Maniac Eyeball (11 page)

My opening agitation was now replaced by assurance, as he took me into his studio on the floor above and for two hours kept displaying his paintings for me, the largest as well as the smallest, which he put on his easel. He went to and fro, choosing, weighing, setting up, silent and quick, stepping back, carefully inspecting his own genius but dancing his courtship dance for me alone and looking at me with long looks of complicity.

We each knew who we were. Our mutual silence was charged with an electricity of the highest potential. On coming in, I had told him I wanted to see him before wanting to visit the Louvre. And with Olympian assurance he had accepted this compliment that might have choked a Spanish grandee. It was my way of admitting the head start he had over me. It was 1927, and I still had to prove myself before I could overtake him. He must have sensed something, for our last glances at each other were a mutual sign of understanding and challenge. On your guard, Picasso! On your guard, Dalí! I had accomplished the main thing. Paris did not scare me any more. The probe had come up with satisfactory markings. Soon, I would be able to say without any doubt, “Paris is mine!”

Back in Figueras, I painted a great deal: an empty-eyed harlequin, a soft guitar, and a flexible fish in
Nature Morte
au Clair de Lune
(
Still Life By Moonlight
), and
Le Miel Plus
Doux que le Sang
(
Honey Sweeter Than Blood
), which, like the sucking-cup of my childhood
maté,
when I think of it fills me with a liquid that supplies the honey of my uterine life.

And also a sun dripping with light and bathing women fit to eat. This ardent work alternated with intense meditation. I put together, for my own account, the jigsaw puzzle of my genius, and conceived the early beginnings of my paranoiac-critical method, which those works attest. I ceased forever having any doubts about the imperious requirement of my own witness. Henceforth, an indefeasible lucidity sorted and channeled all the assaults of the world about me and even my own unconscious impulses to make the whole of the world, even in its most violent contradictions, serve toward the satisfying of my desires. I was henceforth in the saddle, but ever more solitary, as evidenced by my laughing jags, so unusually intense. I was suffocating beneath the pressure of my own genius.

I knew a mysterious machinery was at work forming the circumstances of my destiny. I had but to be myself in order to exist and when the time came everything would be ready for my triumph. I had not the slightest doubt about my royal future and laughed in advance at the interference, the delays that a few grains of sand would try to cause in my inexorable march forward.

Pierre Loeb, a Parisian dealer who was proud of the many artists he claimed to have discovered, happened to come through Figueras with Miró, who knew and liked my work. So he gave him a chance to show what a talent scout he was. But to no avail. A week later I got a letter from the dealer, urging me to work to reach “the development of [my] undeniable qualities so he might be able to handle [me].” He had just passed his chance by and returned to the
grisaille
of his grocery shop. But the very same day Miró was writing my father to assure him of his conviction of my “brilliant future.” Everything happened as anticipated. And another of my friends, Luis Buñuel, became the messenger of my fame.

Buñuel had conceived the remarkable idea of getting his mother to finance a film, and the mediocre idea of a childish scenario: the animation of the various sections of a newspaper, news in brief, theatre, comic strips, and so on. I wrote him that it just happened I had written a scenario that would revolutionize contemporary cinema and that he had to come on at once. He came.

The result of this meeting was
Un Chien Andalou
(
An
Andalusian Dog
). Script under his arm, Buñuel went back to Paris. I was to join him there two months later.

I had thought up a film that I expected to revolt, provoke, upset the ways of thinking and seeing, the sense of bourgeois entertainment of the intellectuals and snobs of the French capital. A film that would carry each member of the audience back to the secret depths of adolescence, to the sources of dreams, destiny, and the secret of life and death, a work that would scratch away at all received ideas and in a massive blow prove my genius and Buñuel’s talent. In thirty minutes my name had to become engraved in the memories of the audience in nightmarish, fantastic, surrealistic letters.

Un Chien Andalou
is an animated Dalí painting. All the symbols of my plastic dream dance a mad round in it to the rhythm of my orgasm. The film was intended as a pyrotechnic display to write Dalí’s signature in letters of fire and allow me to cross the stages of celebrity by giant steps.

