared one after another by turn, coming by force to show me of themselves what I had desired in each one! At the end of a long, exhausting and mortal fifteen minutes, having reached the limit of my strength, I wrenched out the ultimate pleasure with all the animal force of my clenched hand, a pleasure mingled as always with the bitter and burning release of my tears—this in the heart of Paris, where I sensed all about me the gleaming foam of the thighs of feminine beds. Salvador Dali lay down alone in his bed on Rue Vivienne, without the foam of thighs and without even having the courage to think of women again. He would meditate a little on Catholicism before going to sleep...

I often went to the Luxembourg garden, sat down on a bench and wept.

One evening Goemans, my future dealer, took me to the Bal Tabarin. We had settled down at a table on the second floor when he pointed out a man who was just coming in with a lady dressed in black spangles.

“That’s Paul Eluard, the surrealist poet,” he said. “He is very important, and what’s more he buys paintings. His wife is in Switzerland, and the woman with him is a friend of his.”

We went down to join him, and we had several bottles of champagne together.

Eluard struck me as a legendary being. He drank calmly, and appeared completely absorbed in looking at the beautiful women. Before we took leave of each other, he promised to come to see me the next summer at Cadaques.

The following evening I took the train for Spain, and before I left I ate a vermicelli soup in the Gare d’Orsay which to me was like a dream in which all the angels of heaven sang. It was the first time since my illness that I was hungry again. Each of those slippery vermicelli seemed to whisper to me, “You don’t need to be sick any more, since you don’t have to ‘put Paris in the bag’.” And since then my personal experience has proved to me that it is invariably when one has to and wants to put something in the bag and does not succeed that one gets sick. People who actually dominate a situation never get sick, even if their organism becomes increasingly feeble, run down and susceptible.
⁷
The boundaries between the physical and the moral are again tending to disappear, and the adage according to which the body’s life is the reflecton of the soul’s seems to reassume all its realistic and Catholic prestige.

I thus hung my illness on the coathanger of the Gare d’Orsay, as though it had been an old coat which could no longer be of the slightest use for the summer on which I was embarking. If, another winter, I should again need an illness to shelter me from the inclemencies of my bad luck I prefer to buy a brand-new coat. Goodbye! And I retired to my berth on the train which was going directly to Spain, and which would deposit me in Figueras.

The next morning I awoke to the view of the sunswept landscape of the Ampurdán plain. We were just passing the Muli de la Torre, and the train was already whistling to announce that we were approaching the station of Figueras.

Just as the purest skies appear after a storm, so in my case after that illness in Paris I experienced the most “transparent” health that I had
ever “seen,” for I actually felt a kind of transparency, as though I could see and hear all the delightful little viscous mechanisms of my reflowering physiology. I had the illusion of having an exact consciousness of the circulation of my hard blood through the tender and ramified tubes which I felt covering the euphoric curve of each of my shoulders, like epaulettes of living and subcutaneous coral imbedded in my flesh.

All at once I cast a quick glance at the tips of my finger-nails, with the sudden terror of seeing a white cat-hair growing out of them. I had a vague presentiment, which grew and became increasingly precise, that all these signs were the visceral portents of love—I was going to know love this summer! And my hands explored upon the body of the terribly precise noon of Cadaques the absence of a feminine face which from afar was already coming toward me. This could be none other than
Galuchka, resuscitated by growth, and with a new woman’s body—advancing, for I saw her always walking, always advancing.