The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (71 page)

All these ideas were crystallized in a lecture which I was preparing to deliver in Barcelona and which would have had historic repercussions. Mine was not a case of the periodic imitative and discouraged “return to tradition”—the neo-classicism, the neo-Thomism which one heard about everywhere, symptomatically arising out of the fatigue and the nausea over “isms.” On the contrary it was the combative affirmation of my whole experience in the spirit of synthesis of the “Conquest of the Irrational” and the affirmation of the esthetic faith to which Gala had just restored me.

We were thus preparing to leave for Barcelona, and before leaving Port Lligat we went to take a glass of wine with the masons who were working on the new story to our house, to say goodbye to them. They were in the midst of discussing politics.

“The finest thing in the world,” one of them said, “—I mean finest, and I don’t care what anybody says—is anarchy, what you might call libertarian communism. And when I say fine I mean it’s a very fine idea, but you can’t put it into practice. So I’m satisfied with a good liberal socialism, with a few variations that I’ve thought up myself.”

“The only thing that appeals to me about all that,” said another, “is integral free love; everything bad comes from people not having their fill of love.” So saying, he dug his teeth with conviction into the leg of a chicken.

Another said, “I’m for syndicalism—clean and stripped and no politics mixed up in it, and for this idea I wouldn’t stop at anything, I’d even overturn all the streetcars that were necessary.” And he went through a pantomime suggesting that he knew by experience how this was done.

Another said, “Neither syndicalism nor socialism. Communism is the only thing, communism as Stalin understands it. It’s the only realistic way out.”

“Communism, sure,” said another, “but you’ve got to know what kind you mean, because there are five different kinds, not counting my own, which is the right kind. It’s been proved and demonstrated that the Stalinists are murderers of free men, just as criminal as the fascists.” The problem of Trotskyism was an acute one at that time.

But the important thing for all of them was to bring about the revolution.
After that one would see. The master mason listened with consternation to all this debate over various “isms”; then, nodding his head he said to them,

“Do you want me to tell you how all this is going to end? It’s going to end with a military dictatorship that will make all of us shrivel up and won’t allow any of us to breathe . . .”

On my arrival in Barcelona the “isms” began to burst in the form of real bombs set off by the
Federacidn Anarquista Ibérica
that were beginning to explode all around. That same afternoon a general strike was declared, and Barcelona suddenly took on a sinister aspect. Dalmau, the old picture-dealer who had been the first to introduce modern art to Barcelona, and who had organized my present lecture, rang the bell at about five o’clock at the door of our hotel room on Carmen Street with a twice-repeated lugubrious pressure of his bony hand.

“Come in,” I cried. The door opened, and the sight of Dalmau was something unforgettable. His white beard was unkempt, his hair bristling, and by his hurried breathing I could guess that he had come in all haste to tell us something urgent. Nevertheless he remained motionless on the threshold. His fly was wide open and within it he had placed a number of a review that I had asked him to get for me. On the cover of this review I read a title,
La Révolution Surrealiste
. After remaining motionless for some time to enjoy the effect that his unbuttoned appearance produced on us, he said,

“You must get away to Paris as soon as possible. Hell is about to break loose here.”

We spent the whole afternoon looking for a chauffeur who would be willing to take us to the frontier, and going through the red tape necessary to obtain an official permit of exit and circulation. The streets of Barcelona were filling more and more with groups of civilians armed with guns whom no one interfered with. Sometimes they would meet sombre mounted civil guards coming in the opposite direction. All would pretend not to see one another, and each group would go on its way; “Bye and bye!” they seemed to say to each other tacitly. At the
Ministerio de la Gobernaciόn
I had to wait two long hours. The personnel would stop tapping at their typewriters to help set up the machine-guns that were calmly being installed at every window. And everyone had a thread in his mouth, for everyone was sewing—they were sewing armbands with the Catalonian flag and the separatist star on their sleeves. And word passed from mouth to mouth that Companys was going to proclaim the Catalonian Republic. The storm announced by Dalmau was thus going to beat down on Barcelona in perhaps an hour or less, if the army should decide to take matters into its own hands. I was less and less sure of being able to get to the frontier in time. While I was waiting for my interminable exit visa, I recognized the two leaders of Catalonian separatism as being the Badia brothers. They looked exactly like two Buster Keatons; they had the same tragic gestures and
a predestined pallor; I immediately realized that they were about to die—the anarchists were in fact to kill them a few days later.

