Toward the end of that afternoon, after a thousand hesitations, I finally made up my mind to it. But as soon as I saw the white towel in which the barber had enveloped me become covered with my ebony-black strands I was seized for a moment with a Samson complex. What if the story about Samson were true? I looked at myself in the mirror in front of me, and I thought I saw a king on his throne. But this produced in me a great uneasiness. Nothing, in fact, more resembles the grotesque parody of a royal ermine cape than the large and solemn white towel sprinkled with the black tails of our own hair that are being snipped off our heads. It is curious, but that is how it is. It was the first and the last time in my life that for several minutes I lost faith in myself. My image of a king-child appeared to me suddenly as a painful case of biological deficiency, the product of a catastrophic disequilibrium between my sickly, feeble, backward constitution and a precocious but sterile intelligence incapable of functioning in the realm of action, with nothing to look forward to but the degeneration of the terribly incomplete and spiritually aged freak that I was.
I was thinking all these things while the hair fell in shreds on my knees and on the tiled floor—which I remember very well having been of yellow, white and blue porcelain representing a kind of dragon-fish biting its tail. Was I perhaps an imbecile like all the others? I paid, gave the tip and headed toward the Ritz where the barber would put the finishing touches on the work.
As soon as I was in the street, with the barber’s door shut behind me, I felt myself a different man, and all my recent scruples and fears melted in an instant like a soap bubble. I knew that the slamming of that door had separated me forever from the swampy blackness of my hair which they must now be sweeping up. I no longer regretted anything, anything, and with the allegorical, age-avid mouth of the Medusa of my anti-sentimentalism, of my anti-Faust, I spat the last unprepossessing hair of my adolescence upon the pavement of time. Instead of going to the barber’s when I reached the Ritz, I headed for the bar and asked for “a cocktail.”
“What kind will you have?” asked the bartender.
“Make it a good one!” I said, not knowing there were several kinds.
It tasted horrible to me, but at the end of five minutes it began to feel good inside my spirit. I definitely dropped the idea of the barber for the afternoon and asked for another cocktail. I then became aware of this astonishing fact: in four months this was the first day I had missed school, and the most stupefying part of it was that this did not give me the slightest feeling of guilt. On the contrary, I had a vague impression that this period was ended, and that I would never return. Something very different was going to come into my life.
In my second cocktail I found a white hair. This moved me to tears, in the euphemistic intoxication produced by the first two cocktails I had drunk in my life. This apparition of a white hair at the bottom of my glass appeared to me to be a good omen. I felt ideas and ideas being born and vanishing, succeeding one another within my head with an unusual speed—as if, by virtue of the drink, my life had suddenly begun to run faster. I said to myself, “This is my first white hair?” And again I sipped that fiery liquid which I had to swallow with my eyes shut, because of its violence. This perhaps was the “elixir of long life,” the elixir of old age, the elixir of the anti-Faust.
I was sitting in a dark corner from which I could easily observe everything, without being observed—which I was able to verify, as I had just said “elixir of the Anti-Faust” aloud and no one had noticed it. Besides, there were only two persons in the bar in addition to myself—the bartender, who had white hair but seemed very young, and an extremely emaciated gentleman, who also had white hair, and who seemed very old, for when he lifted his glass to his lips he trembled so much that he had to take great precautions not to spill everything on the floor. I found this gesture, betraying a long habit, altogether admirable and of supreme elegance; I would so much have liked to be able to tremble like that! And my eyes fastened themselves once more on the bottom of my glass, hypnotized by the gleam of that silver hair. “Naturally I’m going to look at you close,” I seemed to say to it with my glance, “for never yet in my life have I had the occasion, the leisure, to take a white hair between my fingers, to be able to examine it with my avid and inquisitorial eyes, capable of squeezing out the secret and tearing out the soul of all things.”
I was about to plunge my fingers into the cocktail with the intention of pulling out the hair when the bartender came over to my table to place two small dishes on it, the one containing olives stuffed with anchovies, the other pommel souglées.
