Never had I experienced such a feeling of power, possession, and grace. Our salivas were love potion. Our tongues were exacer bated sex organs. Our teeth bumped sharply against each other’s like shields, but these barriers only made our desires that much more ardent. I would have wanted to be able to dive into her, to lap her, eat her, tear her flesh. And I bit her lips violently until the taste of her blood filled my mouth and I was able to suckle on the fluid sweeter than honey. I was turning vampire, becoming ferocious, falling into a chasm of unheard-of enjoyment. I was a lover.
I remember taking Gala by her hair and throwing her head back, as I cried, “Tell me what I should do now. Tell it to me obscenely so I can become a man and an animal.” Then something unheard-of happened. Gala’s face became fatal and as if fixed by time standing still, assuming the implacable expression of a goddess and at the same time the pathos of a pythoness, as she told me, “I want you to kill me.”
In a flash, I understood that Gala had seen through me, seen right through my soul. She was throwing my own mystery right back in my face. Gala had laid bare my criminal intentions. As she walked airily in front of me, along the paths, over the chasms, or watched me pushing the rocks down into the sea, she knew I was thinking of killing her. She appeared to me suddenly as the Immaculate Intuition. Her clairvoyance overwhelmed me. At the same time, she showed me the esteem she had for me. Gala judged me worthy of the most daring of actions and the most divine courage and capable also of having them brought out. Gala was the love to whom I could pledge myself.
But the truth was even greater than that. Tearing herself away from my furiously grateful kisses she spoke to me of my crime with the detailed precision of a director setting up a key scene. She explained to me that I had nothing to fear, for she would leave a letter disguising my horrible felony as a suicide. She was thanking me in advance for shortening her days, but just wanted the murder to be done as quickly as possible, so as to avoid any suffering, even mental. This fear of death and the instants that precede it was always present in her as an obsession. In choosing me as her executioner she gave away her secret and proved her love for me. We talked at great length about the different methods that my imagination provided. Of course, I was not capable of choking her; poison was somewhat doubtful and might also lead to painful death throes; throwing her from a high parapet or the tower of a cathedral did not have the warranty of non-suffering that Gala demanded. The main thing was to avoid waiting and suffering. Total surprise and immediate success were the key conditions. A revolver? I was all thumbs. Gala discussed her death with assurance, with calm, almost voluptuously. Like the mistress of a house giving her orders for laying the table. With a seriousness that showed me this was no affectation, but a fundamental metaphysical intention.
Gala wanted to die and I was the one she had chosen as the lord high executioner. I was the magic element in her life, the miracle of fate. Her suffering, her loneliness were the equals of mine. Her quiet courage amazed me. That she would submit like the Paschal Lamb overwhelmed me. In a flash, a capital mutation took place in me. My soul was being tempered in the spectacle of this admirable attitude. All the disparate parts of my genius were coming together. I had exhausted the subject by going over in imagination all the details of my crime, as if I had explored my own madness. My cruelty, my ferocity, my desire to humiliate and to soil were being transformed like a laser beam in the diamond prism of Gala’s heart and intelligence. From that moment on, I was cured of my haunting obsessions, my laughter, my hysterics.
Unbelievable, wonderful – in the full sense of the word! A kiss sealed my new future. Gala became the salt of my life, the steel of my personality, my beacon, my double – ME.
Henceforth there were Dalí and Gala united for eternity.
I no longer know whether we made love at that minute, for I was too delirious. My limbs no longer belonged to me, an unbelievable strength had possession of me. I felt myself a man, freed from my terrors and my impotence. By her, I was henceforth gifted with telluric vertical forces such as allow a man to penetrate a woman.
How Love Transformed Dalí’s Vision Of The World
Gala revealed Dalínian love to Dalí. I was at the point of almost absolute narcissism, particularly during masturbation.
