The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (48 page)

Sweet in life
,

Sweet in death
,

If I had known you

I should not have given you death ..
.

A wholly spontaneous way (since involuntarily the word “life” occurs in the first line, in spite of being but a consequence of and a deduction from the second line) of expressing the regret at “having killed her,” which confirms the prevision of the cure of the king’s psychic disturbances.

Thus was realized once more that myth, the leit-motif of my thinking, of my esthetic, and of my life: death and resurrection! The wax manikin with the sugar nose, then, is only an “object-being” of delirium, invented by the passion of one of those women who, like the heroine
of the tale, like Gradiva, or like Gala, are able, by virtue of the skilful simulacrum of their love, to illuminate moral darknesses with the sharp lucidity of “living madmen.” For me the great problem of madness and of lucidity was that of the limits between the Galuchka of my false memories, who had become chimerical and dead a hundred times through my subconscious pulsions and my desire for utter solitude, and the real Gala whose corporeality it was impossible for me to resolve in the pathological aberration of my spirit. And it is these very limits, which were peculiar to me, which are defined with a materialized symbolism in the form of a veritable “surrealist object”
¹⁵
in the tale I have just told–where the wax manikin ends, where the sugar nose begins, where Gradiva ends, and where Zoe Bertrand begins in Jensen’s
Delirium and Dream
.
¹⁶
That is the question! we might repeat, parodying Hamlet.

Now that my readers know the tale, and also its interpretation, I think the moment has come for us to continue on our way, and, as we go back down the opposite slope from that by which we came, for me to try now to establish for you a parallel between my own case and that of the king, so that the continuation of the story of Gala and myself may appear to you comprehensible in every way.

I too, as you all know, was a king. Not only had I lived my whole childhood disguised in a king’s costume (and adolescence and the rest of my life had only accentuated and developed my spirit in ever the same direction–that of absolute autocracy), but also I had decided that the image of my love must continually “feign to sleep,” for I have already explained throughout the preceding reminiscences that each time this image tried to “stir too much” on the adorned bed of my solitude, I cried “Dead!” to it. And the chimerical and invisible image of my love resumed its immobility on the authority of my order and continued to “play dead.” We have also seen that the few times when Galuchka’s image assumed a real form (in the person of the Dullita of my true memories, for instance) things ran the risk of turning out badly. Not only did I feel the constant breath of danger at my side, but I came to the verge of committing a crime! I too, like the king in the story, loved perversely to prolong beyond measure, beyond the frontier of the pathological, the anxious expectation in which reposed the whole tormented voluptuousness of that grandiose myth of “unfulfilled love.” I too ...

But this summer, I knew, the revived and hitherto obedient image
of the chimerical Galuchka of my false memories, now incarnated in Gala’s stubborn body, would no longer obey a simple commanding gesture of my hand, and come as before to “play dead” at my feet. I knew that I was approaching the “great trial” of my life, the trial of love; and my love, the love of a man half-mad, could not either be like that of others! The closer the hour of the “sacrifice” came, the less I dared think about it. Time after time, having just left Gala at the entrance to the Hotel Miramar, I would utter a long, deep sigh, and exclaim, “It’s awful!” What is awful? I would ask myself, not understanding my sudden state of mind. Your whole life has been spent longing only for what is about to happen, and what is more, “It is she!” But now that the moment approaches you feel yourself dying of fear, Dali! As my laughing fits and my hysterical state became more acute, my spirit acquired that suppleness and agility peculiar to defense mechanisms. Indeed, with my flights and my
capeas
¹⁷
worthy of a
torrero
, I was “fighting” this central problem of my life, this bull of my desire who, I knew, would at a given moment be there immobile and menacing a few centimetres from my own immobility, confronting me with the sole and only choice: either to kill him or be killed by him.

Gala was beginning to make repeated allusions to “something” which would have to happen “inevitably” between us, something “very important,” decisive in our “relationship.” But could she depend on me in my present overwrought state which, far from growing more normal, on the contrary bedecked itself with all the showiest tinsel of madness, and gathered behind itself the more and more spectacular procession of “symptoms?” Besides, my psychic state seemed to become contagious and to threaten Gala’s initial equilibrium.

