For a few moments I was the lover connected by umbilical cord to the bellies of his mother and his beloved, and in my ecstasy this libation made me the all-powerful master of the world. My mouth was the source of a warm but troubling well-being. I turned simultaneously into the embryo-little boy and the jealous lover, who always arranged to be next to beautiful Ursulita so as to capture the most of his beloved’s mouth and the reflections in her fascinating hair.
My desire to return to the nourishment, the warmth, the protection of the preparturient placenta was also combined with an intense taste for the strong odors of the human body: blood, sweat, urine. I liked to hide behind the kitchen doors so as to breathe in the suggestive smells of the maids in heat, whose broad beams went about their business at my eye level.
The preparation of meals also provided me with a source of deep satisfaction, what with the fragrances of kidneys, pots and pans, spices, acids, and deep fries floating out like so many promises, with flies dancing over all. I drooled over eyefuls of creamy froths, beaten egg-whites, oozing, soft, and viscous organic matters. The fact that I was forbidden to go into the kitchen only added to the quality of my savoring.
Somewhat as if I had raised the huge skirts of one of the servant girls that fascinated me, and violated the secrets kept from me under them.
I continued wetting my bed for a long time, not just out of contrariness, but to have the pleasure of feeling my warm urine running down my legs and wallowing in its odor. Adults too quickly forget the intense satisfaction there is in rolling around in one’s own filth and becoming intoxicated with one’s self. Imperative taboos turn us away and condition us against the primal verities of skin and senses. I have been able to keep intact my gifts of organic participation.
One of my memories from this period goes back to about my fifth year. I am out walking with three very beautiful, elegant, and refined young women. Three images of grace. They are speaking in low voices and try to keep a distance from me, but I have my eye on them. One of them stops, as the other two watch. With her two hands, she slightly raises her long skirt. And suddenly a stream of urine comes spurting between her two white shoes, breaks the dust of the path like a little crater, and soon runs off around the two feet, spattered and tainted with a long wet spot that turns gray on the Spanish white. Then two other little rivulets are started in silence.
Wild-eyed, I look at the three streams that soil the soil, splattering shoes and petticoats, and each splash hits me like a prickling of shame. I am fascinated by the simmering foamy yellowness that makes such cracklets in the ground. One of the young women sees me – the petrified witness – and all three laugh at once, relieved, and provocative. I stand motionless, haggard-eyed... The blood rushes from my head, and my eyes rise slowly toward the veil of one of the women, whose mocking eyelids crinkle.
I let the three ladies walk ahead of me, and follow them, sensually aroused with a voluptuous feeling of having violated their secret. I have picked up a firefly and my closed fist is full of sweat. A drop falls to the ground and cuts like acid through the thin crust of the path. I feel gooseflesh popping up on my arms.
At that time, first out of awkwardness, but later out of pleasure, I liked to splotch my undershirts with cafe au lait that made spots all the way down to my belly. One of my games was biting into the fruits in the Pichots’ garden and letting the juice run down my chin, while I gargled it in my mouth. I bit a different type of fruit each time, in order to vary the sensations, spoil as many fruits as possible, and especially not fill myself up.
One of the girl lime-blossom pickers at the Pichots’: blooming, heavy, solid breasts. She is up on a ladder. I have my fetish-crutch in hand, and feel a violent, immanent urge to lift her breasts with the fork of the crutch. So I perform an admirable example of paranoia c-critical transfer, with natural deceptiveness, although this is long before I conceived the method.
Completely absorbed by my will to satisfy my fantasy, I note that in the vestibule of the house there is a transom, and if she were to set her ladder up before that little window, at a given time her breasts would be framed right in the transom, as if artificially cut off for my special delectation, and from the inside I would be able to contemplate them without fear of being seen. While looking at the two turgescent mammaries, I would use my crutch to raise the melon hanging from the ceiling, and slowly crush it, thus gaining the full enjoyment of my act through substitution. To get the woman to come over to the transom, I leaned out of the second-storey window, and got my Diabolo tangled in a rosebush that climbed the wall there, so that, in order to free it, one would have to climb up to the transom level; then I begged the girl to come to my assistance. I contemplated her up on the ladder, sexually excited at the view of her tits, and further aroused by seeing her hairy armpits, from which a drop of sweat rolled and fell on my forehead like manna that was a harbinger of the pleasure that lay before me.
