There was Catherine the Great looking like Princess Chachavadze before the lovers and the borzois; the Emperor and Empress of China disguised as Mr. and Mrs. Arturo Lopez; Cleopatra, pretending to have been painted by Tiepolo, with Lady Cooper’s features; Mozart, the spitting image of Barbara Hutton; Prince Ruspoli as ever like himself, and Princess Hyderabad, recognizable despite her blue domino costume.
I had asked Christian Dior to make me a disguise as a seven-meter-tall giant so I could look down on everyone else. The city was in transports, and my success so great that, twenty years later, I still dream of it some nights...
Now is the time to admit it, I am a snob. That means that I like to be and be seen in places where few are admitted, always and everywhere looking down from above. That is a talent I have always had. As a child, I fell in love with a woman because she was wearing a hat – which nobody did where I lived; as a young man, all I needed to see was depilated armpits to be subjugated; but, little by little, things fell into place, I mean that I worked out a veritable strategy of success through snobbery and transcended my desires – the sublimation of instincts is the characteristic of man.
A great deal of my prestige among the Surrealists came from the dinner invitations I received. As soon as the arguments at Place Blanche got hairy, and I was no longer the center of attraction, I would get up and say, “You’ll have to excuse me, I’m expected at a dinner.” And I always made sure the next day that my little friends, getting along on sardines and bread crusts, knew that I had eaten ortolans the night before at the Beaumonts’.
Among the snobs, on the other hand, the point was to let them know I could not stay all evening since I had to get together with my Surrealist friends to draw up a letter of insult to their cherished Catholic poet Paul Claudel. This balancing game allowed me to make my way on the tightrope. I got into the most exclusive sets in this way, preceded by my reputation for genius, for each wanted me in its clan and feared offending me. It even happened that I was sometimes the only remaining link between old friends who had fallen out over me.
When Sir Edmund Hillary was asked why he climbed Mount Everest, he answered, “Because it was there.” I wanted to get into the most inaccessible circles in order to be there. The Everest was Dalí. Everyone has to get that through his head.
The height of snobbery is not being believed and savoring the pride of success by oneself. King Umberto of Italy comes to visit us at Port Lligat. A friend of my father’s happens in, wanting me to authenticate an old painting that he put down near the stuffed bear in the vestibule.
“Wait,” I tell him, “His Majesty the King is changing his swimsuit hidden behind the bear.”
“You’re a better painter than practical joker,” he replies. “What do you take me for?”
And as he goes out, the sardana band, that I ordered in honor of the King, sees the door open and breaks into music, leaving him speechless.
“Don’t you get tired,” one visitor asked me, “going up and down steep stairs all the time and through narrow corridors with such sharp turns? Your house is a regular Dalínian maze!”
The idiot had just supplied the answer that made his question pointless. How could Dalí grow tired of Dalí, who is always doing something new, always astounding himself, with no limits to his imagination? His Port Lligat home was born like a polyp, a slow stratification, the conjunction of Gala’s love and Lidia’s passion. It is not a house made of rooms, but the arcana of a delirium. Every thing in it is conceived to harbor our dream lives. Each step of the stairs, each corridor, each piece of furniture, each object recalls the dramatic steps in the saga of Dalí-Gala. I am in my own atmosphere there, breathing my own air. All the walls have our two names en twined on them in watermark. Everything there celebrates the cult of Gala, even to the round bedroom, with its perfect echo, that crowns the complex of buildings and is like the dome of this Gala-ctic cathedral; and when I go through this house, I am looking at myself, living my own concentricity. I love its Mauresque severity. I had to give Gala a setting more solemnly worthy of our love. That is why I gave her the twelfth-century castle in which she reigns, and which I shall not speak of, for I have meant her to be its absolute sovereign – to the point that I go there only when invited in her own hand. It was enough that I decorated the ceilings so that whenever she looks up she finds me in her heaven.
Thus, our couple, at all seasons of its life, comes together in the wonder of the most passionate and delicate of loves.
