The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (21 page)

I went down the stairs like a somnambulist, bumping myself several times against the walls at the turns, and each time I uttered in a low voice, through which pierced the whole force of my will,

“You shall be Dullita! You shall be Dullita! Tomorrow!”

I knew that the linden blossom picking was to last another day. The following morning Dullita was again there. The sun rose, the blossom-picker picked, the breasts hung, and the melons hung, but this morning it was as though all the attraction I had felt for the breasts the day before had totally disappeared, thanks to the realization of my fantasy with the melon. Not only could I not recapture even the traces of a desire which after all had been extremely vivid, but a real disgust seized me as I reconstructed the scene in my mind. The ermine cape soiled with melon juice, the prickly and excessively sweet taste of the latter, and even the breasts no longer seemed so beautiful as I looked at them again, and in any case I was far indeed from according them that element of sentimental poetry which on the previous afternoon had made the mere sight of them bring tears to my eyes.

Today I felt myself fascinated exclusively by the slimness of Dullita’s waist, which seemed to diminish in diameter as the sun advanced toward the zenith, the increasingly vertical shadows accentuating the vulnerable fragility of the hour-glass whose form her body was assuming for me–the slimmest and proudest body of them all, the body of my new Dullita, of my Galuchka Rediviva.

I said nothing to her in the morning on seeing her again, but to myself I said, “Today there shall be no one but she! I have all the time I want!”

And I began to play with my diabolo. I was extremely skilful at this game. After having made it whirl and glide in all directions, with a most capricious dexterity, I tossed it up into the air to great heights, always catching it on the string drawn taut between my two sticks. I felt myself admired by Dullita, and the ease with which I played allowed me to adopt attitudes which I was sure must be of great beauty to Dullita’s eyes. I tossed my diabolo higher and higher, and finally it got away from me and fell on a flowery shrub. Dullita, amused and smiling, ran to pick it up, and she hesitated a little to give it back to me, asking me to let her play too. I took back my diabolo, without answering her, and went on with my game.

Diabolo.

But each time I tossed it into the air I felt myself seized with a violent anguish, arising from the sudden fear of missing my catch (which in fact happened quite frequently from then on), and Dullita’s attempts to recover my diabolo each time occasioned little races between us, leading to hostile demonstrations on my part. Dullita would always yield smilingly, but with her demand to which I had not acceded and which my pride rendered each time more unacceptable, she had created in my mind a germ of remorse which I quickly transformed into rancor. Instead of admiring me play, instead of watching the prodigies of my movements addressed exclusively to her, Dullita preferred to play herself! Violently I whirled my diabolo up into the sky, which was an “immaculate conception” blue, and the anguishing fear of not catching it made me tremble. But again this time I victoriously caught it. And no sooner had I caught it than I threw it up once more and with greater force, but so clumsily this time that it landed far away.

Dullita promptly broke into a laugh that wounded me in all the fibres of my being. She ran to pick up my diabolo, and I let her, since I still had the sticks and she could not play without them. I went slowly toward her, my eyes charged with repressed anger. She immediately understood my attitude, and seemed this time to be preparing for a long resistance. We walked one behind the other in a calm persecution, and as soon as I increased my pace she would increase hers, but just enough to keep herself always at the same distance; we went round the garden in this way several times.

Finally she went and lay down on one of the piles of linden blossoms which had been sorted out as bad, for the flowers were yellow, bruised, and consumed by bees. Mollified, I went up close to Dullita, thinking she was going to give me back my diabolo. I took a large pile of white, fresh linden blossoms in my arms, and let them fall on Dullita. She turned over on her stomach at this moment, hiding the diabolo under her body, showing me in this manner that she wanted to keep it at all costs. Seen thus from behind, Dullita was extraordinarily beautiful. Between
her round, delicate buttocks and her back one saw hollowed out the abyss of her deep waist half-buried in flowers. I got down on my knees on top of her, and encircling her queenly waist with an almost imperceptible gentleness, with the caressing embrace of my two arms I said to her in a low voice,

“Give me the diabolo!...”

“No!” she answered, already suppliant ..

“Give me the diabolo!...”

“No!” she repeated.

“Give me the diabolo!” And I pressed her tighter. “Give me the diabolo!...”

“No!”

“Give me the diabolo!...”

“No!”

I then pressed her with all the savage might of which I was capable. “Give me the diabolo!...”

“Ale!”

An incipient sob already shook her little shoulders, and pulling out my diabolo, which she was holding clutched to her bosom, she let it drop. I picked it up and went away a short distance. Dullita too got up and went to seek refuge under the ladder where her mother was working. The two slopes of this ladder were united by a taut cord which prevented them from slipping apart. With angelic grace Dullita went over and, holding on to the two slopes of the ladder with her arms, leaned against the ladder’s taut cord with the slenderest portion of her waist which I had just so savagely squeezed. I could feel burning into my own flesh the pain which I assumed the pressure of this cord must produce on Dullita’s back. She was weeping without grimacing, and with absolute nobility; I could see very well that she was holding back even this so that no one would notice anything. But I felt ashamed and was looking for a way to escape Dullita’s tear-drenched glance.

A hegemonic desire for total solitude took violent hold of me, and I felt myself ready to run away no matter where, when a mad plan assailed my brain with that tyrannic force which already then no power in the world could modify. What I planned to do was to go up and play with my diabolo at the top of the Tower, so as to throw it as high up as possible; and if it should fall outside the Tower, it would be lost! This danger made my heart beat wildly.

Just then I heard Julia come and call me to lunch. I pretended not to have heard and ran full speed up into the Tower, for I absolutely had to experience the emotion of my game at least once before going down into the dining room.

