The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (64 page)

As soon as we had got settled in Port Lligat I painted a portrait of Gala with a pair of raw chops poised on her shoulder. The meaning of this, as I later learned, was that instead of eating
her, I
had decided to eat a pair of raw chops instead. The chops were in effect the expiatory victims of abortive sacrifice—like Abraham’s ram, and William Tell’s apple. Ram and apple, like the sons of Saturn and Jesus Christ on the cross, were raw—this being the prime condition for the cannibalistic sacrifice.
⁹
In the same vein I painted a picture of myself as a child at about the age of eight, with a raw chop on my head. I was trying thus symbolically to tempt my father to come and eat this chop instead of me. My edible, intestinal and digestive representations at this period assumed an increasingly insistent character. I wanted to eat everything, and I planned the building of a large table made entirely of hard-boiled egg so that it could be eaten.

This hard-boiled-egg table was perfectly feasible, and I herewith give the recipe, for anyone who would like to try to make one. The first thing to do is to make the mold of a table out of celluloid (preferably a Louis XIV table), exactly as if one were going to make a cast. Instead of pouring
plaster into the mold, one pours the necessary quantity of white of egg. Then one dips the whole into a bath of hot water, and as soon as the white begins to harden one introduces the yolks into the mass of egg-whites by means of tubes. Once the whole has hardened, the celluloid mold can be broken and be replaced by a coating of pulverized egg-shell mixed with a resinous or sticky substance. Finally this surface can be polished with ground pummice until it acquires the texture of egg-shell. By the same process one can make a life-size
Venus of Milo
, who would likewise be made integrally of hard-boiled egg. You would then be able to break the egg-shell of the Venus, and inside you would find the hard white of egg really made of white of egg, and by digging deeper you would find the hard egg-yolk, really made of egg-yolk.
¹⁰
Imagine the delightful thirst which such a Venus of solid hard-boiled egg could produce in a victim of the perversion of “retention of thirst,” when this pervert after a long summer day of waiting, in order to work himself into a paroxysm, would dip a blue silver spoon into one of the breasts of the Venus, exposing the egg-yolk of her insides to the light of the setting sun, which would thus make it yellow, red, and fire of thirst!

That summer I was very thirsty. I think that the alcohol which I had been obliged to swallow in Paris to overcome the reapparition of my fits of timidity had its share in the kind of voluptuous irritation to which my stomach was subject, which caused me to feel an Arab thirst rising from the visceral depths of my North-African atavisms, a thirst which had come on horse-back to civilize Spain and immediately invent shade and water fountains. When I shut my eyes to hear what went on within me, it was as if in the burning desert of my skin I could feel the murmur of the whole Alhambra of Granada sounding in the very centre of the cypress-shaded patio of my stomach plastered with the whitewash and the bismuth of the medicines with which I had to plaster its walls and partitions.
¹¹

But if I was thirsty as an Arab, I also felt as combative as one. One evening in early fall, Gala and I left to go to Barcelona. I had been invited to give a lecture, and I had decided to try out my oratorical talents and test once and for all my ability to stir an audience. My lecture took place in the
Ateneo Barcelonés
, which was the most traditional and impressive intellectual centre in the town, and I decided to attack with the utmost violence the native intellectuals who were vegetating at this period in a kind of local patriotism of a boundless philistinism. I arrived on purpose a half hour late, and found myself at once facing a public at the height of excitement from waiting and curiosity, at just the right point of readiness.

I immediately entered upon the theme of my speech with a short and vibrant apology of the Marquis de Sade, whom I held up in contrast to the degrading intellectual ignominy of Angel Guimerá
¹²
, who had died a few years before, and who was the most venerated and respected of patriotic Catalonian
littérateurs
. Coming to one of the climaxes of my speech I said, with dramatic emphasis, “That great pederast, that immense hairy putrefaction, Angel Guimera . . .” At this moment I realized that my lecture was over. The audience was seized with complete hysteria. Chairs were thrown at me and I would surely have been beaten to a pulp if the assault guards had not come to protect me from the fury of the crowd. I had to be surrounded by the guards and escorted out to the middle of the street, where they put me into a taxi. “You are very courageous,” one of them said to me. I think that on this occasion I behaved in fact quite coolly, but the real courage was displayed by the guards who actually received the few blows that were intended for me.

This incident had considerable repercussions. A short time later I received another invitation to give a speech, this time before a revolutionary group with predominantly anarchist leanings. “At our meeting,” their president said to me, “you can say anything you like—and the stronger it is, the better.” I accepted, and merely asked the organizers to get me a large loaf of bread, as long as possible, and straps to tie it with. On the evening of the lecture I arrived ten minutes early to give instructions about the props I had asked for. In the small office adjoining the lecture hall a large loaf of bread lay on the desk, and with it some leather straps. They asked me if this was what I wanted. “It’s perfect. Now listen to me carefully. At a certain point in my speech I shall make a gesture with my hand and say, ‘Bring it!’ Then two of you must come up on the stage while I am talking and tie the loaf of bread to my head with the straps, which are to be passed under each arm. Be sure to keep the loaf horizontal. This operation must be performed with utmost seriousness, and even with a touch of the sinister.”

I was dressed with provocative elegance, and when I appeared I was given a stormy reception. Nevertheless the catcalls and jeers were gradually drowned out by an “organized” applause, and then by a voice shouting, “Let him speak first!”

