Maniac Eyeball (16 page)

I rented a house at Torremolinos surrounded by flowers and looking out to sea, having Gala pose as queen of the carnations in the middle of a brilliant parterre. My frenetic sexuality turned into a wild debauch of tenderness. During her illness, in order to keep up my hopes, I had spent entire days dreaming of the presents I might concoct for her the day she was well. I had no other ways to prove my love to her than my hands, my brushes, and my cock. Gala was so weak that the slightest effort exhausted her. We would walk out slowly in the sun, or else I would stay alongside her on a chaise longue as she motionlessly lay there and tanned almost visibly. She quickly became black and golden as a brioche and her energy daily came back in waves. Her weeping spells, which expressed her de pression, soon stopped. She laughed even at the sadistic tortures I inflicted on her.

How Dalí Explains His Strange Sadistic Tenderness

Love is strength, power, ingestion, digestion. It is sex organ, tongue, tooth, claw, caress. It is domination and submission, obedience and refusal. The animality sleeping in all of us that awakens with possession and orgasm is the essential of the ecstasy of love. Fantasying and symbolism are but a way of exploring the vacuum that one’s male strength is going to fill and, for the woman, the make-ready of her being to prepare to satisfy her man. Illness had made Gala as fragile as her diaphanous skin, and her tender beauty chal lenged my sexual violence. I raged to have to put up with such im potence.

Having to be satisfied with holding her in my arms, I squeezed her as if to crush her, covering her with kisses, licking her like a dog in love with his master’s hand. She suffocated beneath my embraces, choked, and soon was weeping in my arms. Her beautiful face turned ugly beneath the tears and I sometimes took pleasure in turning it into a clown’s mask. I would bite the end of her nose to make it turn red, knead her cheeks to bring out their sanguine color, twist her ears into conches, and pull her lips out with the suction of my mouth. I found a kind of pleasure in these tortures of love. But that was only an accident, a way of getting even for what I had suf fered while she was ill. Health brought a masterful Gala back to me and I was once again her fulfilled lover. We rolled over and over on the bed, living through the joy of finding each other again in the intoxication of our bodies. Gala, moulded by our love-making, then went walking through the blooming fields and even into the village, her bosom bare and victorious. I watched her with pride and enjoyment, my cock at attention with the joy of life.

I was working on finishing
The Invisible Man.
In the evening, we would walk along the beaches, very careful not to squash the gorgeous turds that the fishermen deposited in such provocative little piles. Shitting sessions, in the evening, after dinner, were the highlight of the village. The forum hour. They would gather by family affinity or commonality of interest to be able to discuss what was on their minds while they dropped trousers. Our presence did not in any way embarrass them. With a bit of encouragement they might easily have asked us to join them, for we had become very popular. I watched them most interestedly as these excrements extruded from the hard white arses and formed into such perfect spirals. Their healthfulness was patent in these stools as in their way of shitting together without bashfulness.

We would have extended these Homeric sessions if the ends of the evenings did not generally degenerate into fights. For, while the fathers were sharing their shit and piss, the children were exchanging stones as hard as their slingshots could carry them. The fights quickly turned nasty and bloody. Then the adults would raise their trousers without wiping themselves and no sooner were they buttoned up than they joined the fight, each on the side of his own offspring.

When the knives started coming out, the women mixed in and separated the combatants. The beach rang out with curses, in sults, shouts, and cries. We slowly went back up toward our house and the noise of the arguments followed us far on up the hill. I have never forgotten those men and those times; not only because these memories are linked to precious images of a brutal, true, and marvelously Spanish lifestyle, but because these pictures of a certain kind of happiness in living were the prelude to heavy, dark, and trying moments in my existence.

