The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (7 page)

When I was seven years old my father decided to take me to school. He had to resort to force; with great effort he dragged me all the way by the hand, while I screamed and raised such a commotion that all the shopkeepers on the streets we passed through came out on their doorsteps to watch us. My parents had succeeded by this time in teaching me two things: the letters of the alphabet and how to write my name. At the end of one year of school they discovered to their stupefaction that I had totally forgotten these two things.

This was by no means my fault. My teacher had done a great deal to achieve this result–or rather, he had done nothing at all, for he would come to school only to sleep almost continually. This schoolmaster’s name was Senor Traite, which in Catalonian is something like the word for “omelet,” and he was truly a phantastic character in every respect. He wore a white beard separated into two symmetrical plaits that were so long that when he sat down they hung below his knees. The ivory tint of this beard was stained with yellowish spots shading into brown like those that form a patina on the fingertips and nails of great smokers, and also the keys of certain pianos–which, of course, have never smoked in their lives.

As for Senor Traite, he did not smoke either. It would have interfered with his sleeping. But he made up for this by taking snuff. At each brief awakening he would take a pinch of criminally aromatic snuff, which made him sneeze wholeheartedly, bespattering an immense handkerchief, which he rarely changed, with ochre stains. Senor Traite had a very handsome face of the Tolstoyan type to which something of a Leonardo had been grafted; his blue eyes, very bright, were surely peopled with dreams and a good deal of poetry; he dressed carelessly, he was foul-smelling, and from time to time he wore a top-hat, which was altogether unusual in the region. But with his imposing appearance
he could allow himself anything: he lived surrounded by a legendary aureole of intelligence which made him invulnerable. Now and then he would go off on a Sunday excursion and return with his cart filled with bits of church sculpture, Gothic windows and other architectural pieces which he stole from the churches of the countryside or which he bought for next to nothing. Once he discovered a Romanesque capital which particularly appealed to him and which was set in a belltower. Senor Traite managed to find his way in at night and break it loose from the wall. He dug and dug so hard that a part of the tower collapsed, and with a noise easy to imagine two large bells fell through the roof of an adjoining house, leaving a gaping hole. By the time the awakened village was able to realize what had happened Senor Traite was already galloping away in his cart, though it is true that he did not escape a few inhospitable rocks. Although the incident aroused the people of Figueras, it rather enhanced his glory, for he became on this account a kind of martyr to the love of Art. What is certain in this story is that bit by bit Senor Traite was building in the vicinity an outlandish villa in which he lumped together the whole heterogeneous archeological collection gathered in the course of his Sunday pillagings, which had assumed the endemic form of a veritable devastation of the artistic treasures of the countryside.

Why had my parents chosen a school with so sensational a master as Senor Traite? My father, who was a free-thinker, and who had sprung from sentimental Barcelona, the Barcelona of “Clavé choirs,”
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the anarchists and the Ferrer trial,
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made it a matter of principle not to put me into the Christian schools or those of the Marist brothers, which would have been appropriate for people of our rank, my father being a notary and one of the most esteemed men of the town. In spite of this he was absolutely determined to put me into the communal school–Senor Traite’s school. This attitude was regarded as a real eccentricity, only partly justified by the mythical prestige of Senor Traite, of whose pedagogical gifts none of my parents’ acquaintances had the slightest personal experience, since they had all raised their children elsewhere.

I therefore spent my first school year living with the poorest children of the town, which was very important, I think, for the development of my natural tendencies to megalomania. Indeed I became more and more used to considering myself, a rich child, as something precious, delicate, and absolutely different from all the ragged children who surrounded me. I was the only one to bring hot milk and cocoa put up in a magnificent thermos bottle wrapped in a cloth embroidered with my initials. I alone had an immaculate bandage put on the slightest scratch, I alone wore a sailor suit with insignia embroidered in thick gold on the sleeves,
and stars on my cap, I alone had hair that was combed a thousand times and that smelt good of a perfume that must have seemed so troubling to the other children who would take turns coming up to me to get a better sniff of my privileged head. I was the only one, moreover, who wore well-shined shoes with silver buttons. These became, each time one of them got torn off, the occasion of a tussle for its possession among my schoolmates who in spite of the winter went barefoot or half shod with the gaping remnants of foul, unmatched and ill-fitting
espadrilles.
Moreover, and especially, I was the only one who never would play, who never would talk with anyone. For that matter my schoolmates, too, considered me so much apart that they would only come near me with some misgivings in order to admire at close range a lace handkerchief that bloomed from my pocket, or my slender and flexible new bamboo cane adorned with a silver dog’s head by way of a handle.

