The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (27 page)

The following day I awoke with my heart constricted by a mortal anguish. I could not swallow my
café-au-lait
. I took my speech, which I rolled up and secured with an elastic, combed my hair as best I could, and left for the Republican Centre, where the meeting was to take place.

I walked down the street as though I were going to my execution. I arrived on purpose an hour ahead of time, for I thought that by familiarizing myself with the place and the audience as it gradually foregathered, I would perhaps succeed in lessening the brutal shock of finding myself suddenly facing a crowded hall, in which as you appear silence suddenly falls with the sole aim of sucking in, as through a syphon, the speech which you bear within you. But as I reached the Republican Centre my discouragement reached its peak. The grown-up people were terribly intimidating, and there were even girls! As I entered I blushed so violently that everything became blurred before my eyes, and I had to sit down. Someone immediately brought me a glass of water. The people were pouring in in great numbers, and the sound of voices was deafening. A platform had been erected and dressed with the republican flags, and I had to take my place on it. On this platform there were three chairs. The one in the middle was reserved for me; to my right was the chairman, to my left the secretary. We sat down and were received with scattered applause and a few mocking laughs (which remained seared in my flesh like brands). I put my head between my hands as though I were studying my speech, which I had just unfolded with a firmness which I would not have thought myself capable of a moment before. The secretary got up and began a long explanation of the reasons for the meeting. He was being constantly interrupted by the more and more numerous members of the audience who took our meeting as a joke.

My eyes, unable to see a thing, were glued to my speech, and my ears could register only a confused hum amid which the only distinct notes were the clear, cruel and brutal stridences of the sarcasms directed at us. The secretary hurriedly concluded his introduction because of the audience’s lack of interest, and gave me the floor, not without alluding to my heroism on the occasion of the burning of the flag. An impressive silence fell over the hall, and I had for the first time the consciousness that the people in the audience were there only to hear me. Then I experienced that pleasure which I have since prized so highly: feeling myself the object of an “integral expectation.” Slowly I rose to my feet,
without having the slightest idea what I was going to do. I tried to remember the beginning of my speech. But unable to do so, I did not open my mouth. The silence around me became even thicker, until it became an asphyxiating embrace: something was going to happen—I knew it! But what? I felt my blood rise to my head and, lifting my arms in a gesture of defiance, I shouted at the top of my lungs, “Long live Germany! Long live Russia!” After which, with a violent kick, I flung the table at the audience. Within a few seconds the hall became a scene of wild confusion, but to my surprise nobody paid any further attention to me. The members of the audience were all arguing and fighting among themselves. With sudden self-possession I slipped out and ran home.

“What about your speech?” my father asked.

“It was fine!” I answered.

And it was true. Without my realizing it, my act had led to a result of great political originality and immediacy. Martin Villanova,
⁶
one of the agitators of the region, undertook to explain my attitude in his own way.

“There are no longer allies or vanquished,” he said. “Germany is in revolution, and must be considered on the same basis as the victors. This is especially true of Russia, whose social revolution is the only fruit of this war that offers a real hope.”

The kick that had overturned the table was just what was needed to awaken a public too slow to become alive to historic facts.

The next day I took part in the parade, carrying a German flag, which was greeted with applause, and Martin Villanova carried another, bearing the name of the Soviets, the U.S.S.R. These were certainly the first of their kind to be borne in a Spanish street.

Some time later, Martin Villanova and his group decided to baptize one of the streets of Figueras President Wilson. Villanova came to my house bringing a long canvas like a ship’s sail, and asked me to paint on it in large “artistic” letters the words, “The City of Figueras Honors Woodrow Wilson, Protector of the Liberties of Small Nations.” We climbed up on the roof of the house and hung the canvas by its four corners to rings which usually served to hang the laundry. I promised him I would go and buy pots of paint and begin the work that very afternoon so that all would be ready the next day for the unveiling of the marble plaque which would give the new illustrious name to the street.

The following morning I awoke very early, gnawed by a feeling of guilt, for I had not yet begun my work. It was probably already too late for my letters to dry in time, even if I should begin work right away. Then I had an idea. Instead of painting the letters with paint, I would cut them out, so that the motto would be made by the blue of the sky that would show through. With the lack of practical sense which characterize
me at this time, I did not realize how difficult this would be and I went down to fetch some scissors. The canvas was so tough that I was not even able to puncture it. I then went and fetched a large kitchen knife. But after many efforts I succeeded only in cutting out a formless hole, which completely discouraged me from pursuing this method further. After all sorts of reflections, I decided on a new technique, even madder and more impracticable—I would burn holes in the canvas following roughly the forms of the letters, after which I would even them out with the scissors, and I would have several pails of water handy in case the canvas should start to burn beyond the edges of the letters. But this was an even more categorical failure than the last effort: the canvas caught fire, and though I managed to put it out there remained of all my labors of two hours only a blackish hole and another smaller hole which I had previously pierced with the knife.

