Maniac Eyeball (10 page)
I had just killed the dream-image of Dullita by exorcising all that haunted me through this symbolic act that transformed the impulses of death into spirituality. This transfer made her memory into a sublime image which would one day incite me to resurrect her through artistic re-creation.
This sacrifice had definitely tempered my narcissistic soul by revealing to me all the resources I might anticipate from the wonderful lode that in my eyes the limitless blossoming of my personality now was.
At What Point Did Dalí Become An Adolescent?
Drying in the sun, after bathing, one morning at the Gulf of Rosas, I noticed a light black down, prolonged by a few longer hairs outlining my pubis. I delicately grasped one of those hairs and pulled on it, causing the flesh to rise as the hair doubled in length. With a sharp tug I pulled it out and looked at it in the sun, surprised at this new part of me which I had not seen coming into existence. I wet it with saliva, and the light became iridescent on it. Rolling it around my finger, I made it into a band the ends of which stuck together perfectly. Then, with my saliva, I made a kind of bubble that turned into a little rainbow through which I could see the beach and the sea. I hardened one of my thickest hairs by wetting it and letting it dry in the sun, then used it as a pin to prick the bubble.
I had less innocent games, too, having discovered the joys of masturbation in the toilets at the Drawing Institute, but it had not given me any true pleasure yet, supplying mainly astonishment at seeing my penis grow big, then suddenly blossom and spew out its sperm. My hand quickly gained expertise in this caress, and I found more delight in the gestures of adoration addressed to this living part of my body than in the rapid ecstasy that revulsed me at the termination of the exercise. I was seized with the view of this physical transformation of my sexual organ, as it went from a soft appendage to being a long hard one, the tip of which turned into a red and then purple glans until its little lips spread and projected their semen. The whole of this operation fascinated me as an extraordinary process of posses sion. I was vaingloriously proud of being able to know and live this phenomenon and also full of consternation at what I was doing, realizing how reprehensible it might be considered. In truth, I was very backward by comparison to my schoolmates who had long since become addicted to onanism, and whose bits of overheard conversation on the subject I had been intrigued by. I had been totally unaware of how one went about procuring such pleasure. I only knew it could be done alone or in twos, but my singularity kept me from asking any of my fellows to explain it to me. My ignorance, the secrecy in which this was carried on, and the belated revelation of its ecstasy all endowed me with a painful feeling of guilt. I remember that, after the first time I experienced this solo pleasure, feeling let down and guilty, I determined I would never do it again – a resolution that lasted only three days. After that, the practice became almost automatic.
This period of the discovery of my sexual proclivity was also characterized by dreams in which I lost all my teeth, while I became subject to violent nosebleeds. My guilt feelings increased the more. Then, to overcome my remorse, I devoted myself to drawing with unequaled attention and energy, and my progress was constant. And each work session was generally followed by a masturbation session. I had by now perfected the caress so as to increase and refine the enjoyment. I quickly came to associate the pleasures of masturbating and drawing. And further to enhance the voluptuousness of it, I invented a method: rather than feel guilty or fight the temptation, I decided to set one day aside for “doing it”, Sunday.
The week now went by in anticipation, exaltation, and a restraint that almost made me dizzy. The anticipation became more voluptuous than the consummation. It was these hours of my adolescence that taught me one of the key principles of my method: exacerbation of desire until it is immobilized, with anticipation becoming an ascesis, and refusal to take what one can possess, a source of delectation. What we call pleasure, moreover, the quick ejaculation, soon appeared to me as a mere wink of voluptuousness, quickly gone, compared to the deeper satisfactions I could get from the complex display of my will power; postponing my desire, molding it, stretching it, working it to suit my imaginative fantasy. I could live “in” pleasure that way for a whole week and constantly impart to my whole body the feeling of my desire, whereas the spasm wore out my muscles, dispelled my enchantment, and left me swollen with regrets.
This was when I started looking girls in the eye. Until then, they had intimidated me, made me blush, and I had been able to watch them calmly only from my balcony. I had never been involved in the evening games that sent boys and girls together out into the streets of Figueras, in chases punctuated by laughter and cries; and I reveled in my moroseness, my originality, intoxicating myself with my chimeras, cultivating my latent masochism as if it were some rare plant.
