The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (72 page)

XIII. Tyranny and Liberty of the Human Gaze

“Herodiade,” 1936, painted under the influence of the look in Gala’s eyes.

“The Sublime Moment,” influenced by Gala’s gaze.

“Telephone Grilled Sardines at the End of September,” influenced by Gala’s gaze.

Gala’s gaze, characterized by Paul Eluard as “the look that pierces walls.”

The dark apartment at 88, rue de l’Universite in Paris, where I first discovered the phenomenal intensity of Gala’s gaze.

XIV. Exorcism

“Ominous Pastimes,” a terror picture.

“Soft Violincello, Spider, Great Masturbator,” etc.—type of waking nightmare.

“The Face of War,” the eyes stuffed with infinite death.

“The Invisible Man,” personage with benevolent smile, painted in 1930, which still serves to exorcise all my terrors.

From all parts of martyred Spain rose a smell of incense, of chasubles, of burned curates’ fat and of quartered spiritual flesh, which mingled
with the smell of hair dripping with the sweat of promiscuity from that other flesh, concupiscent and as paroxysmally quartered, of the mobs fornicating among themselves and with death. And all this rose toward heaven like the very odor of ecstasy of the orgasm of revolution.

The anarchists lived their dream in which they had never wholly believed. Now they did in fact enter the office of the notary public and perform their intimate functions right on his desk, which stood as the symbol of property. In several villages in which integral libertarianism was set up, all the bank notes were burned.

The Spanish Civil War changed none of my ideas. On the contrary it endowed their evolution with a decisive rigor. Horror and aversion for every kind of revolution assumed in me an almost pathological form. Nor did I want to be called a reactionary. This I was not: I did not “react”—which is an attribute of unthinking matter. For I simply continued to think, and I did not want to be called anything but Dali. But already the hyena of public opinion was slinking around me, demanding of me with the drooling menace of its expectant teeth that I make up my mind at last, that I become Stalinist or Hitlerite. No! No! No! and a thousand times no! I was going to continue to be as always and until I died, Dalinian and only Dalinian! I believed neither in the communist revolution nor in the national-socialist revolution, nor in any other kind of revolution. I believed only in the supreme reality of tradition.

Besides, revolutions have never interested me by what they “revolutionize,” which is always perishable and constantly threatened with becoming the opposite of what it was at the beginning. If revolutions are interesting it is solely because in revolutionizing they disinter and recover fragments of the tradition that was believed dead because it had been forgotten, and that needed simply the spasm of revolutionary convulsions to make them emerge, so that they might live anew. And through the revolution of the Spanish Civil War there was going to be rediscovered nothing less than the authentic catholic tradition peculiar to Spain, that wholly categorical and fanatical catholicism, that passion built of stone, massive with granitic and calcareous reality which is Spain.
⁴
In the Spanish Civil War the Spanish people, the aristocracy of peoples, even while they were devouring one another, were obscurely and unknowingly fighting unanimously for one thing, for that thing which is Spain—ardent tradition. All—atheists, believers, saints, criminals, grave-openers and grave-diggers, executioners and martyrs—all fought with the unique courage and pride of the crusaders of faith. For all were Spaniards, and even the most ferocious sacrileges and manifestations of atheism abounded in faith, illuminating the dark dementia of unleashed and omnipotent passion with flashes of heaven.

The story has often been told of the Andalusian anarchist who during the Civil War walked up the steps of a gutted and profaned church with the grace of a torrero, drew himself up to his full height before a crucifix whose Christ wore long natural hair, and after having insulted Him with the most atrocious blasphemies, spat into His face while with one hand he brutally seized the long hair which he was about to tear out. At this moment the Christ’s hand became detached from the cross and His arm, which was articulated, fell on the shoulder of the Andalusian soldier, who dropped dead on the spot. What a believer! . . .

At the very outbreak of the revolution my great friend, the poet of
la mala muerte
, Federico Garcia Lorca, died before a firing squad in Granada, occupied by the fascists. His death was exploited for propaganda purposes. This was ignoble, for they knew as well as I that Lorca was by essence the most a-political person on earth. Lorca did not die as a symbol of one or another political ideology, he died as the propitiatory victim of that total and integral phenomenon that was the revolutionary confusion in which the Civil War unfolded. For that matter, in the civil war people killed one another not even for ideas, but for “personal reasons,” for reasons of personality; and like myself, Lorca had personality and to spare, and with it a better right than most Spaniards to be shot by Spaniards. Lorca’s tragic sense of life was marked by the same tragic constant as that of the destiny of the whole Spanish people.

Lorca’s death, and the repercussions of the civil war which had begun to create a suffocating atmosphere of partisanship in the heart of Paris, made me decide to leave this city to go and dedicate the whole energy of my thinking to my work of esthetic cosmogony and synthesis which Gala had “inspired” in me at the time of my mortal anguish in Port Lligat. I set off on a voyage through Italy.

