The World Behind the Door (12 page)

      
"Why do you ask?" she said suspiciously.

      
"Because," said Dali, looking more apprehensive than excited, "we have set a date for our marriage."

      
"I hope the two of you will be very happy together," said Jinx, trying to keep the doubt out of her voice.

      
"I shall be ecstatically happy," he replied without much assurance.

      
Funny
, she thought.
I never knew you were a masochist. I wonder what your friend Freud would make of it.
Aloud she said, "Then I am ecstatically happy for you."

      
"It means that you and I will have to be even more discreet in our meetings," he continued.

      
"If she loves you enough to marry you," replied Jinx, "she should love you enough to believe you when you tell her that we are just friends."

      
Dali sighed deeply. "You do not know Gala. She is absolute perfection, of course—but she is not always reasonable. Still, I love her desperately and I need her even more. There are so many things I cannot do. I cannot cook, or clean my clothes, or manage my money. She will take over all these functions and free me to paint."

      
"You are free to paint right now," noted Jinx.

      
"Ah, but Gala says it is time to grow up."

      
"Doesn't that mean that it's time to learn to handle money and feed yourself?" she asked innocently.

      
"You are too young to understand," he said uncomfortably. "Someday you will grow up."

      
"Someday you may, too," said Jinx.

      
"I resent that!"

      
"Then I apologize," she said with obvious insincerity.

      
"I have but a single fear," said Dali after a moment's silence.

      
"Only one?" asked Jinx. "I should think you would have many."
All inspired by Gala
, she added silently.

      
"No, just one," said Dali. "This place is not fitting for a woman of Gala's breeding and quality, and she has explained that it is even less fitting for a man with my current income and prospects. So I think I may be moving after the wedding." He grimaced involuntarily. "That means that I will not be able to visit your world again."

      
"I wouldn't be too sure of that," said Jinx.

      
"Oh?"

      
"Of course, I don't know it for a fact, but I think the doorway will follow you wherever you go."

      
"What makes you think so?" he asked hopefully.

      
"I don't know. I just have a feeling that the doorway is
yours
rather than the closet's. I've asked around, and no one remembers seeing the door before you moved into this place, and now everyone sees it plain as day."

      
Dali closed his eyes, an expression of enormous relief on his face. "I pray that you are right."

      
"We'll know soon enough," said Jinx. "Now let me see what you have been working on."

 

 

 

Chapter 14: Escape

 

      
Gala and Dali took up residence in a bigger place, though it was another two years before they were actually married.

      
In the meantime, she began separating him from his friends, one by one. She was jealous of women, but she was also jealous of men, children, dogs, cats, anything that took Dali's attention away from her.

      
The one exception was his painting. She knew a good thing when she saw it, and she never interfered with his methods, his subject matter, or anything else concerning his art—except to suggest, as prolific as he was, that he become even more so, that popularity didn't always last and the more paintings he could sell now, the better.

      
She also encouraged his public eccentricities. She helped wax and train his mustache, and within two years it had become his trademark, as famed throughout the world as his painting was.

      
She even wrote out some answers for him, after finding out some of the questions that were to be asked in an interview. Examples:

      
Question: Why do you wear a mustache?

      
Answer: In order to pass unobserved.

      
Question: What is surrealism?

      
Answer: Surrealism is myself.

      
Question: It has been suggested that your paintings are great jokes, done at the expense of the critics. Is there any truth to that?

      
Answer: It is not necessary for the public to know whether I am joking or whether I am serious, just as it is not necessary for me to know it myself.

      
By the time of their wedding in 1934, Gala had turned him into the public's favorite celebrity, the probably insane genius of Madrid. Then she decided that the press was taking up too much of his painting time, as well as too much of the time he spent with her, and she severely limited its access to him.

      
This actually made him even more of a celebrity, the mad recluse who emerged every month or two with a new painting that the critics could argue about until the next one appeared.

      
His new studio, a huge room off the living room, had a small closet to hold his supplies—and the day they moved in he found a door at the back of it. He covered it with blank canvases, and since Gala's sole interest was in his finished work, not in the production of it, she never opened the closet.

      
Dali rarely saw Jinx after he moved in, but she showed up twice while Gala was out shopping, once to see what he had painted during the spring and summer, and once to issue him a warning.

      
"A warning?" repeated Dali.

      
"War is coming," she said. "In fact, many wars. It is time for you to leave the country."

      
"Leave Spain?" he replied incredulously. "Are you mad? This is my home."

      
"Your art has made you a citizen of the world. I really think you should take up residence in a safe part of it—though soon there will be no place that is totally safe."

      
"What do you know of such things?" he scoffed. "You are just a child, and not even a child of this world."

      
"You see things no one else can see," said Jinx. "I see things
everyone
except you can see. War is coming, and it is coming to Spain sooner than to most places."

      
"If you are referring to that failed German artist, that Hitler," said Dali, "then you are mistaken. No one who paints that poorly can present any kind of a threat."

