The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (19 page)

Understanding that for the moment I could not regain my new Dullita’s confidence I decided to leave, but not without having cast her a glance of infinite tenderness by which I wanted to tell her, “Don’t worry, I’ll come back again.” Then I left and I wandered at random in the garden. It was just the time when I should have devoted myself to painting, shut up in my studio with the ears of corn. But the day had begun in such an unaccustomed way, and with such exceptional encounters, like that of my crutch, and of Dullita, that I said to myself, dizzy with the whirl of the magic of the linden-blossom gathering, “I might perhaps make an exception to the pre-established plan of my habits,” for already at this period these reigned as supreme mistresses of my destiny, and every infraction of these rules had to be paid for immediately by a dose of anguish and of guilty feeling so painful that when I felt them already begin to gnaw at the root of my soul I made an about-face and went back and shut myself up in my studio. There my unhappiness was not appeased, for I wanted to be elsewhere that morning, and after the short but intense scene of my encounter with Dullita I should have liked to walk about freely in the most out-of-the-way corners of the garden in order to be able to think of her without any other distraction and at the same time to begin to build the imaginary and idyllic foundations of my impending encounter.

But no! My self-inquisition imprisoned me there! And as time passed without any brilliant ideas springing forth in my head, which was supposed to happen each morning at that hour for the satisfaction of my ego, feelings of guilt clutched me more and more tightly in the spiny irons of a horrible moral torture.

I was assailed without respite by seductive representations of my Dullita. But at the same time an invisible rancor against her rumbled in the blue cloudless sky, with dull reverberations of a storm. Again, and for the second time, Dullita with a single moment of her presence had come to trouble, annihilate and ruin the architecture of the narcissistic temple of my divine solitude which I had been engaged in rebuilding with so much rigor and cerebral intensity since my arrival at the Muli de la Torre. I felt that only a bold stratagem, based on a lie capable of fooling myself, could liberate me for a few moments from the four walls of my studio where I felt myself so pitilessly shut in. I therefore convinced myself that it was urgent for me to begin today, and no later, my long projected drawings from life of animals in movement. There was no better way to start than to go and fetch my little mouse, which would make an ideal model. With it I could undertake to do a large picture in the style of the one with the cherries. But instead of representing the same static element I would repeat it to infinity in different movements. It occurred to me that since mice also had tails, I might perhaps find an original idea for effecting a
collage
on this subject.

Souris.

Although the project for my new work did not greatly interest me, and I felt that I was going to repeat the picture of the cherries, I tried nevertheless to convince myself by a thousand arguments that I must at all costs go to the chicken coop in the garden and fetch my box containing the gray mouse which was to be my model. I thought I might perhaps take advantage of the state of anxiety and nervousness in which I had been submerged since the vision of Dullita and attune it to the extremely febrile movements and attitudes of the mouse, thus making the most of my anguish and canalizing it toward the success of my projected work of art and thereby sublimating the “anecdote” of my state of anxiety to the “category” of an esthetic fulfillment.

I accordingly ran to the chicken coop to fetch my little model of the gray mouse. But the moment I arrived I found the latter in a curious state. It was as if swollen; its body usually so slim and agile was now completely round, as round as a cherry miraculously turned gray and hairy. Its unwonted immobility frightened me. It was alive, since I could see it breathe, and I would even have said that its breathing had an accelerated and unusual rhythm. I lifted it cautiously by its tail and the resemblance to my cherry was complete, with its paws all folded up and making no movement. I put it back with the same precaution in the bottom of the box, when all at once it made a single vertical bound, hitting my face that was maternally bowed over it. Then it fell back into the same motionless attitude. This unforeseen leap provoked in me such a frightful start that it took my heart a long time to recover its rhythm.

An intolerable moral uneasiness made me cover my mouse’s box with the top, leaving a little space for it to breathe. I had not yet had time to recover from these painful impressions when I made a new discovery which is one of the most fearful of its kind that people my memories.

The large hedgehog, which I had been unable to find for more than a week, and which I thought had miraculously escaped, suddenly appeared to me in a corner of the chicken-coop behind a pile of bricks and nettles: it was dead. Full of repulsion I drew near it. The thick skin of its bristle-covered back was stirring with the ceaseless to-and-fro movement of a frenzied mass of wriggling worms. Near the head this crawling was so intense that one would have said that a veritable inner volcano of putrefaction was at any moment about to burst through this skin torn by the horror of death in an imminent eruption of final ignominy. A slight trembling accompanied by an extreme feebleness seized my legs, and delicate cold shudders rising vertically along my back spread fan-wise in the back of my neck, from which they fell back, branching outward through my whole body like a veritable burst of fireworks at a feast of the apotheosis of my terror. Involuntarily I drew still closer to this foul ball which continued to attract me with a revolting fascination. I had to get a really good look at it.

But a staggering whiff of stench made me draw back. I ran from the chicken coop as fast as my legs would carry me; coming close to the linden blossoms I took a deep breath of the fragrance with the idea of purifying my lungs; but presently I retraced my steps to continue the attentive observation of my putrefied hedgehog. During the time that I remained near it I completely stopped breathing, and when I could no longer hold my breath I dashed off again toward the linden blossom pickers, who by this time had accumulated great piles humming with bees. I took advantage of these breathing-spells to pour out the dark water of my glance into the sunny well of Dullita’s celestial eyes. Once more I
rushed back to my horror-bristling ball, and again came back to breathe the perfumed air that surrounded my Dullita.

