Maniac Eyeball (15 page)

I had my work. I locked myself in my Figueras studio for a month. I finished
The Great Masturbator
and
Portrait
Of Paul Eluard.
I felt it incumbent on me to fix forever the face of the poet from whose Olympus I had stolen one of the muses.

I left for Paris at the end of the summer, to arrange for my first show, which was to open in November at the Galerie Goëmans. That period remains for me a series of strong images that embody the voluptuousness of deliberate defeat.

I am in a florist’s shop and do not have enough money to pay for the hundred roses I have just ordered for Gala. I wait until the very last moment before going to see Gala whom I am dying to see again.

On our honeymoon at Sitges and Barcelona, I let Gala go back to Paris alone, so as to go and see my father, who tells me it is unthinkable that I should marry a Russian woman. Despite my denials, he believes Gala is a drug addict and has turned me into a narcotics dealer, which alone in his eyes would explain the unlikely sums of money I have been making.

He was to write me that he disowned me. Out of pain, I decided to shave my head completely and, before leaving Cadaqués, went and buried my hair on the beach with a batch of sea-urchin shells fragrant of cunt.

I am on the highest hill overlooking Cadaqués and stare at my village for a last farewell. With my bald scalp, I leave for Paris, a picture of the anguish, pain, and sorrow that indicate the passage to maturity and the landmarks of the Galactite ordeals.

In Paris, all the paintings in the show have been sold and my success is enormous. Gala has just finished transcribing my notes that I plan to publish as
La Femme
Visible
(
The Visible Woman
). Buñuel wants us to start work without delay on the scenario for
L’Age d’Or,
a new film that has just been commissioned from him by the Vicomte de Noailles, who put up a million francs, a fantastic budget for those days. A leaf of my life is being turned, I am emerging from the shadow to the light.

To live with Gala became an obsession to me. To digest her, possess her, assimilate her, melt into her. With my shaven skull and fiery eye I looked exactly like a Grand Inquisitor, but one consumed with love. Gala understood that we had to flee the world so as to temper ourselves as a couple in the crucible of life alone together.

A small hotel on the Riviera, at Carry-le-Rouet, took us in. We rented two rooms. In one, my easel, my canvas of
L’Homme Invisible
(
The Invisible Man
), inspired by the research of Archimboldo, on whom I had meditated for so long, my books, and my brushes; in the other, the bed. They brought our meals up to us. We opened the door a crack only to let the valet or chambermaid in.

I was methodically exploring Gala with the detailed care of a physicist or archaeologist exalted to high pitch by delirious love. I fixed in my memory the value of every grain of her skin so as to apprehend the shadings of their consistency and color; so as to find the right attentive caress for each. I could have drawn up a map of her body with a perfect geography of the zones of beauty and fine ness of her fleshly coil and the pleasures to be derived and evoked. I spent hours looking at her breasts, their curve, the design of the nipples, the shadings of pink to their tips, the detail of the bluish veinlets running beneath their gossamer transparency; her back ravished me with the delicacy of the joints, the strength of the rump muscles, beauty and the beast conjoined.

Her neck had pure grace in its slimness; her hair, her intimate hairs, her odors intoxicated me; her mouth, teeth, gums, tongue overpowered me with a pleasure I had never even suspected. I became a sex freak. I wallowed in it to the very paroxysm of cockcunt, voraciously gobbling, frenzied in the unleashing of my finally sated instincts.

Even today, from those passionate hours of our isolation in sex, my memory retains the images of our orgiastic comings-together – animal but perfect and beautiful in their wildness. We were like two monks of sex, at every hour of the day celebrating the adoration of their god.

Only lack of money – a few pieces of silver – made us surface again. And then everything was silvery, the pale winter sun, the landscape, our cadaverous complexions.

Unsteady on our legs, led along by our dazzled eyes dilated by pleasure, we went as far as a café terrace, attracted by the tropism of the rays of the sun. Gala ordered a gala lunch to celebrate our return to life with others and, during the meal, we laid out the tactics for getting our finances afloat once more. A letter had come that morning from the Vicomte de Noailles – we had been expecting it for several days, for Gala had read the cards and foretold the imminent arrival of a letter, a token of great friendship and much money – and now it informed us that my dealer Goëmans was about to go broke but that, on the other hand, the Vicomte wanted to buy my next painting. There was no time to waste. Gala decided to go to Paris at once to collect the amounts still due me by Goëmans, while I would go to see the Noail leses who were spending the winter at their chateau at St. Bernard, near Hyères, and discuss the subject of my next picture with them.

