Maniac Eyeball (13 page)

The shit-be decked owl didn’t fit, but I could mentally transport it quickly to some other pate. My scatological headpiece always ended up finding a face it could clownishly transform, and I burst into laughter. My game was a kind of acid that could eat away the distinctive image of adults, reducing their self-satisfaction to skeletonization, turning their personality into putrefaction. At the same time that I played this game of death, I developed inward faculties of self-destruction. Everyone could tell I was allowing the marks of dark delirium to live within me.

I was also living some weird hallucinations. This was the time when, returning one morning to my bedroom after having gone down to the second floor to the toilet, I found a woman in a nightgown who seemed to be waiting for me, sitting in profile before the window. I knew immediately that it was a hallucinated vision, but I accepted it naturally and without concern. Slowly I went back to bed without taking my eyes off the apparition. She was perfectly clear, if evanescent. I felt happy and as if floating in beatitude. I don’t know how long the feeling lasted, but for a moment I turned my eyes away and it was all gone. I tried in vain to bring the precious image back, but I have always retained a nostalgia for that unique privileged moment and the hope that I might once again know such grace. I often told myself those awful fits of laughter and the derangement of my faculties were none too great a price to pay for the power to project such visions, and even today before I open a door it often happens that I feel my Unknown Woman will be waiting for me there, sitting in profile before the window, just as she did that Sunday morning in the summer of 1929 in my bedroom at Figueras.

I was in fact living in a kind of perpetual hysteria, what with my fits, my hallucinations, my masturbating – in which I found the greatest delight in the artful caresses that would bring spurting from my cock the pleasure that revulsed me right into ecstasy – and my work. As soon as I got back from Paris I painted without a break a canvas that was to become
Le Jeu lugubre
(
The Lugubrious Game
), in which I did my best to depict a pair of underpants sullied with excrement. Little by little my entire universe was being colored by the glints of madness and I was wasting my genius in laughter, sperm, and visions. It was time for Gala to give me back a soul.

How Dalí Met Gala

Camille Goëmans, my dealer, and his wife, the Magrittes[1], and Buñuel had been in Cadaqués for several days, when one morning Paul Eluard arrived. Gala got out of the car looking dour, just as I was going into one of my fits of uncontrollable laughing. Our first contact took place in a wild burst of laughter.

Some time later, I was to meet them for an aperitif on the terrace of the Hotel Miramar. Another outburst. Eluard, taken aback, listened most carefully as my friends expatiated to him about my condition. Little by little, I was losing control of myself. My fits de pended on chance, coincidences, and the associations in my overworked imagination. Like a drowning man, I was desperately awaiting a life buoy. It all went very fast. But forever fresh in my memory are a few privileged images of those moments.

I spent a great part of my time painting, alone and naked in my bedroom, and it often happened that I would put my brush down so as to take my cock in the same hand and go from one pleasure to the other living through the same ecstasy. I made lengthy preparations for when I went out, so as always to achieve some theatricality. Since my university days in Madrid I had been pomading my hair to turn it into a veritable black helmet, flexible and tough as plastic. But I altered this Argentine tango-dancer look by dressing in women’s clothes: silk blouse of my own design, with broad puffed sleeves that I com pleted with a bracelet, and a low neckline to set off my necklace of fake pearls. I became a bachelor-girl, androgynous in appearance. I was a man through my white pants. At first blush, Gala did not make me out. The mask was misleading.

I might have spoiled the whole thing if, the next day, I had followed my first intention. We were going bathing with the Eluards and were to meet on the beach. My idea had been to floor them by my eccentricity. To the little provincial that I was, this couple were the very salt of Paris; their self-assurance, their blasé attitude, their luxuriousness were a shocking provocation that fascinated me. Gala, with her up-to-the-minute unfolding valises that turned into ward robes, and spewed out gowns and fine lingerie, scared me. I decided to show them a side of myself exactly the opposite of what I had been the day before, and to transform the decadent youth into a ragged bullherder. I scissored the life out of my best shirt, reducing it a third in size to make it into a sort of bumfreezer, and cut off the collar. Two slashes in the chest showed me hirsute and nippled. Mixing some fish paste with goat’s dung I made a sordid musk that I doused myself with, and completed the makeup by shaving my armpits, deliberately cutting myself so as to let the blood run down and coagulate. I added to it some laundry bluing that my sweat promptly spread over my torso. I stuck a jasmine behind my ear, and stunk of goat to high heaven. Then, I opened my window wide, and stood there, hideous and superb.

