Galuchka, who with an exquisite tenderness had reached out the beloved ball till it brushed against my lips suddenly pulled it back cautiously as I made another painful effort to edge forward a little, and a burning pain now bit me to the blood in the hip-bone; my lips were already about to reach my ball once more, but Galuchka pulled it back imperceptibly once more with a gesture so parsimoniously cruel that my eyes drowned in large tears. She remained fixed at that moment in an almost absolute immobility; only the grin of her malicious smile did not vanish from her mouth, but on the contrary it seemed to settle there permanently, assuming a place of honor in the divine oval of her adored face.
However, in spite of her apparent expressive immobility, one would have said that it was rapidly becoming corruptible and without anything external coming to trouble her look of cynical assurance I saw the persistent smile of triumph fade with a rapidity which can only be compared to a reversed and speeded up motion picture of the ephemeral unfolding of a flower.
Galuchka remained thus with the ball dangling from her hand; she was not going to withdraw it, nor was she going to make the slightest movement to bring it closer to me. I knew it. In her fixed glance I read the sureness of a promise, but for this I had to advance still further.
I stretched forward furiously, mad with desire, and by dint of a supreme convulsion I finally succeeded in biting the handful of medals among which my ball was hanging.
At this moment I felt Galuchka’s little hand clench like a little bird’s tightening claw, enfolding the precious cluster and this time pressing it violently, ferociously even, against my avid mouth in which, mingled with the knife-taste of the medals, I immediately felt the beginning of that other strong metallic savor, bitter and bloody, of my own wounded gums.
Suddenly a new jolt, more brutal and unforeseen than the preceding ones—for the paroxysm of my sentiments had completely deafened me to Buchaques’ arrival—dashed my head to the ground with a bang; my cheek was chafed raw on the sand, my body caught between the bars of the chair seemed to break in two, I uttered a cry of pain and I furiously raised my head toward Buchaques whose purple-stained face, almost on top of me now, was illuminated by jealousy, and had attained the congested ugliness of a cockscomb.
He backed away from me and was about to climb the ramp once more when suddenly, retracing his steps, he sent a contemptuous kick in my direction, raising a clod of earth which struck me and blinded me for a moment. Then he again started off. Galuchka, too, had received a blow from my chair and had been thrown a metre away from me.
There was a bloody smudge in the exact centre of her brow. She was wholly given over to feeling this painful spot, dazed by the recent commotion; the abandoned attitude of her half-open legs no longer knew any modesty, and I discovered then for the first time that she was not wearing any pants.
A shadow soft as a dream submerged the upper end of her thighs which were obliterated in the absolute black beneath her little white skirt and in spite of the darkness in which her anatomy completely vanished I felt that she was naked underneath.
She smiled at me, and I got up; this time my vengeance was decided.
I went and sat down on the chair near the one where the sword lay buried between the soldier’s cape and the other accessories belonging to the two ladies with whom he continued to chat while he kept looking deep into the eyes of one of them. The other lady, pretending not to take any interest, was directing her attention elsewhere, intervening in the conversation with quick, disconnected remarks. She wore an imperceptible smile of malicious complicity which seemed to me very troubling; from time to time and without apparent reason she would drop back her head heavy with hair, and would then smile with all her teeth at the soldier who at the same moment cast her a polite glance of gratitude, as brief as possible.
I took advantage of the distraction of this absorbing sentimental game that kept these three beings chained to one another to work my way, without being seen by them, by a series of little sliding moves, toward the chair where the sword reposed.
Épées.
I had to do this in order to reach it from where I was, for I could not change my position without the risk of losing sight of Galuchka who would then be intercepted from me by the plane tree. This tree in turn hid the manipulations full of wile and of sudden skill which I was effecting with my left hand and thanks to which I slowly and by successive stages unsheathed the weapon of my vengeance destined for Buchaques’ impending and frightful martyrdom.
I took the precaution of wrapping a handkerchief around my hand so as not to wound myself. I hid the sword behind my back with a slight trembling which did not exclude sureness in my movements, and I used my cap to prevent Galuchka from seeing the hilt project from the other side of my body.
