I thought this was the end of my good deed, but when meal-time came the valet arrived with three dozen oysters that he implored me to accept by way of thanks. I had just heard that an epidemic was rife in the oysterbeds and the very idea of guzzling one of those mollusks turned my stomach and filled me with horror. I was already thinking on how to dispose of the tray of them, but the man was so overflowing with gratitude that he wanted to watch me eat them, and opened and handed them to me one by one. I thought I should die and for two days was in a sweat of terror awaiting my death.
That night I decided I would never be nice again and I have stuck to it. Gala alone receives my generosity and the attention of my heart.
With my beloved Beatrice away, I got another initiation, in connection with the Vicomte de Noailles’ check. Coming back from his chateau, I had put the pink paper on the desk and considered it most carefully. Its shape, its delicate shade, the way the letters were printed on it, the figures written by hand, and the signature; it seemed to me that all of this contributed to creating an enthralling mise-en-scène celebrating the cult of money. But this little piece of paper was worth millions. The dynamite of an awesome power was hidden in those symbols. The check assumed the shape of a case full of ingots, or turned into meals, fabrics, clothes. It seemed to me that the mere fact of carrying it in my wallet afforded me the protection of armor and the power of a prince. An army of imaginary valets whirled respectfully about me, full of deference and attentive to my slightest whims. I had but to raise a finger and everything became easy. Where there was a will, there was a way. Money was a magic wand. By the time Gala got back, I was giddy with gold.
How Dalí’s Love For Gala Expressed Itself
During these two months devoted to l’amour and the adoration of Gala I had gone down to the very sources of the pleasure of living in the abyssal depths of being. It was a kind of journey to the center of being I had made, going back to my intra-uterine memories, to the very nourishment of the birthing placenta, and in my wild mind seeing Gala’s cunt and my mother’s belly as one. A philter sweeter than honey flowed within me. Gala’s senses, Gala’s belly, Gala’s back exalted my dreams, their shapes mixed together, merged, compounded as the lines and rhythms of the waves of joy that rocked me and carried me over an ocean of felicity. My paranoia knew no bounds. My delirium rose to perfection and Gala’s super-intelligent complicity allowed me to attain the omega point of my inventions. All I had to do was touch the beautymark on Gala’s left earlobe to be carried away on the flying carpet of my wild love.
This wonderful spot seemed to me to be the proton of my beloved’s divine energy, the sun of her heart, the geometrical locus of our passion for each other, the very point at which any contradiction between our two beings ceased to be. All I had to do was rub it with my finger to be flooded with strength and faith in my own des tiny. This divine beautymark to me was the proof of the definitive death of my brother Salvador, his mystical tomb; stroking it, I was rubbing against his gravestone. I thus took blanket possession of my existence in one stroke and had the intoxicating feeling of erasing the memory of this dead brother at the same time that I possessed the whole of the woman I loved, capturing all the beauty of the world and even living and making love to my own life. Even my father was not immune to being symbolically gobbled when I took Gala’s ear lobe between my lips and let it slowly give me suck. Later, Picasso capped my great happiness by showing me he had the same beauty-mark as Gala in exactly the same place. That day, he even made her a present of a Cubist painting – showing that even that awesome person age’s possessive genius could not resist Gala’s radiation. It is true that Gala selected the smallest among the paintings he let her choose from. A fulcrum is all you need to raise the globe and with Gala’s beautymark I can reconstruct the geometry of Dalínian intelligence. Her sacred ear sucked away all the dizzinesses of my soul to allow me to be reborn lucid, complete within unity, the master of the genius of my twin’s personality, capable of overcoming my father’s curse, the virile son of my mother. My entire unconscious found stability around that axis, like a planet around its sun, a believer taking his Host. Magical beautymark, alpha and omega of Dalí!
Further to reinforce my paranoia, during our isolation I had gotten letters from Lidia, the widow of Nando, the Cadaqués fisher man, who with her two sons seemed in my eyes the perfect illustration of paranoiac delirium. The Oracle of Delphi would have turned pale with envy alongside Lidia.
