The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (46 page)

Thus I was ready. Ready for what? Eleven o’clock rang out from the bell-tower of Cadaques. I went over to the window. She was already there. Who, she? Don’t interrupt me. I say that she was there and that ought to suffice! Gala, Eluard’s wife. It was she! Galuchka Rediviva! I had just recognized her by her bare back. Her body still had the complexion of a child’s. Her shoulder blades and the sub-renal muscles had that somewhat sudden athletic tension of an adolescent’s. But the small of her back, on the other hand, was extremely feminine and pronounced, and served as an infinitely svelte hyphen between the willful, energetic and proud leanness of her torso and her very delicate buttocks which the exaggerated slenderness of her waist enhanced and rendered greatly more desirable.

How had I been able to spend the whole previous day with her without recognizing her, without suspecting anything? But was this true, and if so what was the meaning of the inconceivable rig I had just got myself into if it was not a veritable nuptial costume? No, no! It was not true! It was for her that I had just smeared myself with goat dung and aspic, for her that I had torn my best silk shirt to shreds, and for her that I had bloodied my armpits! But now that she was below, I no longer dared to appear thus. I looked at myself in the mirror, and I found the whole thing lamentable. I said to myself, “You look like a regular savage, and you detest that.”

This was true—so true it is that the “savage state” is none other than that of the depth of atavistic and common folly of humanity! I quickly removed all my adornments and washed my body as best I could to get rid of the stifling stench which I gave off. However, I kept the pearl necklace and the immense red geranium, which I reduced to less than half.

I ran out to meet Gala, but when I was about to greet her I was
seized with hysterical laughter, which recurred each time I tried to answer any question she would ask me. I could not utter a word to her. My surrealist friends, who were resigned to this, seemed to say to themselves, “Now we’re in for another whole day of it,” and nonchalantly cast pebbles into the sea. Bunuel especially was terribly disappointed, for he had come to Cadaques with the idea of collaborating with me on the scenario for a new film, whereas I was more and more absorbed in nursing my personal madness, and had thoughts only for this and for Gala.

Since I was unable to talk to her, I tried at least to surround her with all manner of little attentions. I would run to fetch her some cushions, or a glass of water, or make her move to a place where she would have a better view of the landscape. I should have loved to help her on with her shoes a thousand times. If in the course of the walk I happened by chance to brush against her hand all my nerves quivered, and immediately I heard the rain of half-ripe fruit of my erotic illusion falling about me, as if instead of my touching Gala’s hand, a real giant had savagely and prematurely shaken the still frail tree of my desire.

But Gala, who with a vital intuition unique in the world perceived my reactions in every detail, was miles from thinking that I was already madly in love with her. I could see that her curiosity progressed in an unequivocally practical direction. She considered me a genius—half mad but capable of great moral courage. And she wanted something—something which would be the fulfillment of her own myth. And this thing that she wanted was something that she was beginning to think perhaps only I could give her!

The painting
Le Jeu Lugubre
(it was Paul Eluard who gave it this name, with my full approval) was becoming with each passing day a source of increasing concern to every one. The drawers bespattered with excrement were painted with such minute and realistic complacency that the whole little surrealist group was anguished by the question: Is he coprophagic or not? The possibility that I might constitute a case of this repulsive aberration was beginning to create an increasingly marked uneasiness among them. It was Gala who decided to put an end to this doubt, and she took me aside one day and said she had something very serious to talk to me about and begged me to arrange a time when we could meet and talk without having to contend with my laughing fits. I told her that this was something over which I had no control, but that even if I laughed during our discussion it would not prevent me from listening to everything attentively and answering her consequentially.

This occurred at the door of the Hotel Miramar We made an appointment for the following evening. I would fetch her at the hotel, and we would go for a walk alone among the rocks, where we would be able to talk freely. The preoccupied air with which Gala received the answer that I “had no control” over these laughing fits gave me a mad urge to laugh. I was on the verge of a fit, but with superhuman effort
I was able to control it for an instant. I kissed her hand and rushed away. As soon as I felt the door shut behind Gala I burst into a convulsive laugh that did not cease till I reached my house. From time to time I had to sit down on a bench or a door-step before I could continue to walk. On my way I came upon Camille Goemans and his wife who had been observing me for a long time. They stopped to talk to me. “You must be careful. You have been excessively nervous for some time. You work much too hard.”

The following day I went to fetch Gala at the Hotel Miramar, and we went walking toward the rocks of (The Molars), a spot imbued with a “planetary melancholy.” I waited for Gala to start the conversation in her own way, since it was she who had wanted it, but as the moments passed and she failed to come to the point I began to fear that she could not make up her mind how to begin. Thinking that this might be painful for her, I took the initiative myself and alluded to it. She was grateful to me for this, and at the same time conveyed by her firm tone that she did not need my help. I shall now attempt to write down one of my first conversations with Gala.

“It’s about your picture
Le Jeu Lugubre.”

She relapsed into a silence during which I had time to work the whole thing out. I was tempted immediately to answer the question she was going to ask me, but I preferred to wait to hear what she had to say, for this might perhaps enable me to infer other things.

“It’s a very important work, and it is precisely for this reason that Paul and I and all your friends would like to know what certain elements, to which you seem to attach a special importance, refer to. If those ‘things’ refer to your life we can have nothing in common, because that sort of thing appears loathsome to me, and hostile to my kind of life. But this concerns only your own life, and has nothing to do with mine. On the other hand, if you intend to use your pictures as a means of proselytism and propaganda—even in the service of what you may consider an inspired idea—we believe you run the risk of weakening your work considerably, and reducing it to a mere psychopathological document.”

