The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (78 page)

“Meanwhile I continued to feed my fire well with fresh vinestalks that crackled like the hairs of angels. And now one and now another of the militiamen would begin, sure as fate, to come close to my fire. One of them at last would say, ‘We’ll have to think about dinner.’ I would say nothing, and throw another handful of wood on the fire, the smell of which was like a whiff of balsam to the peeled souls of that handful of criminals. ‘Come,’ said another, ‘we’ve got to go and get something to eat.’ And one after another, a chop, a rabbit’s leg, a pigeon would appear and begin to cook, to turn a golden brown, to sizzle, and to glaze.
And as they ate they all became gentle as lambs, and insisted on my sharing everything with them. By being nice to me they tried to make up for all the bad they had done. Nothing was good enough for Lydia, and they began to show me all kinds of attentions. When I discovered someone among them who was capable of understanding me, I would tell them the story of the secret of the Master, the secret of ‘La Ben Plantada.’ It was the life of Cockaigne. Always they went to fetch new chinaware in the gentlemen’s houses, because they would never wash them, and once they had finished a meal they would throw everything, dishes, cups, spoons, into the sea.

“But all this did not last very long, for those of the opposing party would get the upper hand sooner or later. While we would be eating, one of the anarchists would come running, with the face of an exhumed corpse, bringing bad news. The left republicans had repressed the anarchist movement and trucks loaded with assault guards and machine-guns were already on their way from Cadaques. Everyone would get up, tossing the half-finished chop into the air, and prepare to leave. One would leave me a pair of shoes, another a wool blanket, another a stolen phonograph, another a down cushion ‘Come on! Let’s go! The good life is over! Everybody up! The time has come to run. Ay, Ay, they’re already coming! Ay, Ay, Ay! we’ve got to go and die!’

“And the beach became deserted again, without a living soul. But about the middle of the afternoon would come the assault troops of the separatists. They would shout, insult each other and blaspheme like the others, and like the others, no one yet thought of supper, or of dying. But I had already brought a little fresh wood and began to light the fire. Someone would say, ‘Who is that woman over there, dressed in black?’ I don’t know. She’s making a fire.’ ... One of them would come round, then another. They would watch me silently. And I wouldn’t say a word, and I would throw on a fresh handful of vinestalks that would crackle so pleasantly that it was good to hear. Someone would exclaim, ‘We’ve got to think of supper.’ Others would then shout, ‘Let’s go and find something.’

“Then in turn another kind of soldiers would come and chase them away. In short I got in this way everything I needed, and finally came the “Tercio de Santiago’, and even the Arabs. The Arabs were very well planted. All would come and sit in a circle around my fire, and they loved me like a mother. For, good or bad, when meal-time comes round one must eat, and preferably eat hot, and I myself could not starve to death. They would all have time to eat cold in the cemetery, for I was pretty sure most of them would be killed, so young though they were! As for me–what little time I still have to live ...
Que odiosea,
⁵
Señor Dios!
You can’t explain it in words!”

I found again the good fishermen of Port Lligat. All of them had preserved a nightmarish memory of the anarchist period. “No, no, never
again. That was worse than anything: stealing, murdering, and nothing more. Now things are once more the way they’ve always been: you go home, and you’re your own master!”

I opened the door of my house. Everything had disappeared. Nothing left of my library, not a single thing; only the walls covered with obscene drawings and contradictory political emblems. Under all these inscriptions, most of them in pencil and denoting the successive passage of anarchists, Communists, separatists, republicans, Trotskyists, etc., large letters painted with tar: “Viva la Anarquia! F. A. I.! Tercio de Santiago–Arriba Espana!”

