The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (53 page)

“Incomprehensible Object.”

African Lion. It was in hearing a lion roar at the Zoo in Barcelona that I conceived these distortions whose prolonged appendix forms represent in my aesthetic system something like the “cavernous roarings of form.” (Courtesy: American Museum of Natural History; N. Y.)

This period has remained engraved in Gala’s and my memory as one of the most active, exciting and frenzied periods of our lives. And several times, during those long reveries which come over one on train-trips, just at the moment when each of us seemed to be wandering in the most distant of his memories, it has happened that both of us would exclaim at once, “You remember the time at Carry-le-Rouet?”

After two months of voluntary confinement, during which I knew and consummated love with the same speculative fanaticism that I put into my work,
The Invisible Man
was only half completed. But in his smile Gala already saw the same road full of difficulties leading to success that the cards predicted each time she consulted them. I believed blindly in
the cards that Gala interpreted. Every evening I asked her to read them, and after this the slightest spells of anxiety which occasionally came and gnawed at my happiness vanished instantly.

For several days the cards had announced a letter from a dark man, and money. The letter arrived, and it was from the Vicomte de Noailles. The Goemans Gallery was on the verge of bankruptcy, and he offered to help me financially to free me from the least uneasiness on this score. He suggested that I pay him a visit; his car would come and fetch me on a day that I was to set. It was just two months to the day since we had come to the Hôtel du Château, and we decided to go out for a little walk, during which we would examine the situation. I remember that we were overwhelmed by the dazzling brilliance of a sunny winter morning. Our complexions were cadaverous, and we had great difficulty in getting used to the light after our two months of almost continuous darkness. The heat of the sun seemed a delight such as we had never experienced, and we decided to eat outside. For the first time, too, we took wine with our meals. By the time we got to the coffee our decision had been made. Gala would go to Paris to try to get some money that the gallery owed us. I would go and visit the Vicomte de Noailles in his Château de Saint Bernard at Hyères. I would offer to do an important picture for him for which he would pay me twenty-nine thousand francs in advance. With this, and the money Gala had at her disposal, we would go to Cadaques and build a small house just big enough for the two of us. This would permit us to work and to escape Paris from time to time. I like only the landscape of Cadaques, and I would not even look at any other.

Gala left for Paris, and I for the Noailles’, who were enchanted by my proposal. On the same day that Gala returned from Paris, I got back from Hyères. She brought the money, and I had received the check. I spent the whole afternoon looking at the check, and for the first time I had the suspicion that money was a rather important thing. We started off again for Spain, and there began the period of my life which I consider the most romantic, the hardest, the most intense, the most breathless, and also the one that “surprised” me most, for favorable hazards have always seemed to me to be my due–and suddenly it looked as though my good luck were going to end, to spoil.

Now began the brutal battle that I was to wage against life, and which until then I had always thought I would be able to elude. I had in fact until then known no other obstacles or constraints than those of my own imagination. All the odds had been on my side. Love too had served me–it had cured me of my approaching madness, and I adored it to the point of driving it mad. But suddenly I was going to return to Cadaques where, instead of being the son of Dali the notary, I would be the disgraced son, disowned by his family, and living with a Russian woman to whom I was not married!

How were we going to organize our life in Cadaques? There was only
one person on whom we could count–Lydia, “La Ben Plantada.”
¹
Lydia was a woman of the village, the widow of Nando, “the good sailor with the blue eyes and the serene look.” Her age was about fifty. The writer Eugenio d’Ors had spent the summer once, when he was twenty, in the house that Lydia owned at that time. Lydia had a mind predisposed to poetry, and had been struck with wonder at the unintelligible conversations of the young Catalonian intellectuals. Sometimes when d’Ors was about to start out on a boat trip, accompanied by Lydia’s husband, he would shout to Lydia to bring him a glass of water, and in thanking her d’Ors had several times exclaimed,

“Just look at Lydia, how well planted she is!”

The following winter d’Ors published his famous book,
La Ben Plantada
, which was steeped in neo-Platonism, and Lydia immediately said, “That’s me.” She learned the book by heart, and began to write letters to d’Ors, in which symbols presently appeared with alarming abundance. D’Ors never answered these letters. But he was at this time writing his daily column in the
Veu de Catalunya
, and Lydia came to believe that this column of d’Ors’s was the detailed, though figurative, answer to her letters. She explained that this was d’Ors’s only recourse, for a lady whom Lydia had nicknamed “Mother of God of August,” and certain other ladies whom she had her reasons for considering her rivals, would with their perfidy have managed to intercept the correspondence. This obliged d’Ors to speak in a veiled manner and, like herself, to express all his sentiments in a more and more figurative way. Lydia possessed the most marvelously paranoiac brain aside from my own that I have ever known. She was capable of establishing completely coherent relations between any subject whatsoever and her obsession of the moment with sublime disregard of everything else, and with a choice of detail and a play of wit so subtle and so calculatingly resourceful that
it was often difficult not to agree with her on questions which one knew to be utterly absurd. She would interpret d’Ors’s articles as she went along with such felicitous discoveries of coincidence and plays on words that one could not fail to wonder at the bewildering imaginative violence with which the paranoiac spirit can project the image of our inner world upon the outer world, no matter where or in what form or on what pretext. The most unbelievable coincidences would arise in the course of this amorous correspondence, which I have several times used as a model for my own writings.

