Thus I imagined my skull next to Gala’s, and I saw it as a veritable cataclysm, for aside from the chaos of my teeth, my extremely underdeveloped chin would offer a violent contrast to the decisive development of my superciliary arches, which would be monstrously avid of sight once sight was absent. Moreover I could not imagine my own skull as white–it would always be ochre and putrefying, the color of earth saturated with manure. Gala’s–as I have already said–was white, and even sky-blue-tinged, like those smooth, translucid and semi-precious pebbles that Gala’s mother had gathered on the shores of the Black Sea and given her as a present, and which were kept in a cotton-lined box. I thought of the burial of Gala and myself together, holding each other’s hand . . .
Gala’s skull, overflowing with sleep, dropped into my lap. I put it back in place, on my shoulder that already ached from its weight. Opposite me other skulls, attached to anonymous travelers, swayed inertly with the jolts of the train. The flies walked about freely on all these faces. It was in a train wholly occupied by people “dead with sleep” that we reached Málaga.
An African heat already hovered at this season over the country of Andalusia with a phantasmal, royal and supreme majesty. Inscribed in letters of fire on the smooth, outstretched field of the sky without a single cloud, I read this heraldic device, “Here Heat Is King.” The taxi driver went up to a porter sleeping in a shaded corner and tried to wake him up by rolling his body over with his foot. He did this twice, pausing in between. After the second rolling the porter finally made a gesture with his hand which seemed to belong to a ritual of ancient Egypt and by which he gave to understand, “Certainly not today!”
Preparations were in full swing for the Festival of the Dead, with orgiastic processions of Easter flowers. A streetcar conductor stopped his tram before a bar. He was brought a glass of anis del mono. He gulped it down and started off again, singing. In the streets one saw many Picassos5 with a carnation stuck over one ear, watching the passing throngs with eyes of a criminal, intense and graceful intelligence. Great bullfights were scheduled, and in the evenings after the implacable sunset, instead of a “lovely” breeze a hot, often burning wind would sweep in, the wind of the African desert just across the strait.
We Spaniards loved it! And this was the hour that we chose to make love! The hour when the fields of carnations and sweat smelled strongest, while the African lion of Spanish civilization roared! In a tiny village a few kilometres from Málaga, Torremolinos, we rented a fisherman’s cottage which overlooked a field of carnations on the edge of a cliff falling abruptly into the sea. This was our honeymoon of fire! Our skins became dark as those of the fisher folk, who were brown as Arabs. The bed of our house was so hard that the mattresses seemed, instead of wool, to contain pieces of dry bread. It was uncomfortable to sleep on, but afterwards one’s body was completely covered with gentle bruises and aches which, when one gets used to them, become extremely agreeable, for then one perceives that one has a body, and that one is naked.
Gala, with a build like a boy’s, burned by the sun, would walk about the village with her breasts bare, and I had taken to wearing my necklace again. The fishermen of this region had no modesty of any kind, and would drop their pants a few metres from us to perform their physical functions. One could see that it was one of the most pleasurably anticipated moments of the day, and sometimes there was a whole string of them doing it together along the beach beneath a relentless sun. They would take their time about it, all the while tossing epic obscenities back and forth. At other times they would egg their children on with guttural cries as they fought with sling-shots in pitched battles. These stone-fights often ended with a few cracked skulls. The sight of their children’s blood would awaken a little the personal hostilities among the defecators and, quickly pulling up their trousers and carefully readjusting their genital parts, which were always of handsome and well-developed proportions, they would start arguing among themselves about their children’s battles and would in turn end the polemic with one or two knife jabs, accompanied and embellished by the unimportant tears which their wives, in perpetual mourning, would shed as they came running with hair dishevelled and arms raised to heaven, imploring Jesus and the Immaculate Virgin. There was not a shadow of sadness or of sordidness about all this. Their outbursts of anger were gay, biological, like a fish-bone drying in the sun. And their excrements were extremely clean and inlayed with a few undigested muscat grapes, as fresh as before they were swallowed.