These goings and comings between Dullita and the dead hedgehog became so exalted and hysterical that I felt myself gradually losing control of my movements, and indeed at each new approach to the hedgehog I found myself almost on the point of committing an irreparable act, seized with a more and more irresistible longing to throw myself upon it and touch it, just as each time I returned toward the lindens, at the very last limit of the asphyxiating retention of my breath, it seemed as though it would be impossible for me to repress the decisive gesture of embracing Dullita with all my might, to tear the salivary savor of her soul and of her rustic and timid angel’s face from her mouth half-opened like a wound.

In one of my dizzy returns toward the hedgehog I came so fast and so close to it that just at the last second, no longer able to control the inertia of my blind chase, I decided to jump on its body. I stumbled at the last moment with a clumsiness so skillful from the point of view of my subconscious intentions that I came within a millimetre of falling on the dark and repugnant mass.

After this awkward act, which sharpened the fevered stimulant of my desire while it redoubled my disgust, I finally had an idea which was provisionally to procure me a deep satisfaction: I would touch the stinking ball of my hedgehog with my crutch. I could in this manner move the foul ball at will, and without having to come too close to it. I had already tried, before this, to toss several stones in order to observe the mechanical effects of their impact on the decomposed softness of the nauseating body. But these experiments, in spite of the emotion which I derived from them, especially at the moment of throwing the stone, did not appear to me to assume the expected frightful character which I could consider altogether satisfying. Accordingly I advanced, holding my crutch by its lower end, and pressed its other “bifurcated” end against the roundness of the hedgehog’s black heart ripe with death. My crutch’s bifurcation adapted itself so well to the stiffened and pasty ball that one would have thought they were made for each other, so much so that it was impossible to tell whether it was the crutch that held the hedgehog or the hedgehog that held the crutch.

I stirred this nightmare-bristling pile with such terrifying intensity and such morbid voluptuousness that for a moment I thought I was going to faint. Especially when, under the exploratory proddings of my crutch impelled by my curiosity, the hedgehog was finally turned upside down. Between its four stiffened paws I saw a mass of gesticulating worms, big as my fist, that oozed in an abominable fashion after having burst and pierced through the very delicate and violet-colored ventral membrane which until then had maintained them in a compact, devouring and impatient mixture. I fled, leaving my crutch on the spot. This time it was more than I could stand.

Sitting on the ground I watched the linden blossoms fall. I realized that because of the momentary waywardness of my desire I had just doomed my crutch, and I could no longer be attended by the security which it afforded me. For, contaminated as it now was by the gluey contact of the hedgehog’s mass of worms, from being a favorable fetish it had become transformed into a frightful object synonymous with death.

But I could not resign myself to the idea of getting along wholly and forever without my crutch, toward which my fetishistic sentiments had only grown and become consolidated in the course of the morning. I finally found a fairly satisfying solution, which would allow me to resume possession of my crutch after performing some preliminary ceremonies. I would go back and, without looking at the hedgehog this time, rescue my crutch. I would go and dip its soiled end in the clear water of the mill-stream, at the point where the current was strongest and formed little whirls of white foam. After a prolonged immersion I would let my crutch dry, and finally after laying it horizontally on the great pile of linden blossoms warmed with sunshine, I would take my crutch up to the top of the tower at twilight, so that night, and dawn with the heavy dew of my repentance, would effect its complete purification.

I proceeded to carry out this plan, and already my crutch was resting buried under the blossoms while in my calm spirit I could feel the black ball of death still stirring. After an unmemorable lunch came the afternoon. Now my listless glance followed the various incidents of the blossom gathering. Dullita, on the other hand, was looking continually at me, just like Galuchka. Her fixed eyes did not leave me a single moment, and I was so sure that she would now obey me in all that my will was prepared to command her that I could savor with delight that voluptuousness which is the whole luxury of love, and which consists in being able nonchalantly to direct your attention and your glance elsewhere while feeling the passionate proximity of the unique being, thanks to whom each minute becomes a bit of paradise, but whom your perversity commands you to ignore, while keeping him in leash like a dog; and before whom, nevertheless, you would be ready to grovel with the cowardice and the fawning of a real dog the moment you found yourself in danger of losing that loved being whom you pretended up to that point to treat with the inattentive dandyism characteristic of morbid sentimentalism.

Knowing my Dullita to be solidly attached to the end of the shiny yellow leather leash of my seduction, I looked elsewhere, I looked especially up at the under part of the naked arm of the woman with the turgescent breasts. Her arm-pit presented a hollow of great softness; the untanned skin of this part of her body was of an extreme paleness, pearly and glorious, serving as a dream frame to the burst of sudden blackness of the hairs. My glance was engaged in straying alternately from this strange nest of ebony hair surrounded by pearly flesh to her two plethoric breasts, whose divine volume I felt weighing upon each of
my eyelids half closed with the mingled voluptuousness of my visions and my digestion. And presently, through my benumbed laziness, I felt the budding of a new invincible fantasy, and once again the little quicksilver horses of my anguish galloped within my heart. This is what Salvador wanted now! I wanted to disinter my crutch from its tomb beneath the linden blossoms, and with this same “bifurcation” with which I had touched and stirred the hedgehog I now wanted delicately to touch the breasts of the blossom-picker, while adapting the perfumed bifurcation of the crutch with infinite precaution, and with an ever so slight pressure, the carnal globes of those sun-warmed breasts.