The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (42 page)

I arrived in Paris saying to myself, quoting the title of a novel I had read in Spain, “Caesar or Nothing!” I took a taxi and asked the chauffeur,

“Do you know any good whorehouses?”

“Get in, Monsieur,” he answered, with somewhat wounded pride, though in a fatherly way. “Don’t worry. I know them all.”

I did not visit all of them, but I saw many, and certain ones pleased me immeasurably. The “Chabanais” on Rue Chabanais was naturally the most atmospheric of all, with the armchair for diverse erotic uses that Francis Joseph had had built for his own sexual needs, the bathtubs sculptured with gilded bronze swans, and that stairway constructed with grottoes of pumice stone, with mirrors and plump brasses adorned with red Napoleon III trimmings.

Here I must shut my eyes for a moment in order to select for you the three spots which, while they are the most diverse and dissimilar, have produced upon me the deepest impression of mystery. The stairway of the “Chabanais” is for me the most mysterious and the ugliest “erotic”
spot, the Theatre of Palladio in Vicenza is the most mysterious and divine “esthetic” spot, and the entrance to the tombs of the Kings of the Escorial is the most mysterious and beautiful mortuary spot that exists in the world. So true it is that for me eroticism must always be ugly, the esthetic always divine, and death beautiful.

If the interior decoration of the brothels pleased me beyond measure, the girls that were offered in them all struck me as inadequate. Their vulgarity and their prosaic character were exactly the contrary of that prototype of elegance which constitutes the initial condition of my libidinous fantasies. I drew the cross of exclusion over those girls, who were so common that though they were possibly beautiful they always, at no matter what hour, appeared in the parlor with an air of having just regretfully left an interrupted repose which they were still chewing between their teeth. Thus the only possible thing to do would be to utilize the atmosphere and, by the utmost concession, take one of those regulation Creoles, with a perpetual animal smile upon their lips, as an “aid.” But the women would have to be looked for elsewhere and brought here. In any case, with the brothels I had just visited, I had enough to last me for the rest of my life in the way of accessories to furnish in less than a minute no matter what erotic revery, even the most exacting.

After the houses of prostitution, I paid a visit to Juan Miro
³
. We had lunch together, but he did not talk, or at least talked very little.

“And tonight,” he confided to me, “I’m going to introduce you to Marguerite.”

I was sure he was referring to the Belgian painter René Magritte, whom I considered one of the most “mysteriously equivocal” painters of the moment. The idea that this painter should be a woman and not a man, as I had always supposed, bowled me over completely, and I decided beforehand that even if she was not very, very beautiful, I would surely fall in love with her.

“Is she elegant?” I asked Miro.

“Oh, no,” said Miro. “She is very simple.”

My impatience became impossible to contain. Simple or not simple, I must take her to the Chabanais, with a few black and white aigrettes on her head—I would manage to work something out.

In the evening Marguerite came to fetch us at Miro’s studio on Rue Tourlaque. Marguerite was a very slender girl, with a mobile little face like a nervous death’s head. I immediately put aside all thought of erotic experiments with her, but I was fascinated by her. What a strange creature. And to put a final touch to my bewilderment, she did not speak either.

We went out to have dinner. A meal with a rather good
foie gras
and a very passable wine in a restaurant on the Place Pigalle. It was beyond doubt the most silent and the most intriguing meal I had ever had in my life, since neither of my friends spoke a word. Almost the only thing Miro said to me was, “Have you a dinner-jacket?” This in a very preoccupied tone of voice.

I not only tried, by visualizing their paintings, to reconstruct hypothetically what they must be thinking from their tics and each of their movements, that all seemed to me unfathomable mysteries, but moreover I was anxious to guess, by piercing through their double silence, the intimate ideological relationship which unquestionably existed between them. I was unable to advance a single step in my hypotheses. When I at last took leave of them Miro said to me,

“You must get yourself a dinner-jacket. We’ll have to go out in society.” It was only a few days later that I learned that there was no connection between Marguerite and the painter René Magritte.

The following day I went and ordered a dinner-jacket at a tailor’s on the corner of Rue Vivienne, which I later learned was the street where Lautréamont
⁴
had lived.

When my dinner-jacket was made, Miro took me to dinner at the Duchesse de Dato’s, the widow of the conservative minister who had been assassinated in the Rue de Madrid. There were many people present, but the only one I remember was the Comtesse Cuevas de Vera, who was to become a friend of mine a few years later. She was in close touch with the intellectual movement in Madrid, and we spoke of a number of questions which had the virtue of visibly annoying everyone. Miro, imprisoned in a swelling shirt, stiff as armor, continued not to talk, but to observe everything and to think—like the owl in my anecdote.

After dinner we went and had a bottle of champagne at the Bateau Iyre. It was here that I discovered that phantasmal, superlatively phosphorescent and integrally nocturnal being called Jacoby, whom I was to run into intermittently the whole rest of my life in the same propitious penumbra of ever-changing night clubs. Jacoby’s pale face was one of my Parisian obsessions, and I have never been able to understand exactly the reason for this. He was a regular firefly, that confounded Jacoby!

Miro paid the check at the Bateau Ivre with an ease that I envied, and presently we were walking home, just the two of us.

“It’s going to be hard for you,” he said to me, “but don’t get discouraged. Don’t talk too much [I then understood that perhaps his silence was a tactic] and try to do some physical culture. I have a boxing instructor, and I train every evening.”

Between sentences he would contract his mouth into an expression full of energy.

“Tomorrow we’ll go and visit Tristan Tzara, who was the leader of the Dadaists. He is influential. He’ll perhaps invite us to go to a concert. We must refuse. We must keep away from music as from the plague.”

