The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (59 page)

The more proofs I had of my influence the less capable I became of acting. I was beginning to be known, but this was worse, for then French good sense seiżed upon my name as a bugaboo. “Dali, yes—it’s very ‘extraordinary,’ but it’s mad and it can’t live.” Nevertheless it had at all costs to be made to live. I wanted to tear from this admirative and timorous society a minimum of its gold, which would permit Gala and me to live without that exhausting phantom, the constant worry about money, which we had seen rise for the first time on the African shores of Málaga.

But if I did not succeed in earning money, Gala achieved the miracle of making the little we had do—everything. Never did the dirty ears of Bohemianism enter our domicile, walking on the long staggering legs of an anemic frog, dressed in a cape made of soiled bedsheets with rice and fried potatoes stuck to them, glued and hardened by sweet champagne that has dried for two long months. Never have we been exposed to the degrading insistence of the shadows of utilities, employees, who stand leaning nervously against the doors of kitchens convulsively empty, though stored with a whole year’s famine. Never have either Gala or I yielded a single inch to the defeats of the prosaic that monetary difficulties drag in their wake, to the inertia of not being aware of anything, and of shutting one’s eyes to the morrow by telling oneself that the little that remains will not be able to alter the situation. Thanks to the strategist that Gala became on these occasions, external difficulties made us on the contrary harden our two souls even more. If we had little money, we ate soberly but well, at home. We did not go out. I worked a hundred times harder than any mediocre painter, preparing new exhibits. For the smallest order I put all my blood into my work. Gala would often reproach me for putting such great effort into the execution of insignificant and miserably remunerated orders. I would answer that inasmuch as I was a genius it was a veritable miracle that I got any orders at all. Our fate would be literally to die of hunger. “If we manage to live modestly it is because you and I at each moment of the day make a continuous and superhuman effort—and thanks to which we shall pierce through in the end.”

All around us artists, who today are annihilated by oblivion, were living handsomely on the adaption and mediocritization of Dalinian ideas. If Dali, the authentic king, was inacceptable and unassimilable, like a too violently seasoned food, on the other hand the formula of
putting a little Dali here and a little there made the most insipid leftover dishes suddenly appetizing. A bit of Dali in the landscape, a bit of Dali in the cloud, a bit of Dali in the melancholy, a bit of Dali in the fantasy, a bit of Dali in the conversation, but just a bit, gave a piquant and tantalizing savor to everything. And everything became readily more commercial as Dali himself, while becoming more and more integrally and violently Dali, frightened people and decommercialized himself more and more. I said to myself: patience—the thing is to last. And with my
stubbornness and my fanaticism, aided and encouraged by Gala’s, instead of taking a step backward, as good sense commanded us to do, I would take five steps forward in the intransigence of my opinions and of my works. It would be longer and more difficult, but the day we “came through,” we would have all the rats and all the dirty ears of Bohemianism, and all the pink cheeks of the easy life, at our feet. As our life became shaped beneath the pitiless constraints of rigor, of severity, and of passion, the others around us were dissolving in facility. Cocaine here, heroin there, opium galore, alcohol and pederasty everywhere. Heroin, cocaine, drunkography, opium and pederasty were sure vehicles to ephemeral success. The freemasonry of vice buoyed all its members with sentimental devotion against the common fear of solitude. All lived together, sweated together, took shots together, watching one another to see which one would croak first in order to plant a friendly dagger in his back at the last moment. Gala’s and my strength was that we always lived a healthy life in the midst of all this physical and moral promiscuity, taking no part in it, without smoking, without taking dope, without sleeping around. Gala and I continued to live as much alone as I had lived during my childhood and adolescence. Not only did we remain distant, but we remained equidistant—at equal distance from the artists of Montparnasse, from the drug-addicts, from society people, from the surrealists, from the communists, from the monarchists, from the parachutists, from the madmen, from the bourgeois. We were at the centre, and to remain at the centre, to preserve that equilibrium of lucidity and be able to play all the notes, by virtue of which you feel yourself dominating the situation—like an organist sitting in the center of a semicircular organ, I wrung every sound as from an organ—it was necessary to leave an area of free space around one, to be able to run away from time to time and settle down.

This free space, for us, was Cadaques, our retreat in Spain for months on end, during which we left Paris as one leaves a kettle full of tripe which to be properly done, as is well known, must cook for several days.
While the kettle of Paris was cooking the
tripes à la mode de Caen
of my gluey imagination, we would be away. But before our departure we would prepare the dishes that we would leave cooking for two or three months. I would sow among the surrealist group the necessary ideological slogans against subjectivity and the marvelous. For the pederasts the problem was simple: I reactualized the classic romanticism of Palladio. For the drug-addicts I furnished a complete theory of hypnagogic images, and I spoke of masks of my invention for seeing dreams in color. For the society people I set up the fashion of sentimental conflicts of the Stendhalian type and polished the forbidden fruit of the revolution. The pederasts I coyly introduced to surrealism. To the surrealists I held up another forbidden fruit, that of tradition.