The inauguration of the Dalí Museum at Figueras filled me with Dalínian delight. It was in this very place, then the local theater, that when I was fifteen two of my first Impressionist works were hung in the standing-room gallery among the paintings of established artists. Nothing could suit me better than a theater as setting for the facets of my caprices. This was to be no ordinary museum! Its Piñero cupola, a geodesic dome of genius, will shelter Dalínian hell and heaven. Like a living body, the Dalí Museum will constantly grow richer with all my creations, and each new element will be the occasion for an event. It will be in a state of permanent unveiling.
Thus, when the Dalí jewels arrived, from the Owen Cheatham Collection, I was made the gift of a wonderful depository that I had conceived twenty years earlier, from Bramante plans, for the sheltering of the treasures in the Arturo Lopez Collection. Everything comes back to its source and the satellites one by one return to the Dalínian orbit. I am waiting for a duplicate of a Guimard Métro station, which I was instrumental in having declared a landmark in Paris, and which includes one of the high points of art nouveau. All the sorts of current topics that inspire me will be grist for the delirium of the Dalí Museum. For instance, the imperial mummy exhibited among the treasures of Chinese art at the Grand Palais in Paris gave me the opportunity to create a funeral armor entirely made of printed circuits and thus to send a solemn message to Mao Tse-tung in the form of a hologram, done by Madrid’s Technological Institute, of this Dalínian burial statue that will be solemnly transmitted to him.
Printed circuits seem to me to be the purest expression of decorative art – a decorative art that strikes me as the most misprized of our time, efforts being made to hide it from us as if it were shameful, or there were something fearful about honoring the fact that cybernetic science, the most advanced of sciences, had in its applications engendered a decorative expression. Youth everywhere has been clamoring, Power to the imagination! And I proclaim: Printed circuits to the fore! Cybernetic decor for the people! That is why I have sent Mao – the leader of the most numerous people in the world – a veritable fountain of symbolic information.
This princess, dressed in her decorative armor of printed circuits, lies facing a ceiling on which I painted the Palace Of The Wind. In its center, the sky, but then, suddenly, the sky is the bottom of a sea from which through a breach a sort of Havana cigar protrudes which is none other than Narcissus Monturiol’s submarine entering the chest of immortal Greece and appearing transformed into an angel. Images out of the hyperaxiological philosophy of Francisco Pujols. On the left, the portrait of a Figueras inhabitant painting my own portrait and of the Figueras pharmacist who was not looking for any thing in the desolate Ampurdan landscape.
The museum will also have some rare Dalí canvases, one Cubist and three abstract, my “experiments” that I went beyond. I intend also to have a Picasso Room so as to go against the current of everything that will be written and said about him during his “purgatory” period, and an Emilio Piñero Room, since his domes will one day cover the world.
All the windows of the theater will be topped by gigantic Atlantes. And meanwhile I will reconstruct the whole history of sculpture since the times of the Greeks, but revised by a paranoiac-critical view.
The museum will become a gigantic and sublime Dalínian “ready made”, haunted by the mystery of my genius. The copy of Michelangelo’s Moses in it will look intact, but I will have replaced the nail of the left toe by a rock-crystal nail in which the morros
de cony, my insect of genius, will be forever arrested, so that there will be no plan, but a kind of Dalínian absolute, stuffed with the Dalí mystery, a perfect bubble of the Dalínian I-game.
My deepest joy comes from the fact that Gala is at the origin of the museum. It was her perseverance that allowed my project to come to fruition. The banderillas she planted in the backs of all the officials accounted for its success: a legitimate place for Dalí’s genius across from the church whose bells on May 11, 1904, announced my birth, and where I was baptized Salvador. My ultra-localism encouraged Spanish imperialism to make the spiritual blood of Catalonia run through the world. Nothing is better than Catalan blood – blood sausage is one of our gastronomical wonders – we have a cult of blood, the blood of which we have four red bars on our golden crest – and was not Michael Servetus, a Catalan of genius, burned on Geneva’s Place de Grève by the Calvinists for having discovered the existence of the circulation of blood? An amusing detail, it took five hours to burn him because the wood was too green, and his friends, in order to shorten his painful ordeal, kept throwing dry faggots on the stake on which he was perishing.
My museum will allow me to serve the memory of all these heroes. I fall asleep dreaming on it.
