Maniac Eyeball (26 page)

Yet, I have always known what superiority money affords. My father, as
notario
, was the keeper of the people’s money, or the “money doctor”, as they called him, but gold is merely a way to reach a certain level of possession, which is all that counts. I remember spending my last hundred pesetas one dawn in Madrid, after a night of carousing, to buy a basket of gardenias that I presented to a speech less beggar-woman, whose dismay delighted me. My promiscuity, my dandyism are both results of the imperative law of my paranoiac desire.

I had told the Vicomte de Noailles that I would make him a painting for twenty-nine thousand francs. Why that figure? Because it was commensurate with his prestige and his wealth. He gave me a check that I gazed upon in admiration as a treasure and inspected with such intensity that I actually assimilated it. When the time came to turn it in to the bank, I felt almost unbearable reluctance that evoked a series of defense reflexes in me.

First, when the bank teller called my name I was very much surprised and immediately mistrustful, since I had never seen him before, and as he reached for my check I put the pink treasure back in my pocket.

“When he shows me the money, I’ll give him the check. Not before,” I said to Gala.

“What are you afraid of?”

“That he may swallow it,” I answered, “which is what I would do if I were in his place.”

She had to set about convincing me, to the young bank clerk’s utter amazement, that he had no taste for eating paper, that his paranoiac-critical passion was of such meager intensity that I need not fear any possessive provocation. I would gladly, after that, have eaten each of the bank notes of my roll of twenty-nine thousand francs, just to be sure I could keep them forever.

Power, money, and gold are a sovereign remedy for the terrify ing fear that scatological elements as well as grasshoppers long inspired in me. The Surrealists believed I was a shit-eater because I showed shit in my pictures. What I was really doing was trying to exorcise it, but gold was the sovereign balm that drove away my phantasms. Lack of money can give me fears and fits of fantastic intensity. One day, on the Málaga-Torremolinos road, I went through some atrocious minutes. Gala and I, at our wits’ end, had gone to borrow fifty pesetas from a friend, who put us on the return bus as he slipped the folded banknote into my hand. We were already on the way when I unfolded the pesetas to discover they were merely a receipt for a telegram he had sent. My blood ran cold; I was furiously choking at the idea of his ignominious trick, the humiliation he was subjecting me to.

I could already see myself serving prison time for “theft of service.” I looked hatefully at the approaching conductor. I was by now visualizing how I would kick him mightily in the groin before running away. I was boiling mad.

Gala, with her wonderful intuition, grasped my hand, ready for the worst. Suddenly, the man pulled the emergency cord and the bus stopped. Our friend hopped aboard. Seeing the mistake he had made, he had grabbed a taxi and caught up with us. I think that that day I could have committed murder: I swore I would never be short of money again.

Having gold often dulls the intelligence. But I have remained a cunning Catalan peasant, with his royal sense of innocence and his mystical hunger for power. The love of gold and God are an integral part of my soul. Very few people are thus as well equipped as I, and most of those “made of gold” become totally dull-witted as a result of the struggle they have had to put up to get their money and keep it.

Ever since I have been living in the U.S., I have been happy to pay my taxes. For, since I have been paying them, I have been rich. The more I pay, the bigger my fortune grows. That is a truly paranoiac-critical reaction. The same applies to my chamberlain-agent, who gives me 90 percent of everything he makes. Of course, I might hold against him the fact that he keeps 10 percent, but that is something I do not do – for you have to know how to throw money out the window if you expect it to come back in through the door.

Moreover, I always work it so that continual gifts add still more to my profits, while reducing the others’ shares. What really counts is only to have as much money as possible at the time one happens to need it.

From Madrid, where I am staying in a hotel, I phone the concierge of our usual hotel in Barcelona. “I need five hundred thousand pesetas,” I tell him, and go take a leak.