That was when I saw her back. Gala was there, sitting on the beach. And her sublime back, athletic and fragile, taut and tender, feminine and energetic, fascinated me as years before my baby-nurse’s had. I could see nothing beyond that screen of desire that ended with the narrowing of the waist and the roundness of the buttocks. Cut the comedy. Like Jupiter’s lightning, the strength and dazzle of life overwhelmed me. My get-up turned my stomach. I would have liked to go to her stark naked, with hands outstretched.

It took a lot of doing to get rid of that goat stink, and when I did get to the beach, I was so shaken that I became convulsed with laughter and was unable to say a word to her. I sat at her feet, choking, but attentive as a dog to her slightest whims.

Ignoring all those about us, I had eyes only for her. My most daring action was to graze her hand so I might feel the electric shock of our mutual desires. I had no other intention than to remain eternally at her feet, my life dangling from her gaze. Her pupils wore a deep question and an appeal that I could not make out despite my intuitive genius.

If a love be great because of the ordeals it overcomes and tempered by the obstacles it masters, then ours is unshakable. In the whole history of the sentiment of love in the literature of all ages, you will not find wildness and equilibrium, strength and mildness, magnetism and volcanic passion so intense in the lives of any couple. Gala and Dalí incarnate the most phenomenal myth of love transcend ing beings, wiping out the vertigo of absurdity, and proclaiming the pride and quality of human genius. Without love, without Gala, I would no longer be Dalí. That is a truth I will never stop shouting or living. She is my blood, my oxygen.

Gala had been told I was a shit-eating coprophagist when she saw my
Lugubrious Game
with its underpants covered in excrement. She interpreted that image as an attempt to exalt my freakiness.

Why did I tell her the truth, I who had always preferred to lie to women the better to reduce them to subjection? I looked intensely at her, appreciating not only the beauty of her thin olive-dark face, her eyes distended by a paroxysm of feelings, her almost undernour ished skinniness, her wasp waist, but also the frank, honest, noble expression of her attention, that forbade me suddenly from dissembling with her, and most of all, I was truly snobbily taken by Gala’s cosmopolitan charm. Here I had, within reach of my hand, of my mouth, a Parisienne, the wife of a famous Surrealist poet, an elegant, divine woman, coming to me from the far corners of Europe – Eluard and Gala were back from Switzerland, where they had visited René Crevel, who was there for his health – with her wardrobe valise lush with laces and labels of great couturiers. A woman I had heard so much about, who was the stuff on which I much had dreamed. And this woman was talking to me about me, asking me about my secret self, and I was able to spread myself before her, evoke her deeper curiosity and passionate interest. Gala was of my own size. I had just found the sister soul.

I told her that grasshoppers, blood, and shit were terrifiers to me, and explained to her my method for creating a controlled delirium that gave me the upper hand over my terrors and allowed me to fas cinate “the others”. Gala took my hand with a grace and strength I can still feel today. In the fullest sense of the term, she was taking me in hand. She had understood all about me and my soul and I do believe about her own at the same time.

The contact of her skin brought on a new convulsion in me, but to her ears my laughter must now have had a different ring. The genius of her intuition had just perceived me completely. I felt her strength entering me as the pressure of her hand increased. She knew I was not the flighty Argentine dancer I seemed to be, nor one of those blasé characters around her, but an abysm of terror, of fright, a child of genius lost in the world, the horrible world teeming with stupidity as well as monsters with mandibles, claws, and talons, im bued with hatred for all that was beyond them. And my frightening laugh was a cry of despair and rage, an appeal from my whole being, the final message from an intelligence getting lost in the labyrinth of nothingness. Gala heard me.

