The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (49 page)

“I want you to croak me!”

No interpretation in the world could modify the meaning of this answer, which meant exactly what she said.

“Are you going to do it?” she asked.

I was so astonished and disappointed at having “my own secret” offered me as a present instead of the ardent erotic proposal I had expected that I was slow in answering her, lost in a whirl of undefinable perplexity.

“Are you going to do it?” I heard her repeat again.

Already the tone of her voice betrayed the disdain of doubt. I pulled myself together again, goaded by pride. I was suddenly afraid of destroying the faith Gala had had until then in my potentialities of moral courage and madness. Again I seized her in my arms, and in the most solemn manner of which I was capable I answered,

“YES!”

And I kissed her again, hard, on the mouth, while I repeated deep within myself, “No! I shall not kill her!”

And my second kiss to Gala, while it was a Judas kiss by virtue of the hypocrisy of my tenderness, simultaneously consummated the act of saving her life and resuscitated my own soul.

Gala had begun to explain to me minutely the reasons for her wish, and it suddenly occurred to me that she, too, had an inner world of desires and frustrations, and moved with a rhythm of her own between the poles of lucidity and madness. As she spoke I began by degrees to take “her case” into consideration. I kept saying to myself that it was by no means a foregone conclusion that I would not end up by doing what she asked me–by killing her! Certainly no scruple of a moral nature could prevent me from committing such an act. With our perfect agreement on this question as a starting point, the incident of her death could easily have been turned into a suicide. All that would be needed would be that I should have a letter from Gala confirming this hypothesis.

Gala now described her insurmountable horror of the “hour of her death,” which had tortured her since childhood. She wanted it to happen without her knowing it, “cleanly,” and without experiencing the fear of the last moments.

One of the lightning-ideas that flashed into my mind was to throw Gala from the top of the bell-tower of the Cathedral of Toledo, a place where I had already had similar temptations once when I had climbed up there in the company of a very beautiful girl I had known during my stay in Madrid. But this idea did not suit Gala’s ideas, for during the fall she would have had a moment of fearful terror. For a host of other reasons the Toledo bell-tower idea immediately struck me as completely out of the question–how, indeed, was I to justify my presence in the tower at the same time? The simple procedure of poison, however, did not interest me, and I always came back to my “vicious precipices.” In this connection I launched upon a revery unfolding in Africa, a place that seemed propitious to me for a moment because of the atmosphere. But I immediately gave up this idea too. It was too hot! And besides it did not appeal to me.

I therefore gave up looking for ideas, since they all died before they were even born, and concentrated my whole attention on what Gala was saying with such inspired eloquence in her delivery and her gestures that I could not make up my mind whether to look at her or listen to her. Gala’s fantasy of seeking death at an unplanned and happy moment of her life was not simply a childish and romantic urge, as it might seem to someone who unlike myself did not immediately realize the vital importance of such a representation, as I did by the very “tone” of conscious exaltation in which she made her request. Gala’s idea constituted indeed the very basis of her psychic life, and in the lovely expression of her face at the moment she made her avowal I saw all the fibres of her flayed sensibility converge into a pyramid–saw them converge toward the point of a single inacceptable representation: the hour of death with the procession of signs of old age which precede and prepare its approach.

Only Gala’s secret life, however, could unveil the real reasons for her resolve. But although she has authorized me to write of this, I refuse to do so. In this book I want to dissect one and only one person—myself!—and
this living dissection of myself I am performing, not through sadism, or through masochism. I do so through narcissism. I do so as a matter of taste–my own taste–and jesuitically. Besides, a total dissection has no eroticizable meaning; it becomes as secret and dressed as before the skin and flesh were removed. The same is true for the total skeleton. My method is to conceal and to reveal, delicately to suggest the possibilites of certain visceral lesions, while at the same time strumming elsewhere the exposed tendons of the human guitar in parts completely torn away, all without ever forgetting that it is more desirable to strike the physiological resonances of the preludes than the ultimate and melancholy ones of accomplished fact.

Therefore let the Dalinian dissection be effected esthetically and artfully, and let the bones gleam with sobriety, just where they can produce the most harrowing effect. “The bone you could see on him! The bone you could see on him! The bone you could see on the tip of his big toe!”
¹⁸

I had just heard Gala dissect herself alive before me. Yet she was but all the more precise and reblooming with multiple new muscles, which seemed to incarnate the lofty, proud and anatomic figure of her spirit. Surely she is right, I repeated to myself again, and it is not yet decided that I shall not do it...

September “septembered” wine and moons of May; the moons of September vinegared the May of my old age, old age harvested the grapes of passion...In the young rock of my heart adolescent bitterness, seated in the shadow of the tower of Cadaques, engraved these words: Take advantage of her and kill her! ... I thought: she will teach me love, and after that, as I have always wished, I shall come back alone. She wants it, she wants it, and she has asked it of me!