After a week spent in Madrid I flew to Lisbon where Gala awaited me to continue our trip to America. In Madrid I stumbled by chance upon the sculptor Aladreu, one of the youngest members of the group of my adolescent days in Madrid. I found at the home of the poet Marquina one of my paintings of my first classic period of Cadaques. I established contact with the intellectuals, among them Eugenio Montes, with whom I had had twelve years before very close spiritual affinities, and who is the most severe and the most lyrical of our philosophers of today. Effusively I embraced the Master, the “Petronius of the Baroque” and the inventor of the Mediterranean “Ben Plantada,” and brought him messages from the ever well-planted Lydia of Cadaques. Eugenio d’Ors’s bushy and remarkably long eyebrows, with the silver price of his age, already bore a remarkable resemblance to Plato’s. I met Dyonisio Ruidejo, who is the youngest poet of the most ardent and vigorous lyric style. As for the anti-Gongorist Raphael Sanchez Moros, by his Catholic respiratory morphology and by the Machiavellism of his glance, I understood with a single glance of my own that he was initiated into all the secrets of the Italian Renaissance, and even a little more so into those of the coming Occidental renaissance.

But before giving birth to this cosmogony which for nine years I had felt pressing and growing and giving me kicks in the depths of my logical bowels I would have to continue on the road of my life, which the war of Europe might even involuntarily bar, in order to be able to continue to attend to my moral, material and capricious “needs,” as for a pregnant woman–which I was and which I continually am for the honor and glory of everyone. I needed, in fact, immediately to get away from the blind and tumultuous collective jostlings of history, otherwise the antique and half-divine embryo of my originality would risk suffering injury and dying before birth in the degrading circumstances of a philosophic miscarriage occurring on the very sidewalks of anecdote. No, I am not of those who make children by halves. Ritual first and foremost! Already I am concerning myself with its future, with the sheets and the pillows of its cradle. I had to return to America to make fresh money for Gala, him and myself ...

So I arrived in Lisbon. Lisbon beneath the frenzied song of the
crickets at that torrid period of the dogdays was a kind of gigantic frying-pan bubbling over with all the boiling oil of circumstances, in which was being cooked the future of thousands of migratory and fleeing fish, which the thousands of refugees of all sorts and all nationalities and all races had become. In that historic Place del Rossio which had once been fragrant with the stench of the burning flesh of the victims of the Inquisition, now again rose the ardent smoke of the new martyrs immolated by the red-hot iron pincers of visas and passports, with a smell which choked respiration and which was the very smell of the nauseating fried fish of destiny. Of the fish of that destiny I had to taste a piece of the tail, which the European actuality put perforce into my mouth. I chewed and rechewed it, but I did not swallow it, and the moment I felt my two feet solidly braced on the deck of the
Excambion
which was to take me to America I spat it with enraged repugnance and spite into that hand which I was going to abandon. It was in that right shoulder of the Iberian peninsula weighted down with the monumental sack of atavistic and pointless melancholy of the marvelous city of Lisbon that was performed the authentic and the most pitilessly sad drama of the European war (with the theatre empty of spectators, and with neither glory nor pleasure). It was a solitary drama, without effusion, that was being played in the oozing effusion of those hotel rooms where the refugees slept crowded together like rotting sardines, to which they returned every evening after a day of fruitless efforts, no longer discouraged, smiling with hatred and with the gangrene of hopeless bureaucratic proceedings already devouring the tissues, blue-tinged with death, of their donkeys’ patience! It was the drama of those who were going to take advantage of the small comfort offered by the sole comfort station of the ignominiously bespattered watercloset for which they also had to stand in line in order at last basely to open the veins of their sole and ultimate liberty with a razor blade!

My sojourn in Lisbon still continues to appear to me as something utterly unreal. One had always the impression of meeting familiar faces in the street. One turned round, and so they were. “Say, doesn’t she look like Schiaparelli?” It was she. “He’s the spitting image of René Clair!” It
was
René Clair! The painter Sert would be leaving the Zoological Park by streetcar just as the Duke of Windsor crossed the street and Paderewski sat down on a bench opposite to enjoy the sun. On the edge of the sidewalk, sitting on a newspaper, the famous banker, king of the bankers, would listen to the song of a cricket shut up in a golden cage, which he had just bought, and next to him the legless man who was observing him you would have sworn was Napoleon Bonaparte in person, so greatly did the bitter brow and the triangular nose resemble those of the Emperor. At the far end of the square, standing in line before the Navigation Company offices, the one you see from behind, wearing a brown suit, looks like Salvador Dali...

