Maniac Eyeball (3 page)
“DEATH IS THE THING THAT FRIGHTENS ME THE MOST, AND RESURRECTION OF THE FLESH, THAT GREAT SPANISH THEME, THE ONE MOST DIFFICULT FOR ME TO ACCEPT – FROM THE VIEWPOINT OF LIFE.”
[1] It is a well-known fact that Vincent Van Gogh’s birth was also preceded by the death of a brother named Vincent. As a schoolboy, the future artist each morning was obliged to go by a cemetery in which he saw his own name on a tombstone.
Chapter Two: How To Get Rid Of One's Father
To the manchild I was, my father was a giant of strength, violence, authority, and imperious loves love. Moses plus Jupiter.
The love he had felt for Salvador, his firstborn, given the strength of his character and the quality of newness, was never to abandon him. At any rate, I was to experience its waves, its radiations searingly through me. When he looked at me, he was seeing my double as much as myself. I was in his eyes but half of my person, one being too much. My soul twisted in pain and rage beneath the laser that ceaselessly scrutinized it and then, through it, tried to reach the other, who was no more. And for a long time I had in my side a bleeding wound that my impassive, insensitive father, unaware of my suffering, kept continually reopening with his impossible love for a dead boy. For a long time this love was delivered to me like a sledgehammer blow, when through a word as fine-honed as a dagger it did not slash at my heart.
In spite of him, in spite of this feeling of being superfluous, of being ill-loved for myself – choked within the corset of the image of the other that was being forced upon me – I tried to keep catching my breath, to fight back vigorously as one does when drowning, to conquer my own place in the sun of life. This despair drove me to delirium, but yet, fascinated by the purely Spanish hardness of my father who was in fact the natural, biological, and psychological axis of my future personality, I could never stop admiring him. So, while afraid of the shadow of the oak he was, and trying at the same time to free myself of the oppressive hold it had on me, with my mind inspired by his example and his strength I skinned myself against its rugged bark and scratched my soul on its trunk. In order for me to become Dalí, I had to immolate on the psychoanalytical altar my father Dalí i Cusí shrink him as do the Java head-hunters to the size of one of those celluloid toys that as a child I hammered to bits, and swallow him like the Eucharistic host so as to digest him and be nurtured by his substance and essence. For, I must, at the same time, never cease to keep his admirable presence before me, so that my wild rage of power and resentment might not get the better of me, but remain channelized and mold itself little by little into the monumental projection that would be he and I, me and him, my genius flowering with the secret of his strength.
He spent the night sitting up with me when I was sick. The next day, a Sunday, he instructed that he not be disturbed. A client, a Figueras peasant, came to the house asking to see him. Soon, he was demanding to see the
notario
, and his voice began to roar about those public servants who get paid for doing nothing and are never there when needed, spending their nights carousing and their days sleeping it off, while honest folk like him had to work even on Sundays. My father heard him, and suddenly was up. He was in undershirt and drawers. I heard the door violently flung open. He grabbed the man by the collar, with a yell, and they both lurched out on to the stairs; they went on fighting each other all the way down to the sidewalk, then in the public square, right under my windows. I ran to the balcony and watched through the bars as my father and that man rolled over and over on the ground, tearing at each other. My father’s sex organ, breaking out through the fly of his drawers, now as the two wrestlers tugged back and forth, dipped into the dust and beat against the ground, like a sausage. When my father got mad, the whole
rambla
of Figueras held its breath; his voice broke out of his office like a torrential stream carrying away everything before it in its path.
A client who had come to deposit some money with him once asked for a receipt, pending getting the official document the next day. “After all, you might die tonight,” he said. My father jumped at him: “Do I look like the kind of man who might die?” And the
notario
of Figueras threw the impertinent client out.
In the sober aspect of his character, he was no less impressive. I could tell his worries by a tic he had. Taking a lock of hair between his thumb and forefinger, he would twist it into a coil that stood out like a horn on one side of his head, and his wrinkled brow, his ma jestic scowl, turned him into a Moses inspired, charged with divine authority.
