The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (60 page)

Two days after my arrival in solitary Port Lligat, my little room was already swarming with madmen. I realized the unlivableness of this, and took necessary measures. Every day I was going to get up at seven o’clock to work. A door opening inopportunely was enough to disturb my work for hours. No one must ever remain in the house. I would see him outside. And from then on the madmen would prowl outside the house, and only exceptionally came in on Sundays.

Another of our importunate Lligat friends was Ramon de Hermosa. He was a man of about fifty, very hale and hearty, with a coquettish moustache
à la
Adolphe Menjou—he even looked a little like him. He was probably the laziest man in the world. He liked to repeat the phrase, “There are years when you don’t feel like doing anything.” In his case this phenomenal kind of year had occurred without interruption since his childhood. The sight of other people working filled him with admiration. “I can’t understand how they don’t get tired out doing all that!” he would say. His case of do-nothingness was so proverbial that it had been accepted, with a touch of pride even, by the fishermen. There was a tinge of admiration in the contempt with which they would say, “Don’t you worry about Ramon’s being willing to do that!” And if Ramon had been willing, everyone would have been disappointed, and he would have lost his prestige forever. His do-nothingness was a kind of institution, a rarity, a phenomenon, something unique, which did not exist anywhere else. His total and parasitic inactivity was a source of pride in which everyone had a small share. Nevertheless when the fishermen would be dragging their heavy burden of fishing tackle under the relentless afternoon sun and would pass the casino and see Ramon savoring a coffee, a cigar and a glass of brandy, their anger would often break loose in the crudest insults, which provoked on Ramon’s part only the most comprehensible, bitter and comprehensive of smiles. Knowing that he was incapable of earning his living, the gentlemen gave him their old suits and a few centimos on which he lived with the miracle of each moment. It was because of this that he was always dressed as a gentleman. For years he wore an English-cut sport jacket. The mayoralty lent him a large house in which he had to cohabit with the vagrants who passed through the town, of whom there were very few, and whom he somehow managed to have keep house for him and even to fetch his water. I had been several times to see Ramon in his house. There were two fig trees in front of it full of rotting figs, but which he never touched—out of sheer laziness, of course, but offering the pretext that he did not like them. The house was infested with fleas. The rain leaked in everywhere, and one witnessed bloody battles between cats and rats. Once Gala made an arrangement with Ramon to have him pump water for us once a day, just enough to fill the wash-tub. It would take him only a few minutes, and he could
do it at sundown, when it was cool. Ramon started off to perform this little job. On the second day there was still not a drop of water in the tub, and yet one heard the intermittent sound of the pump. I went to see what was going on, and found Ramon lying under an olive tree, in the act of skilfully imitating the sound of the pump by rhythmically striking two irons (with the aid of strings, which enabled him to do this with the minimum of effort), each iron having a different pitch, which from afar resembled the sound of the pump—tock, tock, tock, tock . . . Every day when I saw him come and try to coax some of the kitchen left-overs out of me I would ask him,

“Well, Ramon, how goes it?”

“Badly, very badly, Señor Salvador,” he would invariably repeat, “worse and worse!” After which he would let slip out a sly little smile that scurried under his moustache.

Ramon had the virtue of telling the least interesting things in the world with a minuteness and an epic tone worthy of the
Iliad
. His best story was about a three-day trip he had made in which he had had the duty of carrying a small suitcase for a billiard champion. It was told with all the minute-to-minute details and was a masterpiece of build-up without suspense. After the tense, agitated conversations of Paris, swarming with double meanings, maliciousness and diplomacy, the conversations with Ramon induced a serenity of soul and achieved an elevation of boring anecdotism that were incomparable. And the gossip of the fishermen of Port Lligat, with their completely Homeric spirit, was of a corporeal and solid substance of reality for my brain weary of “wit” and
chichi
.

Gala and I spent whole months without any other personal contacts than Lydia, her two sons, our maid, Ramon de Hermosa, and the handful of fishermen who kept their equipment in their shacks in Port Lligat.
In the evening everyone left for Cadaques, even the maid, and Port Lligat remained absolutely deserted, inhabited solely by the two of us. Often at five o’clock in the morning our light was still lit. Just as the moon would be melting in the sky. We would begin to look for something a knock at the door. It was one of the fishermen.

“I saw the light on, and I thought I would come in for a moment to bring you this sea perch. It will be good and fresh for tomorrow morning. And this stone. I picked it up for Madame Gala. I know she likes strange stones. Señor works too hard. The day before yesterday too he went to bed very late.” And, speaking to Gala, “Señor Salvador should take a purge. That insomnia he complains about comes from his stomach. He ought to clean it out once and for all, and have it over with. The sky is clear as a fish eye. That moon—we’ll have good weather. Good night.”

When the fisherman had gone I would look at Gala, begging her, “Go to bed. You’re dead tired. I
have to
paint for another half hour.”

“No, I’ll wait for you. I have a thousand things to classify before I go to bed.”