When I finally obtained my exit visa, Dalmau reappeared, bringing us an anarchist chauffeur who was willing to compromise himself, for a rather considerable sum, by taking us to the frontier. Gala, Dalmau, the anarchist and I went and shut ourselves up in a men’s lavatory to discuss the price and the conditions of our trip. Once everything had been settled the anarchist winked at us, and said, “I have foreseen everything,” and pulled a Catalonian flag out of his pocket. “This I put on the car to get there,” and, pulling a Spanish flag out of the other, he added, “and this one will get me back in case they lose their revolution, which they almost certainly will. But this quarrel between Spain and Catalonia doesn’t concern us anarchists. Besides, ‘our moment’ hasn’t come yet. All these bombs you hear exploding are our bombs all right, but they’re just to make a few casualties and keep up appearances. Whenever there are people killed we have to be in on it—it’s up to us to make the most noise. But that’s all. The day hasn’t come yet for us to blow the lid off.”

We got into the car and started on our way. It took us no less than twelve hours to make the trip that usually can be made in two. Our car was stopped every moment by groups of the armed populace who demanded to see our safe-conduct. The mood of these groups varied in the extreme, like their state of sobriety, and on several occasions we were allowed to continue on our way only thanks to the eloquence of our anarchist driver who invariably was able to convince these people of the validity and legality of our document.

Midway we stopped in a little sea-side resort town to fill our gasoline tank. Inside a large “envelat”
³
a crowd was madly dancing to the sound of
The Beautiful Blue Danube
. Outside, boys and girls were walking arm in arm. On the dusty white road lighted by the October moon a barrel of black wine had been spilled. Within a tavern whose doors were swung wide open one saw two grown men playing ping-pong. When we had filled our tank our anarchist driver said to us, “Now you will excuse me a moment. I have to go and change the olive water, and then we’ll start off again.” He disappeared in the rear of the tavern, and he emerged buttoning himself with one hand while with the back of the other he wiped his chin which was dripping with a hurriedly swallowed
anis del mono
. He started round the table, catching a ping-pong ball on the bounce as it fell to the floor. He asked one of the players for a racket and played one or two rallies very skilfully. Suddenly he dropped the racket, ran out and jumped into the driver’s seat of our car. “We have to hurry,” he shouted. “The radio has just announced that Companys has proclaimed the Catalonian Republic and they’re already fighting in the streets of Barcelona.” Inside the “envelat”
The Beautiful Blue Danube
was playing for the third time. Everything seemed perfectly
normal, except that for a moment a group of armed men discussed discreetly among themselves, in a low voice but loud enough for us to hear, whether or not it would be proper to shoot us. They were all particularly concerned over Gala’s numerous suitcases, which impressed them as provocative evidence of luxury. Finally our driver, growing impatient, began to blaspheme with such inspiration and violence that he aroused a sudden respect in all of them, and we continued on our way.

The following day we awoke in a small hotel in the frontier town of Cerbére, and we learned from the newspapers that the uprising had been put down, and the leaders killed or arrested. The Catalonian Republic had thus lasted only a few hours. We had lived through the “historic night” of October 6th, and since that night I have always had the same picture of a historic night. A historic night to me is a perfectly idiotic night like any other, in which people play
The Beautiful Blue Danube
a great deal, a little ping-pong, and in which you risk getting shot. We were to learn a few days later in a letter which we received from Dalmau that our driver was caught by a spray of machine-gun bullets coming back through the suburbs of Barcelona and was killed. They had thus definitely changed the water of the white ping-pong balls of his black olives into fresh blood.

I was definitely not a historic man. On the contrary I felt myself essentially anti-historic and a-political. Either I was too much ahead of my time or much too far behind, but never contemporaneous with pingpong-playing men. The disagreeable memory of having seen two Spaniards capable of indulging in that imbecile game filled me with shame. It was a dreadful omen: the ping-pong ball appeared to me as a little death’s-head—empty, without weight, and catastrophic in its frivolity—the real death’s head, personifying politics completely skinned. And in the menacing silence that surrounded the tock, tock, tock, tock of the light skull of the ping-pong ball bouncing back and forth across the table I sensed the approach of the great armed cannibalism of our history, that of our coming Civil War, and the mere memory of the sound of the pingpong ball heard on the historic night of October 6th was enough to set my teeth on edge in anticipation.