We were often visited by friends coming through or artists and intellectuals in thrall to the then-fashionable Surrealist “keys”. Each of them, as a welcome greeting, brought us some bits of news from the outside world which we had systematically cut ourselves off from since coming to Torremolinos. This was how in the matter of a few hours we found out that Buñuel – probably under the influence of his Marxist friends – had started shooting
L’Age d’Or
without waiting for me to be there, suggesting betrayal with the worst kind of banali ties, and that the Galerie Goëmans had gone broke. I was morally and materially ruined. To cap the calamity, we did not have a penny left and our Malaga friend had left this very day for a long trip through Spain, without even warning us or leaving an address. That evening, the postman brought us the Cadaqués carpenter’s bill, which had grown to double the original figure. I suddenly felt myself sur rounded by the hyenas of misfortune. The next day we had nothing left to eat, all that was on hand being a remainder of olive oil, which I ordinarily used to relish with some anchovies, then rubbing into my hair whatever was left over of the salad dressing. My Samson hair in this way regained its original strength and shape.

What Effect Did Lack Of Money Have On Dalí’s Character?

I found a hallucinating image deep in my memory. I am on my knees in a dark grotto. I see the hole of light at the entranceway like a gigantic cunt. My pants are open and down. I am holding my cock in both hands. I am trying to get the pleasure to spurt from my flesh and am madly masturbating. My eyes are riveted to the luminous opening but I close the lids so as to project on their screens the erotic and slightly dirty picture of the huge cheeks of the arse of a Gypsy woman I just saw stoking a campfire. I hear the sound of men’s voices a few meters away. A baby is crying because the breast has been taken from it. Before my eyes, there is a hallucinating go-round: the ugly faces of militiamen who that very morning had come near our house to arrest a half-crazed neighbor who during the night had killed his mother with a pruning-hook. With the murderer wrapped up like a package, the cops are having their sport shooting at schools of migrating swallows passing over like clouds. They laugh very loud and every shot lashes me like a whip. I run through the fields in a paroxysm of rage, my switch playing havoc with the flowers, and just as a rain of carnation heads comes down on me like the burst of a fireworks my sperm ejaculates. I plant a man in the ground and allow myself to sink slowly down, spent. I am hungry. I am thirsty. I wish I could go with Gala and live like an outcast among the Gypsies. Only the idea of having to move Gala’s huge wardrobe-trunk dissuades me, but my fury catches fire like a bundle of vinestems. I grow terribly angry with myself and as hard as I can I punch myself on the lips. Crack! My mouth fills with blood. I am left speechless by my action and slowly tongue my teeth. My tongue pushes up a tiny sliver of ivory that I spit out. I have just broken a babytooth. I have a mouth as singular as my genius. I had three babyteeth left till I was twenty-six, and I am still short two molars.

My violence immediately ceases. Having ejected my sperm and broken my tooth has brought about a mutation in me. When I get up I am another man. The little tooth in the palm of my hand is a talisman – my solidified sperm that has just come back to me.[2] There and then I decide I will hang this spermatic babytooth by a thread right in the center of our house at Port Lligat. Eros has brought my genius the solution to my misfortune.

On returning home, I told Gala of my decision. We went and asked one of our friends to telegraph the hotel in Barcelona and have them send us some money out of their safe, and then we would go on to Paris determined to increase our fortune tenfold. In the depths of despair, resolve had come to me. My good-luck spermatic tooth was going to bring gold raining down on the house at Port Lligat – gold that I would cause to spurt out of my genius.

We got there at the height of a scandal. First, as we had anticipated, Buñuel had betrayed me by selecting to express himself images that reduced the Himalaya of my ideas to little folded paper dolls.
L’Age d’Or
had become an anti-clerical, irreligious picture. Buñuel had taken over the most primitive meanings of my way-out ideas, transforming them into associations of stuttering images with out any of the violent poesy that is the salt of my genius. All that came to the surface here and there out of my butchered scenario were a few sequences he had been unable not to bring off, since my staging directions had been so detailed. And they were enough to gain him a personal triumph. With admirable opportunism, Buñuel left Paris for Hollywood on the eve of the Paris premiere. Three days later, Studio 28, in which
L’Age d’Or
was shown, was a wrecking site. The royalist Camelots du roi had shot up the ceiling with their re volvers and driven the audience out with stinkbombs, before smashing bottles of ink against the screen; they had broken all the show cases exhibiting Surrealist books and lacerated my paintings on dis play in the lobby. It was a memorable, if pitiful, evening. The Prefecture of Police, with the endorsement of part of the press, banned the movie. I expected I might even be deported.