We would walk for long periods among the olive trees and the vines, without saying anything to each other, in a painful, tense state of mutual restraint in which all our twisted, repressed and tightly knotted feelings seemed to want to be subdued by the physical violence of our long walks. But one does not tire the spirit at will! No weariness or truce, no exhaustion either for the body or for the soul while the instincts remain cruelly unsatisfied. What a sight we must have been during those walks, the two of us, both mad! Sometimes I would throw myself to the ground and passionately kiss Gala’s shoes. What must have transpired in my soul a moment before to unleash the remorse implied by such lively effusions? One evening Gala vomited twice in the course of our walk and was seized with painful convulsions. These vomitings were neurogenic and, she explained to me, had been familiar symptoms of a long psychic illness that had absorbed a great part of her adolescence. Gala had vomited just a few drops of bile, clean as her soul, and the color of honey.

At this period I began to paint
The Accommodation of Desires
, a
painting in which desires were always represented by the terrorizing images of lions’ heads.

“Soon you will know what I want of you,” Gala would say to me.

This could not be very different from my lions’ heads, I thought, trying to accustom myself in advance to the impending revelation by the most frightening representations.

I never pressed Gala to tell me the things she had on her mind before she was ready. On the contrary I would wait for these as for an inevitable sentence before which, once pronounced, we could no longer draw back. Never in my life had I yet “made love,” and I represented this act to myself as terribly violent and disproportionate to my physical vigor–“this was not for me.” I took advantage of all occasions to repeat to Gala, in an obsessive tone which visibly irritated her, “Above all, remember we promised each other that we would never hurt each other!”

At this point in our idyll we had reached the month of September. All my friends of the little surrealist group had left for Paris, and Eluard too. Thus Gala alone remained in Cadaques. At each new encounter we seemed to say to each other, “We must have it over with!” One could already hear the intermittent shots of the hunters resound amid the solitary echoes of the hills, and the August skies, smooth and serene to the point of exasperation, were followed now by those twilights charged with the ripening clouds of autumn which began already to become feverish with the approaching juicy grape-harvest of our passion. Seated on a dry-rock wall Gala ate black grapes. It was as if she were growing brighter and more beautiful with each new grape. And with each new silence-rounded afternoon of our idyll I felt Gala sweeten in unison with the grapes on the vines. Even Gala’s body seemed to the touch to be made
of the “flesh-heaven” of a golden muscat. Tomorrow? we both thought. And as I brought her two new clusters of grapes I gave her the choice–white or black?

She was dressed in white on the day we had finally set. It was a very light dress that trembled so shudderingly as we climbed up the slope that she “made me cold.” The wind became too violent as we went up, and I used this as a pretext for turning our walk away from the heights.

We climbed down again and went and sat down facing the sea on a slate bench cut into the rocks, which sheltered us from the slightest gust of wind. It was one of the most truculently deserted and mineral spots of Cadaques, and the month of September held over us the “dying silver” garlic-clove of the incipient crescent moon, haloed by the primitive taste of tears that painfully knotted Gala’s throat and mine. But we did not want to weep, we wanted to have it over with.

Gala’s face wore a resolute expression.

“What do you want me to do to you?” I said to her, putting my arms around her.

She was speechless with emotion. She made several attempts to speak, and finally she shook her head abruptly, while tears flowed down her cheeks. I kept insisting. Then, with a decisive effort, she unsealed her lips at last to tell me, in a plaintive little child’s voice,

“If you won’t do it, you promise not to tell anyone?”

I kissed her on the mouth, inside her mouth. It was the first time I did this. I had not suspected until then that one could kiss in this way. With a single leap all the Parsifals of my long bridled and tyrannized erotic desires rose, awakened by the shocks of the flesh. And this first kiss, mixed with tears and saliva, punctuated by the audible contact of our teeth and furiously working tongues, touched only the fringe of the libidinous famine that made us want to bite and eat everything to the last! Meanwhile I was eating that mouth, whose blood already mingled with mine. I depersonalized and annihilated myself in this bottomless kiss which had just opened beneath my spirit like the dizzy gulf into which I had always wanted to hurl all my crimes and in which I felt myself now ready to sink.

I threw back Gala’s head, pulling it by the hair, and, trembling with complete hysteria, I commanded,

“Now tell me what you want me to do to you! But tell me slowly, looking me in the eye, with the crudest, the most ferociously obscene words that can make both of us feel the greatest shame!”

Breathless, ready to drink in all the details of this revelation, I opened my eyes wide the better to hear, the better to feel myself dying with desire. Then, with the most beautiful expression that a human being is capable of, Gala prepared to tell me, giving me to understand that nothing would be spared me. My erotic passion had by now reached the limits of dementia and, knowing that I still had just enough time, I repeated to her in a more tyrannical, deliberate way,

“What do you want me to do to you?”

Then Gala, transforming the last glimmer of her expression of pleasure into the hard light of her own tyranny, answered,