All histories of film give it careful analysis, and even the least well-disposed are forced to recognize that it was a date in film history, a scandalous act, the expression of a will to shock, and conceived in such a way as to create the greatest possible visual malaise at the spectator level. Revolt, angst, dream, imagination, scatology, all made this concept of mine an anti-film contrary to all cinematic rules. I had hoped to see audiences faint during the first sequence when a straight razor runs through and slits a girl’s eye; see them vomit at discovering the scene of the rotting donkeys with their empty eye sockets and chopped-away lips; see them weep impotently at the naked woman carrying a sea urchin on each arm; sweat with fear as the couple behind the window does on discovering the accident in the street below... An admirable sadistic realization appealing to everyone’s latent masochism,
Un Chien Andalou,
that
succès de scandale,
marked my first Parisian recognition.

When I got to Paris, Buñuel had already chosen our leading man, Pierre Batcheff, a being who might have come out of the eye slit at the start of the film, in unstable equilibrium on the borderline between the conscious and the unconscious, who kept himself drugged with ether in order to remain present in the world, and swung between life and death until at last committing suicide on the final day of the shooting schedule, like a holocaust offered to Moloch for my greater glory.

The poet Eugenio Montès, who ten years later was to be one of the key men of the Spanish Falange, wrote after seeing the film that
Un Chien Andalou
refuted everything that was 
... known as good taste, pretty, agreeable, epidermic, French ... Spain is a planet on which the roses are rotted asses ... Spain is the Escorial ... In Spain, the Christs on their crosses
really bleed... This is a date marked in blood, as Nietzsche
would have wanted it, as Spain has always done it!

These lines, which tied me in with the great tradition of Catalan creators, were a happy echo to my own ambition. A snobbery was born about my name. I had just given myself a certificate of Parisianism and made an entrance as shattering as would be my exit from the Surrealist group several years later. My Parisian début was a masterstroke.

As if to add to my aura, Federico García Lorca publishes in
La Revista de Occidente
the
Ode To Salvador Dalí
that stands as Spain’s salute at the dawn of my new career:

 
Forever vivid finger marks of blood on gold

Crossing the
heart of eternal Catalonia.

May stars like falconless fists light
your way

As your painting and life come to flower.

Eschew the waterclock with its membraned wings

And the
inflexible scythe of allegories.

But color your brush and paint ever out in the open

Facing
a sea alive with sailors and boats.

The U.S. with its International Painting Exhibition at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute at the same time discovers my
Corbeille de Pain
(
Basket Of Bread
),
La Jeune Fille Assise
(
Seated Young Girl
), and
Ana Maria,
three canvases that make a deep impression through their modern classicism.

All this, of course, is now getting about, both in Barcelona – where my friends on the magazine,
L’Amic de les Arts,
whom I had turned into fanatical boosters, are lauding my name to the skies – and in Paris where the fluid Surrealist group is making use of my personality to revive the movement, although the first article to appear about me in Paris, signed by Charles-Henry Ford, had prophetically brought into view my anti-Surrealist ideas. But no one here knows as yet who I am nor what I want.

What Dalí Dreamt Of Apart From Glory

First, women, for my erotic reveries. I had still never had intercourse, but my thirst for Eros was all the greater for that.

Landing at the Gare d’Austerlitz, the first thing I did was to jump into a taxi and instruct the driver to take me to Paris’ best whorehouses. I made the grand tour of Parisian bawdry, starting, of course, with Le Chabanais, the One Two Two, Le Panier Fleuri, with their ceilings, baroque furnishings, Chinese room, mirrored walls, and lubricious apparatuses, such as the King of England’s adjustable armchair, designed to allow him to satisfy his lusts despite his regally huge pot-belly. I was passionately gripped by the atmosphere and gorged on that erotic climate like a sponge storing up a stock of images for my private dreams. I did not touch the women, who were very vulgar, too fat, and devoid of any of the charms I anticipate from an erotic surprise.

