Later that evening she went home and put on her glasses. Her two sons, humble and taciturn fishermen of Cape Creus, watched her while they prepared their lines and their nets for the next day’s fishing. Lydia uncorked the ink-bottle and, on the best ruled paper that was sold at the village post office, she began her new letter to the “master,” as she called him. She liked to begin directly with sentences like this:
“The seven wars and the seven martyrologies have left the village of Cadaques with its two fountains dry! La Ben Plantada is dead. She was killed by Pusa, El Greco, and also by a society of ‘goats and anarchists’ recently founded. The day you decide to come here on an excursion, be sure to make it clearly known to me in your daily article. For I have to know a day in advance so as to go and fetch meat in Figueras. In this summer season, with all the people there are here, it is impossible to find anything good at the last moment . . .”
One day she said to me, “D’Ors was at a banquet in Figueras the day before yesterday!” I knew positively that this was not true, but I asked her how she could have found out. She said, “It was written in the menu that the paper published,” and she showed me the menu, pointing with her finger to “Hors d’oeuvres.” I answered her,
“The ‘Hors’ is all right. But what does ‘oeuvres’ mean?”
She thought for a moment. “ ‘Oeuvres’–it’s as if you were to say ‘Incognito.’ D’Ors incognito–he didn’t want anyone to know it!”
Such was Lydia of Cadaques who, if she lived as she did in a world of her own which was very superior, spiritually speaking, to that of the rest of the village, did not on this account fail to have her feet firmly planted on the ground–with a sense of reality which the people of Cadaques were as ready to recognize as her folly whenever she got on the subject of “Master d’Ors and La Ben Plantada.”
“Lydia isn’t crazy,” people would say, “just try to sell her a bad weight of fish or to put your finger in her mouth!”
Lydia could make riz de langouste like no one else, and dentos2 a la marinesca–really Homeric dishes. For this last dish she had found a culinary formula worthy of Aristophanes. She would say,
“To make a good dento a la marinesca it takes three different people–a madman, a miser, and a prodigal. The madman must tend the fire, the miser add the water, and the prodigal add the oil.” For the success of this dish in fact required a violent fire and a great deal of oil, while the water had to be used very sparingly.
But if Lydia was linked to reality, and of the most substantial kind, by multiple terrestrial and maritime ties, her sons on the other hand were really mad, and ended much later by being committed to an asylum. They thought they had discovered at Cape Creus several square kilometres of precious mineral. They would spend the moonlit nights hauling dirt in wheelbarrows from a great distance to bury the vein of the mineral so that no one might discover it. I was the only one who inspired them with confidence, because of my long conversations with their mother on the subject of the “master” and La Ben Plantada. They arrived one evening at my family’s house, the summer before I met Gala, to inform me of their discovery. We shut ourselves up in my room. I asked what the mineral was that they had discovered. Then they insisted on my closing the shutters on the windows: there might be spies listening to us from outside. I shut the two windows and drew close to them, putting my hands on their shoulders in order to inspire them again with confidence.
“Well, what is it?”
They looked at each other again, as if to say, “Shall we tell him or shall we not?” But finally one of them was unable to hold it back any longer.
“RADIUM!” he whispered hoarsely.
“But is there much of it?” I asked .
And he answered, indicating with his hands a volume twice the size of his head, “Pieces like that, and as many as you like!” .. .
Lydia’s two sons owned a miserable shack with a caved-in roof which they used to keep their fishing tackle. This shack stood in a small port, Port Lligat, which was a fifteen minutes’ distance from Cadaques, beyond the cemetery. Port Lligat is one of the most arid, mineral and planetary spots on the earth. The mornings are of a savage and bitter, ferociously analytical and structural gayety; the evenings often become morbidly melancholy, and the olive trees, bright and animated in the morning, are metamorphosed into motionless gray, like lead. The morning breeze writes smiles of joyous little waves on its waters; in the evening very often, because of the offshore islands that make of Port Lligat a kind of lake, the water becomes so calm that it mirrors the dramas of the early twilight sky.
During the two months that I spent with Gala at Carry-le-Rouet, almost the only correspondence I received from Spain was Lydia’s letters, which I collected and analyzed as paranoiac documents of the first order, and when I received the letter from the Vicomte de Noailles I immediately thought of buying the shack belonging to Lydia’s sons at Port Lligat and of fixing it up to make it habitable. This shack happened to be set exactly in the spot which I liked best in all the world. With the capriciousness which always characterizes my decisions, it became in a moment the only spot where I would, where I could, live. Gala wanted only what I wished, and we wrote to Lydia offering to buy her sons’ shack. She answered that they agreed to this, and that they awaited our coming.
Thus we arrived in Cadaques in the dead of winter. The Hotel Miramar, taking my father’s side, used the fact that they were remodeling as a pretext for not receiving us, and we had to go to a tiny boarding house, where one of our former maids did everything she could to make our stay bearable. The only people with whom I was interested in keeping on good terms were the dozen fishermen of Port Lligat who, being more independent of the opinions of Cadaques, received us at first with reserve, but were quickly captivated by Gala’s irresistibly winning nature and by the aureole of my prestige. They knew that the papers were writing about me. “He’s young,” they said. “He doesn’t need his father’s money. He’s free to do what he likes with his youth.”