The disasters of war and revolution in which my country was plunged only intensified the wholly initial violence of my esthetic passion, and while my country was interrogating death and destruction, I was interrogating that other sphinx, of the imminent European “becoming,” that of the RENAISSANCE. I knew that after Spain, all Europe would sink into war as a consequence of the communist and fascist revolutions, and from the poverty and collapse of collectivist doctrines would arise a medieval period of reactualization of individual, spiritual and religious values. Of these imminent Middle Ages I wanted to be the first, with a full understanding of the laws of the life and death of esthetics, to be able to utter the word “renaissance.”

My voyage to Italy was generally interpreted as the symbol of my reputed lightness and frivolity of spirit. Only the few friends who closely followed my work could observe that it was precisely in the course of this voyage to Italy that the hardest and most decisive combats of my soul took place. I would walk through Rome with a volume of Stendhal in my hand. On my own and Stendhal’s behalf I grew indignant over the
bourgeois mediocrity of the conception of “modern Rome” which, claiming to revive the Rome of the Caesars while adapting it to the urban necessities of a modern city, by that very fact destroyed the divine myth, that other Rome of all time, the real and living Rome, that anarchic and often paradoxical conglomeration which had been and should continue to be—and will continue to be, in spite of everything—the true Rome, Catholic in essence and in substance. The splendors of Rome are not the peeled bones of the old columns of Caesar, but the teeming and triumphant flesh of the spirit with which Catholicism had ended by covering the barbarian carcasses of architecture of territorial victories. A broad modern avenue had just been cut through which gave access to the Vatican, and instead of arriving suddenly, after a labyrinthian series of narrow streets of an irreplaceable and savory sordidness, and being struck to the heart by the sublime proportions, one now saw the Vatican fifteen minutes sooner, placed at the end of an avenue which seemed to have been conceived by the brain of one of those lamentable organizers of international expositions. Saint Peter’s of Rome, you who were built for the sole and unique space between the two open arms of Bernini’s colonnade, or for that of the whole of heaven and earth! . . .

I spent a long season in the villa Cimbrone near Amalfi, to which I was invited by the poet Edward James, within a stone’s throw of the garden where it appears that Wagner found his inspiration for his
Parsifal
. It was just at this period that I conceived my integrally Wagnerian spectacle,
Tristan Fou
. Later I set up my studio in the Roman Forum, at Lord Berners’, where I spent two months and painted
Impressions of Africa
, which was the consequence of a brief excursion to Sicily, where I found mingled reminiscences of Catalonia and of Africa. I had no contact with the social life of Rome. My solitude with Gala was almost complete. I saw only a very few English friends.

A famous actress was traveling in Italy at the time, in the company of a well-known musician, and one evening I met her all alone in the museum of Etruscan jewelry in Pope Julius’ villa. I was surprised by her inelegant appearance and her shabby coat. However, there had been talk the day before, at the Berners’, of her lack of style. I did not know her personally, and I did not greet her. Nevertheless she took the initiative of greeting me with a smile so charming that I bowed politely, and continued my tour of the museum. As I left the museum I became definitely aware that she was following me. Purposely I took an irregular course through a number of side streets in order to test my impression, and I noticed that she was indeed still behind me at a distance of some six or seven metres. This incredible situation struck me as more and more ridiculous. Should I turn round and face her, or continue to run away?

There was a great crowd converging toward the Piazza Venezia, where Mussolini was delivering a speech, and in a moment we were caught in the flood of people coming between and around us, who increased the distance separating us. Reaching the Piazza Venezia we could no longer move either forward or back. Mussolini was reaching the end of his speech, and on several occasions as he was being applauded I was startled to observe the enthusiam with which she raised her arm in the fascist salute. She kept her eyes almost constantly on me, and seemed to be reproaching me with her glance for not doing as everyone else did. What a fuss-budget, she seemed to say, what difference does it make whether you salute this way on any other way? Suddenly abandoning her initial ill-temper indicated by the contraction of her extremely mobile brows, so characteristic of her, she looked straight at me with an irresistible friendliness and burst into a peal of laughter, while she began energetically to squeeze her way toward me through the dense crowd and succeeded in getting to within a metre from where I was standing. There she got wedged again, surrounded by a phalanx of pot-bellied Romans who formed an impassable barrier. Nevertheless I saw very clearly the gestures she was making to me with her hand. She was obviously drawing my attention to a stack of postcards of Roman scenes which she was holding up for me to see between all the upraised arms. All this appeared to me to be more and more abnormal and anguishing. I looked stupidly at these views of Rome that she slowly unfolded before me, spreading them out fanwise, and suddenly I shuddered. Among the views of the
Eternal City I had caught a glimpse of an erotic picture, which was followed by another. With a coy gesture she quickly flicked these two pictures out of sight, again concealing them among the other, conventional, picture postcards, emphasizing her gesture of precocious immodesty with an attitude of feigned innocence by which she wished to make the sudden and incomprehensible exhibitionistic act comical.