We decided that twenty-nine thousand francs was the proper advance to request from aristocrats of their standing, their thoughtfulness, and their wealth.

Gala left. And then I had a call from the floor valet who, livid with terror, told me that while sweeping the hotel salon he had inadvertently knocked down a master’s painting and run it through with his broomstick. He would obviously lose his job, unless I, the artist, could find a way to repair the damage. I was still all full of love and open to pity. I agreed, and with very great care I did away with all traces of the hole.

I thought this was the end of my good deed, but when meal-time came the valet arrived with three dozen oysters that he implored me to accept by way of thanks. I had just heard that an epidemic was rife in the oysterbeds and the very idea of guzzling one of those mollusks turned my stomach and filled me with horror. I was already thinking on how to dispose of the tray of them, but the man was so overflowing with gratitude that he wanted to watch me eat them, and opened and handed them to me one by one. I thought I should die and for two days was in a sweat of terror awaiting my death.

That night I decided I would never be nice again and I have stuck to it. Gala alone receives my generosity and the attention of my heart.

With my beloved Beatrice away, I got another initiation, in connection with the Vicomte de Noailles’ check. Coming back from his chateau, I had put the pink paper on the desk and considered it most carefully. Its shape, its delicate shade, the way the letters were printed on it, the figures written by hand, and the signature; it seemed to me that all of this contributed to creating an enthralling
mise-en-scène
celebrating the cult of money. But this little piece of paper was worth millions. The dynamite of an awesome power was hidden in those symbols. The check assumed the shape of a case full of ingots, or turned into meals, fabrics, clothes. It seemed to me that the mere fact of carrying it in my wallet afforded me the protection of armor and the power of a prince. An army of imaginary valets whirled respectfully about me, full of deference and attentive to my slightest whims. I had but to raise a finger and everything became easy. Where there was a will, there was a way. Money was a magic wand. By the time Gala got back, I was giddy with gold.

How Dalí’s Love For Gala Expressed Itself

During these two months devoted to
l’amour
and the adoration of Gala I had gone down to the very sources of the pleasure of living in the abyssal depths of being. It was a kind of journey to the center of being I had made, going back to my intra-uterine memories, to the very nourishment of the birthing placenta, and in my wild mind seeing Gala’s cunt and my mother’s belly as one. A philter sweeter than honey flowed within me. Gala’s senses, Gala’s belly, Gala’s back exalted my dreams, their shapes mixed together, merged, compounded as the lines and rhythms of the waves of joy that rocked me and carried me over an ocean of felicity. My paranoia knew no bounds. My delirium rose to perfection and Gala’s super-intelligent complicity allowed me to attain the omega point of my inventions. All I had to do was touch the beautymark on Gala’s left earlobe to be carried away on the flying carpet of my wild love.

This wonderful spot seemed to me to be the proton of my beloved’s divine energy, the sun of her heart, the geometrical locus of our passion for each other, the very point at which any contradiction between our two beings ceased to be. All I had to do was rub it with my finger to be flooded with strength and faith in my own des tiny. This divine beautymark to me was the proof of the definitive death of my brother Salvador, his mystical tomb; stroking it, I was rubbing against his gravestone. I thus took blanket possession of my existence in one stroke and had the intoxicating feeling of erasing the memory of this dead brother at the same time that I possessed the whole of the woman I loved, capturing all the beauty of the world and even living and making love to my own life. Even my father was not immune to being symbolically gobbled when I took Gala’s ear lobe between my lips and let it slowly give me suck. Later, Picasso capped my great happiness by showing me he had the same beauty-mark as Gala in exactly the same place. That day, he even made her a present of a Cubist painting – showing that even that awesome person age’s possessive genius could not resist Gala’s radiation. It is true that Gala selected the smallest among the paintings he let her choose from. A fulcrum is all you need to raise the globe and with Gala’s beautymark I can reconstruct the geometry of Dalínian intelligence. Her sacred ear sucked away all the dizzinesses of my soul to allow me to be reborn lucid, complete within unity, the master of the genius of my twin’s personality, capable of overcoming my father’s curse, the virile son of my mother. My entire unconscious found stability around that axis, like a planet around its sun, a believer taking his Host. Magical beautymark, alpha and omega of Dalí!

