Maniac Eyeball (14 page)

I can see her still, dressed in white, her fragile little body out lined by the wind, walking on the path along the rocks. So thin, so seemingly weak that I would have liked to take her in my arms and I asked her to sit down sheltered from the breath of the sea behind a rock. We both felt that the great moment was at hand. I had been pursued for days now by erotic obsessions growing out of my feel ings of impotence. I took revenge in my dreams on what haunted and frightened me. I possessed my beloved like a brute, I tore her dress, laid bare her breasts, tattered her underclothes, and impaled her on the ferocious stake of my upstretched cock. I twisted her around into every position of desire and frenetically bent her to my wishes. I ejaculated over my fantasies and over her tender and grate ful submission. But as soon as I was actually with her, her eyes, her voice, her smile swept away my fancies. Once more I was headlong into love and fear.

I took her in my arms. The silence became terrifying with nothing but the whistling of the wind against the shards of slate. Suddenly I knew Gala was weeping. Big liquid pearls were running down her cheeks.

I brought my lips close to hers. Her mouth began to open. I had kissed before, but cynically, almost pervertedly, falsely and to fool myself, to ape desire and love, to do myself some good by doing evil. Now I discovered what a kiss is, a being giving herself by turning into a wisp that you drink in with her saliva as you breathe her breath. I ran my tongue as far as could be into her mouth and drilled it into hers which I was gobbling into me. Several times, like live animals ours tongues mixed it up, wound around each other as if to fight the better to love each other.

Never had I experienced such a feeling of power, possession, and grace. Our salivas were love potion. Our tongues were exacer bated sex organs. Our teeth bumped sharply against each other’s like shields, but these barriers only made our desires that much more ardent. I would have wanted to be able to dive into her, to lap her, eat her, tear her flesh. And I bit her lips violently until the taste of her blood filled my mouth and I was able to suckle on the fluid sweeter than honey. I was turning vampire, becoming ferocious, falling into a chasm of unheard-of enjoyment. I was a lover.

I remember taking Gala by her hair and throwing her head back, as I cried, “Tell me what I should do now. Tell it to me obscenely so I can become a man and an animal.” Then something unheard-of happened. Gala’s face became fatal and as if fixed by time standing still, assuming the implacable expression of a goddess and at the same time the pathos of a pythoness, as she told me, “I want you to kill me.”

In a flash, I understood that Gala had seen through me, seen right through my soul. She was throwing my own mystery right back in my face. Gala had laid bare my criminal intentions. As she walked airily in front of me, along the paths, over the chasms, or watched me pushing the rocks down into the sea, she knew I was thinking of killing her. She appeared to me suddenly as the Immaculate Intuition. Her clairvoyance overwhelmed me. At the same time, she showed me the esteem she had for me. Gala judged me worthy of the most daring of actions and the most divine courage and capable also of having them brought out. Gala was the love to whom I could pledge myself.

But the truth was even greater than that. Tearing herself away from my furiously grateful kisses she spoke to me of my crime with the detailed precision of a director setting up a key scene. She explained to me that I had nothing to fear, for she would leave a letter disguising my horrible felony as a suicide. She was thanking me in advance for shortening her days, but just wanted the murder to be done as quickly as possible, so as to avoid any suffering, even mental. This fear of death and the instants that precede it was always present in her as an obsession. In choosing me as her executioner she gave away her secret and proved her love for me. We talked at great length about the different methods that my imagination provided. Of course, I was not capable of choking her; poison was somewhat doubtful and might also lead to painful death throes; throwing her from a high parapet or the tower of a cathedral did not have the warranty of non-suffering that Gala demanded. The main thing was to avoid waiting and suffering. Total surprise and immediate success were the key conditions. A revolver? I was all thumbs. Gala discussed her death with assurance, with calm, almost voluptuously. Like the mistress of a house giving her orders for laying the table. With a seriousness that showed me this was no affectation, but a fundamental metaphysical intention.