We were to leave the following morning. After a thousand efforts we had managed to scrape together a little money. I had hurriedly to set up the secret links of my influence, and I drew up the list of the last visits I must make: in the morning, a cubist, a monarchist, and a communist;
in the afternoon, society people, selected among those who detested one another most; and the evening, for Gala and myself. For the two of us to achieve this was the greatest triumph. The other couples were never together, or when they were their respective minds were elsewhere. They were horrified to discover us together in a corner of one of the best restaurants, before a good vintage wine, talking to each other with the avidity of a fresh idyll which was only in its first or second day! What did we talk about? We talked about being alone, about that magic prospect of going to Cadaques to be alone, to see what was going to happen between the two of us. Down there we were going to build walls in the sun to protect us against the wind, wells to catch springs of water, stone benches to sit on. We were going to build the first steps of the critical-paranoiac method; we were going to continue that tragic and beautiful labor of living together, of living for the reality of just the two of us!

We took the train at the Gare d’Orsay, loaded as bees. Ever since I can remember I have wanted to travel with my documents—that is to say, with some ten suitcases stuffed with books, photographs of morphology, insects, architecture, texts, endless notes. This time, moreover, we brought a few pieces of furniture from our Paris apartment, and a whole collection of butterflies and leaf-insects mounted under crystal, with which we planned to decorate the house; also gasoline lamps and heaters, for in Port Lligat there was no electricity. The instruments for my painting made a whole pile of baggage by themselves, among which a large revolving easel stood out.

From Cadaques to Port Lligat the road leads between abrupt rocks, where no car can get through. So it was necessary to carry everything on a donkey’s back. It took us two days to get settled, and during these two days we lived in a continual fever. The walls were still all damp, and we tried to dry them a little at a time by turning the heat of our gasoline lamps on them. At the end of the second day Gala and I were lying on the great divan which at night became our bed. The
tramontana
²
was blowing outside like a madwoman. Lydia “La Ben Plantada,” was seated on a little chromium stool in front of us. She spoke to us about mystery, about the “master,” about an article on William Tell that d’Ors had just written. “William and Tell,” she said, “are two different people. One of them is from Cadaques, the other from Rosas...” She had come to make our supper, and as the conversation on William and Tell was sure to develop methodically, she went to the kitchen to fetch the chicken, and what she needed to kill it with. Lydia this time sat on the floor, and while continuing to interpret Eugenio d’Ors’s last article she adroitly plunged her scissors into the chicken’s neck, and held its bleeding head in a deep glazed terra-cotta vessel.

“No one will believe I am ‘La Ben Plantada.’ I can understand that. People don’t have strong minds like the three of us—no spirituality! They don’t see farther than the mark of the letters on the paper. Now Picasso did not talk much, but he was very fond of me; he would have given his blood for me. One day he lent me a book by Goethe . ..”
³

The chicken was in the last extremity of its agony, and remained with its legs stiff and motionless, like vinestalks hemmed in by winter. Lydia began to pluck it, and soon the whole room was covered with feathers. When this operation was over she cleaned the chicken, and with her fingers dripping with blood she began to pull out its viscera which she arranged neatly on a separate dish on the crystal table, where I had laid a very expensive book of facsimiles of the drawings of Giovanni Bellini. Observing that I jumped up anxiously to remove the book against the possibility of splashing, Lydia smiled bitterly, and said, “Blood does not spot,” and then she immediately added this sentence, which a malicious expression in her eyes charged with erotic hidden meanings, “Blood is sweeter than honey. I,” she went on, “am blood, and honey is all the other women! My sons...” (this she added in a low voice) “at this moment are against blood and are running after honey.”

At this very moment the door opened, and the two sons appeared, the one very sombre with his red moustache, the other smiling constantly in an anxious and disturbing manner. The latter said, “She is coming now.” “She” was the maid whom Lydia had picked out for us, and who would begin to take care of the house the following day. She arrived a few minutes later. She was a woman of about forty, with black shiny hair, like a horse’s mane. She had a Leonardesque facial structure, and a passion in her eyes which denoted insanity. She was really insane, and we were to have dramatic proof of this later. I have several times observed, by my own experience, that a violent abnormality of mind mysteriously attracts madness to the point of grouping it protectively around itself. No matter where I go, madmen and suicides are there waiting for me, forming a guard of honor. They know obscurely and intuitively that I am one of them, although they know as well as I that the only difference between me and the insane is that I am not insane. Nevertheless my “effluvia” attract them irresistibly. I remember the chrysalis cocoon that Fabre transported, as an experiment, several hundred kilometers from the spot where this species was exclusively to be found. He put it on a table, and at the end of the time necessary for butterflies of the same species to arrive the room was invaded by a swarm of them. They had come as with one mind at the tyrannical call of an effluvium so immaterial that one could not even detect it by smell. It was enough for this chrysalis to have been for one moment in contact
with a piece of cotton for this cotton to acquire its attractive power and cause hundreds of frenzied butterflies to fly through space, rushing in answer to the call.