She finally moved the ladder, which gave me time to take refuge in the vestibule, get undressed – for I planned to do all this naked – and don the ermine cape that was my royal uniform. As I had anticipated, her fine breasts fitted through the transom. I shed the royal ermine, and as she made efforts to release the Diabolo I raised the crutch and slowly squashed one of the hanging melons as my eyes feasted on those gorgeous tits. My pressure crushed the melon completely, and its fragrant sticky juice ran down in a long stream that I tried to catch in my mouth. My whole face was flooded with sweet effusion. My eyes, moist with sublime tears, went constantly from the breasts to the melon, until they no longer could tell them apart in the dim light. When the woman came down from her ladder, light suddenly flooded into the vestibule.
The squashed melon came tumbling down on my head, and I collapsed haggard on my ermine cape, broken, enchanted, spent. For a moment, I was sorry that as she came down the ladder the woman had not been able to see me naked and sticky. But I was so weary that soon I had but one desire: to stretch out on my bed. I had just experienced a mental orgasm that I was never to forget.
From those hours, I have retained a sharp taste for armpits and the strong smell of their sweat (but I have since divested the precious place of its hairy attributes. Today, I prefer depilatoried or shaved armpits, with a slightly bluish tint), and the ample, plethoric, turgescent breasts of my childhood remain very powerful erotic archetypes. Certainly, the creative process of my genius developed during these intensely pleasurable moments, and among them the games that I would call intra-uterine are the most precious of all.
My tub-game was one of the most important contributions to the crystallization of my paranoiac-critical delirium. At the Mill Tower, I would place a chair in the middle of a tub that I filled with warmish water that had been long in the sun, and I worked that way, soaked almost to the armpits, painting on hatbox lids that I placed on a washboard set on the rim of the tub. I was reconstructing the warm ambience and protective isolation of a belly.
I painted Helen of Troy or sketched Venus de Milo with delicious little erotic thrills. By playing the embryo-genius in that way, I gave birth to the genius; setting up the conditions for its birth, I created its cause. My paranoia reversed the order of physical values, for to me effects can just as well be causes. I shortcircuit the logic of reactions by introducing irrational elements into the chain so as to cause mutations. Salvador Dalí was invented inside a belly created by Salvador Dalí. I am at once my father, my mother, and myself – and perhaps bit of a deity, too.
Mr. Truiter’s optical theater and the appearance of Galushka coincide with a period when I might have enjoyed being a girl. The Narcissus in me was surprised to find beneath his hand a scrawny, moist, and limp appendage, a kind of useless excrescence that I tried sometimes to hide by squeezing it between my thighs, when I donned the ermine and crown of my royal panoply. I was the less proud of being a boy for the fact that my elder brother, Salvador, vied with me for first place in my parents’ memory. But the situation called for my having male organs.
And in my daydreams, Galushka was virtually sexless, with a flat chest and a crotch that could hardly be divined beneath her dress, even when she fell down and her legs spread. At one time, I might even have fallen in love with Butxaques and his little rear end so clearly marked out by his tight-fitting pants, had he been willing not to behave like a violent, brutal boy who was already sex-conscious.
The girls of my own age that I saw on the street, alive, laughing and chattering girls, scared me, paralyzed me, and I even felt ashamed when my eyes met theirs. Not one of them would ever be able to understand me. What good would it do to talk to them? I did not belong to any sex, I was neither boy nor girl, but perhaps angel or demon. Seated in my vaginal tub, I was remaking a sex for myself.
Dalí Faces Solitude
I accentuated my solitude by reducing to the minimum contacts with others. Meals were knocked off in short order. I took refuge in the toilet on the slightest of pretexts. I have almost always had, at home or at my parents’ friends’, one room that was mainly my isolation booth and studio. I avoided boys of my age, even at school recess. Along with my aggressiveness – of which I have given many examples – self-destructive tendencies were also developing. I was fascinated by empty spaces. While I adored high places that let me dominate situations, I experienced dizziness that both scared and excited me. I would repeatedly jump into space from the top of a stairway or wall, whether alone or for the excitement of doing it before everyone. I was aware of the danger and of my strength, of the headiness of death and the narcissistic voluptuousness of my body. Galushka was in a way my enchanted double, a perfect image of myself that I could love, re-create, adore, till my eyes streamed sublime tears. She was my spiritualized accomplice, the part of my soul that I was lacking because Salvador the First had taken it with him into the grave.