It was in the streets, in buses, on sidewalks that I looked for women, but so timidly that it seemed I would never make the grade. My imagination went wild with the vision of all those bodies offered like so much prey yet inaccessible to my hands, my cock, or my mouth, that only glory would bring tumbling into my bed. I panted with desire. I sat down on a café terrace, paying for my drinks in advance so that I might get up and leave at the slightest encouragement. I tried auto-suggestion by telling myself every woman who went by was all primed to be willing, and that all I had to do was state my desires for her to accede to my whims.

I looked first at their legs, the calves, the feet, then mentally sketched the thighs that I tried to picture, which led me to visualize the vulva with its labia and the forest of pubic hairs implanted about it. When they walked slowly, I had time to recompose their fragrance, but more often they hurried by and I had to imagine the shape of their buttocks and backs. But if the face and the elegance of movements did not please my eye, I went on to the next and again began my lascivious undressing.

How many cunts, thighs, bellies, arses had I digested in that manner? Sometimes I went so far as to wink boldly and was rewarded with a dark angry look. I would have wanted to slice one of those beautiful girls with a sadistic, barbaric razorstroke to expunge the affront from my memory. I kept wondering what I might do with that harem that kept passing me like so much bait. I dreamed of shoving my upright cock into those pretty mouths and exploding inside them with volcanic voluptuousness, or else I visualized myself forcing the café waiter to sodomize them before my eyes while they greedily swallowed my genius-laden sperm. They were naked on all fours, panting with desire, offering their arses, awaiting my caresses, eyes riveted on my cock, and I passed among them like an animal-tamer among his wild beasts, awarding my favors only parsimoniously and almost cruelly. With a sharp fingernail, I made a red mark across a firm white buttock. I scratched a breast with my claws. Here I tore out a handful of pubic hair, bringing blood. I sat down on a back and nonchalantly crossed my legs, as I tapped the taut arse with my switch. It was a great erotic moment and my cock swelled wondrously.

The whorehouse décors were also very useful to me. I rolled around on beds as huge as Arab tents and covered with animal skins, surrounded by naked women, their nipples at the alert, their pussies shaven, their bellies flat, slaves to my desires and bending to my slightest wink, doing the tiniest of my biddings. We made fantastic human tableaux, making love in groups of four, five, or six, and acrobatic, delirious positions that I dreamed up, reflected on all sides in wall mirrors like a veritable fireworks of lust.

I would have liked to be able to get up, stand on the cafe table, and ejaculate publicly amid the bravos and huzzahs. But when I rose from my seat suddenly to follow a pair of buttocks that wiggled ahead of me, it was only to discover that the woman had not even noticed me. I followed her stealthily along the sidewalk, not daring to talk to her, and soon getting to hate her for the advances I dared not make. I wanted to whip her, slash her with a razor, beat her, throw her down and vent my useless passion upon her. Sometimes I caught up with her on a bus and got to sit down next to her.

Then, timidly, I would rub knees with her. I never got one to respond. I had been told that, during rush hour, some men succeeded in getting their cocks out, showing them to the object of their desire, and getting them to fondle them! With me, at the first rub, she almost always got up, leaving me with my soft useless tool, and a short time later there I was again back on the sidewalk, swallowed up by the crowd, pushed around by hostile arses, tough thighs, rough hands, and pitiless faces. I even tried to work it on the ugliest of women!

I was young, well dressed, attractive, and a genius. None of them could see it. I hated them for their indifference, stupidity, vanity, and the shame they caused me. I would have liked artfully to torture them with molten lead that I would have strewn on their bodies drop by seething drop, cutting away the tips of their tits, ravaging their cunts and their beautiful provocative arses. But I rushed back to my hotel room on Rue Vivienne and, watching myself in the wardrobe mirror, grabbed my cock in both my hands, making it tumescent, and slowly caressed it up to its orgasmic revulsion. My sperm flooded all over the mirror while tears flowed from my eyes, making a screen composed of orgiastic visions of all those females who had rejected me. I fell to my knees, praying God to burn them all in hell.