At this period I developed a passion for olive oil. I would put it into everything. I would begin early in the morning by dipping my toast in oil with anchovies swimming in it. The considerable amount that remained in the dish I drank directly as though it were a precious liquid. Finally I poured the last drops on my head and my chest. I rubbed my hair and my body with it. My hair grew out again with renewed vigor, and so thickly that I broke all my combs. I continued to paint The Invisible Man begun at Carry-le-Rouet, and wrote the definitive version of The Visible Woman.
From time to time we received the visit of a small group of intellectual surrealist friends who all hated one another passionately and who were beginning to be gnawed by the canker of left and right ideologies. I saw at once that the day these cankers reached the stature of real serpents the civil war in Spain would be something ferocious and grandiose, a kind of monumental head of Medusa which instead of having a face in its head would have a face in its belly in which instead of intestines there would be serpents mutually strangulating one another in a continual iliac passion of death and of erection.
One day we received a batch of mail with several items of bad news. The Goemans Gallery, which owed us almost a month in arrears, had just gone into bankruptcy; Bunuel was going ahead all by himself with the production of L’Age d’Or–thus the film would be executed without my collaboration; the carpenter of Cadaques, who claimed to have nearly completed our house at Port Lligat, was asking for the balance of his bill, augmented by a series of supplementary expenses which made it amount to more than twice what we had originally contemplated. At the same moment our rich Málaga friend went off without leaving his address, saying he would be back in twenty days! The money we had brought to Málaga was spent. We had enough to live on for another three or four days. Gala suggested that we send for the money in Barcelona. I did not want to touch this money, which for that matter was no longer enough to pay the carpenter’s bill. The house at Port Lligat was sacred! So we decided to send telegrams to Paris asking friends to advance us money on the paintings I would bring them. But none of these friends answered, and the three days went by.
In the evening we requisitioned all the small change that always lay scattered in the pockets of my suits, and succeeded in collecting two pesetas. That very evening we received the visit of a surrealist who was a Communist sympathizer. I begged him to send a telegram for me, which I drafted, to our hotel in Barcelona to have our money sent to us. We would reimburse him the cost of the telegram as soon as we received our money. He left promising to do this. But the whole next day passed without any answer, and the following day likewise. To cap our misfortune, we were without a maid, and the empty house was without a single crumb of food. I knew moreover that our condition of sudden distress was solely due to my stubbornness in not having wanted to follow Gala’s advice to send for the Barcelona money, which I had at first refused to touch out of superstition in regard to the Port Lligat house. This whole situation assumed in my brain the proportions of an incipient tragedy.
The intense African heat which had been beating on my body for a long month was making me see everything in red and black. In the morning, in an adjoining house, a crazed youth had just half-killed his mother with a pair of tongs. In the evening the customs-officer amused himself by shooting swallows with his rifle. Gala tried to convince me that our situation was annoying but far from tragic. All we had to do was to go and settle comfortably in a hotel in Málaga and wait there for the Barcelona money which could not
fail shortly to arrive. There were several reasons why the money might have been delayed. We had telegraphed on a Saturday, and because of the English week the banks were closed that day. Perhaps our friend had neglected to send the telegram.
But I would not listen to all these arguments. I wanted to take advantage of the occasion to play out the drama of my anger once and for all, after having held it in leash ever since I had encountered my first economic difficulties. I would not admit the affront, the injustice, the monstrousness of the fact that I, Salvador Dali, should have to interrupt the writing of The Visible Woman because I, Salvador Dali, found myself without money, and the fact that my Galuchka should be dragged into the same degrading situation was the last drop to make the already full cup of my patience overflow.
I left the house, slamming the door, and with the remorse of leaving Gala there in anguish, in the midst of packing our baggage. I picked up a stick from the ground and stalked through the fields of red carnations down toward the sea. As I went I furiously mowed the heads of the carnations, which shot into the air like the spurting blood of the decapitations so savagely painted by Carpaccio.