With Dullita, my narcissism bloomed. I often found I had my hand on my genitals, surprised by the sweet, burning sensation born from that contact. I was really not precocious when it came to sexual understanding; the conversations I had overheard among my schoolmates had taught me little, and I was yet to discover the joys of solitary or group onanism. My sexual exasperation first took the form of incoherent speeches; the profusion of the words that poured out of my mouth was like an orgasm and in no way expressed the sublimeness of my thoughts. My sharp-as-a-blade intelligence seemed to penetrate the mysteries of the laws of the world through the intoxication of my genius, on which I sold myself with fanatical pride. But, toward myself, I was filled with deep tenderness, while also subjecting myself to real suffering, experiencing a masochistic voluptuousness in forcing down on my head the royal crown that was too small and tortured my temples, or keeping my two ears pinned under my schoolboy cap, in order later to free myself and let the wind blow around my suddenly bare head, closing my eyes to savor the ecstasy of the delicious caress. When I had a nosebleed, a big metal key was applied to my back, and I forced it into my flesh like a hair-shirt. At the same time, I considered myself inordinately handsome, and loved to look at my nude body whenever I got the chance.
I had invented Dullita in order to test my new power, taking as archetype a little girl whom I had seen in back view on the street, urged along by two girl friends who held her by the waist. I only heard her name and did not see her face. The mere memory of her wispy waistline brought tears to my eyes. But I also dreamed of making my beloved suffer, making her my slave, forcing her to lean out over empty space in order to terrify her. And with perverse joy I longed to torture her mentally. I finally one day did meet a little girl, who had come along with her mother to gather lime-blossom leaves at the Pichots’, and right off, touching her with my fetish-crutch, I dubbed her Dullita.
My passion turned fanatical, despite the upsurging anguish at having to share my narcissistic exaltation. I would have wanted to make her an angel so as to read my reflection in her eyes, and drink my own saliva from her mouth. I would have wanted her to die of love, as my very own luxury, and become the plaything of my caprice. I dragged her along into my wide-awake dreams, and with her lived through a dangerous and magnificent existential experience.
I courted her first by skillfully manipulating my Diabolo before her, creating the finest poses to show myself to advantage, sending the Diabolo into such extreme configurations that finally it got away from me. Dullita rushed to pick it up. She immediately asked if she could play with me. I reacted to her request as if it were a provocation.
How dared she? When she could just stand there and admire me. I resented her lack of submission. And when, out of coquetry, she tried to hold on to the Diabolo for a moment, I got angry and grabbed her so roughly I made her cry.
Later, alone in my tower, I watched the approaching storm, and saw the clouds attacking the sky in a terrifying tumult threaded through with lightning. Swallows in the van, mere lines in the sky, announced the tempest ahead. The entire countryside, consenting, submitting to the forces that electrified it, thrilled with the thirst of desire. The rain unfurled with erotic violence. The entire humus surrendered its odors like a woman fully possessed. Dullita, pressed against me, in the tower loft, was frightened by the thunderclaps and furious rain squalls. The darkness grew deeper. And to feel this little bird nestled against me in the isolation that made her wholly dependent on my strength, allowed me to savor the instant with ravishing delight.
But Dullita lay on her back and closed her eyes. As I bent over her to observe her tense face, she suggested we play at sucking each other’s tongues, and forthwith stuck out toward me a little pointed tongue. I pushed her violently away, feeling wounded with shame at this salivary exchange which would perhaps have enchanted me had I conceived it myself as an evidence of Dullita’s subjugation. But this sharing horrified me as if it were a profanation of my own person. I showed my anger so threateningly that she became frightened. I would have liked to take her by her narrow waist and break her in two. The rain stopping, I suggested we go to the top of the tower, and ran headlong for the stairs. She did not follow immediately. Fearing my prey might escape me and being impatient, I doubled back, furious, and grabbed her by the hair, painfully forcing her to come on up the steps.