On arriving in America I almost immediately went to the home of
our friend of the period of the Moulin du Soleil, Caresse Crosby, at Hampton Manor. We were going to try all together to revive a little of that sun of France which had just set, far away, beyond Ermenonville. I shut myself up for five months, spending my time working, writing my book and painting–hidden away in the heart of that idyllic Virginia which constantly makes me think of Touraine, which I have never seen in my life. Gala reread Balzac to me, and on certain nights the spectre of Edgar Allan Poe would come from Richmond to see me, in a very pretty convertible car all spattered with ink. One black night he made me a present of a black telephone truified with black pieces of black noses of black dogs, inside which he had fastened with black strings a dead black rat and a black sock, the whole soaked in India ink. It was snowing. I placed the telephone on the snow, and the effect was simply and above all that of black on white.

I began to believe more and more in the good sense of that miraculous thing, the eyel In pre-sleep, with my eyes shut, I would look at my eye, with my eye from the depth of my eye, and I began to “see” my eye and to consider it as a veritable soft photographic apparatus, not of the objective world but of my hard thought and of thought in general. I immediately reached conclusions which enabled me to affirm that one can photograph thought and began the theoretical bases for my invention. This invention is today an accomplished fact, and as soon as it is mechanically perfected I shall offer it for the scientific consideration of the United States.

It will in fact become possible to obtain what has always appeared to be miraculous: the objective visualization of the virtual images of the thought and imagination of each individual. This is the true future of the cinema, that unknown and long-sought-for thing which every man at birth bears latently enfolded in the histological complexity of his brain, and which since the beginning of time and in all epochs humanity has tried to materialize by the approximate means peculiar to artistic activity, which has always been the privilege of an extremely limited number of mortals.

All the rest of my life will now be devoted to the realization and the perfecting of my invention, with the aid of the men of science with whom I shall of necessity have to collaborate. The sudden idea of my discovery occurred exactly on the night of the 8th of May in New York, in my room in the Hotel St. Regis, during an awakening of a half hour between six and half past six in the morning. When I awoke I noted down the sensational conclusions of my conception, in which I hardly dared to believe. Nevertheless my long reflections on the original plan of these notes, jotted down in haste and with anxious fear lest I forget something, have only become more and more systematically consolidated, to the point of reaching the present certainty that my invention is not a figment of my imagination, and even that the realization of the first apparatus of this kind is a not remote possibility, if I can succeed in rapidly gathering
around myself the technicians and specialists whom I will of course need in order to succeed in giving a concrete form to the reality of my discovery ...

This book is about to end.

Customarily writers begin to write their memoirs “after their life is over,” toward the end of their life, in their old age. But with my vice of doing everything differently from others, of doing the contrary of what others do, I thought that it was more intelligent to begin by writing my memoirs, and to live them afterwards. To live! To liquidate half of life in order to live the other half enriched by experience, freed from the chains of the past. For this it was necessary for me to kill my past without pity or scruple, I had to rid myself of my own skin, that initial skin of my formless and revolutionary life during the Post-War Epoch. It was necessary at all costs that I change skins, that I trade this worn epidermis with which I have dressed, hidden, shown myself, struggled, fought and triumphed, for that other new skin, the flesh of my desire, of my imminent renaissance which will be dated from the very morrow of the day this book appears. I am at this moment, as I write these lines, in the midst of making the last convulsions, which are in reality the end of this chapter, which will allow me to shuffle off and completely detach myself from the prison of my old skin, exactly as snakes do, and as those flexible pianos imagined by Dali also do, when toward the end of certain transparent October days they leave hanging all along the rocks of the beach of Monterey the torn shreds of their old lyrical epidermis which the seals–who in turn so much resemble soft pianos–believe, when they see them drying, to be the sacred remains of their polar ancestors, because of the respect with which the even and regular superiority of the ivory of the teeth of soft pianos inspires them, when they compare them with their own maritime and unsuccessful elephants’ teeth.