She adopted me. I became her new-born baby, her child, her son, her lover – the man to make love to – she opened heaven to me and we both sat down on its clouds, far from the world. She took unto herself the power to be my protectress, my divine mother, my queen. I conferred on her the strength to create the mirage of her own myth before her eyes and before the world. Our two lives were henceforth going to justify each other. “Mon petit, we are not going ever again to leave each other.” These words of Gala’s sealed the pact of the Dalínian miracle.

Gala drove the forces of death out of me. And first and fore most the obsessive sign of Salvador, my dead elder brother; the Castor whose Pollux I had been, and whose shadow I was becoming. She brought me back to the light through the love she gave me, of which I could feel the emanations. Gala had already achieved a degree of maturity and despair that made her sensitive to the full reality of my tragedy, allowed her to communicate immediately with my most secret self and offer me the gift of her radiant energy, almost mediumistically. Through her I was in communion with the cry of life.

The steps were difficult and often dramatic. I dragged Gala with me on my mad dashes along the strand and we climbed play fully to the highest rocks that were several meters above the sea. We grazed the abysses. Gala went along with me without demur, her sphinx-like smile and great eyes following me. One day I understood she had not been taken in. We had gotten to the top of a huge mass of pink granite and I suddenly started pushing into the sea blocks of stone that I threw with rage. My state of excitement was becoming frenzied. I felt Gala was observing me, and instantly stopped.

I sped down the sharp incline, my criminal intentions laid bare. Like Dul lita, from the top of the Pichots’ mill tower, I was dreaming of throwing Gala down to the sharp-ridged rocks below. I identified in the same archetypal image the little girl and the woman who had both offered to save me from my solitude. I did not yet understand that this was the price of my salvation, and became intoxicated with my own despair.

Why was I not able to kill Gala? How could she put up with the harassment of my reproaches and the wounds of my injustice? As if I had not been the asker, the inciter, the calculator of this nascent love, I accused her of distracting me from my painting, leading me far from my inner self, and dissipating my genius. Actually, I was scared to death of
l’amour.
I went from the state of the most cow ardly and unreasonable aggressiveness to the most servile subjection; kissing Gala’s feet and shoes and begging her to show the slightest interest in me – she who was giving me her soul! – and, crushed, atomized with fear and shame, silent, unfriendly, humiliated of my self, I left her at the door of her hotel.

But she was sublime. Coming back from an outing, I painted a picture that I called
L’Accommodation du Désir
(
Accommodations Of Desire
), and today I know it was trying to exorcise me and fore told my fate.

Was Dalí A Virgin Despite His Sexual Experiences?

I masturbated frequently, but with great control over my penis, mentally leading myself on to orgasm but disciplining my actions so as the better to savor my ecstasy. Masturbation at the time was the core of my eroticism and the axis of my paranoiac-critical method. The prick I was hooked on, so to speak. There was me and my orgasm – and then the rest of the world. I went from my painting
Le Grand Masturbateur
(
The Great Masturbator
), which is the ex pression of my heterosexual anxiety – with its mouthless character incarnated by a grasshopper while the ants eat its belly – to
Accommodations Of Desire
, in which lions’ maws translate my terror before the revelation of the possession of a woman’s cunt that would lead to the revelation of my impotence. I was getting prepared for the recoil of my shame. At this period, my laughing fits turned hysterical.

Eluard elegantly decided to return to Paris alone and went off with his friends. In September of that year, 1929, I remained alone with Gala. My passion grew daily, the more so since Gala changed her clothes three times a day and at each meeting I rediscovered her anew.

“You will soon understand what I want from you,” she said to me.

All I could answer was, “Just don’t hurt me. Promise me that. We will never hurt each other.”

I was delirious with fear and anxiety, possessed of the strange happiness that perhaps binds the victim to the executioner. It was grape-gathering time. Gala sat in the sun on a retaining wall and ate the muscadines I had just given her. I watched, fascinated, as her hand carried the fruits from the bunch to her mouth. She was all grace and beauty, the image of the fullness of enjoyment and charm. I swelled with desire and recorded this instant so strongly that later in my
Etude Pour La Ville Paranoïaque
(
Study For A Paranoiac
City
) I had only to close my eyes to recapture intact the picture of Gala gleaning the grapes.