She spoke sublimely. Because the writer Eugenio d’Ors once, while on vacation at Cadaqués, having gone fishing at sea several times with Nando, said to her, as she was bring ing him a glass of water, “Lidia, how well set you are!” her head and heart had been carried away. It was love-at-first-sight, and after Nando died she dreamed only of Eugenio d’Ors. Especially when she read his book La Bien Plantada (The Well-Set Woman), in which she unwarrantedly recognized herself. She read every article by her hero, who did a regular feature in La Veu de Catalunya (The Wind Of Catalonia), and in each piece decoded the words to interpret them as a love letter to her. She finally convinced herself that d’Ors did this to mislead her rivals. And of course she wrote him. The amazing part was that she could always find in the next day’s article a word, an allusion that referred back to her previous day’s letter. With an unheard-of genius for interpretation she found links between the most conflicting ideas, working out the strictest syllogisms to demonstrate the logic in her most unbelievable of algebras.
Lidia was sure of Eugenio d’Ors’ most absolute love and the thinnest of allusions whipped up her passion. Beyond that, she re mained a thrifty housekeeper and the most faithful of friends. The mystical, passionate, intransigent, inquisitorial Catalonian soul lived in her in all its magnificence. When I persuaded Gala to invest the Vicomte de Noailles’ twenty-nine thousand francs in a home at Cadaqués, I was dreaming of a return to my native country, defying my father, and also sharing with Lidia the most wonderful of paranoiac climates, fascinated by the implacable coherency of the mind of this woman who could make parallels out of perpendiculars. I never found an intelligence more subtle in dealing with the absurd and implanting impeccable geometry over chaos. Like an experienced philologist, she interpreted the meanings of words, sniffed out love like a diamond in its matrix, establishing concordances and relation ships, raising raving to the level of fine art. With her, I was breathing my own kind of air.
I landed at Cadaqués like a pariah disowned by his father. Against me there was the weight of this curse which was subscribed to by all right-thinking people, especially since I was living in sin with a foreign woman who was supposed to be damaged goods. The Hotel Miramar, claiming it was undergoing repairs, refused to rent to us. A lousy little boarding-house took us in. Lidia, whom I had advised of my return, welcomed us like a mother, and indulged my desire to turn our backs on all the petit bourgeois magnetized by my notario of a father, so we could face the sea I so admired. She found us a little fisherman’s hut at Port Lligat, the other side of the Cadaqués cemetery, in a heavenly place. But our castle was a cabin four meters to a side and our first move was to get a carpenter to transform a storeroom three steps up into a shower, a toilet, and a kitchen.
A series of events followed each other very rapidly, night mare fashion. We had gone to Barcelona to cash the Vicomte’s check when Gala took to bed, burning up with fever. It was pleurisy. I was sick along with her, suffocating, choking, raving just as she did. The osmosis between us was such that I thought I was able to impart some of my strength to her and share her torment. Psychically and mentally, I was sicker than if I had been ill myself. Finally, she began to convalesce. We were in dire straits because we had mutually agreed that we would deposit the full amount of the Vicomte’s check in the hotel safe so it could all go toward setting up our Port Lligat nest. The fixing-up of “our” house, the creation of our shell, seemed to us the most important thing in the world, a vital necessity. We did not want this little nest to be tentative, but rath
er the shell that gives birth to the invincible coral reef. Meantime, for all our pile of gold, we were broke until a friend who lived in Malaga asked us to be his guests, letting us pay him with paintings. I interpreted this proposal as a happy omen. It was but a brief stop in the series of adversities that were to beset us, but I had gotten back into my spring-like happy frame of mind.
I rented a house at Torremolinos surrounded by flowers and looking out to sea, having Gala pose as queen of the carnations in the middle of a brilliant parterre. My frenetic sexuality turned into a wild debauch of tenderness. During her illness, in order to keep up my hopes, I had spent entire days dreaming of the presents I might concoct for her the day she was well. I had no other ways to prove my love to her than my hands, my brushes, and my cock. Gala was so weak that the slightest effort exhausted her. We would walk out slowly in the sun, or else I would stay alongside her on a chaise longue as she motionlessly lay there and tanned almost visibly. She quickly became black and golden as a brioche and her energy daily came back in waves. Her weeping spells, which expressed her de pression, soon stopped. She laughed even at the sadistic tortures I inflicted on her.