“Another?” he asked with a glance, seeing that my glass was less than half full.
“No thanks!”
With a ceremonious gesture he then wiped up a few drops that I had spilled on the table and went back to his post behind the bar. Then I plunged my forefinger and my thumb into my glass. But as my nails were cut very, very short it was impossible for me to catch it. In spite of this I could feel its relief; it seemed hard and as if glued to the bottom of the glass. While I was immersed in this operation an elegant woman had come in, dressed in an extremely light costume with a heavy fur hanging around her neck. She spoke familiarly, lazily to the bartender. Full of respectful solicitude, the latter was preparing for her something that required a great din of cracking ice. I immediately understood the subject of their conversation, for an imperceptible glance cast by the bartender toward the spot where I was sitting was followed after a short interval by a long scrutinizing gaze from the lady. Before fixing her eyes on me with an insistent curiosity she let her eyes wander lazily around the entire room, resting them on me for a mere moment, meaning in this clumsy way to make me believe it was by pure chance that her gaze settled on me. With his eyes glued to the metal counter, the bartender waited for his companion to have time to examine me at her leisure, and then, with rapid words and an ironic though kindly smile, he told her something about me which had exactly the effect of making the woman’s face turn in my direction a second time. This time she did it with the same slowness, but without taking any precautions. At this moment, exasperated as much by this scrutinizing gaze as by my clumsiness in not being able to get out the white hair, I pressed my finger hard against the glass and slowly pulled it up, slipping it along the crystal with all my might. This I could do without being seen, for a column concealed half of my table from the lady and the bartender just at the spot where my hand and my glass happened to be.
I did not succeed in detaching the white hair, but suddenly a burning pain awakened in my finger. I looked, and saw a long cut that was beginning to bleed copiously. Out of my wits, I put my finger back into the glass so as not to spatter blood all over my table. I instantly recognized my error. There was no hair at the bottom of my glass. It was simply a very fine crack that shone through the liquid of my accursed cocktail. I had cut myself by mistake in sliding the flesh of my finger hard along this crack, with the impulsive pressure which the lady’s second glance had increased in intensity. My cut was at least three centimetres long and it bled uniformly and without interruption. My cocktail became almost instantly colored a bright red and began to rise in the glass.
I was sure I knew what the bartender had said to the lady. He had told her that I was most likely a provincial who had dropped in here by chance, and that not knowing what kind of cocktail to order I had naively asked him to “make it a good one.” In spite of the distance I could have sworn that I had seen exactly these syllables emerge from between the bartender’s lips. At the moment when he finished telling his anecdote my blood had begun to color my drink, making it rise, and my hemorrhage continued. Then I decided to tie a handkerchief round my finger. The blood immediately went through it. I put my second and last handkerchief over it, making it tighter. This time the spot of blood which appeared grew much more slowly, and seemed to stop spreading.
I put my hand in my pocket and was about to leave, when a Dalinian idea assailed me. I went up to the bar and p
aid with a twenty-five peseta bill. The bartender hastened to give me my change—my drink was not more than three pesetas. “That’s all right,” I said with a gesture of great naturalness, leaving him the whole balance as a tip. I have never seen a face so authentically stupefied. Yet I was already familiar with this expression; it was the same that I had so often observed with delight on the faces of my schoolmates when as a boy I had exchanged the famous ten-centimo pieces for fives. This time I understood that it worked “exactly” the same way for grown-ups and I at once realized the supremacy of the power of money. It was as if by leaving on the bar the modest sum of my disproportionate tip I had “broken the bank” of the Hotel Ritz.
But the effect I had produced did not yet satisfy me, and all this was but the preamble to that Dalinian idea which I announced to you a while ago. The two cocktails I had just drunk had dissipated every vestige of my timidity, all the more so as I felt after my tip that the roles were reversed and that I had become the author of intimidation. An assurance and perfect poise now presided over the slightest of my gestures, and I must say that everything I did from this moment until I reached the doorstep was marked by a stupefying ease. I could read this constantly on the face of the bartender as in an open book.
