The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (55 page)

Dents de l’homme: 1. Incisive; 2. Canine; 3. Molaire.

Thus I imagined my skull next to Gala’s, and I saw it as a veritable cataclysm, for aside from the chaos of my teeth, my extremely underdeveloped chin would offer a violent contrast to the decisive development of my superciliary arches, which would be monstrously avid of sight once sight was absent. Moreover I could not imagine my own skull as white–it would always be ochre and putrefying, the color of earth saturated with manure. Gala’s–as I have already said–was white, and even sky-blue-tinged, like those smooth, translucid and semi-precious pebbles that Gala’s mother had gathered on the shores of the Black Sea and given her as a present, and which were kept in a cotton-lined box. I thought of the burial of Gala and myself together, holding each other’s hand . . .

Gala’s skull, overflowing with sleep, dropped into my lap. I put it back in place, on my shoulder that already ached from its weight. Opposite me other skulls, attached to anonymous travelers, swayed inertly with the jolts of the train. The flies walked about freely on all these faces. It was in a train wholly occupied by people “dead with sleep” that we reached Málaga.

An African heat already hovered at this season over the country of Andalusia with a phantasmal, royal and supreme majesty. Inscribed in letters of fire on the smooth, outstretched field of the sky without a single cloud, I read this heraldic device, “Here Heat Is King.” The taxi driver went up to a porter sleeping in a shaded corner and tried to wake him up by rolling his body over with his foot. He did this twice, pausing in between. After the second rolling the porter finally made a gesture with his hand which seemed to belong to a ritual of ancient Egypt and by which he gave to understand, “Certainly not today!”

Preparations were in full swing for the Festival of the Dead, with orgiastic processions of Easter flowers. A streetcar conductor stopped his tram before a bar. He was brought a glass of
anis del mono
. He gulped
it down and started off again, singing. In the streets one saw many Picassos
⁵
with a carnation stuck over one ear, watching the passing throngs with eyes of a criminal, intense and graceful intelligence. Great bullfights were scheduled, and in the evenings after the implacable sunset, instead of a “lovely” breeze a hot, often burning wind would sweep in, the wind of the African desert just across the strait.

We Spaniards loved it! And this was the hour that we chose to make love! The hour when the fields of carnations and sweat smelled strongest, while the African lion of Spanish civilization roared! In a tiny village a few kilometres from Málaga, Torremolinos, we rented a fisherman’s cottage which overlooked a field of carnations on the edge of a cliff falling abruptly into the sea. This was our honeymoon of fire! Our skins became dark as those of the fisher folk, who were brown as Arabs. The bed of our house was so hard that the mattresses seemed, instead of wool, to contain pieces of dry bread. It was uncomfortable to sleep on, but afterwards one’s body was completely covered with gentle bruises and aches which, when one gets used to them, become extremely agreeable, for then one perceives that one has a body, and that one is naked.

Gala, with a build like a boy’s, burned by the sun, would walk about the village with her breasts bare, and I had taken to wearing my necklace again. The fishermen of this region had no modesty of any kind, and would drop their pants a few metres from us to perform their physical functions. One could see that it was one of the most pleasurably anticipated moments of the day, and sometimes there was a whole string of them doing it together along the beach beneath a relentless sun. They would take their time about it, all the while tossing epic obscenities back and forth. At other times they would egg their children on with guttural cries as they fought with sling-shots in pitched battles. These stone-fights often ended with a few cracked skulls. The sight of their children’s blood would awaken a little the personal hostilities among the defecators and, quickly pulling up their trousers and carefully readjusting their genital parts, which were always of handsome and well-developed proportions, they would start arguing among themselves about their children’s battles and would in turn end the polemic with one or two knife jabs, accompanied and embellished by the unimportant tears which their wives, in perpetual mourning, would shed as they came running with hair dishevelled and arms raised to heaven, imploring Jesus and the Immaculate Virgin. There was not a shadow of sadness or of sordidness about all this. Their outbursts of anger were gay, biological, like a fish-bone drying in the sun. And their excrements were extremely clean and inlayed with a few undigested muscat grapes, as fresh as before they were swallowed.

At this period I developed a passion for olive oil. I would put it into everything. I would begin early in the morning by dipping my toast in oil with anchovies swimming in it. The considerable amount that remained in the dish I drank directly as though it were a precious liquid. Finally I poured the last drops on my head and my chest. I rubbed my hair and my body with it. My hair grew out again with renewed vigor, and so thickly that I broke all my combs. I continued to paint
The Invisible Man
begun at Carry-le-Rouet, and wrote the definitive version of
The Visible Woman
.