How Dalí Explains His Strange Sadistic Tenderness
Love is strength, power, ingestion, digestion. It is sex organ, tongue, tooth, claw, caress. It is domination and submission, obedience and refusal. The animality sleeping in all of us that awakens with possession and orgasm is the essential of the ecstasy of love. Fantasying and symbolism are but a way of exploring the vacuum that one’s male strength is going to fill and, for the woman, the make-ready of her being to prepare to satisfy her man. Illness had made Gala as fragile as her diaphanous skin, and her tender beauty chal lenged my sexual violence. I raged to have to put up with such im potence.
Having to be satisfied with holding her in my arms, I squeezed her as if to crush her, covering her with kisses, licking her like a dog in love with his master’s hand. She suffocated beneath my embraces, choked, and soon was weeping in my arms. Her beautiful face turned ugly beneath the tears and I sometimes took pleasure in turning it into a clown’s mask. I would bite the end of her nose to make it turn red, knead her cheeks to bring out their sanguine color, twist her ears into conches, and pull her lips out with the suction of my mouth. I found a kind of pleasure in these tortures of love. But that was only an accident, a way of getting even for what I had suf fered while she was ill. Health brought a masterful Gala back to me and I was once again her fulfilled lover. We rolled over and over on the bed, living through the joy of finding each other again in the intoxication of our bodies. Gala, moulded by our love-making, then went walking through the blooming fields and even into the village, her bosom bare and victorious. I watched her with pride and enjoyment, my cock at attention with the joy of life.
I was working on finishing The Invisible Man. In the evening, we would walk along the beaches, very careful not to squash the gorgeous turds that the fishermen deposited in such provocative little piles. Shitting sessions, in the evening, after dinner, were the highlight of the village. The forum hour. They would gather by family affinity or commonality of interest to be able to discuss what was on their minds while they dropped trousers. Our presence did not in any way embarrass them. With a bit of encouragement they might easily have asked us to join them, for we had become very popular. I watched them most interestedly as these excrements extruded from the hard white arses and formed into such perfect spirals. Their healthfulness was patent in these stools as in their way of shitting together without bashfulness.
We would have extended these Homeric sessions if the ends of the evenings did not generally degenerate into fights. For, while the fathers were sharing their shit and piss, the children were exchanging stones as hard as their slingshots could carry them. The fights quickly turned nasty and bloody. Then the adults would raise their trousers without wiping themselves and no sooner were they buttoned up than they joined the fight, each on the side of his own offspring.
When the knives started coming out, the women mixed in and separated the combatants. The beach rang out with curses, in sults, shouts, and cries. We slowly went back up toward our house and the noise of the arguments followed us far on up the hill. I have never forgotten those men and those times; not only because these memories are linked to precious images of a brutal, true, and marvelously Spanish lifestyle, but because these pictures of a certain kind of happiness in living were the prelude to heavy, dark, and trying moments in my existence.
We were often visited by friends coming through or artists and intellectuals in thrall to the then-fashionable Surrealist “keys”. Each of them, as a welcome greeting, brought us some bits of news from the outside world which we had systematically cut ourselves off from since coming to Torremolinos. This was how in the matter of a few hours we found out that Buñuel – probably under the influence of his Marxist friends – had started shooting L’Age d’Or without waiting for me to be there, suggesting betrayal with the worst kind of banali ties, and that the Galerie Goëmans had gone broke. I was morally and materially ruined. To cap the calamity, we did not have a penny left and our Malaga friend had left this very day for a long trip through Spain, without even warning us or leaving an address. That evening, the postman brought us the Cadaqués carpenter’s bill, which had grown to double the original figure. I suddenly felt myself sur rounded by the hyenas of misfortune. The next day we had nothing left to eat, all that was on hand being a remainder of olive oil, which I ordinarily used to relish with some anchovies, then rubbing into my hair whatever was left over of the salad dressing. My Samson hair in this way regained its original strength and shape.