The seashore was hollowed out by grottos in which lived olive-complexioned gypsies, who were cooking fish in boiling oil that hissed in the frying pans like the very vipers of my own anger. For a second I thought of the absurd possibility of bringing down Gala’s fitted trunk and coming to live among them. The thought of this promiscuous contact with the very beautiful gypsy women who were there half naked suckling their babies was a powerful aphrodisiac, to which the tenacious dirtiness of these women contributed. I fled to a solitary cove, my imagination whirling with the memory of those nursing breasts mingled with the vision of the glistening rump–like a black horse’s–of one of the women puttering over the fire. My legs gave way and, falling to my knees on the jagged rocks, I felt like one of those anchorites in the throes of ecstasy painted by Rivera. With my free hand I caressed and scratched the calcinated skin of my body. I wanted to touch it everywhere at the same time. And I riveted my half-shut eyes upon a shred of cloud from which the scatological golden rain of Danae fell in oblique rays. My whole fury had now taken hold of the jerks and trembling of my flesh. All my pockets were empty. No more gold, eh? But I could still spend this! And I spilled upon the ground the large and the small coin of my precious life, which seemed to me this time to be extracted from the deepest and darkest recesses of my bones.
This new and unnecessary “expense,” the moment the pleasure it afforded me was over, only accentuated for me with an intensified feeling of discouragement the intolerable reality of my financial situation. Then all my impulsive anger turned toward myself. To punish myself for having done “that,” I looked at my closed fist, the recent instrument of my enjoyment, and with it I pitilessly struck my face. I hit it several times in succession, harder and harder, and suddenly I felt that I had broken a tooth. I spat blood on the ground, on the very spot where a moment before I had squandered my treasure of pleasure. It was written: a tooth for a tooth!
I returned to our cottage, in a fever of excitement, but radiant. Victoriously I showed Gala my fist:
“Guess!”
“A glow-worm,” she said, knowing that I was fond of gathering them.
“No! My tooth–I broke my little tooth; we must by all means go and put it in Cadaques, hang it by a thread in the centre of our house at Port Lligat.”
XI. The Great Paranoiac
Apparition of the head of Don Quixote in an Austrian postal card.
Under this cypress, which figures in my early memories, I first read Don Quixote.
The postal card as it appeared when originally discovered by Gala.
Apparition of Velasquez’ Infanta in the summit of a piece of Hindu architecture.
Velasquez’ painting of the Infanta.
XII. The Mouth of an Aesthetic Form
The exact spot at Cadaques, where the jagged rocks made it uncomfortable to sit, which inspired the famous Divan in the Shape of a Mouth.
My idea as realized by the decorator, Jean-Michel Frank, one of my great friends during the Paris period, who was to commit suicide almost immediately after his arrival in America.
The mouth, the sea, and its foam treated as aesthetic forms in wrought iron by the architect Gaudi of Barcelona.
Mysterious Mouth appearing in the back of my nurse.
Four Mouths or “Age, Adolescence, and Youth.”
The Face of Mae West, which might be used as an apartment.
This little tooth inspired in me a great tenderness and pity. It was tiny, so thin that it was translucid. It was like a small fossilized rice-grain, with an infinitesimal fragment of a daisy-petal caught within it. For one could in fact see a tiny whiter point at the center. Perhaps if one could have microscopically enlarged this little white spot one might have seen the aureole of a tiny Virgin of Lourdes appear. I have always had a precise consciousness of the advantage of my infirmities. In deficiencies, as a consequence of the laws of compensation, of disequilibrium and of heterogeneity, there are created breaks out of which new hierarchies of the normal coefficients of elasticity are created. I am quite aware that the Argonauts were supposed to have aggressive and well-stocked jaws, and we are told a great deal about the will logically directed toward success. But within my own experience I have never seen these strong faces with flawless porcelain teeth—prototypes of mordant tenacity—except among the anonymous crowds, capable at best of climbing to the most average situation in life. The rich, on the contrary, always have bad teeth. Money ages and wrinkles the man who is going to be rich, even before he succeeds in becoming so, just as the effluvia of certain malefic and carnivorous flowers intoxicate in advance the insect that comes to rest upon its fatal pistils. “My beloved, impoverished, uneven, decalcified teeth, stigmas of my old age, henceforth I shall have only you to bite at money!”