Gala wove unwearyingly the Penelope’s cloth of my disorder. As soon as she had succeeded in organizing the documents and notes necessary for the methodical course of my work I would begin, in a frenzy of impatience, to mix them all up to find some unnecessary thing which, for that matter, I was almost sure to have left on purpose in Paris and which Gala had advised me to take. For Gala has always known better than I what I needed for my work. Five o’clock would ring, and the moon would be melting in the sky. We would begin to look for something which had appeared to me for a moment with the flash of a caprice. Gala tirelessly undid the valises, without laziness and without hope, and knowing that we would not sleep. If I did not sleep, she would not go to bed. She followed the anguish of my picture with more intensity even than myself, for I would often cheat, in order to derive pleasure from my drama, and even to see Gala suffer.

“It is mostly with
your
blood, Gala, that I paint my pictures,” I said to her one day, and since then I have always used her name with mine in signing my work.

Gala and I lived for three months steadily in Port Lligat, stuck like two cancers, one in the stomach, the other in the throat, of time. We did not want a fraction of an hour to flow by without having consumed the life of all its tissues in our devouring embrace. We obliged time to heed us by torturing it. There was not an hour of the day that could escape appearing and rendering account before the inquisitorial judgment of our two souls. Around us gray, cutting rocks, aridity, famished cats, wind, sickly vinestalks, exalted madmen in rags, Ramon—dressed as a gentleman, cynical, and covered with fleas—a dozen or so fishermen nobly reserved, unflinchingly awaiting the hour of their death, their fingernails crammed with fish-guts and the soles of their feet hardened by absinthe-colored callouses. In Cadaques, at a quarter of an hour’s distance,
my father’s hostility, whose passion I could feel at a distance, localized behind the mountain that separated us, in the exact spot of my parents’ house where I had lived my childhood and adolescence, and from which I had been evicted. This house of my father’s I saw at a distance in the course of my walks; it seemed to me like a piece of sugar—a piece of sugar soaked in gall.

Port Lligat: a life of asceticism, of isolation. It was there that I learned to impoverish myself, to limit and file down my thinking in order that it might become effective as an ax, where blood had the taste of blood, and honey the taste of honey. A life that was hard, without metaphor or wine, a life with the light of eternity. The lucubrations of Paris, the lights of the city, and of the jewels of the Rue de la Paix, could not resist this other light—total, centuries-old, poor, serene and fearless as the concise brow of Minerva. At the end of two months at Port Lligat I saw rising day after day before my mind the perennial solidity of the architectural constructions of Catholicism. And as we remained alone—Gala and I, the landscape and our souls—the ancient brows of the Minervas came more and more to resemble those of the Madonnas of Raphael, bathed in a light of oval silk.

Every evening we took a walk and would sit down in our favorite parts of the landscape. “We shall have to have the well dug five metres deep to try to find more water ...At the new moon we will go to the
encessa
⁴
and fish sardines . . . We will plant two orange trees beside the well . . .” These were the kinds of things I would say to Gala to relax us from a long day of spiritual work. But my eyes remained fixed on those smooth and immaculate skies of the serene winter days. Those skies were great and rounded like the intact cupola that awaited the painting of an allegory of glory—the triumph and the glory of the critical-paranoiac method, perhaps?

Oh, nostalgia of the Renaissance, the sole period that had been able to meet the challenge of the cupola of the sky by raising cupolas of architecture painted with the unique splendor of the Catholic faith. What has become, in our day, of the cupolas of religion, of esthetics, and of ethics which for centuries sheltered the soul, the brain and the conscience of man? The soul of man, in our day, dwells out in the cold, like beggars, like dogs! Our age has invented mechanical brains, that degrading and horrible “apparatus of slowness,” the radio. What does it matter to us if we can hear the wretched noises that reach us from Europe or China? What is this compared to the “speed” of the Egyptian astrologers, of Paracelsus or of Nostradamus, who could hear the breathing of the future three thousand years ahead! What does it matter that man can hear the World War communiqués and the “congas” sung from one hemisphere to the other—man, whose ears were made to hear the sound of the battles of archangels, and the canticles of the angels of heaven?
What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust. What is the socialist ideal of a “higher living standard” for man, who is capable of believing in the resurrection of his own flesh? If a donkey should suddenly begin to fly, or a fig sprout wings and take to the sky, this might astonish us and distract us for a moment. But why be astonished at a flying machine? It is more meritorious for a laundry iron to fly than for a plane, even though if you throw an iron into the air it will fly too, while it is up, like any plane. What is it for a machine to fly? And what is it for man to fly, he who has a soul?

Our epoch is dying of moral scepticism and spiritual nothingness. Imaginative slothfulness, entrusting itself to the mechanical, momentary and material pseudo-progress of the post-war period, has de-hierarchized the spirit. It has disarmed it, dishonored it before death and eternity. Mechanical civilization will be destroyed by war. The machine is doomed to crumble and rust, gutted on the battle fields, and the youthful, energetic masses that have constructed them are doomed to serve as cannon-fodder.

Yes! I am thinking of you, enthusiastic and devoted youth; youth with flushed, heroic faces, with your teeth holding trophies snatched in world contests held in concrete stadiums. I am thinking of you, the generation of youth, you who have been raised on athletic feats in the unbroken roar of planes and the radio. I am thinking of you, youth exuberant with gay generosities, youth of neo-paganism guided by a
monstrous utopian idea bloody and sacrilegious. I am thinking of you, companions, comrades of nothingness! .. .