Gala, this afternoon, wants to go on an outing to Cape Creus. I have just finished my siesta. I played at making phosphenes by pressing on my eyelids and creating a succession of fascinating, hallucinogenic, paradisiac images, feeding on my own fantasy and precipitating myself into the heart of an exceptionally lucid dream world. I get up with my mind washed clean. Fantastic Dalí, determined to be Dalí!
My easel awaits. I sit down on my stool. But Gala comes in. Slim, fragile, delicate, airy, so strong, so radiant, so totally herself and us. At every second of her presence, I can get a reading on our love. My entire determination to paint turns into renunciation, acquiescence. We leave. The fishermen greet us as we make our way between the boats to get to the car.
Along the way, I am elated to see the rocks standing out beneath the sun and against the sea foaming about them. Phidias appears to have sculpted the dead gods who line this sea like eternal witnesses. We go as far as the eagle of Tudela. On foot, we wander a while among the titanic screes. Gala is laughing, talking, happy.
That evening, a shooting star crosses the sky as a sign of our indefectible happiness. When we get back to the patio, some ten people or so are waiting and get up. I have pink champagne served. I go off by myself with two pretty women to the phallic pool.
They ask me to explain what they call my temple that I built behind the house. Having gotten a cylindrical radio as a present, I had noted the startling geometry of its plastic packing, and decided then and there to make use of exactly that enlarged form to erect the tabernacle of my dreams. In the chancel, from a lead wire I hung the symbol of my babytooth like a Eucharist. My whim suddenly as I spoke took on its full meaning. I noticed that the shape of the building was very exactly the crystallization of the extraordinary design my sacred insect, the morros de cony, had on its back like a faceted diamond. So, the paranoiac-critical method guided every one of my actions and was a proof by casting out nines of all my caprices.
Knowing that I would sleep soundly, I decided to take a soporific so as to sleep longer and drool at my ease. And, awakening the next morning very late, I discovered a big circle of saliva on my pillow. My lip was slightly chapped by this intense wetting, and a slight irritation at the corner made me scratch it. All day long, I would irritate that painful little wound with the tip of my tongue, savoring that leftover bit of sleep with masochistic pleasure. I have always liked refining small meaningless pains, which, like objective hazards, allow me to dream of my body. Soon, this chapping would be covered with a small bit of skin like a shell, I would detach it carefully with my tongue so as to catch it; that tiny grain of dead skin can be enough to trigger the most amazing journey: dreaming that I become a fish.
I see Gala’s yellow boat coming near the jetty. I ask one of the young women who just came in to give me two hairs from her head, and stick them together for a third of their length. With a rapid scissors-stroke, I make two paper butterflies and attach them to the ends of the hairs. I stick the hairs on my forehead and, borrowing a fan, make the butterflies flutter by around my head.
When Gala comes in, I am a flower and my mustache stamens on which the white wings of the lepidoptera land.
This will be my gift of the evening to her, who is dearer to me than my life.
“BEFORE I WAS SIX, I HAD BEEN IN THE PRESENCE OF PUTREFYING ANIMALS, WHICH WAS WHAT UPSET ME MOST: THEN, AROUND TWELVE, I FELT A MORE AND MORE COMPELLING ATTRACTION TO ANYTHING THAT WAS PUTREFACTION. THERE WERE ALWAYS FEELINGS OF REPUGNANCE COMMINGLED WITH THE GRANDIOSE.”
Chapter Twenty: How Dalí Thinks Of Immortality
I decided to have myself hibernated. This is connected with my ultra-localism.
In Figueras, there is a small cafe that fancies itself headquarters for the sporting crowd, known as Sport Figuerense. A good share of my doings are aimed solely at that spot: I act in terms of what people there will say about me. International opinion means less to me than their reactions!
Let’s say I die. I don’t want them simply to say, “Dalí is dead,” but I want them to add: “Once more, Dalí is not like the rest. He’s had himself hibernated!”
Señor Carbona held court every evening in this cafe. The invariable subject of conversation at his table was his mausoleum. He wanted to have a magnificent tomb built. He described it to us in detail and everybody chimed in.