The following day we went to Málaga to ask for a little money of our communistically inclined surrealist friend. We took the bus, with just enough money for the one-way trip. Thus, if we did not get hold of any it would be impossible for us to come home. After looking for him everywhere we finally caught him. I said to him, “We need at least fifty pesetas to keep us for three or four days more till our money comes.” Our friend assured us that he had sent our telegram the very evening we wrote it. He had no money of his own, but he promised me that he would immediately look up the various people from whom he might borrow this sum, and that I could surely count on it. He made us sit on the terrace of a café, and while Gala had an horchta and I a vermouth with olives he went on his pilgrimage to find money to lend us.
It was getting close to the time our bus was to leave, and there was still no sign of our savior. We began to despair of ever seeing him again when, just at the last moment, he came running.
“Run over and get seats on the bus!” he said. “Everything is arranged. I’ll see you off.”
He saw us to our seats, and while he wiped the sweat from his face with one hand, he shook my hand with the other, in which a piece of paper was discreetly folded, and said goodbye. I thanked him with all my heart, saying, “It won’t be long now.”
He smiled to indicate that we could in any case count on him, the ous started off, and for the first time the contact with a fifty-peseta bill within my hand seemed to be imbued with all the white magic of the earth combined. Here I held three days of the life of Gala and of Salvador Dali which I savored in advance as the most magnificent in our existence. I relaxed my hand with the deliberation of one who wants to prolong the pleasure of anticipation indefinitely, able at last to observe with his own eyes the symbol of a happiness awaited with too much anguish.
But a chill came over me when I discovered that what I had in my hand was not a fifty-peseta bill but that my friend, apparently in sarcasm and derision, had simply left me the crumpled blue receipt of the telegram which he had sent for me two days before, thus not only giving me to understand that he was n
ot disposed to lend me the sum I had asked him for, but cynically reminding me of the debt I owed him for the telegram. We had no money to pay our bus fare, and if the conductor had asked me at that moment for the price of my ticket, I should probably have tried to kick him off the bus. Gala was aware of the danger of such fits of anger which, when they take hold of me, can lead to the most unforseen, but always catastrophic solutions. She clutched my arm, begging me not to do anything. But I had got to my feet and was looking about for some pretext to perpetrate one of my phenomenal acts. As if in mechanical obedience to my sudden anxiety the conductor rang the bell and the bus stopped. I thought for a moment that my aggressive intentions had somehow been divined and that I was going to be thrown out of the bus. With both hands I clutched one of the nickel bars, prepared for a desperate resistance. But at this moment I saw our surrealist friend come rushing toward me, looking very unhappy, and waving in his hand what this time was visibly a fifty-peseta bill. In the last-minute confusion of leave-taking he had given me the wrong piece of paper and he had followed our bus in a taxi to catch up with us. We continued on our way.
When we reached home a stack of letters bearing good news awaited us, and among them was a check from Barcelona for our money which had been transferred to a Málaga bank. I ate a couple of anchovies with tomatoes and slept the whole afternoon with a sleep as heavy as the somnambulist noon-day bus that had brought us back. When I awoke, a moon that was red as a slice of watermelon rested on the fruit-dish of the bay of Torremolinos cut off by the window-frame and seemingly standing right on the table. My sudden awakening gave to this combination of images a confused synthesis in which the real spatial relationships began only gradually to organize themselves. I could not tell a priori what was near and what was far, what was flat and what was in perspective. I had just seen photographically a picture of the type of Picasso’s cubist windows, a picture which, evolving in my brain, was to become the key to the mimetic and paranoiac images I was later to produce, like my bust of Voltaire. While I lay on my bed reflecting upon all these complicated problems of vision, which are essentially philosophical problems, my finger was pleasurably exploring the inside of my nose, and I pulled out a little pellet which struck me as too large to be a piece of dry mucus. And upon examining and compressing it with delicate attention I discovered that it was in fact a piece of the telegram receipt which I must have pressed, rubbed and rolled into a ball with the sweat of my hand and absentmindedly stuck in one of my nostrils, an automatic bit of play which was characteristic of me at that period.
The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (Dover Fine Art, History of Art) Page 37