What, then, did I do during a whole year in this wretched state school? Around my solitary silence the other children disported themselves, possessed by a frenzy of continual turbulence. This spectacle appeared to me wholly incomprehensible. They shouted, played, fought, cried, laughed, hastening with all the obscure avidity of being to tear out pieces of living flesh with their teeth and nails, displaying that common and ancestral dementia which slumbers within every healthy biological specimen and which is the normal nourishment, appropriate to the practical and animal development of the “principle of action.” How far I was from this development of the “practical principle of action”–at the other pole, in fact! I was headed, rather, in the opposite direction:
each day I knew less well how to do each thing! I admired the ingenuity of all those little beings possessed by the demon of all the wiles and capable of skillfully repairing their broken pencil-boxes with the use of small nails! And the complicated figures they could make by folding a piece of paper! With what dexterity and rapidity they would undo the most stubborn laces of their
espadrilles,
whereas I was capable of remaining locked up in a room a whole afternoon, not knowing how to turn the door-handle to get out; I would get lost as soon as I got into any house, even those I was most familiar with; I couldn’t even manage by myself to take off my sailor blouse which slipped over the head, a few experiments in this exercise having convinced me of the danger of dying of suffocation. “Practical activity” was my enemy and the objects of the external world became beings that were daily more terrifying.

Senor Traite, too, seated on the height of his wooden platform, wove his chain of slumbers with a consciousness more and more akin to the vegetable, and if at times his dreams seemed to rock him with the gentleness of reeds bowing in the wind, at other moments he became as heavy as a tree-trunk. He would take advantage of his brief awakenings to reach for a pinch of snuff and to chastise, by pulling their ears till they bled, those going beyond the limit of the usual uproar who either by an adroitly aimed wad of spittle or by a fire kindled with books to roast chestnuts managed to anticipate his normal awakening with a disagreeable jolt.

What, I repeat, did I do during a whole year in this wretched school? One single thing, and this I did with desperate eagerness: I fabricated “false memories.” The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant. Already at this period I remembered a scene which, by its improbability, must be considered as my first false memory. I was looking at a naked child who was being washed; I do not remember the child’s sex, but I observed on one of its buttocks a horrible swarming mass of ants which seemed to be stationary in a hole the size of an orange. In the midst of the ablutions the child was turned round with its belly upward and I then thought that the ants would be crushed and that the hole would hurt it. The child was once more put back into its original position. My curiosity to see the ants again was enormous, but I was surprised that they were no longer there, just as there was no no longer a trace of a hole. This false memory is very clear, although I cannot localize it in time.

On the other hand, I am perfectly sure that it was between the ages of seven and eight while I was at Senor Traite’s school, forgetting the letters of the alphabet and the way to spell my name, that the growing and all-powerful sway of revery and myth began to mingle in such a continuous and imperious way with the life of every moment that later it has often become impossible for me to know where reality begins and the imaginary ends.

My memory has welded the whole into such a homogeneous and indestructible mass that only a critically objective examination of certain events that are too absurd or clearly impossible obliges me to consider them as authentic false memories. For instance, when one of my memories pertains to events happening in Russia I am after all forced to catalogue it as false, since I have never been in that country in my life. And it is indeed to Russia that certain of my false memories go back.

It was Senor Traite who revealed to me the first images of Russia, and this is how it happened:

When the so-called study-day was over, Senor Traite would sometimes take me to his private apartment. This has remained for me the most mysterious of all the places that still crowd my memory. Such must have been the room where Faust worked. On the shelves of a monumental bookcase, spasmodically depleted, great dusty volumes alternated with incongruous and heterogeneous objects. Some of the latter were covered or half-concealed by cloths, sometimes exposing a part of their enigmatic complexities, which was often just the detail necessary to set off at a gallop the ever-ready Arab cavalry
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of my “phantastic interpretations,” holding themselves in with frenzied impatience, and waiting only for the silver spurs of my mythomania to prod their bruised and bloody flanks in order to dash into an unbridled race.

Senor Traite would seat me on his knees
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and awkwardly stroke my chin with its fine, glowing skin, grasping it with the forefinger and large thumb of his hand which had the lustreless skin, the smell, the color, the temperature and the roughness of a potato wrinkled and warmed by the sun and already a little rotten.

Senor Traite always began by saying to me:

“And now I’m going to show you something you have never seen.”

Then he would disappear into a dark room and presently return loaded with a gigantic rosary which he could barely carry on his shoulders and which hung down the whole length of his bent body and trailed two metres behind him on the floor, making an infernal din and raising a cloud of dust.

“My wife (God save her!) asked me to bring her back a rosary as a present from my trip to Jerusalem. I bought her this one, which is the largest rosary to be found in the whole world, besides which it is carved out of real olive wood from the Mount of Olives.”

So saying, Senor Traite would smile slyly.

Another time Senor Traite pulled out of a large mahogany box lined with garnet-red velvet a statuette of Mephistopheles of a wonderful red color, as shiny as a fish just out of water, and he lighted an ingenious contrivance in the form of a trident which the demon brandished with his movable arm, and sheafs of multicolored fireworks rose to the ceiling while in the almost complete darkness Senor Traite, stroking his immense beard, paternally observed the effects of my amazement.