The last drop has barely dropped off my aristocratic penis when there is a knock on the door of my suite. A bellboy is holding out a tray with a hillock of bank notes on it. The concierge phoned his opposite number in Madrid and the latter sent them up. The time it takes to have a piss and fortune is at my door. Wealthy and free, is the best policy.

The Surrealists, in my eyes, have the opposite failing. They pretend to scorn money because they are not able to make it. They build up truly paralyzing inhibitions. They react to gold as they do to crap, anus, or pederasty. The truth offends them. They would like to re-create an ideal man, sans arsehole, or genitals, or appetite, living out in dream a scenario written by Aragon and directed by Breton.

My whole life has been an alchemist’s work. My secret resides in the paroxysmically acute intelligence that comes to the support of my paranoia and reveals the secrets of the world to it.

Gala and I long made a secret of our secret, that we were short of funds. At the worst times, even as we wept over not know ing what today’s day would be made of, we always found courage enough to hide our shortness of funds, not to say our dire poverty. Pity is the virtue of whores and we could do without the charity of outsiders. In Catalonia, we are taught to maintain our genius and our dignity till death do us part from them. And dying of hunger is nothing, provided everyone else thinks you are dying of indigestion.

I solemnly affirm that I refuse any concession to gold just because I am very rich. Which also means I do not have to prostitute myself to earn a living or serve my ideas; for, commitment, in an intellectual or an artist, is what the “trick” is to the whore. They degrade themselves, in order to be able to rationalize that what they are doing makes them socially useful!

I like the bread-and-butter of reality only when it is spiritualized, that is, spread with a good layer of gold. The tip of my brush brings forth the double treasure of my genius and my fortune and de fines my fate, making my most dangerous ideas tangible and creative. My best days are those on which on awakening I earn $10,000 before breakfast by engraving a plate for my own enjoyment, and which end with a $50,000 check that I pocket without a murmur after a fine gourmet supper. I am known to be a man of gold. And gold beckons to gold. My treasury keeps increasing as each day I become more spiritual, each day growing closer to angelicism.

So that now I hardly ever fart any more and my stools, as my fortune increases, become more odorless and beautifully formed. When I was poor and dissipated, they were awful and stank to high heaven. The honey of gold turns me suave while my paranoia in creases even more. Alone, immutable, there remains my love for Gala, whom I continue to love more than my mother, more than my father, and even more than money.

“I NEVER KNOW WHETHER I AM RICH OR POOR: MY WIFE KEEPS ALL THE ACCOUNTS.”

[1] Joseph Forêt, the same publisher who later was also to bring out
The Apocalypse
, the most expensive book in the world.

Chapter Twelve: How To Conquer America

To get away from Europe, and France, obsessed me, as the floodtide of hatred and violence rose. I had lived through the “night of the Catalan uprising” on October 6, 1934, at Barcelona, and almost been shot, and had sworn to myself I would never again be party to any historical events I did not myself create. My hopeful and envious eyes looked beyond the ocean to the honeyed shores of the American cake. And, like an athlete, I went into training for that broad jump.

America was the first country, outside my native Catalonia, to recognize me. Since 1927, my
Basket Of Bread
was part of an American collection, so I had half a loaf in Uncle Sam’s larder. But the crossing was a long one for me, not to be “undertaken without bread”. The main thing was to have one’s way paved in advance... In my corner, I had ideal seconds to help force the locks of America’s strongboxes, the best-mannered assistants in the world, the most authoritative voices, the biggest names: all those international snobs who had adopted me, as Francis the First of France had be lieved his court jester indispensable to his majesty. All of that year, I played every card I had in the social whirl. I was front and center at every snazzy gathering. The Vicomte de Noailles saw me as a very frequent dinner guest. Several of my pictures hung on his walls, notably
The Lugubrious Game
and
Dormeuse-Cheval-Lion-Invisible (Invisible Sleeper,
Horse, Lion
) along side the greatest names in painting: his 1923 Châteauneuf-du-Pape was a wine worth the effort. I placed my
Vertigo – Tour du Plaisir
(
Vertigo – Tower Of
Pleasure
) at Prince de Faucigny-Lucinge’s, certain that the nude couple embracing in it would cause tongues to wag. I went to the Comtesse de Polignac’s concerts, knowing I would see the finest social poll parrots of Paris there, ready to go croaking in all the salons of the city, spreading the image of my distinction.