Further to reinforce my paranoia, during our isolation I had gotten letters from Lidia, the widow of Nando, the Cadaqués fisher man, who with her two sons seemed in my eyes the perfect illustration of paranoiac delirium. The Oracle of Delphi would have turned pale with envy alongside Lidia.

She spoke sublimely. Because the writer Eugenio d’Ors once, while on vacation at Cadaqués, having gone fishing at sea several times with Nando, said to her, as she was bring ing him a glass of water, “Lidia, how well set you are!” her head and heart had been carried away. It was love-at-first-sight, and after Nando died she dreamed only of Eugenio d’Ors. Especially when she read his book
La Bien Plantada
(
The
Well-Set Woman
), in which she unwarrantedly recognized herself. She read every article by her hero, who did a regular feature in
La Veu de Catalunya
(
The Wind Of Catalonia
), and in each piece decoded the words to interpret them as a love letter to her. She finally convinced herself that d’Ors did this to mislead her rivals. And of course she wrote him. The amazing part was that she could always find in the next day’s article a word, an allusion that referred back to her previous day’s letter. With an unheard-of genius for interpretation she found links between the most conflicting ideas, working out the strictest syllogisms to demonstrate the logic in her most unbelievable of algebras.

Lidia was sure of Eugenio d’Ors’ most absolute love and the thinnest of allusions whipped up her passion. Beyond that, she re mained a thrifty housekeeper and the most faithful of friends. The mystical, passionate, intransigent, inquisitorial Catalonian soul lived in her in all its magnificence. When I persuaded Gala to invest the Vicomte de Noailles’ twenty-nine thousand francs in a home at Cadaqués, I was dreaming of a return to my native country, defying my father, and also sharing with Lidia the most wonderful of paranoiac climates, fascinated by the implacable coherency of the mind of this woman who could make parallels out of perpendiculars. I never found an intelligence more subtle in dealing with the absurd and implanting impeccable geometry over chaos. Like an experienced philologist, she interpreted the meanings of words, sniffed out love like a diamond in its matrix, establishing concordances and relation ships, raising raving to the level of fine art. With her, I was breathing my own kind of air.

I landed at Cadaqués like a pariah disowned by his father. Against me there was the weight of this curse which was subscribed to by all right-thinking people, especially since I was living in sin with a foreign woman who was supposed to be damaged goods. The Hotel Miramar, claiming it was undergoing repairs, refused to rent to us. A lousy little boarding-house took us in. Lidia, whom I had advised of my return, welcomed us like a mother, and indulged my desire to turn our backs on all the petit bourgeois magnetized by my
notario
of a father, so we could face the sea I so admired. She found us a little fisherman’s hut at Port Lligat, the other side of the Cadaqués cemetery, in a heavenly place. But our castle was a cabin four meters to a side and our first move was to get a carpenter to transform a storeroom three steps up into a shower, a toilet, and a kitchen.

A series of events followed each other very rapidly, night mare fashion. We had gone to Barcelona to cash the Vicomte’s check when Gala took to bed, burning up with fever. It was pleurisy. I was sick along with her, suffocating, choking, raving just as she did. The osmosis between us was such that I thought I was able to impart some of my strength to her and share her torment. Psychically and mentally, I was sicker than if I had been ill myself. Finally, she began to convalesce. We were in dire straits because we had mutually agreed that we would deposit the full amount of the Vicomte’s check in the hotel safe so it could all go toward setting up our Port Lligat nest. The fixing-up of “our” house, the creation of our shell, seemed to us the most important thing in the world, a vital necessity. We did not want this little nest to be tentative, but rather the shell that gives birth to the invincible coral reef. Meantime, for all our pile of gold, we were broke until a friend who lived in Malaga asked us to be his guests, letting us pay him with paintings. I interpreted this proposal as a happy omen. It was but a brief stop in the series of adversities that were to beset us, but I had gotten back into my spring-like happy frame of mind.