I spoke. It was not a dithyrambic apology of the Marquis de Sade that I offered this time, but simply a speech of the irrational and poetic type, in which the crudest obscenities occasionally flashed. These enormities which no one had ever heard uttered in public I delivered in the most matter-of-fact and casual way, which only augmented their truculent and disconcertingly pornographic character. An insurmountable uneasiness took hold of this audience of sentimental and humanitarian anarchists, most of whom had brought their wives and daughters—having
said to themselves, today we’re going to amuse ourselves by listening to the eccentricities of Dali, that amiable petty-bourgeois ideologist whom we’ve heard so much about, and who has the gift of making the bourgeoisie itself howl.

Suddenly a lean, severe-looking anarchist, handsome as a Saint Jerome, interrupted me in a loud voice and with great dignity reminded me that the place where we were was not a brothel and that “their womenfolk” were among the audience. I answered him that an anarchist centre was not exactly a church. I said, furthermore, that the person I esteemed most highly in the world was my wife, and that since she was present and was listening, I saw no reason why their wives could not perfectly well listen too. My answer reestablished my authority for a moment, but a string of fresh obscenities, this time enhanced by my own type of realism, and which were blasphematory to boot, made the hall roar like a lion, and I could not make out whether it was with pleasure or with fury.

I now judged that the moment was psychologically ripe, and making an impatient movement with my hand I gave the pre-arranged signal to “have it brought to me.” All eyes turned in the direction in which I had waved my hand, and the surprise at the apparition of two persons carrying the bread and the straps exceeded all my hopes. While the bread was being fastened to my head the tumult increased, showing all the preliminary symptoms of a general fracas. When the bread was finally secured on my head I suddenly felt myself infected by the general hysteria, and with all the strength of my lungs I began to shout my famous poem on the “Rotten Donkey.” At this moment an anarchist doctor with a face as red as if it had been boiled, and a white beard which made him look for all the world like a Boecklinian allegory, was
seized with a real fit of madness. I was told later that this man, who besides being mad was also an alcoholic, frequently had such fits, though nothing like the one he had that evening. Everyone tried, unsuccessfully, to control him. One man would clutch his legs while others would hold his head and arms. It was of no avail. With a supreme convulsion, and the indomitable strength of his delirium, he would always manage to free one of his legs and with a fantastic kick knock over a whole group of those black and sweating anarchists struggling to reestablish order. After the tirade of my obscenities, which still rang in everyone’s ears, the apparition of the loaf of bread on my head, and the fit of delirium tremens of the old doctor, the evening ended in an unimaginable general confusion.

The organizers of this meeting were well pleased. “You went a little far,” they told me, “but it was very good.”

The meeting had broken up, and the people were leaving. Suddenly a man came up to me, who seemed perfectly well balanced, though his eyes twitched with cynicism. He was vigorously chewing a sprig of mint-leaves as though he were a goat. When he had finished it he pulled out others which he kept wrapped up in a newspaper. The blackness of his fingernails was so intense that I could look at nothing else.

“I’ve been an anarchist all my life,” he said to me, “and I eat only herbs, and a rabbit from time to time. I like you, but there is another man I like better, and if I tell you who it is you won’t believe me. You see, I’ve never been sold on Joseph [by Joseph he meant Stalin]. But Hitler, on the other hand, if you just scratch him till you get under the surface you’ll find Nietzsche. And that fellow [still referring to Hitler] is a
morros de con
who can blow up all of Europe with one foot. And I’ve no use for Europe, you understand?”

So saying, he showed me his package of mint leaves and winked maliciously. And then he left.
“Salud!”
he said, “and don’t forget—‘direct action.’ “

The political ideology of Barcelona at this period was reaching a degree of confusion which verged on the Biblical apotheosis of the Tower of Babel. Political parties were born, became subdivided, fought among one another, were born again, split up into a thousand and one schisms each of which, in spite of its theoretical insignificance, immediately created distances and abysses of hatred. There were three communist parties claiming to be the true official party, three or four shades of Trotskyists, the political syndicalists, the socialist syndicalists, the pure anarchists of the Iberian Anarchist Federation, the separatists who called themselves “we alone,” the republican left, etc., etc., etc. So much for the left, for the parties of the centre and those of the right were as numerous, active and agitated. Everyone felt that something phenomenal was going to happen in Spain, something like a universal deluge in which, instead of a simple downpour of water, there would rain archbishops, grand pianos and rotten donkeys. A peasant of the vicinity of
Figueras found the exact phrase to sum up the anarchic state of the country, “If politics continue in this way we’ll come to a point where even if Jesus Christ in person were to come down to earth with a clock in his hand he would not be able to tell what time it was!”

On our return to Paris we moved from 7 Rue Becquerel to 7 Rue Gauguet. This was a modern functionalist building. I considered this kind of architecture to be auto-punitive architecture, the architecture of poor people—and we were poor. So, not being able to have Louis XIV bureaus, we decided to live with immense windows and chromium tables with a lot of glass and mirrors. Gala had the gift of making everything “shine,” and the moment she entered a place everything began furiously to sparkle. This almost monastic rigidity, meanwhile, excited my thirst for luxury even more. I felt like a cypress growing in a bathtub.

For the first time I realized that people had been waiting for me in Paris, and that my absence had left “desert emptinesses” impossible to fill without me. They were counting on me to show them how to “continue,” but this time I would refuse. I preferred to leave them to themselves, to let them go their own way and get over their illusions once and for all.

My two lectures in Barcelona had cured me of my pathological residues of timidity. I knew that I was capable of arousing the passion and frenzy of the public, in the way I wanted, by the sole efficacy of certain images which I alone could invent and manipulate. I had a growing desire to feel myself in contact with a “new flesh,” with a new country, that had not yet been touched by the decomposition of Post-War Europe. America! I wanted to go over there and see what it was like, to bring my bread, place my bread over there; say to the Americans, “What does that mean, eh?”