When I was sure she was obeying my wishes, I let her go on alone continuing up the calvary of her enslavement. Obviously, she could not know that each movement of hers corresponded to the scenario I had mentally conceived days before, as I dreamt of taking Dullita to the top of my tower, like the master of the world revealing his domain to his queen, drunk with power and perfectly capable, as the absolute tyrant, of hurling her from the top of the dungeon – his whim being the only law.
I had set my fetish-crutch and my Diabolo out like flagpoles to welcome her. The clattering, shattering tempest above our heads supplied a decor out of the Apocalypse. To get her to the exact place I wanted her to be, I pretended the opposite of what I wished, knowing that her desire to provoke me would make her react in reverse: I told her that if she did not go near the edge, I would give her my Diabolo. Naturally, she mockingly rushed over there and sat down on the parapet, her legs dangling over the side, to defy what she took for my concern and protectiveness toward her.
I moved stealthily away and grabbed my crutch. I was fascinated by Dullita’s frail back as, innocent as the lamb, she swung her legs while her eyes followed the last skirmishes of the winds driving away the clouds. Softly, lovingly, with the sublime courage of Abraham raising his knife against Isaac in the name of Jehovah, I set the fork of my crutch against her narrow waist, and pressed slightly so it would fit in well. I was experiencing unprecedented pleasure. I was the celebrant holding the Eucharist above the bowed heads of the faithful. By a sort of sublime misunderstanding, my Dullita, totally unaware of my intentions, saw me and, falling in with what she thought to be a game, coquettishly herself tightened her hips against the fork of the crutch and settled in with the satisfaction of a woman offering her charms. She smiled, and her face had an expression of intense contentment. This charming grace was a si
gn from heaven. I inserted the end of the crutch into the opening of a flagstone, then, suddenly taking the Diabolo from her hands, flung it from the top of the tower, down into the darkness that was beginning to envelop the ground.
I had just killed the dream-image of Dullita by exorcising all that haunted me through this symbolic act that transformed the impulses of death into spirituality. This transfer made her memory into a sublime image which would one day incite me to resurrect her through artistic re-creation.
This sacrifice had definitely tempered my narcissistic soul by revealing to me all the resources I might anticipate from the wonderful lode that in my eyes the limitless blossoming of my personality now was.
At What Point Did Dalí Become An Adolescent?
Drying in the sun, after bathing, one morning at the Gulf of Rosas, I noticed a light black down, prolonged by a few longer hairs outlining my pubis. I delicately grasped one of those hairs and pulled on it, causing the flesh to rise as the hair doubled in length. With a sharp tug I pulled it out and looked at it in the sun, surprised at this new part of me which I had not seen coming into existence. I wet it with saliva, and the light became iridescent on it. Rolling it around my finger, I made it into a band the ends of which stuck together perfectly. Then, with my saliva, I made a kind of bubble that turned into a little rainbow through which I could see the beach and the sea. I hardened one of my thickest hairs by wetting it and letting it dry in the sun, then used it as a pin to prick the bubble.
I had less innocent games, too, having discovered the joys of masturbation in the toilets at the Drawing Institute, but it had not given me any true pleasure yet, supplying mainly astonishment at seeing my penis grow big, then suddenly blossom and spew out its sperm. My hand quickly gained expertise in this caress, and I found more delight in the gestures of adoration addressed to this living part of my body than in the rapid ecstasy that revulsed me at the termination of the exercise. I was seized with the view of this physical transformation of my sexual organ, as it went from a soft appendage to being a long hard one, the tip of which turned into a red and then purple glans until its little lips spread and projected their semen. The whole of this operation fascinated me as an extraordinary process of posses sion. I was vaingloriously proud of being able to know and live this phenomenon and also full of consternation at what I was doing, realizing how reprehensible it might be considered. In truth, I was very backward by comparison to my schoolmates who had long since become addicted to onanism, and whose bits of overheard conversation on the subject I had been intrigued by. I had been totally unaware of how one went about procuring such pleasure. I only knew it could be done alone or in twos, but my singularity kept me from asking any of my fellows to explain it to me. My ignorance, the secrecy in which this was carried on, and the belated revelation of its ecstasy all endowed me with a painful feeling of guilt. I remember that, after the first time I experienced this solo pleasure, feeling let down and guilty, I determined I would never do it again – a resolution that lasted only three days. After that, the practice became almost automatic.
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