After a silence he spoke again.

“The important thing in life is to be stubborn. When what I’m looking for doesn’t come out in my paintings I knock my head furiously against the wall till it’s bloody.”

And he left, shouting
“Salud!”
across his shoulder.

For a moment I had a vision of that bloody wall. It was the same blood as my own. Already at this period Miro’s work was beginning to be the contrary of everything that I believed in and of everything that I was to worship. But no matter—the coagulated blood was there, vividly present.

The following day we dined at Pierre Loeb’s with half a dozen of his “colts.”
⁵
All of them already had their signed contracts, and had managed to attain a small and befitting glory, which had lasted only a short time, which had never been too hot and which was already beginning to cool.

These artists, most of them, already had the sneer of bitter mouths that see before them the unencouraging prospect of having to eat an eternally warmed-over glory for the rest of their lives. And they also had that pale greenish complexion which is but the consequence of the excesses that are paid in bile, the product of all the visceral ravages to which the system has been subjected.

The only personality among that group of faces absolutely effaced from my memory was that of the painter Pavlik Tchelitchev, who when we left was the person who put me in the first
Métro
that I took in my life. For nothing in the world would I enter it. My terror made him laugh so heartily that his eyes were drowned in tears. When he announced to me that he had to get off at the station before mine I clutched at his overcoat, terrified. “You get out at the next stop,” he repeated to me several times. “You’ll see ‘Exit’ in large letters. Then you go up a few steps and you go out. Besides, all you have to do is to follow the people who get off.”

And suppose nobody got off?

I arrived, I went up, I got out. After this horrible oppression of the
Métro
everything struck me as easy. Tchelitchev had just shown me the underground way, and the exact formula for my success. For the rest of my life I was always to make use of the occult and esoteric subways of the spirit.

Even my closest friends would wonder for long periods, which sometimes lasted four or five months, “But where is Dali? What is he doing?” Dali was simply traveling by subway, and suddenly, when people least expected it, I arrived, I went up, I got out! I would withdraw again, and again I would arrive, go up, get out. And the half asphyxiated noise
of the
Métro
starting off at a furious rate kept repeating with its monotonous and Caesarian voice (for I did not give it a minute’s rest), “Veni, vidi, vici—veni, vidi, vici—veni, vidi, vici—veni, vidi, vici—veni, vidi, vici!”

In spite of the success of the first “Exit” from the
Métro
I was careful not to repeat the experience, and took taxis that I ordered to wait where-ever I went, and to whose drivers I gave fantastic tips that were ruining me.

I’m coming! I’m coming! I came in time.
Chien Andalou
was going into production. Pierre Bacheff had exactly the physical appearance of the adolescent I had dreamed of for the hero. Already at this time he had begun to take drugs, and continually smelled of ether. Barely was our film completed when he committed suicide.

Le Chien Andalou
was the film of adolescence and death which I was going to plunge right into the heart of witty, elegant and intellectualized Paris with all the reality and all the weight of the Iberian dagger, whose holt is made of the blood-red and petrified soil of our pre-history, and whose blade is made of the inquisitorial flames of the Holy Catholic Inquisition mingled with the canticles of turgescent and red-hot steel of the resurrection of the flesh.

Here is an extract from what Eugenio Montes wrote at the time (1928) about
Le Chien Andalou:

“Bunuel and Dali have just placed themselves resolutely beyond the pale of what is called good taste, beyond the pale of the pretty, the agreeable, the epidermal, the frivolous, the French. One passage of the film was synchronized with the playing of
Tristan
. They should have played the Jota
⁶
of La Pilórica, of her who would not be French, who wanted to be Aragonese, of the Spain of Aragon, of the Ebro—the Iberian Nile (Aragon, you are an Egypt, you erect pyramids of Jotas to death!).

“Barbarous, elementary beauty, the moon and the earth of the desert, in which ‘blood is sweeter than honey,’ reappear before the world. No! No! Do not look for the roses of France. Spain is not a garden, nor the Spaniard a gardener. Spain is a planet and the roses of the desert are rotten donkeys. Hence no wit, no decorativism. The Spaniard is essence, not refinement. Spain does not refine, it cannot falsify. Spain cannot paint turtles or disguise donkeys with crystals instead of their skin. The sculptured Christs in Spain bleed, and when they are brought out into the streets they march between two rows of civil guards.”

And he concludes by saying,

“A date in the history of the cinema, a date marked with blood, as Nietzsche liked, as has always been Spain’s way.”

The film produced the effect that I wanted, and it plunged like a dagger into the heart of Paris as I had foretold. Our film ruined in a single evening ten years of pseudo-intellectual post-war advance-guardism.

That foul thing which is figuratively called abstract art fell at our feet, wounded to the death, never to rise again, after having seen “a girl’s eye cut by a razor blade”—this was how the film began. There was no longer room in Europe for the little maniacal lozenges of Monsieur Mondrian.

Cinema property-men are usually hardboiled fellows who think that they have seen it all and that nothing one could ask them would astonish them. In spite of this, and in spite of the fact that our film was short and required little in the way of properties, our property-man confessed to us that he thought he was dreaming. These were some of the things we asked for: a nude model, for whom he had to find some way of wearing a live sea-urchin under each arm; a makeup for Bacheff in which he would have no mouth, and a second one in which his mouth would be replaced by hairs which by their arrangement would recall as much as possible those of the underarms; four donkeys in a state of decomposition, each of which had to be placed on a grand piano; a cut-off hand, looking as natural as possible, a cow’s eye, and three nests of ants.