This period of the discovery of my sexual proclivity was also characterized by dreams in which I lost all my teeth, while I became subject to violent nosebleeds. My guilt feelings increased the more. Then, to overcome my remorse, I devoted myself to drawing with unequaled attention and energy, and my progress was constant. And each work session was generally followed by a masturbation session. I had by now perfected the caress so as to increase and refine the enjoyment. I quickly came to associate the pleasures of masturbating and drawing. And further to enhance the voluptuousness of it, I invented a method: rather than feel guilty or fight the temptation, I decided to set one day aside for “doing it”, Sunday.
The week now went by in anticipation, exaltation, and a restraint that almost made me dizzy. The anticipation became more voluptuous than the consummation. It was these hours of my adolescence that taught me one of the key principles of my method: exacerbation of desire until it is immobilized, with anticipation becoming an ascesis, and refusal to take what one can possess, a source of delectation. What we call pleasure, moreover, the quick ejaculation, soon appeared to me as a mere wink of voluptuousness, quickly gone, compared to the deeper satisfactions I could get from the complex display of my will power; postponing my desire, molding it, stretching it, working it to suit my imaginative fantasy. I could live “in” pleasure that way for a whole week and constantly impart to my whole body the feeling of my desire, whereas the spasm wore out my muscles, dispelled my enchantment, and left me swollen with regrets.
This was when I started looking girls in the eye. Until then, they had intimidated me, made me blush, and I had been able to watch them calmly only from my balcony. I had never been involved in the evening games that sent boys and girls together out into the streets of Figueras, in chases punctuated by laughter and cries; and I reveled in my moroseness, my originality, intoxicating myself with my chimeras, cultivating my latent masochism as if it were some rare plant.
How Dalí Remembers His First Love
One afternoon, at the Institute, after an elective philosophy lecture that was held out-of-doors, I exchanged a long look with one of the girl students. When our eyes met they recognized immediate agreement in each other. Without hesitation, we left together. Running, the better to hide our emotion, we were soon outside the town. The countryside was not far away. I pointed to a wheatfield. A few more steps, and we were lying down in a little nest made by the bent wheatstalks. Her fine firm tits attracted me. I put my hands on them and felt them moving under her dress. I took her mouth at length, wildly, almost choking off her breath. And since she had a cold, she sniffled hurriedly, unable to hold back the mucus that smeared over her cheeks. As soon as I released her, she would dab at her nose with her little hankie, then with the hem of her skirt. She did not stop sniffling during our whole date, and seemed terribly embarrassed. I took her in my arms, rubbing my lips against her blond hair to wipe off the streaks of dried snot that tickled my lips and try to inhale the little-lamb fragrance that came up from her armpits.
It was on this novia that for five years I was to essay the keyboard of my egotistic, narcissistic, paranoiac, and sexual feelings, and bring out the various aspects of my sexual perversity. First, to fascinate her. Through my vocabulary, my kisses, my attitudes, my ambitions. She was easy prey. My natural lying and hypocrisy quickly created a spell that conquered her.
Then, to break any resistance she might have. From the very first afternoon, I had hit her with a terrible truth that dumbfounded her: “I’m not in love with you.” Very quickly, I let her know that I would go with her for only five years, without ever falling in love. Our love affair was chaste: caressing of breasts and much tongue-kissing. This continence, my contemptuous tones, my rude attitude wove the artful net of moral slavery I wanted to impose upon her.
Servitude, far from decreasing her love, made her even more devoted, and confirmed to me that the natural masochism of people was a lode to be exploited as one of the true sources of my delight. My coldness made her have an even greater feeling of guilt, inferiority, raising even higher the level of her unrequited desires, that I aimed to bring to “white heat.” At each of our meetings, I set the dialogue in such a way that every sentence I spoke became a dart aimed at her heart and her love. I wanted to get her to experience the sensation of a complex pleasure, based on the single fact that she suffered from knowing her love for me was hopeless and that I battened on her suffering.
Her beauty was an ideal instrument for me to test my desire on. I had decided there would be no love between us. This sentiment had to remain in the domain of daydream, the imaginary and absolute. I used her as a totem whose tits I could squeeze, whose spit I could drink, whose mouth I could bite; as a guinea pig I would inoculate with love before placing it in the center of a maze of traps set to test it, to measure its susceptibility to suffering, and study the evolution of its illness. I would have been delighted had the experi ment not had to halt this side of death.