But something limped in my enthusiasm, and the conviction of my resounding resolve to murder, instead of resounding within the armors of my Machiavellism with the sonorous prestige of fine bronze, rang only with the defective noise of tin! What is wrong with you, Dali? Can’t you see that now, when your crime is being offered to you as a present, you don’t want it any longer! Yes! Gala, the wily beauty, Gradiva of my life, with the sabre-stroke of her avowal had just cut off the head of that wax manikin which I had watched since childhood on the bedecked bed of my solitude, that wax manikin of her double, the chimerical Galuchka of my false memories, whose dead nose had just jumped into the delirious sugar of my first kiss!

Gala thus weaned me from my crime, and cured my madness. Thank you! I want to love you! I was to marry her.
¹⁹

My hysterical symptoms disappeared one by one, as by enchantment. I became master again of my laughter, of my smile, and of my gestures. A new health, fresh as a rose, began to grow in the centre of my spirit.

On the day when I returned from the station of Figueras after seeing Gala off to Paris, I rubbed my hands, exclaiming, “Alone at last!” For if the vertiginous twists and turns of the murderous impulses of my childhood had in fact disappeared from my imagination forever, my desires and my need for solitude would be long and stubborn to heal. “Gala, you are reality,” I would often say, opposing the tangible experience of her flesh to the virtual and idealized images of my chimerical pseudo-loves. And I would bury my nose in a knitted wool bathing suit of hers which kept something of her odor. I wanted to know that she was alive and real, but also I had to remain alone from time to time.

My new solitude appeared to me truer than the old, and I loved it all the more. I shut myself up for a month in my studio in Figueras, and I immediately returned to my familiar monastic life. I finished painting Paul Eluard’s portrait, begun in the course of the summer, and two large canvases, one of which was to become famous.

It represented a large head, livid as wax, the cheeks very pink, the eyelashes long, and the impressive nose pressed against the earth. This face
had no mouth, and in its place was stuck an enormous grasshopper. The grasshopper’s belly was decomposed, and full of ants. Several of these ants scurried across the space that should have been filled by the nonexistent mouth of the great anguishing face, whose head terminated in architecture and ornamentations of the style of 1900. The painting was called
The Great Masturbator
.

My works once finished, they were packed with the “maniacal care” which I had succeeded in communicating to a cabinet-maker of Figueras, whom I must count among the endless list of my anonymous martyrs. The works were shipped to Paris for the exposition which was to take place from November 20th to December 5th at the Goemans Gallery.

I went to Paris. The first thing I did upon arriving was to go and buy flowers for Gala. I naturally went to one of the best florists, and asked for the best they had. They recommended red roses, which it seems were unusually fine. I pointed to a large mass of these and asked the price. “Three francs.” I ordered ten such bouquets. The salesman seemed panicstricken by my purchase, and showed no intention of carrying out my order. He was not even sure he would be able to furnish me such a quantity. I wrote a word or two on a card addressed to Gala, and as I went to pay the bill I read the figure of 3000 francs. I did not have this amount on hand and I asked to have the mystery of the price explained to me. It was simply that the bunch that I had pointed to contained one hundred roses, and that they were three francs each. I had thought it was three francs for the whole bunch! Then I told him to give me 250 francs’ worth, which was all I had on me.

I spent the whole morning roaming through the streets, and at noon 1 had two Pernods. In the afternoon I went to visit the Goemans Gallery where I met Paul Eluard. He told me that Gala was very much surprised that I had not paid her a visit, nor even let her know when I would meet her. This astonished me greatly, for I had a vague intention of drifting along for several days in this state of waiting, which appeared to me filled with all manner of delights.

I finally went to call on her in the evening, and stayed for dinner. Gala showed her anger only for a moment, which stimulated everyone’s hunger, and we sat down to the table which was filled with an innumerable procession of bottles of all kinds, containing the most varied Russian alcoholic drinks. The alcohol I had drunk in Madrid rose in the tomb of my palate like the mummy of Lazarus. “Walk!” I commanded. And it walked. This was the only mummy capable of inspiring fear in everyone. Indeed, the inaugural and living alcohol of Madrid had been dead in my spirit for the whole last summer. But its resurrection made me eloquent again. Thereupon I said to this mummy, “Speak!” And it spoke. It was a discovery to discover that besides painting what I was painting I was not an utter cretin. I also knew how to talk, and Gala with her devoted and pressing fanaticism furthermore undertook to convince the surrealist group that besides talking I was capable of “writing,” and of
writing documents whose philosophic scope went beyond all the group’s previsions.