I garnered sexual pleasure from my self exalted and totemized into my penis standing erect and caressed on to ecstasy. But the ultimate moment of pleasure is the instant in which there appears, just before the spurt of sperm, a strong image that dazzles me and of which my act is somehow the negation: my father on his deathbed, for example, or else I gaze with the greatest intensity at an image as if I were trying to engrave it in myself and arrest time. I masturbated scores of times looking out the small attic window at the steeple of the Figueras church – because it was what was before my eyes, of course, but it was also a premonitory attempt, since the steeple was razed during the Spanish Civil War. And in truth, that delight in the image which I expel from my memory or which I record intensely at the moment of orgasm constituted my true erotic joy. I am imagefully orgasmic, and my painting is a pursuit of ecstasy.
I have always taken delight in making up erotic games that in my imagination are films in which the image of each frame is unbelievably precise. I reconstitute with hallucinated exactness the details of a position, every pubic hair, every grain of the skin, every line, and my pleasure springs from the quality of fineness and precision of my visions.
With Gala pleasure became joy by complexifying itself in an unbelievable way. I can give no better idea of it than to refer to Proust who with the taste of a madeleine recreates a whole world. Gala is like a magic mirror toward which the most marvelous mo ments of the successive presents of my life converge. Just before I explode inside her, after having penetrated and caressed her with my cock, on a rhythm that is natural and full of tenderness, I can feel mounting in me a power of imagery that dazzles me vertiginously. Not a radiant image but an unbelievable wealth of visions that are so many privileged moments with the retinue of their odor, their affectivity that is part of it, a quality of memories that submerges my consciousness. As if ruled by the gridwork of a decoding system, these images soon become orderly and convey to me a unique truth from which my erotic enjoyment is born.
Over the Figueras steeple associated with the memory of my adolescent masturbations, are superimposed the lines of the St. Narcissus church at Gerona and a view of the Delft church painted by Vermeer. The superimposition of these three privileged churches gives my orgasm a new and exalting dimension. The pleasure of the flesh can be achieved only if a special dimension is created, a sort of stereo scopic phenomenon, an imaginary hologram as true as true. My mental life has to take part intimately in the blossoming of my body. At the minute when I melt into Gala I always succeed in a grandiose superimposition of my visions, and my orgasm at one and the same time occurs in three dimensions: Gala’s body, my own, and a kingdom that is the present of all my presents.
I have suddenly to have present all of these images of my past that make up the whole cloth of my life. They are the bed of my enjoyment. Each time, Gala is making love with all of the Dalís that ever existed. In painting I have tried to convey this sensation by reconstructing the vision of a fly’s eye that gives the feeling of being in all dimensions, up and down, right and left, front and back, or even the moiré fabric that superimposes luminous images of reality in which one can select one’s vision according to distance. Every microscopic element of the moiré can give birth to a separate vision. To make love comes down to inventing an anamorphosis of reality into the Dalínian conception of eroticism.
Gala has become a fundamental catalytic element in my life. My visual and affective memory has been transcended by her. Thanks to her – to her love felt and accepted by myself – I can bring forth this sheaf of projections of images and am capable of selecting among them the strongest, most qualitative, so I can decant my prodigious wealth to produce the diamond of Dalínian reality.
She is indispensable to me because thanks to her I can produce my elixir, my semen, and the substance of the strength that allows me to conquer and dominate the world.
I might have remained nothing but a voyeur impassioned of the spectacle of couples whipped to frenzies of desire. Gala allowed me to accede to the spiritual delights of Eros, she knocked out the barriers of my childhood fancies, my death anxieties, by appearing nude before me, stripped down to her own obsessions. She cured me of my self-destructive rage by offering herself as holocaust on the altar of my rage to live. I did not go mad, because she took over my madness.
As important as her gifts of love, are her gifts of persuasion. Her discourse is essential to my soul. She calms me. She reveals me. She makes me. She convinces me of my talent to live. The paranoiac-critical method owes its all to her. She forced me to transform my lucidity into a faculty of self-analysis that screens my most awful and awesome thoughts to turn them into light and action. I should have died crushed under the weight of my imagination and fears. I became wealthy with all the mud that I turned into gold. I channeled the torrent of my impressions with which I domesticated my reality.