As soon as I had reached the top of the Tower I tossed my diabolo with all my might into the air, and it fell beyond the edge of the Tower. But by a miracle of skill and a gesture of great suppleness, I leaned over the rampart, with half my body over the edge of the sheer drop. Thus
I was able to catch my diabolo. The mortal danger of this act to save my diabolo made me so dizzy that I had to sit down on the terrace to recover myself. The whole flag-stone terrace of the tower, and the crutch itself, planted in the centre, seemed to reel around me. Someone below kept calling me. I went down into the dining room feeling a kind of seasickness which had robbed me of all inclination to eat. Señor Pitchot too had a severe head-ache, and he had wrapped a tight white band around his head. In spite of the terror I had just undergone I promised myself to go back, after eating, and get my diabolo which I had left on the tower terrace, so that I could continue the same game. I promised myself, however, that I would be more careful next time. I would go and play immediately after lunch, and again in the evening, and I was already thinking of the sunset. I wanted to avoid Dullita this afternoon, I wanted evening to come quickly!

Do not be impatient, Salvador, this evening there will occur one of the most moving experiences in your life, aureoled by a fantastic sunset–wait, wait!

When luncheon was over Señor Pitchot headed for the balcony and, drawing the shutters himself, ordered that the same be done for all the rest of the windows and balconies of the Muli de la Torre. He added, “We are in for a storm.” I looked with astonishment at the sky, which appeared as blue and smooth as before. But Señor Pitchot took me out on the balcony and pointed out to me, far down on the horizon, some tiny cumulus clouds, white as snow, and which seemed to be rising vertically. He said, pointing to them with his finger,

“You see those ‘towers’? Before tea-time we’re going to have lightning and thunder, if it doesn’t hail.”

I remained clutching the iron railing of the balcony, watching those clouds grow in a steady absorption and wonderment. It was as though the spots of moisture on the vaulted ceiling of Señor Traite’s school where I had seen the procession of all the first fantasies of my childhood, which had since been obliterated by my memory’s layers of forgetfulness, had suddenly revived in the glory of the flesh and of the immaculate foam of those towers of flashing clouds which rose on several points of the horizon.

Winged horses swelled their chests, from which began to bloom all the breasts, all the melons and all the wasp-waisted diabolos of my delirious desire. Presently one of the clouds, which had rapidly swollen to the point of assuming the form of a colossal elephant with a human face, would divide into two big pieces, which in turn would quickly, before one had time to anticipate it, be transformed into the muscle-bound bodies of two immense bearded wrestlers, one of whom bore an enormous rooster attached to his back. These two fighters now came together violently, and the space of cobalt-blue sky which still separated them in their definitive struggle rapidly diminished. The shock was of such ferocity that the slow motion of the gestures which they adopted made
their clinch only more inhuman. I saw the two bodies simultaneously penetrate each other with an unconscious force of inertia which destroyed them instantly, mingling them in a single and unique conglomeration, in which both of them obliterated their personalities now confused in formlessness.

Immediately the latter began to reorganize itself into the whirl of a new image! I recognized it right away! It was the bust of Beethoven, an immense bust of Beethoven which grew so fast that it seemed presently to fill the entire sky. Beethoven’s cranium, bowed in melancholy over the plain, augmented in volume while at the same time it turned gray, that dirty “storm” color which is proper to and characteristic of the deposits of dust that darken pieces of plaster sculpture that have long been forgotten. Soon Beethoven’s entire face was reabsorbed by his immense brow which, growing at an accelerated speed, became an incommensurable and apotheotic leaden skull. A streak of lightning flashed, splitting it in two, and it was as though for the duration of a second one had seen the quicksilver brain of the sky itself through the suture of the frontal lobes of his skull.

Almost simultaneously a clap of thunder shook the Muli de la Torre to its foundations for a half minute. The leaves and the linden blossoms were lifted by a whirl of dry and choking wind. The swallows grazed the earth, uttering cries of paroxysm, and all at once, after a few heavy drops of rain, like great Roman coins, a compact and pitiless downpour flagellated the fearful and avid garden, from which rose a fragrant gust of moss and wet bricks, a gust which seemed already to pacify the fury of the first brutal shock, the erotic, long-contained consequence of the prolonged, anxious, electrified and unsatisfying Platonic contemplation of the sky and the earth which had lasted for two long months! The propitious darkness in which that afternoon of continuous rain remained plunged was one of the accomplices in the drama of which Dullita and I were destined to become the protagonists at the end of that long day marked by the unleashed violence of the elements mingled with that of our own souls.

Dullita and I had run, suddenly and tacitly in accord, to lie down together and play in the tower attic where almost total darkness reigned. The very low ceiling, the solitary location of the spot and the absence of light were most propitious to the anxiously awaited unfolding of our dangerous intimacy. The fear with which the place usually inspired me (even when I merely stood before the door, and especially since I had discovered two days previously the huge laurel crown given to Nini Pitchot), this fear had completely vanished, and in the company of Dullita, whom I felt at last to be quite alone with me, with the torrential rain outside, which isolated us from the rest of the world, this attic which had appeared lugubrious to me until then, became suddenly the most desirable place in the world. The gilded laurel of the crown itself, in spite of the mortuary sense which I continued to attach to it, glowed with a kind of appetizing coquettishness at each new flash of lightning which blinded us intermittently through the heavy closed shutters. My new Dullita, my Galuchka Rediviva, stepped into the hole of the crown and lay down inside it like a corpse; she shut her eyes. The bursts of thunder and lightning succeeded one another around our tower in a growing din,
while a swelling presentiment oppressed my chest. Something–I did not know what–but something frightful was about to happen between us.