Maniac Eyeball (25 page)

And he did. I was being gypped out of 50 percent of the sum agreed on. Hard as it was to do, I tossed the gold bricks back at the greedy double-dealer who had tried to cheat me by playing up to my oldest passion.

The reader knows that the great game in my childhood was to hold in the treasure of my bowels as long as possible. A pleasure that came close to ecstasy. I squeezed my buttocks together. I danced on one foot. I turned red, pale, and contorted with spasms. My guts tied in knots. I derived masochistic enjoyment from my pains. Then, having reached the limit that revulsed my whole body, and my anus being painful with the tautness, I went on to the second phase: the tormenting of my family. Eyes wet with painful tears, I went from room to room looking for some unexpected corner.

When at last I had found it, I made sure no one could see and with a thrill of profound delectation dropped my pants as I savored the shit that was finally being molded out through my voluptuously distended buttocks.

Similarly, until the age of eight, each morning I pissed in bed after a fascinating speculation on the pleasure I was going to derive from this vengeance, while the urine ran down along my legs and I thought of the fact that I was rejecting the deep satisfaction I could have had by coming into possession of the very fine tricycle my father had set up on top of the wardrobe, directly across from my bed so I might not lose sight of it – to be my reward for deciding to piss in the pot. But I was not letting them have either my piss or my shit. My anus and my penis were gates I closed to protect my treasures. A psychoanalyst, knowing that gold and excrement are akin in the subconscious, would not have been surprised that Salvador Dalí turned into Avida Dollars and that I used my shit-like the hen’s golden eggs, the droppings of the golden ass, or Danaë’s divine diarrhoea – to perform a phenomenal transmutation through the application of my paranoiac-critical method.

It was André Breton who had meant to denounce my taste for gold by pillorying my fine name into that anagram of
avidadollars.
All he achieved was to compose a talisman that saw me through the doors of banks and safes. America recognized me as its prodigal son and threw dollars at my head like handfuls of confetti. Breton is responsible for my financial success. I have every reason to thank him for inventing that beneficent distinguished image. Gold dazzles me and bankers are the high priests of the Dalínian religion. Auguste Comte was quite right to put them at the top of the hierarchy in his positivist society. Gold is the keystone not only of economy but of humanism. It ennobles all it touches.

A Sartre thinks only of the dark and negative side of man, who seems in his eyes no more than a “useless passion”, and believes that the possession of gold is degrading. To me what is degrading is to die in poverty as Cervantes did after creating the immortal Don Quixote, or as Christopher Columbus did despite his discovery of America. Success through gold is proof by casting out nines of quality. To each his own criteria.

How Dalí Sees Man Through The Prism Of Gold

I have an alchemist’s view of the human being. I do not believe in an abstract notion of man – his genitals, his odors, his excreta, the genes of his blood, his Eros, his dreams, and his death are an integral part of existence. I believe on the contrary that the “substance being sought is the same as that from which it must be derived”, which is the basic principle of alchemy. Every element of matter has a treasure within it.

And man to me is alchemical matter
par excellence
: the well from which wealth must flow, the gold-mine of the absolute, provided you know how to transcend it. Gold is the true proof of knowledge, of God, of the laws of life, and the deeper morality.

All great men have always affirmed it. Lenin dreamt of set ting up a golden urinal as a symbol of the success of the Revolution; St. Ignatius of Loyola at the height of his mystical ecstasies created the Jesuit style, characterized by the display of gold in all churches. In all domains, gold glitters. Gustave Moreau had gilt glinting all over his pictures. Paul Verlaine, eaten away by the pox in the last days of his life, spent all of his time painting in gold the chair on which he set his arse and his chamberpot. I would wish, moreover, that the kinship of excrement and gold not cease in the deeper vision of human reality. Guy de Maupassant in the asylum practiced holding back his urine so as to avoid the loss of his precious piss which, in his hallucinations, he said was a river of diamonds; those obsessed with the pee-bread from public urinals believe that the food they soak in the urine there is the expression of absolute wealth, collective gold. Between the dreams of Lenin – who like all syphilitics was obsessed by golden stools as a result of his treponemata – and those tormented by the pee-Eucharist, there is a common denominator: the inner conviction that the vilest of matter is the sanctuary of hidden gold. Personally, I prefer avariciously to hide my wealth the better to enjoy it.