We hired a carpenter, and together Gala and I worked out all the details, from the number of steps there were to be in the stairway to the dimensions of the smallest window. None of the palaces of Ludwig II of Bavaria aroused one half the anxiety in his heart that this little shack kindled in ours.
The shack was to be composed of one room about four metres square, which was to serve as dining-room, bedroom, studio and entrance hall. One went up a few steps, and on a little hallway opened three doors leading to a shower, a toilet and a kitchen hardly big enough to move around in. I wanted it to be very small–the smaller, the more intrauterine. We had brought the nickel and glass furniture from our Paris apartment, and we covered the walls with several coats of enamel. Not being in a position to carry out any of my delirious decorative ideas, I wanted only the exact proportions required by the two of us and the two of us alone. The only extravagant ornament which I planned to use was a very, very small milk tooth of mine which had never been replaced, and which I had just lost. It was white and transparent like a rice-grain, and I wanted to pierce a hole in it and hang it by a thread from the mathematical center of the ceiling.
The idea of hanging my milk tooth from the ceiling of my house made me forget all kinds of practical difficulties which began to gather round Gala’s worried face. “Don’t think about those problems any more,” I would say to her then, “ . . . the water, the lighting, the difficulty of deciding where to have the maid sleep. The day you see my milk tooth hanging from its thread, reigning in the center of our house, you will be as enthusiastic as I at having undertaken all this. And we’ll never have any flowers, or a dog–only aridity around our passion! And intelligence will age us quickly, and together! One day I shall write a book about you, and you will become one of those mythological Beatrices that history is forced to carry on its back, lashed by the fury of my whip and spitting fire in the rage of its resentment.”
Once we had decided on all the details for the construction of our hou
se in Port Lligat, we went to Barcelona. The peasants of the region around Barcelona like to repeat this adage, “Barcelona is good if your purse rings.” With the deposit we had given the carpenter of Cadaques, we had gone through all our money. I prepared to make my purse ring. We went to the bank to cash the Vicomte de Noailles’ check for twenty-nine thousand francs. At the bank I was surprised that the gentleman at the cashier’s window deferentially called me by my name. I was not aware of my already great popularity in Barcelona, and this familiarity of the bank employee, instead of flattering me, filled me with suspicion. I said to Gala,
“He knows me, but I don’t know him!”
Gala was furious at such survivals of childishness and told me I would always remain a Catalonian peasant. I signed my name on the back of the check, but when the employee was about to take it I refused to give it to him.
“I should say not!” I said to Gala. “I’ll let him have my check when he brings me the money.”
“But what do you expect him to do with your check?” said Gala, trying to convince me.
“He might eat it!” I answered.
“But why would he eat it?”
“If I were in his place I would certainly eat it!”
“But even if he ate it you would not lose your money.”
“I know, but then we would not be able to go and eat torts and rubellons a la llauna this evening.3”
The bank clerk looked at us blankly, unable to follow our conversation, for I had purposely dragged Gala out of earshot. She finally convinced me, and I went back to the cashier’s window full of resolution. I said to the clerk, disdainfully throwing down my check, “All right, go ahead!”
Throughout my life it has in fact been very difficult for me to get used to the disconcerting and flabbergasting “normality” of the beings who surround me and who people the world. I always say to myself, “Nothing of what might happen ever happens!” I cannot understand why human beings should be so little individualized, why they should behave with such great collective uniformity. Take such a simple thing as amusing oneself by derailing trains! Think of the thousands of kilometres of railroad tracks that cover the earth, in Europe, America and Asia! And what a negligible percentage of those who have a passion for derailing trains ever put it into practice, as compared to the number who have a passion for traveling! When the train wrecker Marouchka was caught in Hungary this was regarded as a sensational and unique event.
I cannot understand why man should be capable of so little fantasy. I cannot understand why bus drivers should not have a desire once in a while to crash into a five-and-ten-cent store window and catch a few toys on the fly for their wives, and amuse the children who happened to be around.
I do not understand, I cannot understand why toilet manufacturers do not put concealed bombs in the flushing compartment of their products which would burst the moment certain politicians pulled the chain.
I cannot understand why bath-tubs are always made in approximately the same shape; why no one invents taxi-cabs more expensive than the others fitted inside with a device for making artificial rain which would oblige the passenger to wear his rain coat when he got in while the weather was fine and sunny outside.
I do not understand why, when I ask for a grilled lobster in a restaurant, I am never served a cooked telephone; I do not understand why champagne is always chilled and why on the other hand telephones, which are habitually so frightfully warm and disagreeably sticky to the touch, are not also put in silver buckets with crushed ice around them.
Telephone frappé, mint-colored telephone, aphrodisiac telephone, lobster-telephone, telephone sheathed in sable for the boudoirs of sirens with fingernails protected with ermine, Edgar Allan Poe telephones with a dead rat concealed within, Boecklin telephones installed inside a cypress tree (and with an allegory of death in inlayed silver on their backs), telephones on the leash which would walk about, screwed to the back of a living turtle . . . telephones . . . telephones . . . telephones .. .