“And now I should like to buy one of those cherries you have there,” I said pointing to a silver dish full of the candied fruit.
He respectfully put the dish before me. “Help yourself, Señor, take all you want.”
I took one and placed it on the bar.
“How much is it?”
“Why, nothing, Señor. It’s worth nothing.”
I pulled out another twenty-five peseta bill and gave it to him. Scandalized, he refused to take it.
“Then I give you back your cherry!”
I put it back into the silver dish. He reached the dish over to me, beseeching me to put an end to this joking. But my face became so severe and contracted, so offended, so stony, that the bartender, completely bewildered, said in a voice touched with emotion,
“If the Señor absolutely insists on making me this further present. . .”
“I insist,” I answered in a tone which admitted of no argument.
He took my twenty-five pesetas, but then I saw a rapid gleam of fear flash across his face. Perhaps I was a madman? He cast a quick glance at the lady seated beside me at the bar whom I could feel staring at me hypnotically. I had not looked at her for a single second, as though I had been completely unaware of her presence. But now it was to be her turn. I turned toward her and said,
“Señora, I beg you to make me a present of one of the cherries on your hat!”
“Why, gladly,” she said with agile coquettishness, and bent her head a little in my direction. I took hold of one of the cherries and began to pull it. But I saw immediately that this was not the way to do it, and remembered my long experience with such things. My aunt was a hatmaker, and artificial cherries had no secrets for me. So instead of pulling, I bent the stem back and forth until the very slender wire that served as its stem broke with a snap, and I had my cherry. I performed this operation with a prodigious dexterity and with a single hand, having kept my other, wounded, hand buried in the pocket of my coat.
When I had obtained my new artificial cherry I bit it, and a small tear revealed the white cotton of its stuffing. Having done this, I placed it beside the real cherry, and fastened the two together by their stems, winding the wire stalk of the false one around the tail of the real one. Then, to complete my operation, I picked off with a cocktail straw a little of the whipped cream that covered the lady’s drink and applied it to the real cherry, so that now the real and the false both had a white spot, the one of cream and the other of cotton.
My two spectators followed the precise course of all these operations breathlessly, as if their lives had hung on each of my minute manipulations.
“And now,” I said, solemnly raising my finger, “you will see the most important thing of all.”
Turning round, I went over to the table I had just occupied and, taking the cocktail glass filled with my blood, and holding my hand around it, carried it cautiously and daintily put it down on the metal top of the bar; after which, quickly removing my hand from it and picking up the two cherries by their joined stems I plunged them into the glass.
VII. My Rare Works
Portrait of Sigmund Freud, clone on blotting paper in London a year before his death.
My first Surrealist portrait: Paul Eluard, at Cadaques in 1929.
Self-Portrait, my first Cubist painting, clone in 192o. Portrait of my Father and Sister, my first pencil drawing.
My first “architectural drawing,” inspired by the contours of Gala’s head.
VIII. The Tragic Implications of Spain
“Le Chien Andalou,” first Surrealist film by Dali and Butmel: asses putrefying on pianos.
El Greco’s statue of Christ. The Loyalists called it “El Rey de los Maricones.”
“My Secret Life,” engraved on my forehead. (Courtesy Halsman)
One of the famous “Lovers of Teruel,” disinterred at the outset of the Civil War.
“Observe this cocktail carefully,” I said to the bartender. “This is one you don’t know!”
Then I turned on my heels and calmly left the Ritz Hotel.
I thought over what I had just done, and I felt as greatly moved as Jesus must have felt when he invented Holy Communion. How would the bartender’s brain solve the phenomenon of the apparition, in a glass which he had observed with his own eyes to be half empty a moment before, of the red liquid which now filled it to the brim? Would he understand that it was blood? Would he taste it? What would they say to each other, the lady and the bartender, after my departure?