After the success of this first operation, which enabled me to unsheathe the sword without being seen by anyone, I cautiously slipped it back under the materials, but with the blade now bare and pointed in the right direction. All I had left to do was to push it as I wished so that at the right moment the sword would intercept Buchaques’ descent.
But my preparations were not yet absolutely completed. A dizzying fever of calculation and of ceremonial in the minutest details took hold of my brain as I felt the irremediable moment approaching. I redoubled the intensity of my amorous gaze in Galuchka’s direction to keep her rooted to her place; after the blow she had received in the forehead she remained crouching in a posture of such chilled weariness that my fervent glance, reinforced by the sway which the voluptuous approach of my cruel act gave it, succeeded in maintaining my Galuchka in a kind of paralysis of which I felt myself the more and more absolute master as the moments passed.
Without moving my sword one millimetre I waited for Buchaques’ imminent descent. Against all anticipations, though he came at the same dizzying speed as usual, he did not come crashing against me this time, but got off his scooter and, going over to the plane tree without daring to look at me, asked me, “Where is she?” I did not answer. He knew perfectly well. He went behind the plane tree and for a long time stood stupidly looking at Galuchka.
Without changing her posture, her eyes riveted to mine, she seemed not to see him.
Finally Buchaques said to Galuchka, “If you show me Dali’s dwarf monkey I won’t do it any more.” She shuddered and pressed my beloved ball with the handful of medals against her bosom. Buchaques then said, “Let’s play!” “Play what?” I answered. He turned toward me and with a repugnant look of gratitude, assuming from my question that I had forgiven him, said, almost joyously, yet with something of the social climber’s sugar-coated fear, “Let’s all three play robbers and civil guard!” I answered “Yes, let’s!” And while with one hand I pressed his, with the other I pressed the sword’s cold hilt. “Who’ll begin?” asked Buchaques. “The taller one of us.” Buchaques accepted this absurd condition, for he was clearly taller than I. And suddenly he became very weak, with a weakness which continued to grow in direct ratio to my power of domination.
We measured ourselves against the trunk of the plane tree, marking our heights in the bark by means of a notch made with a pebble.
It was he, then, who would have to go; he would walk up the ramp very slowly in order to give Galuchka and myself time to go and hide.
Once he reached the top he would come down full speed on his scooter and I challenged him to do it faster than he had done the previous times, goading the living and congested flesh of his pride with infallible sureness.
I saw Buchaques start off nonchalantly, dragging his scooter behind him and climbing the ramp which was to be fatal to him. At each new furtive glance that I cast in his direction I saw the volume of his buttocks progressively diminishing, with their ungainly movements outlined by his tight-fitting pants. My antipathy toward my former lover grew with each of his awkward steps, in whose beatific and nauseating succession I could read the progressive revival of his good conscience, after the troubled waters of remorse which my hypoc
ritical and perverse reconciliation had just calmed.
In my mind there was present the maxim of Philip II, who said one day to his valet, “Dress me slowly because I’m in a great hurry.”
I hurried without haste in order to give the last indispensable touches to the scrupulous “finish” of the brilliant painting of my imminent sanguinary creation toward which, with exclusive delight, all the representative force of my imperial imagination was converging.
I absorbed myself in a rigorous calculation which called for my utmost powers of dissimulation so that Galuchka would continue to believe me to be imbued with the simulated ecstasy of my contemplation, when in reality I was occupied solely in coldly calculating Buchaques’ stature from the mark of his height in the plane-tree bark, while taking into account the approximate elevation of his scooter, since after all the only thing I wanted to know was the exact location in space of the middle of my rival’s throat, in order to be able to dispose my sword in a fashion adequate to a categorical, Doric and pitiless slitting of his throat.
I had to assure myself also of the resistance of the chairs which were to serve as pillars to the sharp-pointed bridge of my sword. For this I brought together several additional chairs which would serve as reinforcement, thus redoubling the fearful efficacy of my trap.