I now felt that it was definitely too late to make any further attempt. Discouraged, dead tired, I lay down on the canvas that hung like a hammock. Its swinging seemed very pleasant, and I immediately felt like going to sleep. I was about to doze off, but I suddenly remembered my father’s telling me that one could get a sunstroke from going to sleep in the sun. I felt my head benumbed both by the sun and sleepiness, and in order to arouse myself from this state I decided to undress completely, after which I placed one of the buckets just below the burned hole. I had just invented a new fantasy by which, in the most unexpected and innocent manner in the world, I was going to risk an almost certain death! Lying flat on my belly on the great suspended cloth which served as a hammock, I passed my head through the burned hole
⁷
in such a way as to be able to plunge it into the cool water. But to get my head in and out of the water it was not enough merely to contract my shoulders, for the hole had widened and one of my shoulders was already halfway through. Then my foot found the solution, making my plan extremely easy to execute. For the second hole, the one I had made with the kitchen knife, happened to be just at the level of my foot; I introduced my foot into this hole, and all I had to do to bring my head up was slightly to contract my leg.

I immersed my head several times satisfactorily, deriving an immense
voluptuous pleasure from the performance. But during one of these operations there occurred an accident which might well have been fatal. After having held my breath for a long time and wishing to pull my head out of the pail of water I exerted the necessary pressure with my leg. Just then the hole in which my foot was caught tore, and instead of coming out of the water my head sank all the way to the bottom. I found myself suddenly in a critical situation, unable to make any movement, or even to upset the pail in which my head was now thoroughly caught and which immobilized me by its weight. The twisting and squirming of my body only made me swing on the hammock in a futile way, and it is thus that I found myself with no alternative but to wait for death.

It was Martin Villanova who came to my rescue; seeing that I did not appear with my poster, he came to my house, all out of breath, to find out what had happened to me. And what was happening was simply this, that Salvador Dali was in the act of dying of asphyxiation on the heights, on those same dangerous heights on the roof of the house where as a child-king he had experienced for the first time the sensation of
vertigo. It took me some time to recover after I had been delivered from the pail. Martin Villanova looked at me, stupefied.

“What in the world were you doing here, stark naked, with your head inside the bucket—you might have drowned! And the mayor has already arrived, and the whole crowd is there, we’ve been waiting for more than half an hour for you to arrive! Tell me what you were doing here.”

I have always had an answer for everything, and this time I also had one. “I was inventing the counter-submarine
⁸
,” I said.

Martin Villanova was never able to forget this scene, and he told it that very evening on the
rambla.
⁹
“What do you think of Dali, isn’t he great! While we were waiting with all the notabilities and the band was there, and everything, there he was stark naked on the roof inventing the ‘counter-submarine,’ with his head plunged into a bucket of water. If by some misfortune I had not arrived in time, he would be good and dead right now! Isn’t he great! Isn’t Dali great!”

The following evening they were playing
sardanas
¹⁰
on President Wilson Street, and the poster, which I had finally succeeded in painting in his honor, floated across the street, fastened to two balconies. Two sinister, torn holes could be seen in the canvas, and it was only Martin Villanova and I who knew that one of them corresponded to Salvador Dali’s neck and the other to his foot. But Salvador Dali was there, alive, quite alive! And we shall still hear many strange things of him. But patience! We must proceed methodically.

Thus, let us summarize Dali’s situation at the outset of this decisive post-war period: Dali, thrown out of school, is to continue his baccalaureate studies at the institute; martyrized by the anguishing grasshoppers, running away from girls, always imbued with the chimerical love of Galuchka, he has not yet experienced “it”; he has grown pubic hair; he is an anarchist, a monarchist, and an anti-Catalonian; he has been under criminal indictment for a supposed antipatriotic sacrilege; at a pro-Ally meeting he has shouted, “Long live Germany! Long live Russia!,” kicking over the table at the audience; finally he has been within a hair’s breadth of meeting death in the invention of the counter-submarine! How great he is! Look how great Salvador Dali is!

¹
I have never read this book, but Kropotkin’s portrait on the cover, and the title,
The Conquest of Bread,
appeared to me of great subversive value, and were intended to make me appear interesting in the eyes of the people who saw me pass through the streets of the town.

²
All my life I have been preoccupied with shoes, which I have utilized in several surrealist objects and pictures, to the point of making a kind of divinity of them. In 1936 I went so far as to put shoes on heads; and Elsa Schiaparelli created a hat after my idea. Daisy Fellowes appeared in Venice with this shoe-hat on her head. The shoe, in fact, appears to me to be the object most charged with realistic virtues as opposed to musical objects which I have always tried to represent as demolished, crushed, soft–cellos of rotten meat, etc. One of my latest pictures represents a pair of shoes. I spent two long months copying them from a model, and I worked over them with the same love and the same objectivity as Raphael painting a Madonna.

It is therefore extremely instructive to observe how in an improvised lie, produced in ultra-anecdotic circumstances, I anticipated the formulation of a durable and integrated philosophic platform, which was only to become consolidated with time.

³
In 1922, in Madrid, I developed this idea of an anarchic monarchy, mingling the most caustic humor with a whole series of anti-social and a-political paradoxes which at least had the virtue of being a convincing polemic weapon by which I could amuse myself, scattering seeds of doubt and ruining my friends’ political convictions.

⁴
In this game with my olive I frequently ended by repeatedly inserting or pressing it into other parts of my body, under my arms, etc., after first wetting it with my saliva.