I was always astonished to observe all the beings around me who were quite content in their various specialties to do again and repeat blindly and wearilessly always the same thing! And just as it astonished me that a bank clerk never had the simple idea of swallowing the check confided to him by his client, so it astonished me that no painter had ever yet had the idea of painting a “soft watch.”
Naturally I was able to cash the Vicomte de Noailles’ check without incident, and that evening we sat endlessly over a repast in which I ate two dozen small birds, with champagne, and during which we did not stop talking for a moment about our house in Port Lligat. The following day Gala fell ill of pleurisy, and I was plunged into such anxieties that for the first time in my life I felt the massive architecture of my egoism shaken to its foundations by that subterranean earthquake of sentimental altruism. Was I really going to end by loving her?
During Gala’s illness I accepted the invitation of a friend of my Madrid days who asked me to come and visit him in Málaga. He would pay for my stay there, and promised to buy a picture from me. We accordingly planned to go to Málaga as soon as Gala was well again, but we promised ourselves not to spend a centime of Noailles’ money, which we would leave in a safe at the Hotel de Barcelona, for this money was to be put aside for Port Lligat, which had become something sacred. I spent hours thinking up gifts and plans for Gala’s convalescence. Her illness had given her such a fragile look that when one saw her in her tea-rose pink night gown she looked like one of those fairies drawn by Raphael Kishner that seemed on the point of dying from the mere effort of smelling one of the decorative gardenias twice as large and heavy as their heads. A feeling of tenderness toward Gala that was quite new in my life took a hegemonic hold of my spirit. Each of her movements made me feel like weeping, a feeling sweet as honey. This fondness was accompanied by slight sadistic impulses. I would get up excitedly, full of loving care, and say to her, “You are too pretty!” while I began to kiss her everywhere. But I would squeeze her tighter and tighter, and the more I squeezed and felt her weakly try to resist my too energetically passionate embraces, the more irresistible was my desire to grind her, so to speak, between my arms. I felt Gala become exhausted by my effusions, and this only stimulated, in a more and more delirious way, my desire not to stop my “games” of compression and asphyxiation the whole afternoon. At last Gala, unable to stand any more in her state of weakness, began to weep. Then I would attack her face. I began by gently kissing it a hundred times all over. Then I began to squeeze her cheeks, to flatten her nose, to suck her lips which I obliged to contract in a snoutish grimace which appeared to me irresistible; I sucked her nose, and then her nose and her mouth at the same time while I flattened her ears toward her cheeks with both hands. All these squeezings became more and more frenzied, and finally I was grinding that little fairy face with a force that I felt to be dangerous, as though I were pulling, kneeding, folding over and patting a piece of dough to make a loaf of bread. In trying to console her I had just made her weep again.
“Let’s go out! Let’s go out!”
I put her in a car and took her to the International Exposition of Barcelona. I forced her to walk up a long flight of stairs with her eyes shut. I helped her to go up, holding her by the waist; she was so feeble that we had to rest every four of five steps. I led her thus to the top of a terrace from which one saw the whole exposition, and in the foreground the luminous, monumental fountains which were the most beautiful I have ever seen in my life. They rose to great heights, spreading fanwise, changing their form and color with combinations of a disconcerting magic effect. The sky too exploded with sheafs of fireworks. And Gala, her livid head leaning on my chest, asked,
“What have you prepared for me to see?”
“Now look!” I said.
No child has ever been so wonderstruck. The sardanas shed their melancholy rhythm around us. She said,
“You know how to do everything for me! You make me weep all the time!”
The anonymous crowd dragged its lazily stupid feet along the lanes of the fiasco that an international exposition always is. Misery of miseries! None of them wept!
Two days later we left for Málaga. The long three-day voyage was undertaken too soon after Gala’s illness. In our second-class compartment she remained for hours with her cheek glued against my chest, and I was astonished that her small head, which seemed to be composed wholly of expression, should be so heavy. It was as if the whole little cranium were filled with lead. And I fell to meditating about her skull. I saw it very white and clean, with those teeth of hers that are so perfect, so well-shaped, regular and categorical, brilliant and glorious as though each of them had been the mirror of the truth of her red tongue emerging from the salivary well of her larynx. I compared her skull, without tongue, saliva or larynx, just armed with the truth of its teeth, with the lie of the teeth of my skull. I really had the mouth of an old man. No dentist has ever been able to fathom the mystery of my dental structure,4 which always causes them to burst out in astonishment–I do not know whether from terror or admiration; for once the dentist who was examining them could not help congratulating me on the incomparable disaster of my dentition which, according to him, was something unique. Not a single tooth was where it should be. I lacked two molars that had never grown, and the two incisors of the lower jaw, which were milk teeth and which I had lost, did not grow out again (in fact they never have); still other teeth grew where they were not supposed to. . .
Dents de l’homme: 1. Incisive; 2. Canine; 3. Molaire.
The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (Dover Fine Art, History of Art) Page 36