I made up and told fantastic stories that charmed them. At Comte Etienne de Beaumont’s I rubbed elbows with the Maharajah of Kapurthala and a few Surrealists, erstwhile chums who turned up only for the petits fours and other sweets being served. Bébé Bérard’s beard got caught in my vest buttons several times. He looked remarkably like a houri, and his intelligence reached right down to the tips of the pudgy fingers he waved incessantly the better to draw attention to the dirt under his nails. His filthiness fascinated me quite as much as his mind.

Bettina Bergery, and her husband Gaston, then ambassador of France to Moscow and later to Ankara, somewhat like a praying mantis married to a Stendhal, appealed to me as the solution to an impossible equation.

Coco Chanel and Misia Sert, alongside Bettina, were the favorites in my gossip-harem. Marie-Louise Bousquet’s salon was often the laboratory for the concoction of unbelievable stories that were soon circulating all over Paris. I used everything and everyone as messengers: the old couturier Paul Poiret, sleepy dealer Ambroise Vollard, sprightly Jean Cocteau, Marie Laurencin, Serge Lifar, Leonid Massine, Boris Kochno, one of the lighting artists of the Ballets Russes whose skull shone like a billiard ball. My mustache was a woman-trap at Arturo Lopez’ dinners and Reginald Fellowes’ dancing soirées. I became an indispensable character at all the ultra-snobbish parties, and my walking stick set the tone of successful affairs.

I sent up several of my most brilliant bubbles to burst amid laughter and cheers: artificial fingernails of mirror glass to reflect the glint of one’s eyes, erotic gowns with special upholstering that could be moved about to suit the masculine imagination; additional pectoral falsies that could be blown up so as to have breasts all the way around in back. One day I walked in carrying a transparent mannequin with goldfish swimming inside. Each of my appearances was an awaited event, which ultimately had to be heard about over seas. My tall tales were already the talk of Paris, and one of them, the one about the revolutionary bread, was even a bit later to inspire one of my most noted paranoiac-critical acts.

At the time, I was surrounded by a bevy of the most elegant women. It was an evening at the Polignacs’. Diamonds like turds out of a geometric arsehole were cutting a swathe hundreds of carats wide across the bosoms of the
crème de la crème
. The concert was over and it seemed like the hanging gardens of Babylon with a decadent atmosphere suspended in the air. I announced, enunciating each word, that I was about to start a secret revolutionary society: the Order of Bread, that would be the starting point of a revolution in mass sensibility and cause the systematic requestioning of social logic and world order. Nothing less.

I explained my plan as follows: We were going to bake a bread fifteen meters long in a special oven, which of course would require a heavy investment to build. But the sale of just a few of the diamonds bunched about me would be amply sufficient for the first costs. My eye caressed the pearl necklaces and jewels already heaving over shivers of apprehension and excitement, and I went on. The well-baked bread, made accord ing to the best traditions of French bakeries, would then be wrapped in old newspapers and tied with string. One night, the members of the Secret Society of Bread, dressed as workers, would steal into the Palais-Royal gardens on the pretext of bringing in a new water main, and place their fifteen-meter bread in the middle of the garden. It would be just a matter of time till someone wondered what it was, undid the strings, opened the papers, and took fright. Of course, at first the reality of the bread would be doubted. The police laboratory would be called in; bomb-disposal squads would have to make sure it was not explosive; chemists would test it for poison! But when no one claimed the bread, and it appeared to present no danger, questions would pop up everywhere about why the waste.