Gala wanted to die and I was the one she had chosen as the lord high executioner. I was the magic element in her life, the miracle of fate. Her suffering, her loneliness were the equals of mine. Her quiet courage amazed me. That she would submit like the Paschal Lamb overwhelmed me. In a flash, a capital mutation took place in me. My soul was being tempered in the spectacle of this admirable attitude. All the disparate parts of my genius were coming together. I had exhausted the subject by going over in imagination all the details of my crime, as if I had explored my own madness. My cruelty, my ferocity, my desire to humiliate and to soil were being transformed like a laser beam in the diamond prism of Gala’s heart and intelligence. From that moment on, I was cured of my haunting obsessions, my laughter, my hysterics.

Unbelievable, wonderful – in the full sense of the word! A kiss sealed my new future. Gala became the salt of my life, the steel of my personality, my beacon, my double – ME.

Henceforth there were Dalí and Gala united for eternity.

I no longer know whether we made love at that minute, for I was too delirious. My limbs no longer belonged to me, an unbelievable strength had possession of me. I felt myself a man, freed from my terrors and my impotence. By her, I was henceforth gifted with telluric vertical forces such as allow a man to penetrate a woman.

How Love Transformed Dalí’s Vision Of The World

Gala revealed Dalínian love to Dalí. I was at the point of almost absolute narcissism, particularly during masturbation.

I garnered sexual pleasure from my self exalted and totemized into my penis standing erect and caressed on to ecstasy. But the ultimate moment of pleasure is the instant in which there appears, just before the spurt of sperm, a strong image that dazzles me and of which my act is somehow the negation: my father on his deathbed, for example, or else I gaze with the greatest intensity at an image as if I were trying to engrave it in myself and arrest time. I masturbated scores of times looking out the small attic window at the steeple of the Figueras church – because it was what was before my eyes, of course, but it was also a premonitory attempt, since the steeple was razed during the Spanish Civil War. And in truth, that delight in the image which I expel from my memory or which I record intensely at the moment of orgasm constituted my true erotic joy. I am imagefully orgasmic, and my painting is a pursuit of ecstasy.

I have always taken delight in making up erotic games that in my imagination are films in which the image of each frame is unbelievably precise. I reconstitute with hallucinated exactness the details of a position, every pubic hair, every grain of the skin, every line, and my pleasure springs from the quality of fineness and precision of my visions.

With Gala pleasure became joy by complexifying itself in an unbelievable way. I can give no better idea of it than to refer to Proust who with the taste of a madeleine recreates a whole world. Gala is like a magic mirror toward which the most marvelous mo ments of the successive presents of my life converge. Just before I explode inside her, after having penetrated and caressed her with my cock, on a rhythm that is natural and full of tenderness, I can feel mounting in me a power of imagery that dazzles me vertiginously. Not a radiant image but an unbelievable wealth of visions that are so many privileged moments with the retinue of their odor, their affectivity that is part of it, a quality of memories that submerges my consciousness. As if ruled by the gridwork of a decoding system, these images soon become orderly and convey to me a unique truth from which my erotic enjoyment is born.

Over the Figueras steeple associated with the memory of my adolescent masturbations, are superimposed the lines of the St. Narcissus church at Gerona and a view of the Delft church painted by Vermeer. The superimposition of these three privileged churches gives my orgasm a new and exalting dimension. The pleasure of the flesh can be achieved only if a special dimension is created, a sort of stereo scopic phenomenon, an imaginary hologram as true as true. My mental life has to take part intimately in the blossoming of my body. At the minute when I melt into Gala I always succeed in a grandiose superimposition of my visions, and my orgasm at one and the same time occurs in three dimensions: Gala’s body, my own, and a kingdom that is the present of all my presents.

I have suddenly to have present all of these images of my past that make up the whole cloth of my life. They are the bed of my enjoyment. Each time, Gala is making love with all of the Dalís that ever existed. In painting I have tried to convey this sensation by reconstructing the vision of a fly’s eye that gives the feeling of being in all dimensions, up and down, right and left, front and back, or even the moiré fabric that superimposes luminous images of reality in which one can select one’s vision according to distance. Every microscopic element of the moiré can give birth to a separate vision. To make love comes down to inventing an anamorphosis of reality into the Dalínian conception of eroticism.