      
She stared at him for a long moment. "I should not say this to someone who is older than me, and especially to someone who has shown me so many kindnesses—but you are a fool, Salvador. Flee while you still can."

      
"I know a few people are unhappy with the government," said Dali, "but you are over-reacting. This is
Spain
."

      
"I tried to warn you," she said unhappily. "If you survive, I hope I will see you again, wherever you end up. If not, I have enjoyed our friendship."

      
"No one's dying and no one's leaving," said Dali. Suddenly he heard Gala's footsteps approaching the house. "Except you, right now."

      
"Good-bye, Salvador,"

      
When he had dinner with Gala he asked her about the current political situation.

      
"Who has been discussing it with you?" she demanded suspiciously.

      
"No one," replied Dali. "But I hear things."

      
"From who?"

      
"Damn it!" he snapped. "Just tell me about it!"

      
She glared at him angrily. "The poor and the dispossessed are unhappy. The poor and the dispossessed are
always
unhappy. It is not for you to worry about. You must concentrate on your painting. The government is quite capable of keeping the peasants in their place."

      
He believed her, and since it would never occur to him to disobey her, he went back to his painting. It was only when they traveled to Catalonia in October, where Dali was to give a lecture on surrealism, that the real world intruded. The lecture was canceled due to violence in the streets, and the Dalis, hoping it would be rescheduled, spent the night at the home of Gala's friend Josep Dalman.

      
But by morning the Spanish Civil War was raging, with pitched battles taking place in Madrid, Barcelona and Asturias. At noon Catalonia declared independence.

      
Gala knew they couldn't return to their elegant dwelling in Madrid, and she spent most of the day securing a safe-conduct pass and a driver who was willing to risk taking them to the French border.

      
They were stopped a mile short of the border by rebels who took one look at their expensive clothes and declared that they should be shot on general principles. Dali was too terrified to speak, and Gala was so imperious that she did nothing but enrage the gunmen. It was their driver who took charge of the situation, explained what a safe-conduct pass was to the mostly-illiterate rebels, and finally was allowed to cross over into France.

      
Dali and Gala made their way to Paris by train and bus, where they received news that their driver had been killed by stray machine-gun fire. They spent the night in a hotel, then hunted up an apartment the next day. It took Dali two more days to acquire the supplies he needed, but soon he was painting again—and this time, although it was still surrealistic, it was done with passion and purpose.

      
One day, after they'd been there for two weeks, Gala went out to Coco Channel's to have some dresses designed, and Dali, on a hunch, looked in the back of each closet. He had looked the day they moved in, and there had been no door; he looked now, and the result was the same. He decided that he had lost his friend Jinx forever, and was feeling very morose about it when there was a knock at the door. He opened it and found himself confronting the redheaded girl.

      
"You!" he exclaimed.

      
"I am glad to see you finally took my advice," she said, walking past him and entering the apartment. "This is very nice. Not as nice as your house in Madrid, but much nicer than the first place we met."

      
"How did you get here?" asked Dali.

      
"The same way as always."

      
He shook his head. "No you didn't," he said. "There are no doors in the back of any of my closets—and you came in through the front door."

      
She smiled. "You have a storage closet in the basement."

      
"We do?" he said, surprised.

      
"Yes."

      
"I didn't even know the building had a basement," he admitted.

      
"Officially your storage closet is part of the apartment." She paused. "It's quite empty. The door to my world is in the back of it."

      
"I shall remember that," he promised. "It has been a long time since I visited your world." A look of anger spread across his face. "There are enough bizarre events happening right here in my own world. You were right about the war."

      
"Of course I was. Only someone who was as wrapped up in his work as you were could have missed it."

      
"Thank you," he said sardonically.

      
"May I see what you are working on now, before Gala returns?" asked Jinx.

      
"It will shock you," said Dali.

      
"If I wasn't shocked by
The Andalusian Dog
, or by your pornographic sketches—yes, I found them in one of your notebooks—I won't be shocked by this."

      
"It is not entirely finished," said Dali.

      
"That didn't stop you from showing me
The Persistence of Memory
every day when you were working on it."

      
He sighed. "All right. Come into the studio."

      
She followed him through the living room to the studio. There was a cloth hanging over the easel, obscuring the canvas.

      
"It has two titles," he announced.

      
"Two?"

      
He nodded. "My first inclination was to call it
Premonitions of Civil War
. Then I decided that was too direct, too accurate a description for a Dali painting, so I am also calling it
Soft Construction With Baked Beans
."

      
She laughed aloud. "That hardly sounds like a painting that will shock me."

      
"It will shock everyone when I am done with it."

      
He pulled back the cloth, revealing the half-finished painting. It was very clearly a Dali painting, yet it was different. Atop all the surrealistic structures was the most hideous face Jinx had ever seen, atop a pile of dismembered bodies and their entrails. She stared at it and shuddered.