I can see him rocking in his chair, with his ear toward the huge horn of the phonograph scratching out Gounod’s “Ave Maria”. Standing in front of him, against the background of the music I can see his leonine jaw coming and going above my head, full of its terrifying energy.
He had locked himself in, but I had seen him carry a platter piled high with the sea urchins he adores. I imagine him cracking them open in one movement and swallowing them with a sensuous enjoyment the more voluptuous for being savored privately.
I am seven years old, and he holds me by the arm with his huge hand. We are going across town. He has to drag me. I scream and refuse to go to school. Shopkeepers on their doorsteps watch the
notario
exercising his authority. He is just as furious as I am. This will be a dramatic confrontation. But the imposition of force will only increase my megalomania.
My father, being a free thinker, felt I should go to the public school rather than the one run by the Brothers, even though the latter was more in keeping with our social station. My arrival at the school was looked upon as an intrusion. In my little sailor suit, with neatly combed and scented hair, polished shoes, I was like a fashion plate suddenly dropped among these ragged street urchins. Everything about me, from my lace kerchief to the initialed thermos bottle with my four-o’clock hot chocolate, set me aside more implacably than a social disease. They came smelling around me, mocking me, calling me names. I lived in a kind of silently prideful quarantine, while around me there was a whole bustle of unaffected life, made up of shouts, fights, noisy games, in which the barefoot boys of Figueras gave vent to the vitality of their ages. I remained turned in on myself. And within a year I forgot everything my mother had taught me at home, all the letters of the alphabet and how to sign my name. I was so intimidated I could hardly even undress alone any more. To take my sailor blouse off was an exploit that came near choking me to death. I was unable to lace my shoes, and might stand gaping before a doorknob, paralyzed at the idea of having to turn it. The world around me was loaded with deviltries, bristling with spikes, undermined by pitfalls. My nights were invaded by monsters and I would scream out in terror. My mother had to take me in her arms, and she would spend whole nights cradling me on her knees.
How Dalí Remembers His First Class
Mr. Truiter, our teacher, looked like Tolstoy, with his white beard yellowed by the snuff he took mechanically but in massive doses. He had a strong smell and was dressed outlandishly, but he wore one of the rare high hats ever seen in Figueras. When he sat down, the two points of his beard surrounded his face like the flaps of a frock coat, and ran down to his knees. He was supposed to be very intelligent, and his eccentricity was equaled only by his gift for wool-gathering. Truiter is a Catalan word meaning omelet. He must have eaten his runny and had trouble digesting them, for he spent the better part of his class time snoozing. Between dreams, he pinched snuff like a “fix”, and then, after a good sneeze that shook his whole carcass, went back to his old-man’s slumber. When one of the kids got too noisy and brutally brought him out of his dreams, his heavy mass of flesh as if needled by a nightmare jumped up into the middle of the room and he grabbed some youthful ear between thumb and forefinger, muttered a curse at the offender, then returned to the sweet arms of Morpheus. His pedagogy, as can be seen, shone best in the art of the siesta.
As the only socially acceptable pupil, although as dull a student as the rest – for obvious reasons – I was enshrined by Mr. Truiter in a special niche in the midst of his vegetative life. He had one passion – one escape – one way to fend off the present: collecting works from the past, which he did to the point of vandalism. They used to tell how once he was almost stoned to death when, in trying to swipe a Roman capital from the column of a belltower, he made a corner of the building collapse, narrowly missing bringing down the bells that might have crushed him, but not escaping the violent reaction of the villagers. This incident had contributed much to the legend of his being a man of culture and lover of art. He had a whole houseful of treasures he had pillaged and invited me to come and see them.