How Dalí Remembers His First Love
One afternoon, at the Institute, after an elective philosophy lecture that was held out-of-doors, I exchanged a long look with one of the girl students. When our eyes met they recognized immediate agreement in each other. Without hesitation, we left together. Running, the better to hide our emotion, we were soon outside the town. The countryside was not far away. I pointed to a wheatfield. A few more steps, and we were lying down in a little nest made by the bent wheatstalks. Her fine firm tits attracted me. I put my hands on them and felt them moving under her dress. I took her mouth at length, wildly, almost choking off her breath. And since she had a cold, she sniffled hurriedly, unable to hold back the mucus that smeared over her cheeks. As soon as I released her, she would dab at her nose with her little hankie, then with the hem of her skirt. She did not stop sniffling during our whole date, and seemed terribly embarrassed. I took her in my arms, rubbing my lips against her blond hair to wipe off the streaks of dried snot that tickled my lips and try to inhale the little-lamb fragrance that came up from her armpits.
It was on this novia that for five years I was to essay the keyboard of my egotistic, narcissistic, paranoiac, and sexual feelings, and bring out the various aspects of my sexual perversity. First, to fascinate her. Through my vocabulary, my kisses, my attitudes, my ambitions. She was easy prey. My natural lying and hypocrisy quickly created a spell that conquered her.
Then, to break any resistance she might have. From the very first afternoon, I had hit her with a terrible truth that dumbfounded her: “I’m not in love with you.” Very quickly, I let her know that I would go with her for only five years, without ever falling in love. Our love affair was chaste: caressing of breasts and much tongue-kissing. This continence, my contemptuous tones, my rude attitude wove the artful net of moral slavery I wanted to impose upon her.
Servitude, far from decreasing her love, made her even more devoted, and confirmed to me that the natural masochism of people was a lode to be exploited as one of the true sources of my delight. My coldness made her have an even greater feeling of guilt, inferiority, raising even higher the level of her unrequited desires, that I aimed to bring to “white heat.” At each of our meetings, I set the dialogue in such a way that every sentence I spoke became a dart aimed at her heart and her love. I wanted to get her to experience the sensation of a complex pleasure, based on the single fact that she suffered from knowing her love for me was hopeless and that I battened on her suffering.
Her beauty was an ideal instrument for me to test my desire on. I had decided there would be no love between us. This sentiment had to remain in the domain of daydream, the imaginary and absolute. I used her as a totem whose tits I could squeeze, whose spit I could drink, whose mouth I could bite; as a guinea pig I would inoculate with love before placing it in the center of a maze of traps set to test it, to measure its susceptibility to suffering, and study the evolution of its illness. I would have been delighted had the experi ment not had to halt this side of death.
She was incessantly reborn out of my worst wickednesses and responded with immeasurable docility to my whims: show me your tits, lower down, lie down, play dead, stop breathing, kiss me. The comedy went on at each meeting without her obedience ever flagging. Sometimes she had weeping fits that I coldly cut off. Each of her moments of weakness made me the more demanding. I even ordered her to stop seeing any of her friends, so she might be entirely devoted to me alone. She acquiesced. I destroyed in her mind any esteem she had for her kin by demolishing them with bitter criticisms. I created a desert around her, and her sadness grew deeper by the minute. I tortured her by counting out the months that remained until we were to separate, as I had irrevocably decreed. I finally made it so she was unable to sleep, and she lost that healthy look that disgusted me so. She became waxen, sorrowful, and love-hungry. Our daily half hour together was a torture ever renewed, but that she could not live without. I started skipping days. She wrote me letters of exquisite banality, but overflowing with passion, which I left in my pockets. I soon had her weeping every time so I could drink her tears in with the kisses. I alternated tenderness and violence the better to keep her off balance. When she was reduced to the state of a mental and sentimental wreck, I said farewell. The deadline had come, anyway: I was leaving for Madrid.