Once I wrote a manifesto against the blind and afterwards experienced fear, even anguish, over the loss of my sight. I spent entire days maintaining the madness of a poor fisherboy of Cadaqués who finally committed suicide.
Feeling guilty, I went into a state of arrest, becoming unable to eat or drink, by way of self-punishment. These are two cases out of a hundred. Gala was always there to ex plain my attitude to me, bring me back to normal, return me to my paintbrushes, and turn my haunting obsessions into genius.
Out of the most terrible mental malady, my fantastic wan derings, my paranoiac visions, my deliriousness, she made a classical order. She de-li-mit-ed – I might say Dalí-mit-ed – my delirium and set up the mental mechanisms that determine the share of truth. Thanks to her, I can differentiate between dream and reality, between ethereal intentions and practical inventions. By exercising constantly with her intelligence, I developed my sense of objectivity while at the same time maintaining the freedom of the irreducible share of my paranoia from which my genius derives. This dualism is the most unbelievable originality of my being. I achieved the sublime mutation of evil into good, madness into order, and even succeeded in getting my contemporaries to accept and share my madness. Dalí projected himself on the world and thus became truly Dalí.
Had Dalí Already Made Love To Another Woman?
Dalí cannot come with any other woman. It is impossible.
You cannot be unfaithful to your shadow, and to lose it is to lose your soul. That is quite enough for me, and I do not think either of having children. Those embryos disgust me. Their fetal aspect bothers me wildly. Nor could I ever, like any genius, give birth to anything but an idiot.
I also do not want to face up to the reality of Gala’s death. My mind would need to call on all of its resources to survive that. But with the training she has put me through I am certain I could maintain my intelligence at the level of my love of life. Though henceforth I could overcome the most abysmal of misfortunes, she would remain irreplaceable. I have moreover so often thought of her death, from the very first day of our love, that I am as if prepared for that tragedy. Gala today, as on that first day, goes on saying that her death would be the finest day of her life.
Perhaps I would say, despite my immense sorrow, as I did the day after our first coming-together, in Figueras when I saw her to the train as she was departing for Paris, despite my love and my sorrow at seeing her leave, “Alone at last.” For nothing is greater than to discover one’s true dimensions and put up with one’s solitude. Gala taught that to me, so it would be one more way of paying deep tribute to her by going on living as she had wanted.
At that time, I was hardly inured despite my pride and like one obsessed I had to look for my strength and courage among the things she had imprinted with her mark, her odors, her memory: an old pair of rope sandals, a swimsuit, a pebble. I kneaded them in my hands, smelled them with delight, trying to recapture a bit of her presence and her life, and warming my heart with the magnetism they still radiated.
I had my work. I locked myself in my Figueras studio for a month. I finished The Great Masturbator and Portrait Of Paul Eluard. I felt it incumbent on me to fix forever the face of the poet from whose Olympus I had stolen one of the muses.
I left for Paris at the end of the summer, to arrange for my first show, which was to open in November at the Galerie Goëmans. That period remains for me a series of strong images that embody the voluptuousness of deliberate defeat.
I am in a florist’s shop and do not have enough money to pay for the hundred roses I have just ordered for Gala. I wait until the very last moment before going to see Gala whom I am dying to see again.
On our honeymoon at Sitges and Barcelona, I let Gala go back to Paris alone, so as to go and see my father, who tells me it is unthinkable that I should marry a Russian woman. Despite my denials, he believes Gala is a drug addict and has turned me into a narcotics dealer, which alone in his eyes would explain the unlikely sums of money I have been making.
He was to write me that he disowned me. Out of pain, I decided to shave my head completely and, before leaving Cadaqués, went and buried my hair on the beach with a batch of sea-urchin shells fragrant of cunt.