Gala has become a fundamental catalytic element in my life. My visual and affective memory has been transcended by her. Thanks to her – to her love felt and accepted by myself – I can bring forth this sheaf of projections of images and am capable of selecting among them the strongest, most qualitative, so I can decant my prodigious wealth to produce the diamond of Dalínian reality.

She is indispensable to me because thanks to her I can produce my elixir, my semen, and the substance of the strength that allows me to conquer and dominate the world.

I might have remained nothing but a voyeur impassioned of the spectacle of couples whipped to frenzies of desire. Gala allowed me to accede to the spiritual delights of Eros, she knocked out the barriers of my childhood fancies, my death anxieties, by appearing nude before me, stripped down to her own obsessions. She cured me of my self-destructive rage by offering herself as holocaust on the altar of my rage to live. I did not go mad, because she took over my madness.

As important as her gifts of love, are her gifts of persuasion. Her discourse is essential to my soul. She calms me. She reveals me. She makes me. She convinces me of my talent to live. The paranoiac-critical method owes its all to her. She forced me to transform my lucidity into a faculty of self-analysis that screens my most awful and awesome thoughts to turn them into light and action. I should have died crushed under the weight of my imagination and fears. I became wealthy with all the mud that I turned into gold. I channeled the torrent of my impressions with which I domesticated my reality.

Once I wrote a manifesto against the blind and afterwards experienced fear, even anguish, over the loss of my sight. I spent entire days maintaining the madness of a poor fisherboy of Cadaqués who finally committed suicide.

Feeling guilty, I went into a state of arrest, becoming unable to eat or drink, by way of self-punishment. These are two cases out of a hundred. Gala was always there to ex plain my attitude to me, bring me back to normal, return me to my paintbrushes, and turn my haunting obsessions into genius.

Out of the most terrible mental malady, my fantastic wan derings, my paranoiac visions, my deliriousness, she made a
classical order.
She de-li-mit-ed – I might say Dalí-mit-ed – my delirium and set up the mental mechanisms that determine the share of truth. Thanks to her, I can differentiate between dream and reality, between ethereal intentions and practical inventions. By exercising constantly with her intelligence, I developed my sense of objectivity while at the same time maintaining the freedom of the irreducible share of my paranoia from which my genius derives. This dualism is the most unbelievable originality of my being. I achieved the sublime mutation of evil into good, madness into order, and even succeeded in getting my contemporaries to accept and share my madness. Dalí projected himself on the world and thus became truly Dalí.

Had Dalí Already Made Love To Another Woman?

Dalí cannot come with any other woman. It is impossible.

You cannot be unfaithful to your shadow, and to lose it is to lose your soul. That is quite enough for me, and I do not think either of having children. Those embryos disgust me. Their fetal aspect bothers me wildly. Nor could I ever, like any genius, give birth to anything but an idiot.

I also do not want to face up to the reality of Gala’s death. My mind would need to call on all of its resources to survive that. But with the training she has put me through I am certain I could maintain my intelligence at the level of my love of life. Though henceforth I could overcome the most abysmal of misfortunes, she would remain irreplaceable. I have moreover so often thought of her death, from the very first day of our love, that I am as if prepared for that tragedy. Gala today, as on that first day, goes on saying that her death would be the finest day of her life.

Perhaps I would say, despite my immense sorrow, as I did the day after our first coming-together, in Figueras when I saw her to the train as she was departing for Paris, despite my love and my sorrow at seeing her leave, “Alone at last.” For nothing is greater than to discover one’s true dimensions and put up with one’s solitude. Gala taught that to me, so it would be one more way of paying deep tribute to her by going on living as she had wanted.

At that time, I was hardly inured despite my pride and like one obsessed I had to look for my strength and courage among the things she had imprinted with her mark, her odors, her memory: an old pair of rope sandals, a swimsuit, a pebble. I kneaded them in my hands, smelled them with delight, trying to recapture a bit of her presence and her life, and warming my heart with the magnetism they still radiated.