Our affair had lasted for five years. I had gotten her into a kind of state of mystical exaltation. I had imposed my cynicism, my violence, and my lies on my Nina, and especially I had perfected the principle of my system: maximization of sensual pleasure through the deliberate unfulfillment and subjugation of one’s partner. Naturally, I was not really in love with her, but I got all the satisfaction I could from her subjection, her veritable bestialization. I regretted only that the end of the affair did not also signify the death of my mistress. We were both virgins when we separated.
Love seemed to me a kind of sickness, somewhat like seasickness, with the same annunciatory symptoms: shivers, anxiety, and loss of balance. I said at that time that the feeling of falling in love might be mistaken for the need to vomit.
But this made me no less susceptible to the beauty of women, and the image of the broad-buttocked cooks with their turgescent tits, stiff hairs, and strong smells that had awakened my childhood senses, was being slowly transformed. At eighteen, I was taken with elegance, paid no more attention to breasts, but insisted on an elongation of the iliac bones which beneath the dress had to appear like the aggressive handle of a basket. I liked shaved, bluish armpits, and wanted even the stupidest of women to have an intelligent look in the eye, for appearances were all my eroticism cared about. Wholesomeness seemed to me to be in bad taste, except where hair was concerned.
My eroticism found its fodder in three elements: angelicism, i.e., an expression that was seemingly asexual; cold, crude, refined, cruelty that killed sentiment; and a scatology which, as in the paintings of Gustave Moreau, is reflected by the accumulation of jewels, chains, buckles, raiment. Gold and shit, as is well known, represent the same thing to psychoanalysts. A woman in the grip of the shimmering tyranny of jewels is as if covered with excrement, and makes my mouth water.
Two things haunted me, and paralyzed me, at the time. One, a panic fear of venereal diseases. (My father had bred in me a horror of microbes. It is something I have never gotten over, and at times it has led me to fits of madness.) But, more especially, I long suffered from the terrible ache of believing myself impotent. Naked and trying to compare myself to my schoolmates, I found my cock small, pitiful, and soft. I have never forgotten a pornographic novel I once read in which a Don Juan effected new holes in female bellies with ferocious delight, stating that what he loved was to hear women crack open like so many watermelons. I was sure I would never be able to make any woman crack open like a watermelon. And that weakness gnawed at me. I tried to hide this aberration from myself, but I was often overcome by fits of uncontrollable laughter, reaching the point of hysteria, which were like the external sign of the great shifts that were taking place deep inside me. It was time for me to meet Gala.
“REPUGNANCE IS THE SENTRY STANDING RIGHT NEAR THE DOOR TO THOSE THINGS WE DESIRE THE MOST.”
Chapter Six: How To Conquer Paris
I was dreaming not of love but of glory, and I knew that the road to success led through Paris. But in 1927 Paris was far from Figueras, far away, mysterious, and big. I landed there one morning with my sister and aunt, to judge its distance and size, as a boxer does during a round of studying his opponent.
First I discovered Versailles (and continued to like the Escorial better) and the musty Musée Grévin waxworks. My self-confidence increased daily, but nothing essential had been accomplished. What I needed was the accolade of the only Parisian who mattered in my eyes: Pablo Picasso.
I had carefully prepared my way to him. I knew that Picasso had seen one of my paintings in Barcelona,
Muchacha de
Espaldes
(
Rear View Of A Girl
; known in English as
Girl’s
Shoulder
or
Girl’s Back),
and had liked it: he had mentioned it to his dealer, Paul Rosenberg, who had written me out of the blue to ask for some photographs of my work. I had asked a friend of Lorca’s, the Cuban painter Manuel Angel Ortiz, to take me to Picasso’s studio. As soon as I got to 23 Rue La Boétie, I knew those two jet-black button eyes of his had recognized me. I was “the other one” – the only one able to stand up to him. (In truth, now I know the world was a little too small for the two of us. Fortunately, I was still young!) I respectfully tendered a gift to him, another Figueras
muchacha
such as the one he had appreciated, and it took me quite a while to extricate it from its mummy’s wrappings; but it was a real live painting that came out of the diapers and it seemed to me that as he looked at it, it took on a sudden new life. Picasso spent a long while, scrutinizing it minutely, and it had never looked finer to me. From that minute on, he was at great pains to dazzle me.