I am on the highest hill overlooking Cadaqués and stare at my village for a last farewell. With my bald scalp, I leave for Paris, a picture of the anguish, pain, and sorrow that indicate the passage to maturity and the landmarks of the Galactite ordeals.
In Paris, all the paintings in the show have been sold and my success is enormous. Gala has just finished transcribing my notes that I plan to publish as La Femme Visible (The Visible Woman). Buñuel wants us to start work without delay on the scenario for L’Age d’Or, a new film that has just been commissioned from him by the Vicomte de Noailles, who put up a million francs, a fantastic budget for those days. A leaf of my life is being turned, I am emerging from the shadow to the light.
To live with Gala became an obsession to me. To digest her, possess her, assimilate her, melt into her. With my shaven skull and fiery eye I looked exactly like a Grand Inquisitor, but one consumed with love. Gala understood that we had to flee the world so as to temper ourselves as a couple in the crucible of life alone together.
A small hotel on the Riviera, at Carry-le-Rouet, took us in. We rented two rooms. In one, my easel, my canvas of L’Homme Invisible (The Invisible Man), inspired by the research of Archimboldo, on whom I had meditated for so long, my books, and my brushes; in the other, the bed. They brought our meals up to us. We opened the door a crack only to let the valet or chambermaid in.
I was methodically exploring Gala with the detailed care of a physicist or archaeologist exalted to high pitch by delirious love. I fixed in my memory the value of every grain of her skin so as to apprehend the shadings of their consistency and color; so as to find the right attentive caress for each. I could have drawn up a map of her body with a perfect geography of the zones of beauty and fine ness of her fleshly coil and the pleasures to be derived and evoked. I spent hours looking at her breasts, their curve, the design of the nipples, the shadings of pink to their tips, the detail of the bluish veinlets running beneath their gossamer transparency; her back ravished me with the delicacy of the joints, the strength of the rump muscles, beauty and the beast conjoined.
Her neck had pure grace in its slimness; her hair, her intimate hairs, her odors intoxicated me; her mouth, teeth, gums, tongue overpowered me with a pleasure I had never even suspected. I became a sex freak. I wallowed in it to the very paroxysm of cockcunt, voraciously gobbling, frenzied in the unleashing of my finally sated instincts.
Even today, from those passionate hours of our isolation in sex, my memory retains the images of our orgiastic comings-together – animal but perfect and beautiful in their wildness. We were like two monks of sex, at every hour of the day c
elebrating the adoration of their god.
Only lack of money – a few pieces of silver – made us surface again. And then everything was silvery, the pale winter sun, the landscape, our cadaverous complexions.
Unsteady on our legs, led along by our dazzled eyes dilated by pleasure, we went as far as a café terrace, attracted by the tropism of the rays of the sun. Gala ordered a gala lunch to celebrate our return to life with others and, during the meal, we laid out the tactics for getting our finances afloat once more. A letter had come that morning from the Vicomte de Noailles – we had been expecting it for several days, for Gala had read the cards and foretold the imminent arrival of a letter, a token of great friendship and much money – and now it informed us that my dealer Goëmans was about to go broke but that, on the other hand, the Vicomte wanted to buy my next painting. There was no time to waste. Gala decided to go to Paris at once to collect the amounts still due me by Goëmans, while I would go to see the Noail leses who were spending the winter at their chateau at St. Bernard, near Hyères, and discuss the subject of my next picture with them.
We decided that twenty-nine thousand francs was the proper advance to request from aristocrats of their standing, their thoughtfulness, and their wealth.
Gala left. And then I had a call from the floor valet who, livid with terror, told me that while sweeping the hotel salon he had inadvertently knocked down a master’s painting and run it through with his broomstick. He would obviously lose his job, unless I, the artist, could find a way to repair the damage. I was still all full of love and open to pity. I agreed, and with very great care I did away with all traces of the hole.
Maniac Eyeball Page 11