When I arrived in Paris I painted a large picture which I entitled
Premonition of Civil War
. In this picture I showed a vast human body breaking out into monstrous excrescences of arms and legs tearing at one another in a delirium of autostrangulation. As a background to this architecture of frenzied flesh devoured by a narcissistic and biological cataclysm, I painted a geological landscape, that had been uselessly revolutionized for thousands of years, congealed in its “normal course.” The soft structure of that great mass of flesh in civil war I embellished with a few boiled beans, for one could not imagine swallowing all that unconscious meat without the presence (however uninspiring) of some mealy and melancholy vegetable.

The first news of the Spanish Civil War that I had prophesied in my
painting were not long in coming. I learned it in London, at a supper at the Savoy, after attending a concert of chamber music. I had asked for a poached egg, and this immediately brought up in my mind that ping-pong ball which had, in fact, been haunting me intermittently. It had, so to speak, just had time to mature. I communicated to the composer Igor Markevitch my idea of the lamentable and highly demoralizing effect that playing a game of ping-pong with a poached egg could produce—it would be almost worse than playing tennis with a dead bird. This poached egg set my teeth on edge, for I discovered, incomprehensibly, that it contained sand. I am sure that it was not the fault of the chef of the Savoy, but that it was the African sand of the history of Spain which had just risen to my mouth. Against sand, champagne! But I did not drink any. A period of ascetic rigor and of a quintessential violence of style was going to dominate my thinking and my tormented life, illuminated solely by the fires of faith of the Spanish Civil War and the esthetic fires of the Renaissance—in which intelligence was one day to be reborn.

The Civil War had broken out! I knew it, I was sure of it, I had foreseen it! And Spain, spared by the other war, was to be the first country in which all the ideological and insoluble dramas of Post-War Europe, all the moral and esthetic anxiety of the “isms” polarized in those two words “revolution” and “tradition,” were now to be solved in the crude reality of violence and of blood The Spanish anarchists took to the streets of total subversion .with black banners, on which were inscribed the words, VIVA LA MUERTE! (Long live death!). The others, with the flag of tradition, red and gold, of immemorial Spain bearing that other inscription which needed only two letters, FE (faith). And all at once, in the middle of the cadaverous body of Spain half devoured by the vermin and the worms of exotic and materialistic ideologies, one saw the enormous Iberian erection, like an immense cathedral filled with the white dynamite of hatred. To bury and to unbury! To unbury and to bury! To bury in order to unbury anew! Therein lay the whole carnal desire of the civil war of that land of Spain, too long passive and unsated, too long patient in suffering others to play the humiliating game of the vile and anecdotic ping-pong of politics on the aristocratic nobility of its back. Land of Spain, you who had been capable of fecundating religion itself! And this was what we were now to witness—what the land of Spain was capable of—a planetary capacity for suffering and inflicting suffering, for burying and unburying, for killing and resuscitating. For it was going to be necessary for the jackal claws of the revolution to scratch down to the atavistic layers of tradition in order that, as they became savagely ground and mutilated against the granitic hardness of the bones of this tradition they were profaning, one might in the end be dazzled anew by that hard light of the treasures of “ardent death” and of putrefying and resurrected splendors that this earth of Spain held hidden in the depths of its entrails. The past was unearthed, lifted to its feet, and the past walked among the living-dead, was armed—the flesh was resuscitated in the disinterment of the lovers of Teruel, people learned to love one another in killing one another. For nothing is closer to an embrace than a death-grapple. The militiaman of Faith would come to the cafe carrying on his arm the mummy of a twelfth-century nun whom he had just unearthed; he would not leave her! He wanted to bring her with him, fastened to his
correajes
as his “mascot,” to the trenches on the Aragon front and die with her if need be. An old friend of the architect Gaudi claims to have seen the unearthed body of that architect of genius dragged through the streets of Barcelona by a rope that the children had fastened around his neck. He told me that Gaudi had been very well embalmed, and that he looked “exactly” as he had in the life, except that he did not look very well. This was after all only natural, considering the fact that Gaudi had been buried for some twenty years. In Vic the soldiers played football every afternoon with the head of the archbishop of Vic, in Vic . . .