I said to Galuchka, “Buchaques is coming down!” She came up to me so quickly that I did not have time to accomplish my decisive act. I cast an anxious glance toward the top of the ramp which Buchaques was just reaching, already preparing for his run.
I pressed Galuchka against my chest with a tyrannic will, ordering her not to look. While I profited by her obedience to slip the sword between the bars of two chairs, a last glance reassured me as to my task; almost invisible, the weapon shone feebly in the night with all the cold and inhuman nobility of justice.
We could already hear the din of Buchaques’ scooter launched on its mad descent. We must run! I dragged Galuchka by the hand in a frenzied chase through the crowd; we struggled like blinded butterflies against the river current of the crowd, which at this moment was slowing its rhythm, obeying the force of the melancholy regret that succeeds the ending of a feast.
A last paso doble, executed without conviction, had come to a close. We stopped for a moment just at the spot where, at sunset, I had seen the horse die. On the asphalt sprawled an enormous blood-stain in the form of a great black bird with outspread wings.
Suddenly it was cold and our perspiration made us shiver. We were indescribably dirty, and our clothes were all torn.
I could feel my heart beat in the burning wound of my raw cheek. I touched my head covered with bumps which procured me a sweet and agreeable pain. Galuchka was livid; the clot of blood on her forehead now appeared surrounded by a mauve aureole.
And Buchaques? Where was his blood? I shut my eyes.
1 José Anselmo Clavé, a Catalan musician, founded choral societies in Barcelona which developed into important musical institutions.
2 A famous anti-anarchist trial.
3 In my family tree my Arab lineage, going back to the time of Cervantes, has been almost definitely established.
4 At about the same time in Russia, in the “Lighted Glade,” Tolstoy’s country place, another child, Galuchka, my wife, was seated on the lap of another potato, of another specimen of that kind of earthy, rugged and dreamy old man—Count Leo Tolstoy.
5 Picasso one day related to me a similar impression which had greatly struck him. In his chateau near Paris he went down to the fountain and filled a jug with water; there was a magnificent moonlight. During the time the jug was filling, he had the impression of “living several years,” without preserving any precise memory of it.
6 These multicolored cupolas which in my false remembrances correspond to Russia or at least to the mirages I had of that country, thanks to Senor Traite’s theatre (unless the latter too is a false remembrance), must in all likelihood be localized in the Guell de Gaudi Park in Barcelona, a spot which consists largely of architecture incrusted with violently multicolored and fairylike tiles. I must have attended an open-air festival there. Or, it is possible that my imagination blended a military celebration that took place at the fortified castle of Figueras with the fantastic setting of Guell Park.
7 At the time when I chose the delirious fetish of my plane ball, Galuchka in Moscow projected her whole passion on another fetish, but of a different type; it was a small box of wax matches on the back of which could be seen a glossy picture in color representing the cathedral in Florence where Galuchka had once been on a short voyage with her father.
Each time she wished to console herself for her hyperesthetic desire to return to Italy, she would light one of her precious matches.
CHAPTER FIVE
True Childhood Memories
I shut my eyes and I turn my mind to my most distant memories in order to see the image that will appear to me most spontaneously, with the greatest visual vividness, in order to evoke it as the first and inaugural image of my true remembrances. I see ...
I see two cypresses, two large cypresses of almost equal height. The one on the left is the smaller, and its top leans slightly toward the one on the right which is impressively vertical; I see these two cypresses through the window of classroom 1 of the Christian Brothers’ School of Figueras, the school which immediately followed my supposedly harmful pedagogical experience at Senor Traite’s. The window which served as a frame to my vision was opened only in the afternoon, but from then on I would absorb myself entirely in the contemplation of the changes of light on the two cypresses, along which the slightly sinuous shadow of the rectilinear architecture of our school would slowly rise; at a given moment, just before sunset, the pointed tip of the cypress on the right would appear strongly illuminated with a dark red, as though it had been dipped in wine, while the one on the left, already completely in the shadow, appeared to me to be a deep black. Then we heard the chiming of the Angelus, and the whole class would stand up and we would repeat in chorus the prayer recited with bowed head and folded hands by the superior.