On this occasion, I discovered a certain number of essential realities. In Paris there were still friends of freedom of expression who considered Dalí a creative genius. He had to remain sole master of his work and of his means of expression, henceforth refusing to be a partner with anyone.

It was obvious that I alone would be tarred with the
L’Age
d’Or
scandal, as a cat is belled with an old tin can tied to his tail, and I had to try to turn this handicap into an advantage. Gala was the only being in the world who could make me forget this set back – my fear – through the magic of her presence. Our love emerged stronger from this bump in the road and the dark tunnel it led into.

Did Dalí Feel Persecuted?

I was alone with Gala. My so-called Surrealist friends already detested me and now they were especially promoting ideas absolutely opposed to my deepest convictions. Linking hands with Picasso, they were glorifying African art against the classicism of which I was the liege. Art magazines and galleries of the period, dominated by a phony avant-garde, wanted none of me. We had no money, and yet not a week went by but what my intentions were shamelessly looted.

Two things gave me courage: people were beginning to associate my name with whatever was astounding, delirious, sensational in this century. Dalí was becoming synonymous with genius. And in addition each day Gala was becoming my woman, my wife, my double, my faith, and my conviction. Each morning and each afternoon she left me alone in my studio before my canvas, trudging off with a case under her arm to try to sell some of the fruits of my most sparkling inven tions which since then have knocked contemporaries for a loop and made the fortune of a few clever dealers always unabashedly ready to grab the main chance by the short hairs. I had the happy surprise of seeing false fingernails made of mirror appear on the market, as well as transparent-aquarium mannequins with goldfish swimming around in them, streamlined automobiles, baroque bathtubs, and so on. I was sowing by handfuls to every wind that blew all the facets of an immense talent. Despite the conspiracy of silence, stupidity, and misunderstood interest, the 1930 period was not able to squelch me. But if I was not embittered by the blows I endured, nor by the humiliation heaped on me, I owe it all to Gala. To her courage. She never complained of the gruelling visits she had to make, the waits, the rebuffs, the mockery, the loutishness she was exposed to.

I was demoralized, and often wept. Her valiant little soul kept glowing in the dark like a beacon of hope. She never gave up. She prepared our skimpy meals by performing miracles of economy and ingenuity. The house was always spotless.

She turned seamstress to make her own frocks, and simply refused to be seen socially in Paris.

All about us there was snobbery, perversion, drugs, whoring, pederasty and its closet fraternity. I was becoming tough as a Port Lligat rock, unyielding, proud but sure of myself. One morning, with my easel, my palette, a batch of spirit lamps, some books, metal furniture, and ten valises, we set off to our own house. The departure from the Gare d’Austerlitz was truly Dalínian. I can still hear the north wind whistling across the mountains that greeted us. Having blown out the lamp, I took Gala in my arms in the warmth of our bed, telling myself that, in the midst of the ocean of destructive forces unleashed by nature and mankind, love was a sufficient talisman. I fell asleep reassured as with the last glance before dozing off I saw my babytooth dancing at the end of its thread in the center of my dream castle.

“I FELT A KIND OF CALM, A KIND OF STABILITY, AND IMMEDIATELY KNEW MY LIFE WAS ASSUMING A SYSTEMATIC GOODNESS ... IT SEEMED THAT MY WIFE’S EYES HAD ALREADY STRUCTURED MY PARANOIAC-CRITICAL ACTIVITY... ALL THE DISPARATE, EXCESSIVE, AND DOMINANT ELEMENTS OF MY LIFE WERE TURNING INTO AN ARCHITECTURE.”

[1] The Belgian painter Magritte and Dalí have been lifelong friends.

[2] In psychoanalysis, tooth signifies sperm.

Chapter Eight : How To Become A Surrealist