I was suddenly tempted to answer her with a lie. If I admitted to her that I was coprophagic, as they had suspected, it would make me even more interesting and phenomenal in everybody’s eyes. But Gala’s tone was so clear, and the expression of her face, exalted by the purity of an entire and lofty honesty, was so tense that I was moved to tell her the truth.

“I swear to you that I am not ‘coprophagic.’ I consciously loathe that type of aberration as much as you can possibly loathe it. But I consider scatology as a terrorizing element, just as I do blood, or my phobia for grasshoppers.”

I waited for my answer to relax Gala’s intense, preoccupied air. On the contrary, she registered my answer as something reassuring but instantaneously assimilated, and I guessed then that there was still
another, even more important, question behind that of the coprophagia—her real reason for talking to me, the one that tormented her little face. A fine and communicative anguish ruffled the delicate surface of her olive skin, and I could hear it murmuring as though it had been a twilight breeze suddenly awakened. I was on the point of saying to her,

“What about you? What is on your mind? Let’s have it out, and then say no more about it!”

Instead of which I remained silent, overwhelmed by the reality of her flesh. What need was there of all these avowals? Did not the fragile beauty of her face of itself vouch for the body’s elegance? I looked at her proud carriage as she strode forward with the intimidating gait of victory, and I said to myself, with a touch of my budding humor, “From, the esthetic point of view victories, too, have faces darkened by frowns. So I had better not try to change anything!”

I was about to touch her, I was about to put my arm around her waist, when with a feeble little grasp that tried to squeeze with the utmost strength of her soul, Gala’s hand took hold of mine. This was the time to laugh, and I laughed with a nervousness heightened by the remorse which I knew beforehand the vexing inopportuneness of my reaction would cause me. But instead of being wounded by my laughter, Gala felt elated by it. For, with an effort which must have been superhuman, she succeeded in again pressing my hand, even harder than before, instead of dropping it with disdain as anyone else would have done. With her medium-like intuition she had understood the exact meaning of my laughter, so inexplicable to everyone else. She knew that my laughter was altogether different from the usual “gay” laughter. No, my laughter was not scepticism; it was fanaticism. My laughter was not frivolity; it was cataclysm, abyss, and terror. And of all the terrifying outbursts of laughter that she had already heard from me this, which I offered her in homage, was the most catastrophic, the one in which I
threw myself to the ground at her feet, and from the greatest height!

She said to me, “My little boy! We shall never leave each other.”

She was destined to be my Gradiva,
¹²
“she who advances,” my victory, my wife. But for this she had to cure me, and she did cure me!

Here now is the story of this cure, which was accomplished solely through the heterogeneous, indomitable and unfathomable power of the love of a woman, canalized with a biological clairvoyance so refined and miraculous, exceeding in depth of thought and in practical results the most ambitious outcome of psychoanalytical methods.

The beginnings of my sentimental relationship with Gala were marked by permanent character of diseased abnormality, and by very distinct and pronounced psychopathological symptoms. My laughing fits, from having been euphoric, became more and more painful, spastic, and symptomatic of a pre-hysterical state which already alarmed me in spite of the manifest self-satisfaction which I continued to derive from all these symptoms. My regression to the infantile period became accentuated by the fact of the delirious illusion which I was under that Gala was the same person, grown to womanhood, as the little girl of my “false memories,” and whom, in narrating these, I called Galuchka, the diminutive of the name Gala. The phantasms and representations of vertigo (heights, the desire to throw someone, or perhaps myself, from a cliff) reappeared with increased intensity. In an excursion to the rocks of Cape Creus, I insisted pitilessly on Gala’s climbing to the top of all the most dangerous summits, which reached great heights. These ascents involved obvious criminal intentions on my part, especially when we reached the highest point of a gigantic pink granite block called The Eagle, which leans like an eagle with outspread wings over a sheer drop. On this height, I invented a game which I got Gala to participate in, which consisted in starting large granite blocks rolling down the ledge and into space, and watching them crash far down on the rocks below or into the sea. I should never have tired of this, and only the fear of accidentally pushing Gala, instead of one of these rocks, forced me to avoid these heights where I felt myself continually in danger and possessed by a joyous, quivering excitement which made a destructive drain on my energy.

The same rancor that I had felt toward Dullita was beginning to make its way into my heart in respect to Gala. She too had come to destroy and annihilate my solitude, and I began to overwhelm her with absolutely unjust reproaches: she prevented me from working, she insinuated herself surreptitiously into my brain, she “depersonalized” me. Moreover I was convinced that she was going to do me harm. I often said to her, as if bitten in the nape of the heck by a sudden fear,

“Above all don’t, please don’t hurt me. And I mustn’t hurt you either. We must never hurt each other!”

And then I would suggest to her a walk at sunset to some geological height from which we would get a fine view.

I propose now to take advantage of the fact that we have reached this spot where we overlook a fine view and to allow you, my readers, and myself to rest after this walk over many abrupt slopes that I have forced you to make in order to reach this culminating point on the road of my life as quickly as possible. You and I are tired, and we are a little more than half way through this book. And so we need a little time before we begin–in a little while, after we are well rested–the downward climb along another, more elegiac path, with that more leisurely and philosophic pace appropriate to the experience of the road we have just travelled, back to the reassuring familiarity of our respective abodes.