One evening the man who was scouting for the ideal place for him came on the scene. “Señor Carbona,” he said, “I’ve found it – a perpetual view of the Gulf of Rosas, a guarantee that no other building will ever be put up between the grave and the sea, no sea breeze, no mountain wind, and very cheap to boot.” Carbona listened impassively, then said,
“I’m not interested in it any more.” Everyone was floored. For six years, there had been talk of nothing else. Why, they asked, this change of heart?
“I thought it over,” Carbona said. “What if I don’t die?” That was the real question. Dr. Hubert Larcher, one of the world’s greatest teratologists, published a thesis a few years ago, titled Will Blood Conquer Death?. In it he asked: What if the body should not die? If our corpses became sort of life factories? There are people who, alive, are rotters, and have a foul smell (especially in our consumers’ society among bureaucrats who stink much worse than the others), but when saints die they become perfume factories. Not only saints, but also great courtesans.
According to Dr. Larcher, blood is in natural contact with the cosmos. It is perhaps the matter that alchemists were after when they peered into their retorts looking for what was inside themselves all the time.
More than fifty saints are known to have died in the “odor of sanctity” – which is not just an expression but an objective reality. Some saints’ bodies, after death, can distill scented balms and oils with infinite virtues, known as myroblytes. The most famous case is that of St. Teresa of Avila, who died at the age of sixty-seven and six months on the eve of October 15, 1582. The nuns had to leave the door and windows open all night despite the weather. Lilies, jasmine, and violets seemed to have pooled their most alluring essences in the aroma that was beyond compare.
Anything brought near the body took on the same scent. Her limbs remained supple, flexible, and the arms could be bent and stretched, as if she were still alive. The alabaster white forehead had lost all its wrinkles and the lips formed a half-smile.
The corpse, without slitting or embalming, was placed in a wooden coffin and lowered into a very deep hole dug beneath the grille of the nuns’ chancel. Workmen threw a great quantity of lime stone and moist earth over it before sealing the sepulchral stone. The nuns at Alba, the day of the funeral, distributed her clothes: her veil, her sleeves, her coifs, cut up as relics; even the bits of rope from her alpargatas. All of these things had the aro
ma that exuded from the coffin, and for nine months the scent kept coming through the layers of stone and earth of her tomb.
A year later, the rotted, earth-and water-filled coffin was opened: humidity had rotted the clothes, but the body itself, though covered with greenish mud, remained absolutely intact. Its flesh was soft, white, and scented. Most amazingly of all, perhaps, an oil was running drop by drop out of her limbs. The nuns gathered it on a great many pieces of fabric, which retained the scent. Her leather belt was removed, and the bishop of Tarazona asserted that eighty years later the belt still had its delicious aroma.
In 1594, Mother Anne of Jesus, sent by the superiors of the order from Madrid to the Salamanca convent, visited the tomb. She noted that on Teresa’s shoulders there was a bright spot that looked like fresh blood. “I applied a cloth which immediately became bloody; then an other, which was moistened in the same way. In the meanwhile, the skin remained intact without any sign of a wound or tear. I leaned my face against our sainted mother’s shoulder, reflecting on the great ness of this wonder, for she had been twelve years dead and her blood flowed like that of a living person.”
I would also cite the case of a Maronite monk, Charbel Makhlouf, who died at seventy on December 24, 1898, at the her mitage of St. Maron’s monastery at Annya (Lebanon). One time when the local police chief and several men were out hunting some fugitives from justice who they thought were hiding in the woods, they approached the monastery under cover of darkness. First they saw a dim light, which grew brighter and shone near the monastery door to the east of the chapel. They thought the culprits must be hiding there and rushed the place. But they saw nothing. They then knocked at the door of the monastery. When it was opened, they questioned and searched, but found nothing nor anyone other than the proper in habitants. When they told the Father Superior and the monks what they had seen, the Superior answered, “For some time already, we have been told that some people see a light where you did; it is the monastery crypt, where Father Charbel is buried.” The tomb was opened the following year in the presence of the Father Superior, some monks, and ten persons who had witnessed the funeral. The body was tender, fresh, and supple, though covered with white mold. Good red blood, mixed with water, flowed from its side, without any trace of corruption. Thirty years later, the body was placed in a wood coffin covered with zinc, still as perfectly preserved as ever.
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