Thus, I would love to live in a house entirely made of gold but have it hidden under the tiling of the bathroom, the porcelain of the tub, the steps of the stairs. That would be a matter for profound enjoyment! Being the only one to know that everything one is touch ing is made of gold, and that each and every one is trampling a for tune underfoot without any idea of it! The topper, of course, would be to have the bowl of the toilet visibly made of gold so everyone was obliged to shit on the noblest and dearest matter in the world.

What Dalí Calls Humanism Of The Arsehole

This is not said derisively but, quite the contrary, to celebrate the high notion of man. All great painting comes out of the gut. Chardin, Gustave Moreau illustrate the shit palette. To depict gold or food or still life there are only sienna, ocher, brown, yellow, chestnut, in a word the excrementitial colors.

The great plastic subjects are all haunted by scatology. And any time I see a wealthy woman covered with diamonds, I cannot help mentally transforming each of those precious stones into so many turds decorating her neck, her breasts, and her hands, laying bare what she tries to forget in human nature. The Americans have gone to great lengths to try to pasteurize the fundamental elements and wipe shit and death right out of their concept. They invented UNESCO, which is a theoretical idea of man and society, and made a bonbon-pink and pistachio setting to wrap around realities. But I believe they are not squarely seated on their arses. They shit in their pants and spread their fortunes around like useless diarrhoea. Dalí believes on the contrary in rot, in the smell of life, and in painting with the magical excrementitial palette. Anti-shit colors and fake gaiety fill me with horror.

All great art is born of alchemy and going beyond death. But I make gold by transcending my innards through hyper-consciousness. I have always had a genius for making gold pop out. My switch strikes the ground like Moses’ stick and the source of life miraculously appears. Naturally, ascesis is not all it takes. The ruse of high priests is also required. My pleasure, to be sure, is redoubled by the quality of my inventive genius and I delight in my strategic and bargaining skill. In that way, I have a real orgasm when I succeed in making a multi-millionaire spend twenty times the money he ought to. That’s a record. Especially if I can convince him he got the better of the deal. It’s like cuckolding him and making him enjoy it.

One day a sumptuous yacht hove into Port Lligat. A braided captain came ashore in his dinghy, and called on me. He was the bearer of a message that his boss would come the next day, if agreeable to me, to collect a watercolor for which, sight unseen, he had paid me $10,000 a few months before.

We made a date for five the next afternoon at my studio. Ten thousand dollars seems too little to me, I reflected, as I looked at that yacht. This was a time when I was deep in the study of the ways of sea urchins. I put one of them on the lip of a vase, attach a paintbrush dipped in paint to one of its bristles, and titillate it. Each movement it makes is recorded by the brush against the canvas. Two hours later, my sea urchin is exhausted from playing Rembrandt, and the watercolor is finished. I sign it, after adding a big spot for greater effectiveness.

When the yacht owner comes in, I present him with the water color and his face falls with amazement. The more so since he has just glimpsed one of my own masterpieces, that I had just finished and allowed to hang covering a whole wall of the studio.

“This is a remarkable watercolor,” he says, “but my taste, dear master, does not run to your current experimentation. Your Surrealist imagination was always what I loved. That painting, for example, is a true wonder.” When he left, he was out $200,000, but owned a painting he never would have dreamt of buying had it not been for the cooperation of my sea urchin.

My elegant manner of dressing conceals my serious side just as my exhibitionism is the visible part of the iceberg.

Some day, the whole thing will capsize and it will become clear that a revolutionary power is lurking in my painting, behind the outer pompier coat of classicism. Prudery and great art join together to make me adopt the formulas of tradition. My triumph will lie in the fact that I was able to overwhelm my period and at the same time achieve immortality. My triumph is the gold that accounts for my present-day success and nurtures my eternal genius. Luck, moreover, has put many happy adventures in my path, to such a point that I sometimes feel that paranoiac-criticism is conquering the world through contamination.