She was incessantly reborn out of my worst wickednesses and responded with immeasurable docility to my whims: show me your tits, lower down, lie down, play dead, stop breathing, kiss me. The comedy went on at each meeting without her obedience ever flagging. Sometimes she had weeping fits that I coldly cut off. Each of her moments of weakness made me the more demanding. I even ordered her to stop seeing any of her friends, so she might be entirely devoted to me alone. She acquiesced. I destroyed in her mind any esteem she had for her kin by demolishing them with bitter criticisms. I created a desert around her, and her sadness grew deeper by the minute. I tortured her by counting out the months that remained until we were to separate, as I had irrevocably decreed. I finally made it so she was unable to sleep, and she lost that healthy look that disgusted me so. She became waxen, sorrowful, and love-hungry. Our daily half hour together was a torture ever renewed, but that she could not live without. I started skipping days. She wrote me letters of exquisite banality, but overflowing with passion, which I left in my pockets. I soon had her weeping every time so I could drink her tears in with the kisses. I alternated tenderness and violence the better to keep her off balance. When she was reduced to the state of a mental and sentimental wreck, I said farewell. The deadline had come, anyway: I was leaving for Madrid.
Our affair had lasted for five years. I had gotten her into a kind of state of mystical exaltation. I had imposed my cynicism, my violence, and my lies on my Nina, and especially I had perfected the principle of my system: maximization of sensual pleasure through the deliberate unfulfillment and subjugation of one’s partner. Naturally, I was not really in love with her, but I got all the satisfaction I could from her subjection, her veritable bestialization. I regretted only that the end of the affair did not also signify the death of my mistress. We were both virgins when we separated.
Love seemed to me a kind of sickness, somewhat like seasickness, with the same annunciatory symptoms: shivers, anxiety, and loss of balance. I said at that time that the feeling of falling in love might be mistaken for the need to vomit.
But this made me no less susceptible to the beauty of women, and the image of the broad-buttocked cooks with their turgescent tits, stiff hairs, and strong smells that had awakened my childhood senses, was being slowly transformed. At eighteen, I was taken with elegance, paid no more attention to breasts, but insisted on an elongation of the iliac bones which beneath the dress had to appear like the aggressive handle of a basket. I liked shaved, bluish armpits, and wanted even the stupidest of women to have an intelligent look in the eye, for appearances were all my eroticism cared about. Wholesomeness seemed to me to be in bad taste, except where hair was concerned.
My eroticism found its fodder in three elements: angelicism, i.e., an expression that was seemingly asexual; cold, crude, refined, cruelty that killed sentiment; and a scatology which, as in the paintings of Gustave Moreau, is reflected by the accumulation of jewels, chains, buckles, raiment. Gold and shit, as is well known, represent the same thing to psychoanaly
sts. A woman in the grip of the shimmering tyranny of jewels is as if covered with excrement, and makes my mouth water.
Two things haunted me, and paralyzed me, at the time. One, a panic fear of venereal diseases. (My father had bred in me a horror of microbes. It is something I have never gotten over, and at times it has led me to fits of madness.) But, more especially, I long suffered from the terrible ache of believing myself impotent. Naked and trying to compare myself to my schoolmates, I found my cock small, pitiful, and soft. I have never forgotten a pornographic novel I once read in which a Don Juan effected new holes in female bellies with ferocious delight, stating that what he loved was to hear women crack open like so many watermelons. I was sure I would never be able to make any woman crack open like a watermelon. And that weakness gnawed at me. I tried to hide this aberration from myself, but I was often overcome by fits of uncontrollable laughter, reaching the point of hysteria, which were like the external sign of the great shifts that were taking place deep inside me. It was time for me to meet Gala.
“REPUGNANCE IS THE SENTRY STANDING RIGHT NEAR THE DOOR TO THOSE THINGS WE DESIRE THE MOST.”
Chapter Six: How To Conquer Paris
I was dreaming not of love but of glory, and I knew that the road to success led through Paris. But in 1927 Paris was far from Figueras, far away, mysterious, and big. I landed there one morning with my sister and aunt, to judge its distance and size, as a boxer does during a round of studying his opponent.
First I discovered Versailles (and continued to like the Escorial better) and the musty Musée Grévin waxworks. My self-confidence increased daily, but nothing essential had been accomplished. What I needed was the accolade of the only Parisian who mattered in my eyes: Pablo Picasso.
I had carefully prepared my way to him. I knew that Picasso had seen one of my paintings in Barcelona, Muchacha de Espaldes (Rear View Of A Girl; known in English as Girl’s Shoulder or Girl’s Back), and had liked it: he had mentioned it to his dealer, Paul Rosenberg, who had written me out of the blue to ask for some photographs of my work. I had asked a friend of Lorca’s, the Cuban painter Manuel Angel Ortiz, to take me to Picasso’s studio. As soon as I got to 23 Rue La Boétie, I knew those two jet-black button eyes of his had recognized me. I was “the other one” – the only one able to stand up to him. (In truth, now I know the world was a little too small for the two of us. Fortunately, I was still young!) I respectfully tendered a gift to him, another Figueras muchacha such as the one he had appreciated, and it took me quite a while to extricate it from its mummy’s wrappings; but it was a real live painting that came out of the diapers and it seemed to me that as he looked at it, it took on a sudden new life. Picasso spent a long while, scrutinizing it minutely, and it had never looked finer to me. From that minute on, he was at great pains to dazzle me.