From time to time we received the visit of a small group of intellectual surrealist friends who all hated one another passionately and who were beginning to be gnawed by the canker of left and right ideologies. I saw at once that the day these cankers reached the stature of real serpents the civil war in Spain would be something ferocious and grandiose, a kind of monumental head of Medusa which instead of having a face in its head would have a face in its belly in which instead of intestines there would be serpents mutually strangulating one another in a continual iliac passion of death and of erection.

One day we received a batch of mail with several items of bad news. The Goemans Gallery, which owed us almost a month in arrears, had just gone into bankruptcy; Bunuel was going ahead all by himself with the production of
L’Age d’Or
–thus the film would be executed without
my collaboration; the carpenter of Cadaques, who claimed to have nearly completed our house at Port Lligat, was asking for the balance of his bill, augmented by a series of supplementary expenses which made it amount to more than twice what we had originally contemplated. At the same moment our rich Málaga friend went off without leaving his address, saying he would be back in twenty days! The money we had brought to Málaga was spent. We had enough to live on for another three or four days. Gala suggested that we send for the money in Barcelona. I did not want to touch this money, which for that matter was no longer enough to pay the carpenter’s bill. The house at Port Lligat was sacred! So we decided to send telegrams to Paris asking friends to advance us money on the paintings I would bring them. But none of these friends answered, and the three days went by.

In the evening we requisitioned all the small change that always lay scattered in the pockets of my suits, and succeeded in collecting two pesetas. That very evening we received the visit of a surrealist who was a Communist sympathizer. I begged him to send a telegram for me, which I drafted, to our hotel in Barcelona to have our money sent to us. We would reimburse him the cost of the telegram as soon as we received our money. He left promising to do this. But the whole next day passed without any answer, and the following day likewise. To cap our misfortune, we were without a maid, and the empty house was without a single crumb of food. I knew moreover that our condition of sudden distress was solely due to my stubbornness in not having wanted to follow Gala’s advice to send for the Barcelona money, which I had at first refused to touch out of superstition in regard to the Port Lligat house. This whole situation assumed in my brain the proportions of an incipient tragedy.

The intense African heat which had been beating on my body for a long month was making me see everything in red and black. In the morning, in an adjoining house, a crazed youth had just half-killed his mother with a pair of tongs. In the evening the customs-officer amused himself by shooting swallows with his rifle. Gala tried to convince me that our situation was annoying but far from tragic. All we had to do was to go and settle comfortably in a hotel in Málaga and wait there for the Barcelona money which could not fail shortly to arrive. There were several reasons why the money might have been delayed. We had telegraphed on a Saturday, and because of the English week the banks were closed that day. Perhaps our friend had neglected to send the telegram.

But I would not listen to all these arguments. I wanted to take advantage of the occasion to play out the drama of my anger once and for all, after having held it in leash ever since I had encountered my first economic difficulties. I would not admit the affront, the injustice, the monstrousness of the fact that I, Salvador Dali, should have to interrupt the writing of
The Visible Woman
because I, Salvador Dali, found myself without money, and the fact that my Galuchka should be dragged into the same
degrading situation was the last drop to make the already full cup of my patience overflow.

I left the house, slamming the door, and with the remorse of leaving Gala there in anguish, in the midst of packing our baggage. I picked up a stick from the ground and stalked through the fields of red carnations down toward the sea. As I went I furiously mowed the heads of the carnations, which shot into the air like the spurting blood of the decapitations so savagely painted by Carpaccio.

The seashore was hollowed out by grottos in which lived olive-complexioned gypsies, who were cooking fish in boiling oil that hissed in the frying pans like the very vipers of my own anger. For a second I thought of the absurd possibility of bringing down Gala’s fitted trunk and coming to live among them. The thought of this promiscuous contact with the very beautiful gypsy women who were there half naked suckling their babies was a powerful aphrodisiac, to which the tenacious dirtiness of these women contributed. I fled to a solitary cove, my imagination whirling with the memory of those nursing breasts mingled with the vision of the glistening rump–like a black horse’s–of one of the women puttering over the fire. My legs gave way and, falling to my knees on the jagged rocks, I felt like one of those anchorites in the throes of ecstasy painted by Rivera. With my free hand I caressed and scratched the calcinated skin of my body. I wanted to touch it everywhere at the same time. And I riveted my half-shut eyes upon a shred of cloud from which the scatological golden rain of Danae fell in oblique rays. My whole fury had now taken hold of the jerks and trembling of my flesh. All my pockets were empty. No more gold, eh? But I could still spend this! And I spilled upon the ground the large and the small coin of my precious life, which seemed to me this time to be extracted from the deepest and darkest recesses of my bones.