A New York department store ordered a series of frescoes from me to ornament its façade at its opening. The press made a lot of copy of it. I turned the sketches in just in time for the deadline; unfortunately, the contractors were further delayed in their work and, a week before the great date, I was informed that my sketches would not be used.

I flew into a Dalínian rage, claiming I had been publicly humiliated and, in view of the damage done my reputation, demanding to be paid a second time. They complied.

A few days later, going by the now-open store with its bare façade, I got an idea. I rushed inside to see the big boss and suggested we play a game. Each day, one element of my decor would be placed in a window, with passers-by asked to guess what was to follow the next day. It would be a real jigsaw that would have the whole town talking.

Naturally, I demanded a third payment for the right to use my work in this way. I convinced the owner, but unfortunately his board threatened to kick him upstairs if he gave in to my demands.

I know that to this day he is sorry that he did not do it, but every time he looks at one of those drawings of mine that he keeps in his office as mementos he sighs mightily. His friends say: because he remembers that he had to pay for them twice; his enemies add: because habit, which is second nature, has set in, and he feels terrible that he was not allowed to pay for them a third time. That is probably true, but his record was broken two years later. I copped a triple crown, under circumstances the more unusual in that my basic client was none other than the Italian government.

The then-Minister of National Education commissioned me to illustrate Dante’s
Divine Comedy
. I made the plates for the gover ment printer, and was paid – which was a good thing. For a scandal broke out in Rome: a member of the opposition took public notice of the fact that a foreign artist, a Spaniard – Dalí, truth to tell – had been commissioned to do the illustrating of the most honored poet of Italian history. And in their ultra-chauvinism, the deputies took up the cry of betrayal of the Italian soul. The government was imperiled. Feeling insulted, I decided to have some fun out of it. The Minister, now at wit’s end and fearing a hail of rotten tomatoes, came to beg me not to reply, saying that I could keep both the money and the plates I had already done, provided no more was heard in Italy about Dalí’s illustrations for
The Divine Comedy
. I kept my word – and sold the rights at twice the price to a French publisher.

Every morning I need to have the golden diarrhoea rain down on my head, and for each of my drawings to turn into legal tender, so my gold can go and multiply incessantly in the bank. All I say, or do, turns into gold. I become one fantastic transmutation machine; the Pope of a Church in which the ingot is the basis of salvation; and I would gladly teach my flock Quevedo’s work in praise of the arsehole as the gospel of the new humanism.

However, make no mistake about it, money is merely a symbol to me, and my interest in it is of a paranoiac-critical nature. Captain Moore one day handed me a $50,000 check that I put in my pocket. We were waiting for an elevator at the Waldorf Astoria. I took it, but going up met some friends who invited me to their suite. When I left them, I went back to Gala who was waiting for me.

She asked for the check. I searched my pockets. Nothing. Gala phoned the captain, who assured her he had given it to me. He remembered that I had a copy of
Time
in my hand, probably the one I had thrown into the trash container on my friends’ floor. He went from trash container to garbage pail, till he reached the main dump, which was searched and the copy of
Time
and my check found. I was no happier for that, since the mere knowledge that that small fortune was mine was all that I needed.

How Salvador Dalí Scorns Money

One of my adolescent pastimes consisted of dissolving a bank note in a glass of spirits while sharply bargaining with a whore over her price. The money doubled in value in that way and gave me a sadistic power that brought priceless pleasure!

I had also pretended to my Figueras schoolmates that I had a system that allowed me to make a profit by paying them twice the value of the coins in their pockets. After that, I made endless complicated computations that filled me with jubilation, while they mumbled that I was crazy – quite unaware that their scorn was exactly what I was after!

Needless to say, I never have a dime on me. One day, in New York, Gala gave me five $100 bills. So as not to lose them, I pinned each one with a separate safety pin to my shirt, under my jacket, and with this ammunition ventured confidently out into the street. When I got back at the end of the day, she asked for her change. I had none. I had taken five taxis.