After a schoolday made up of alternate sleeping and violent awakening, Mr. Truiter would often take me to his caravansary. I remember one flat dried frog that he called his dancing-girl: it hung from a thread in his bedroom. He said it acted as a barometer, but its grotesque movements horrified me. There was a statuette of Mephistopheles that he kept in a mahogany niche and he could make sparkling flares come out of its trident like a real display of pyrotechnics. He had also brought back from the Holy Land a giant rosary, cut from the olive trees of the Mount, which he dragged out on his shoulders for me and spread on the floor with a great noise of clanking of chains. But the real wonder was his optical theater: a kind of stereoscope that took on all the hues of the prism and ran moving pictures before your eyes. I can remember as clearly as if I were still looking at it the overwhelming (to me) appearance of a little girl in white furs, riding in a troika chased by wild wolves whose eyes shone in the darkness. She was looking out at me, calling to me for help, and my heart responded to her call and her presence. I was never to forget that face, that call, that image as magical as a first look of love. There were many other things in Mr. Truiter’s optical show; but of all the visions none reached the intensity of that fantastic exchange between my solitary, megalomaniacal, hysterical, and absolute mind, and the dream image that came from nowhere to teach me that on earth and in the skies there was an angel watching over me, who also needed my help.
What Did Dalí’s Father Really Mean To Him?
We are on our way up to the chateau at Figueras. My father is holding my hand. Now it is becoming steep. At the top I see a red -and-yellow flag waving. I point to it and ask him to get it for me. Sly father reasons with me. Soon I am furiously demanding that I have it. My whim becomes a tantrum. I will not give in. My father loses patience. I scream and stomp my feet. My father is at a loss, but in order not to attract everyone’s attention, he decides to turn back and quickly drags me away. I have spoiled his day.
Every day, I find some new way to drive my father to distraction, to rage, fright, or humiliation, and make him think of me, his son. Salvador, as an object of shame and displeasure. I amaze him, throw him, provoke him, challenge him ever anew: from my coughing fits, in which I pretend to be choking and carry on hysterically until he trembles with fear and has to leave the table, his own throat all knotted up, to my misconduct in school. I can still see my father, at the dinner table, reading my report cards and my teachers’ comments about me, as his face grows more and more concerned. There was true delight for me in seeing his discomfiture swell up like a wave and engulf him. I also often pretended to be sick, just to worry my parents, and then peed in bed with pristine pleasure. My father bought me a fine red tricycle that was set up atop a wardrobe, to be given me the day I stopped wetting the bedsheets. I was eight years old, and each morning I would ask myself: “The tricycle, or would I rather piss in bed?” And, having thought it over, knowing how humiliated my father would be, I opted for pissabed.
My shitting habits, I must say, were not without charm, either. I always tried to think of some perfectly unexpected place: say, the living-room rug, a drawer, a shoe box, a step on the stairs, or a closet. Then I went about it discreetly. After that, I ran through the house proclaiming my exploit. Everybody immediately rushed to discover the object of my elation. I became the leading character in the family play. They grumbled, they yelled, they lost their tempers as time dragged on. I tried preferably to select a time when my father was around so he could see it happen, if not be involved himself.
One day, just to make things better, I dropped my doody in the toilet. They looked everywhere for the longest time, but no threat would get me to reveal the place I had chosen. So, for days on end, no one dared open a drawer or set foot on a step without worrying about what they might come upon.
For a long time I kept a king’s costume that my Barcelona uncles had given me as a gift, with an ermine-lined cape and a topaz-covered crown, which in my eyes represented the highest of authorities. With a scepter in one hand and a whip in the other, I haunted the hallways of our home, where I watched in the shadows for the servants who had made fun of me, and cursed them with the most awful anathemas. I would have liked to beat them, and the crown and scepter were warrant to me that sooner or later I would get to do it.
With age, my head got bigger, but I still kept that crown until I could no longer get it on without giving myself a headache, for in my eyes it represented everything I wanted to wrest from my father.
Since my father, on removing me from the tuition of Mr. Truiter, whose pedagogical inadequacy had finally gotten through to him, had enrolled me at the Brothers’ school in Figueras, I had developed a strange new power: I could see through walls and isolate myself completely, something that went well with my unbelievable gift for dissembling. I succeeded in being almost permanently mentally absent from class. I had a gift for dreaming with my eyes wide open that no other equaled. My imagination had taken as its most common inspirational theme what I dubbed “the five sentries”.