From these absorbing meditations I passed abruptly and without transition to a mood of joyous exaltation. The sky over Madrid was a shattering blue and the brick houses were pale rose, like a sigh filled with glorious promises. I was phenomenal. I was phenomenal. The distance which separated the Ritz Hotel from my street-car stop was rather long and I was hungry as a wolf. I began to run through the streets as fast as my legs would carry me. It astonished me that the people I passed were not more surprised at my running. They barely turned their heads in my direction and continued about their business in the most natural way in the world. Peeved by this indifference, I embellished my run with more and more exalted leaps. I had always been very adept at high-jumping, and I tried to make each of my leaps more sensational than the last. If my running, unusual and violent though it was, had not succeeded in attracting much attention, the height of my leaps surprised all passers-by, imparting an expression of fearful astonishment to their faces which delighted me. I further complicated my run with a marvelous cry. “Blood is sweeter than honey,” I repeated to myself over and over again. But the word “honey” I shouted at the top of my lungs, and I pushed my leap as high and hard as I could. “Blood is sweeter than HONEY.” And I leaped. In one of these mad leaps I landed right beside a fellow-student of the School of Fine Arts, who had never known me otherwise than in my studious, taciturn and ascetic aspect. Seeing him so surprised I decided to astonish him even further. Making as if to whisper an explanation of my incomprehensible leaps, I brought my lips close to his ear. “Honey!” I shouted with all my might. Then I ran toward my streetcar which was approaching and jumped aboard, leaving my co-religionist in study glued to the sidewalk and looking after me till I lost sight of him. The next day this student told everyone, “Dali is crazy as a goat!”
That next morning I arrived at the Academy immediately before the end of classes. I had just bought the most expensive sport suit in the most expensive shop I could find in Madrid, and I wore a sky-blue silk shirt with sapphire cuff-links. I had spent three hours slicking down my hair, which I had soaked in a very sticky brilliantine and set by means of a special hairnet I had just bought, after which I had further varnished my hair with real picture varnish.6 My hair no longer looked like hair
. It had become a smooth, homogeneous, hard paste shaped to my head. If I struck my hair with my comb it made a “tock” as though it were wood.
My complete transformation, effected in a single day, created a sensation among all the students of the School of Fine Arts, and I immediately realized that, far from getting to look like everybody else as I had tried to, and in spite of having bought everything in the most exclusive and fashionable shops, I had succeeded in bringing these things together in such an unusual way that people still turned round to look at me as I went by exactly as they had before.
Nevertheless my potentialities as a dandy were now definitely established. My grubby and anachronistic appearance was replaced by a contradictory and fanciful amalgam which at least produced the effect of being expensive. Instead of inspiring sarcasm, I now released an admiring and intimidated curiosity. On coming out from the School of Fine Arts I ecstatically savored the homage of that street, so intelligent and full of wit, in which spring was already seething. I stopped to buy a very flexible bamboo cane from whose leather-sheathed handle dangled a shiny strap of folded leather. After which, sitting down at the terrace of the Café-Bar Regina, and drinking three Cinzano vermouths with olives, I contemplated in the compact crowd of my spectators passing before me the whole future that the anonymous public already held in reserve for me in the bustle of their daily activities—activities that left no trace, activities devoid of anguish and of glory.
At one o’clock I met my group in the bar of an Italian restaurant called “Los Italianos,” where I had two vermouths and some clams, after which we went over to occupy a table which was reserved for us. The story of the tip I had given the bartender had spread like wildfire into the dining-room, and when we got there all the waiters saw us coming and stood at attention. I remember perfectly the menu that I selected on that first day at the restaurant—assorted hors-d’oeuvres, jellied madrilene, macaroni au gratin, and a squab, all this sprinkled with authentic red Chianti. The coffee and the cognac served as a further stimulant to the continuance of the principal theme of our conversations, which was none other than the initial theme of the vermouth developed in the course of the meal and which, naturally, was “anarchy.”
The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (Dover Fine Art, History of Art) Page 24