The two cypresses outside, which during the whole afternoon seemed to be consumed and to burn in the sky like two dark flames were for me the infallible clock by which I became in a sense aware of the monotonous rhythm of the events of the class; for as had been the case at Senor Traite’s, I was likewise completely absent from this new class, where far from being allowed to enjoy the advantages of my first teacher Senor Traite’s blessed sleep to my heart’s content, I had now every moment to overcome the resistance which the Brothers of the Christian School with unequalled zeal, and resorting to the cruellest ruses and stratagems, vainly exerted to attract and solicit my attention. But these only accentuated my capacity for annihilating my outer world: I did not want anyone to touch me, to talk to me, to “disturb” what was going on within my head. I lived the reveries begun at Senor Traite’s with heightened intensity, but feeling these now to be in peril I clutched at them even more dramatically, digging my nails into them as into a rescue plank.
After the Angelus the two cypresses became almost obliterated in the dark. But if their outlines finally disappeared completely in the night, the immobile presence of their invisible personalities remained firmly localized and their spatial situation, drawing me like a magnet, would force my little dream-filled head to turn from time to time to look in their exact direction even though I could not see them. After the Angelus and almost at the same moment that the window became black with night, the corridor leading to the classroom would be lighted, and then through the glass-paneled door I could observe the oil paintings which decorated this corridor, wholly covering its walls. From my seat I could see only two of them distinctly: one represented a fox’s head emerging from a cavern, carrying a dead goose dangling from its jaws; the other was a copy of Millet’s Angelus.1 This painting produced in me an obscure anguish, so poignant that the memory of those two motionless silhouettes pursued me for several years with the cons
tant uneasiness provoked by their continual and ambiguous presence. But this uneasiness was not “all”. In spite of these feelings that the Angelus aroused in me I had a sense of being somewhat under their protection and a secret and refined pleasure shone in the depth of my fear like a little silvery knife blade gleaming in the sunlight.
During those long winter evenings, while I waited for the bell to announce that the school day was about to come to a close, my imagination was in fact constantly guarded by five sentinels, faithful, frightful and sublime: outside to my left, the two cypresses; to my right the two silhouettes of the Angelus; in front of me, God in the person of Jesus Christ—yellow, nailed to a black wooden cross standing on the brother’s table. The Redeemer had two horrible wounds, one on each knee, wonderfully imitated by means of a very shiny enamel which revealed the bone through the flesh. The feet of the Christ were dirty with a sickening gray produced by the daily contact of the children’s fingers, for after having kissed our superior’s hairy hand and before crossing ourselves as we left, each one of us had to touch the pierced feet of the Christ with his ink-blackened fingers.
The brothers of the Christian School noticed the absorption with which I would sit and look out; I was the only child in the class upon whom the window exercised such an absolutist power of fascination. They therefore changed my seat, thus depriving me of the view of my two cypresses; but I continued stubbornly to look in their direction, sensing exactly the spot where they were located! And as if the intensity of my will had endowed my eyes with the power of seeing right through the walls, I was eventually able in my imaginative effort to reconstruct everything according to the hour of the day, which I now had to gauge by what went on in class. I would say to myself, “Now we’re about to begin the catechism, so that the shadow on the right-hand cypress must have reached that burnt hole with a dry branch coming out of it, from which hangs a bit of white rag; the mountains of the Pyrenees must be mauve, and it is also at this moment, as I noticed several days ago, that a window must be shining in the distant village of Villa Bertran!” And this flash of light would suddenly sparkle with the reality of a fiery diamond in the annihilating darkness produced in my brain by the torture of not being allowed to see that beloved plain of Ampardán, whose unique geology with its utter vigor was later to fashion the entire esthetic of the philosophy of the Dalinian Landscape.
The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (Dover Fine Art, History of Art) Page 8