On one occasion d’Ors wrote an ultra-intellectual critical article entitled
Poussin and El Greco
. That evening Lydia arrived, triumphantly waving from afar the newspaper in which the article had just appeared. She adjusted the folds of her skirt and sat down with that ceremonial air by which she indicated that there was a great deal to talk about, and that it was going to take a long time. Then, putting her hand up to her mouth confidentially, she said in a low voice,

“He begins his article with the end of my letter!”

It so happened that in her last letter she had alluded to two popular characters in Cadaques. One of them was called Pusa, and the other was a Greek deep-sea diver, who was surnamed “El Greco.” Hence the analogy was quite obvious, at least phonetically: Pusa and “El Greco”–Poussin and El Greco! But this was just the beginning, for Lydia took the esthetic and philosophic parallel which d’Ors established between the two painters as being the comparison she herself had made between Pusa and the Greek diver, elucidating it word by word in an interpretive delirium so systematic, coherent and dumfounding that she often verged on genius!

Later that evening she went home and put on her glasses. Her two sons, humble and taciturn fishermen of Cape Creus, watched her while they prepared their lines and their nets for the next day’s fishing. Lydia uncorked the ink-bottle and, on the best ruled paper that was sold at the village post office, she began her new letter to the “master,” as she called him. She liked to begin directly with sentences like this:

“The seven wars and the seven martyrologies have left the village of Cadaques with its two fountains dry! La Ben Plantada is dead. She was killed by Pusa, El Greco, and also by a society of ‘goats and anarchists’ recently founded. The day you decide to come here on an excursion, be sure to make it clearly known to me in your daily article. For I have to know a day in advance so as to go and fetch meat in Figueras. In this summer season, with all the people there are here, it is impossible to find anything good at the last moment . . .”

One day she said to me, “D’Ors was at a banquet in Figueras the day before yesterday!” I knew positively that this was not true, but I asked her how she could have found out. She said, “It was written in the menu that the paper published,” and she showed me the menu, pointing with her finger to
“Hors d’oeuvres.”
I answered her,

“The
‘Hors’
is all right. But what does
‘oeuvres’
mean?”

She thought for a moment.
“ ‘Oeuvres’–it’s
as if you were to say ‘Incognito.’ D’Ors incognito–he didn’t want anyone to know it!”

Such was Lydia of Cadaques who, if she lived as she did in a world of her own which was very superior, spiritually speaking, to that of the rest of the village, did not on this account fail to have her feet firmly planted on the ground–with a sense of reality which the people of Cadaques were as ready to recognize as her folly whenever she got on the subject of “Master d’Ors and La Ben Plantada.”

“Lydia isn’t crazy,” people would say, “just try to sell her a bad weight of fish or to put your finger in her mouth!”

Lydia could make
riz de langouste
like no one else, and
dentos
²
a la marinesca
–really Homeric dishes. For this last dish she had found a culinary formula worthy of Aristophanes. She would say,

“To make a good
dento a la marinesca
it takes three different people–a madman, a miser, and a prodigal. The madman must tend the fire, the miser add the water, and the prodigal add the oil.” For the success of this dish in fact required a violent fire and a great deal of oil, while the water had to be used very sparingly.

But if Lydia was linked to reality, and of the most substantial kind, by multiple terrestrial and maritime ties, her sons on the other hand were really mad, and ended much later by being committed to an asylum. They thought they had discovered at Cape Creus several square kilometres of precious mineral. They would spend the moonlit nights hauling dirt in wheelbarrows from a great distance to bury the vein of the mineral so that no one might discover it. I was the only one who inspired them with confidence, because of my long conversations with their mother on the subject of the “master” and La Ben Plantada. They arrived one evening at my family’s house, the summer before I met Gala, to inform me of their discovery. We shut ourselves up in my room. I asked what the mineral was that they had discovered. Then they insisted on my closing the shutters on the windows: there might be spies listening to us from outside. I shut the two windows and drew close to them, putting my hands on their shoulders in order to inspire them again with confidence.

“Well, what is it?”

They looked at each other again, as if to say, “Shall we tell him or shall we not?” But finally one of them was unable to hold it back any longer.

“RADIUM!” he whispered hoarsely.

“But is there much of it?” I asked .

And he answered, indicating with his hands a volume twice the size of his head, “Pieces like that, and as many as you like!” .. .

Lydia’s two sons owned a miserable shack with a caved-in roof which they used to keep their fishing tackle. This shack stood in a small port,
Port Lligat, which was a fifteen minutes’ distance from Cadaques, beyond the cemetery. Port Lligat is one of the most arid, mineral and planetary spots on the earth. The mornings are of a savage and bitter, ferociously analytical and structural gayety; the evenings often become morbidly melancholy, and the olive trees, bright and animated in the morning, are metamorphosed into motionless gray, like lead. The morning breeze writes smiles of joyous little waves on its waters; in the evening very often, because of the offshore islands that make of Port Lligat a kind of lake, the water becomes so calm that it mirrors the dramas of the early twilight sky.