My opening agitation was now replaced by assurance, as he took me into his studio on the floor above and for two hours kept displaying his paintings for me, the largest as well as the smallest, which he put on his easel. He went to and fro, choosing, weighing, setting up, silent and quick, stepping back, carefully inspecting his own genius but dancing his courtship dance for me alone and looking at me with long looks of complicity.
We each knew who we were. Our mutual silence was charged with an electricity of the highest potential. On coming in, I had told him I wanted to see him before wanting to visit the Louvre. And with Olympian assurance he had accepted this compliment that might have choked a Spanish grandee. It was my way of admitting the head start he had over me. It was 1927, and I still had to prove myself before I could overtake him. He must have sensed something, for our last glances at each other were a mutual sign of understanding and challenge. On your guard, Picasso! On your guard, Dalí! I had accomplished the main thing. Paris did not scare me any more. The probe had come up with satisfactory markings. Soon, I would be able to say without any doubt, “Paris is mine!”
Back in Figueras, I painted a great deal: an empty-eyed harlequin, a soft guitar, and a flexible fish in Nature Morte au Clair de Lune (Still Life By Moonlight), and Le Miel Plus Doux que le Sang (Honey Sweeter Than Blood), which, like the sucking-cup of my childhood maté, when I think of it fills me with a liquid that supplies the honey of my uterine life.
And also a sun dripping with light and bathing women fit to eat. This ardent work alternated with intense meditation. I put together, for my own account, the jigsaw puzzle of my genius, and conceived the early beginnings of my paranoiac-critical method, which those works attest. I ceased forever having any doubts about the imperious requirement of my own witness. Henceforth, an indefeasible lucidity sorted and channeled all the assaults of the world about me and even my own unconscious impulses to make the whole of the world, even in its most violent contradictions, serve toward the satisfying of my desires. I was henceforth in the saddle, but ever more solitary, as evidenced by my laughing jags, so unusually intense. I was suffocating beneath the pressure of my own genius.
I knew a mysterious machinery was at work forming the circumstances of my destiny. I had but to be myself in order to exist and when the time came everything would be ready for my triumph. I had not the slightest doubt about my royal future and laughed in advance at the interference, the delays that a few grains of sand would try to cause in my inexorable march forward.
Pierre Loeb, a Parisian dealer who was proud of the many artists he claimed to have discovered, happened to come through Figueras with Miró, who knew and liked my work. So he gave him a chance to show what a talent scout he was. But to no avail. A week later I got a letter from the dealer, urging me to work to reach “the development of [my] undeniable qualities so he might be able to handle [me].” He had just passed his chance by and returned to the grisaille of his grocery shop. But the very same day Miró was writing my father to assure him of his conviction of my “brilliant future.” Everything happened as anticipated. And another of my friends, Luis Buñuel, became the messenger of my fame.
Buñuel had conceived the remarkable idea of getting his mother to finance a film, and the mediocre idea of a childish scenario: the animation of the various sections of a newspaper, news in brief, theatre, comic strips, and so on. I wrote him that it just happened I had written a scenario that would revolutionize contemporary cinema and that he had to come on at once. He came.
The result of this meeting was Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog). Script under his arm, Buñuel went back to Paris. I was to join him there two months later.
I had thought up a film that I expected to revolt, provoke, upset the ways of thinking and seeing, the sense of bourgeois entertainment of the intellectuals and snobs of the French capital. A film that would carry each member of the audience back to the secret depths of adolescence, to the sources of dreams, destiny, and the secret of life and death, a work that would scratch away at all received ideas and in a massive blow prove my genius and Buñuel’s talent. In thirty minutes my name had to become engraved in the memories of the audience in nightmarish, fantastic, surrealistic letters.
Un Chien Andalou is an animated Dalí painting. All the symbols of my plastic dream dance a mad round in it to the rhythm of my orgasm. The film was intended as a pyrotechnic display to write Dalí’s signature in letters of fire and allow me to cross the stages of celebrity by giant steps.
All histories of film give it careful analysis, and even the least well-disposed are forced to recognize that it was a date in film history, a scandalous act, the expression of a will to shock, and conceived in such a way as to create the greatest possible visual malaise at the spectator level. Revolt, angst, dream, imagination, scatology, all made this concept of mine an anti-film contrary to all cinematic rules. I had hoped to see audiences faint during the first sequence when a straight razor runs through and slits a girl’s eye; see them vomit at discovering the scene of the rotting donkeys with their empty eye sockets and chopped-away lips; see them weep impotently at the naked woman carrying a sea urchin on each arm; sweat with fear as
the couple behind the window does on discovering the accident in the street below... An admirable sadistic realization appealing to everyone’s latent masochism, Un Chien Andalou, that succès de scandale, marked my first Parisian recognition.
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