The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (2 page)

BOOK: The Secret Life of Salvador Dali
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Tabernacle.

I have said that at the age of seven I already wanted to be Napoleon, and I must explain this. On the third floor of our house lived an Argentine family named Matas, one of whose daughters, Ursulita, was a renowned beauty. It was whispered in the Catalonian oral mythology of 1900 that she had been selected by Eugenio d’Ors as the archetype of Catalonian womanhood, in his book
La Ben Plantada
(The Well-Planted One).

Shortly after I reached the age of seven, the all-powerful social-libidinal attraction of the third floor began to exercise its sway over me. In the sultry twilights of early summer I would sometimes abruptly interrupt the supreme pleasure of drinking from the terrace faucet (delightfully thirsty, my heart beating fast) when the almost imperceptible creaking of the third-floor balcony door made me hope it would perhaps open. On the third floor I was worshiped as I was at home. There, every day at about six, around a monumental table in a drawing room with a stuffed stork, a group of fascinating creatures with the hair and the Argentine accent of angels would sit and take
maté
,
2
served in a silver sipper which was passed from mouth to mouth. This oral promiscuity troubled me peculiarly and engendered in me whirls of moral uneasiness in which the blue flashes of the diamonds of jealousy already shone. I would in turn sip the tepid liquid, which to me was sweeter than honey, that honey which, as is known, is sweeter than blood itself–for my mother, my blood, was always present. My social fixation was sealed by the triumphal and sure road of the erogenous zone of my own mouth. I wished to sip Napoleon’s liquid! For Napoleon too was there, in the third-floor drawing room; there was a picture of him in the centre of the circle of glorious polychromes that adorned one end of a tin keg; this little keg was painted to look like wood and contained the voluptuous substance of the
maté
. This object was preciously placed on a centrepiece in the exact middle of the table. Napoleon’s image, reproduced on the
maté
keg, meant everything to me; for years his attitude of Olympian pride, the white and edible strip of his smooth belly, the feverish pink flesh of those imperial cheeks, the indecent, melodic, and categorical black of the spectral outline of his hat, corresponded exactly to the ideal model I had chosen for myself, the king.

At that time people were singing the stirring song:

Napoleón en el final
De un ramillette colosal.

This little picture of Napoleon had forcefully taken hold of the very
core of the still nonexistent contours of my spirit, like the yolk of an egg fried in a pan (without the pan, and yet already in the centre of the pan).

Thus I frantically established hierarchies in the course of a year; from wanting to be a cook I had awakened the very person of Napoleon from my impersonal costume of an obscure king. The furtive nutritive delights had assumed the architectural form of a small tabernacle–the keg containing the
maté
. The swarming erotic emotions aroused by the confused visions of the creatures, half women, half horses, who inhabited the kitchen below had given way to those of the third-floor drawing room, provoked by the serene image of a true lady, Ursulita Matas, the 1900 archetype of beauty.

Later on I shall explain and minutely describe several thinking machines of my invention. One of these is based on the idea of the wonderful “edible Napoleon,” in which I have materially realized those two essential phantoms of my early childhood–nutritive oral delirium and blinding spiritual imperialism. It will then become clear as daylight why fifty small goblets filled with lukewarm milk hung on a rocking chair are to my mind exactly the same thing as the plump thighs of Napoleon. Since this may become true for everyone, and since there are all sorts of advantages in being able to look upon things in this way, I shall explain these and many other enigmas, even stranger and no less exact, in the course of this sensational book. One thing, at least, is certain: everything, absolutely everything, that I shall say here is entirely and exclusively my own fault.

 

1
Since 1929 I have had a very clear consciousness of my genius, and I confess that this conviction, ever more deeply rooted in my mind, has never excited in me emotions of the kind called sublime; nevertheless, I must admit that it occasionally affords me an extremely pleasurable feeling.

2
An Argentinian tea.

PART I

CHAPTER ONE

Anecdotic Selfportrait

I know what I eat
I do not know what I do

Fortunately I am not one of those beings who when they smile are apt to expose remnants, however small, of horrible and degrading spinach clinging to their teeth. This is not because I brush my teeth better than others; it is due to the much more categorical fact that I do not eat spinach. It so happens that I attach to spinach, as to everything more or less directly pertaining to food, essential values of a moral and esthetic order. And of course the sentinel of disgust is ever on hand, vigilant and full of severe solicitude, ceremoniously attentive to the exacting choice of my foods.

I like to eat only things with well-defined shapes that the intelligence can grasp. I detest spinach because of its utterly amorphous character, so much so that I am firmly convinced, and do not hesitate for a moment to maintain, that the only good, noble and edible thing to be found in that sordid nourishment is the sand.

The very opposite of spinach is armor. That is why I like to eat armor so much, and especially the small varieties, namely, all shell-fish. By virtue of their armor, which is what their exoskeleton actually is, these are a material realization of the highly original and intelligent idea of wearing one’s bones outside rather than inside, as is the usual practice.

The crustacean is thus able, with the weapons of its anatomy, to protect the soft and nutritive delirium of its insides, sheltered against all profanation, enclosed as in a tight and solemn vessel which leaves it vulnerable only to the highest form of imperial conquest in the noble war of decortication: that of the palate. How wonderful to crunch a bird’s tiny skull!
1
How can one eat brains any other way! Small birds are very much like small shell-fish. They wear their armor, so to speak, flush with their skin. In any case Paolo Uccello painted armor that looked like little ortolans and he did this with a grace and mystery worthy of the true bird that he was and for which he was named.