What Effect Did Lack Of Money Have On Dalí’s Character?
I found a hallucinating image deep in my memory. I am on my knees in a dark grotto. I see the hole of light at the entranceway like a gigantic cunt. My pants are open and down. I am holding my cock in both hands. I am trying to get the pleasure to spurt from my flesh and am madly masturbating. My eyes are riveted to the luminous opening but I close the lids so as to project on their screens the erotic and slightly dirty picture of the huge cheeks of the arse of a Gypsy woman I just saw stoking a campfire. I hear the sound of men’s voices a few meters away. A baby is crying because the breast has been taken from it. Before my eyes, there is a hallucinating go-round: the ugly faces of militiamen who that very morning had come near our house to arrest a half-crazed neighbor who during the night had killed his mother with a pruning-hook. With the murderer wrapped up like a package, the cops are having their sport shooting at schools of migrating swallows passing over like clouds. They laugh very loud and every shot lashes me like a whip. I run through the fields in a paroxysm of rage, my switch playing havoc with the flowers, and just as a rain of carnation heads comes down on me like the burst of a fireworks my sperm ejaculates. I plant a man in the ground and allow myself to sink slowly down, spent. I am hungry. I am thirsty. I wish I could go with Gala and live like an outcast among the Gypsies. Only the idea of having to move Gala’s huge wardrobe-trunk dissuades me, but my fury catches fire like a bundle of vinestems. I grow terribly angry with myself and as hard as I can I punch myself on the lips. Crack! My mouth fills with blood. I am left speechless by my action and slowly tongue my teeth. My tongue pushes up a tiny sliver of ivory that I spit out. I have just broken a babytooth. I have a mouth as singular as my genius. I had three babyteeth left till I was twenty-six, and I am still short two molars.
My violence immediately ceases. Having ejected my sperm and broken my tooth has brought about a mutation in me. When I get up I am another man. The little tooth in the palm of my hand is a talisman – my solidified sperm that has just come back to me.[2] There and then I decide I will hang this spermatic babytooth by a thread right in the center of our house at Port Lligat. Eros has brought my genius the solution to my misfortune.
On returning home, I told Gala of my decision. We went and asked one of our friends to telegraph the hotel in Barcelona and have them
send us some money out of their safe, and then we would go on to Paris determined to increase our fortune tenfold. In the depths of despair, resolve had come to me. My good-luck spermatic tooth was going to bring gold raining down on the house at Port Lligat – gold that I would cause to spurt out of my genius.
We got there at the height of a scandal. First, as we had anticipated, Buñuel had betrayed me by selecting to express himself images that reduced the Himalaya of my ideas to little folded paper dolls. L’Age d’Or had become an anti-clerical, irreligious picture. Buñuel had taken over the most primitive meanings of my way-out ideas, transforming them into associations of stuttering images with out any of the violent poesy that is the salt of my genius. All that came to the surface here and there out of my butchered scenario were a few sequences he had been unable not to bring off, since my staging directions had been so detailed. And they were enough to gain him a personal triumph. With admirable opportunism, Buñuel left Paris for Hollywood on the eve of the Paris premiere. Three days later, Studio 28, in which L’Age d’Or was shown, was a wrecking site. The royalist Camelots du roi had shot up the ceiling with their re volvers and driven the audience out with stinkbombs, before smashing bottles of ink against the screen; they had broken all the show cases exhibiting Surrealist books and lacerated my paintings on dis play in the lobby. It was a memorable, if pitiful, evening. The Prefecture of Police, with the endorsement of part of the press, banned the movie. I expected I might even be deported.
On this occasion, I discovered a certain number of essential realities. In Paris there were still friends of freedom of expression who considered Dalí a creative genius. He had to remain sole master of his work and of his means of expression, henceforth refusing to be a partner with anyone.
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