I have often said that the most philosophic organs man possesses are his jaws. What, indeed, is more philosophic than the moment when you slowly suck in the marrow of a bone that is being powerfully crushed in the final destructive embrace of your molars, entitling you to believe that you have undisputed control over the situation?–For it is at the supreme moment of reaching the marrow of anything that you discover the very taste of truth, that naked and tender truth emerging from the well of the bone which you hold fast between your teeth.

Having once overcome the obstacle by virtue of which all self-respecting food “preserves its form,” nothing can be regarded as too slimy, gelatinous, quivering, indeterminate or ignominious to be desired, whether it be the sublime viscosities of a fish-eye, the slithery cerebellum of a bird, the spermatozoal marrow of a bone or the soft and swampy opulence of an oyster.
2
I shall undoubtedly be asked: In that case, do you like Camembert? Does it preserve its form? I will answer that I adore Camembert precisely because when it is ripe and beginning to run it resembles and assumes exactly the shape of my famous soft watches, and because being an artificial elaboration its original form, though honorable, is not one for which it is entirely responsible. Furthermore I would add that if one were to succeed in making Camembert in the shape of spinach I should very probably not like it either.

But do not forget this: a woodcock, properly high and over which a fine grade of brandy has been burned, served in its own excrement with all the ritual of the best restaurants of Paris, will always represent for me, in this grave domain of food, the most delicate symbol of an authentic civilization. And how beautiful a woodcock is to look upon as it lies naked in the dish! Its slender anatomy achieves, one might say, the proportions of Raphaelesque perfection.

Thus I know exactly, ferociously, what I want to eat! And I am all the more astonished to observe habitually around me creatures who will eat anything, with that sacrilegious lack of conviction that goes with the accomplishment of a strict necessity.

But while I have always known exactly and with premeditation what I wished to obtain of my senses, the same is not true of my sentiments, which are light and fragile as soap-bubbles. For, generally speaking, I have never been able to forsee the hysterical and preposterous course of my conduct, and even less the final outcome of my acts, of which I am often the first astonished spectator and which always acquire at their climax the heavy, categorical and catastrophic weight of leaden balls. It is as if each time one of these thousand iridescent bubbles of my sentiments strays from the course of its ephemeral life and miraculously reaches the earth–reaches reality–it is at that moment transformed
into an important act, suddenly changed from something transparent and ethereal into something opaque, metallic and menacing as a bomb. Nothing can better illuminate this than the kinds of stories which are to follow, selected for this chapter without chronological order from the anecdotic stream of my life. When they are strictly authentic and bluntly told, as these are, such anecdotes offer their colors and contours with the guarantee of an unmistakable resemblance that is essential to any honest attempt at self-portraiture. They would have been, I know, secrets forever sealed for many. My fixed idea in this book is to kill as many of these secrets as possible, and to kill them with my own hands!

I

I was five years old, and it was springtime in the village of Cambrils, near Barcelona. I was walking in the country with a boy smaller than I, who had very blond curly hair, and whom I had known only a short time. I was on foot, and he was riding a tricycle. With my hand on his back I helped to push him along.

We got to a bridge under construction which had as yet no railings of any kind. Suddenly, as most of my ideas occur, I looked behind to make sure no one was watching us and gave the child a quick push off the bridge. He landed on some rocks fifteen feet below. I ran home to announce the news.

During the whole afternoon bloodstained basins were brought down from the room where the child, with a badly injured head, was going to have to remain in bed for a week. The continual coming and going and the general turmoil into which the house was thrown put me in a delightful hallucinatory mood. In the small parlor, on a rocking chair trimmed with crocheted lace that covered the back, the arms and the cushion of the seat, I sat eating cherries. The lace was adorned with plump plush cherries. The parlor looked out on the hall, so that I could observe everything that went on, and it was almost completely dark, for the shutters had been drawn to ward off the stifling heat. The sun beating down on them lit up knots in the wood, turning them to a fiery red like ears lighted from behind. I don’t recall having experienced the slightest feeling of guilt over this incident. That evening while taking my usual solitary walk I remember having savored the beauty of each blade of grass.

II

I was six years old. Our drawing-room was full of people. They were talking about a famous comet that would be visible that same evening if there were no clouds. Someone had said it was possible that its tail might touch the earth, in which case the world would come to an end. In spite of the irony registered on most of the faces I was seized with a growing agitation and fright. Suddenly one of my father’s office clerks appeared in the drawing-room doorway and announced that the comet could be seen
from the terrace. Everyone ran up the stairs except myself; I remained sitting on the floor as if paralyzed with fear. Gathering a little courage I in turn got up and dashed madly toward the terrace. While crossing the hall I caught sight of my little three-year-old sister crawling unobtrusively through a doorway. I stopped, hesitated a second, then gave her a terrible kick in the head as though it had been a ball, and continued running, carried away with a “delirious joy” induced by this savage act. But my father, who was behind me, caught me and led me down into his office, where I remained for punishment till dinner time.

BOOK: The Secret Life of Salvador Dali
3.34Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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