Maniac Eyeball (8 page)

How Dalí Acted In Adversity

My freedom meant the start of a wondrous vacation. Catalonia had been shaken by the tremors of an abortive uprising that General Primo de Rivera (whose son José Antonio was to be founder of the Falange) put down with an iron hand. Obviously, it was these circumstances that accounted for my arrest and detention. I went back to Figueras, where everyone treated me as a local celebrity. Without waiting, I got back to work as if I were in a hurry to make up for all the time lost in my nights of wild carousing.

I saw Nuñez again and developed a passion for engraving. My father even had a press set up in one of the rooms at home. I was soon up on all the techniques and in addition developed a few of my own.

Garcia Lorca came to stay with me for a long visit at Cadaqués. He read us extracts of
Mariana Piñeda,
the play he had just finished writing, for which I was to design the sets. (It was staged in Barcelona, at the Goya Theatre, by Marguerite Xirgu.) I can still hear his vibrant voice hammering out,

I remain alone, the while

Beneath the flowering acacia

In the garden, death waits for me.

My life is here.

My blood is moved and trembles

Like a tree of coral

Cradled by the deep.

We even danced the
sardana
on the
rambla
in his honor before he left. I at the time was painting Cadaqués landscapes, my father, my sister, everything that could be a subject for my frenzied brush.

I was paying close attention to Chirico’s paintings, through the magazines. I was contributing to Barcelona’s
Gaceta de
las artes
and
L’Amic de les arts;
and one book was always at my bedside, Ingres’
Thoughts.
I decided I would take some essential notes out of it as preface to my first one-man show, at the Dalmau Gallery, Barcelona, in November 1925. I put into the catalogue: “Drawing is the touchstone of Art” and “He who calls upon no mind except his own will soon find himself reduced to the most wretched of all imitations, namely, that of his own works.”

This tribute to the beauties of craft and tradition corresponded exactly to my own ideas. This is the basis on which one can afford to be a genius. I exhibited five drawings and seven paintings. The critics, who are always laggards and unaware of truth, were nevertheless enthusiastic.[1]

There was another show at Dalmau’s, from December 31, 1925, to January 14, 1926, this time including twenty paintings and seven drawings, and equally successful. I was not unhappy to display the admirable classical tradition that inspired me – and paradoxically had inspired the anarchist suspended from the Fine Arts School.

I exhibited among others a girl of the Ampurdan, with an admirable pair of buttocks, and a basket of bread that a representative of the Carnegie Institute, visiting from the U.S., was to borrow for an exhibition at Pittsburgh, where it was bought and remained in the States.

I returned to Madrid, the year of my suspension having come to an end. And I saw my old friends and fell into the same kind of nightlife. My father, cautiously – so he thought – had granted me only a tiny allowance, but I signed chits everywhere to be forwarded to him, and he had no choice but to pay them. My friends, who were always ready to go along with any idea of mine and had greeted my return with delirious delight, proved that I had lost none of my pres tige, far from it. I came out magnified by this adventure, during which I had even found time further to polish my craft, while having the wildest of times. They pooled their resources to be able to pay for my whims. The Municipal Pawnshop (sometimes known as the Mount of Piety) became a familiar haunt of young Madrileños, and we had developed the fine art of “mooching” on our friends to the level of an institution of cynical technical perfection. Any expedient, any pocketbook, flush or meager, any lie was acceptable – if it did the trick.

Did The Low Life Not Bother Dalí?

We were really greedy, cunning, and diabolical little lowlifes. I was in the grasp of a self-destructive mania against all values, as if to test their resistance and establish a new hierarchy, selected by my own genius.

Even my friendship with Lorca now was subject to question. I had veritable fits of jealousy that made me shun him several days running. I systematically tried to become more debauched and more detached from all past ties. In painting class, being assigned one day to paint a Gothic Virgin atop a ball, I drew a balance-scale and assured the bemused professor that “That is what I see in the model.” I might also have pointed out to him that in the Zodiac the respective Virgo and Libra are right next to each other, and connected, but that would not have helped any.

The final flourish was sounded by the publication in the official gazette on October 20, 1926, of my order of final expulsion from the Fine Arts School, signed by King Alfonso XIII. I had seen how the King, when visiting the school during my first year there, had adeptly flicked his cigarette butt into the spittoon over two meters away, just like any Madrileño street urchin. Now he disposed of me in the same manner. Need I confess I had been hoping that luck would vouchsafe that kind of experience to me, so I might make a full break with a life that was becoming as unbearable in the monotony of its fake enchantment as the uninterrupted daily routine in the life of a petit bourgeois? By now I knew what a guttersnipe adolescence was like. Well and good. I could leave again for Figueras, hands in my pockets, leaving my luggage behind at the Residence and using my last bit of legal tender to buy a bouquet of gardenias as a gift to an old beggar woman.

When I got home, my father was in the middle of writing the preface to a logbook he was planning to keep as a record of my worldly successes! He was trying to console himself for the mishap that spelled finis to his hopes of seeing me get into an official career as a teacher. It was a real heartwarmer to see how broken up he was over it. I made a faithful drawing of him, with my sister, in lead pencil, and it is true that he had a leaden complexion, his eyes heavy with angst and uncertainty; I devoted a great deal of talent to immortalizing his discomfiture. With a somewhat asinine application, he was trying to paste the pieces of his dream together again. I had no need of such childish paste-ups to convince me of my genius.

I now had solid teachings and a technical mastery that allowed me, like a piano virtuoso, to play everything available on my keyboard, in the noblest classical tradition, while permitting the most secret elements of my subconscious to express themselves. I had developed an unquenchable thirst for knowing and imagining. I had been able to test the hold I could have over the most varied kinds of audiences. I had made everyone accept my singularity. I had exaggerated my persona to every kind of theatrical excess, each time quite capable of perfectly entering into it.

I had spurred on all of my inner contradictions, my wildest tendencies, my maddest imaginings, savoring each time to intoxication the feeling of being alive right out to the tips of my emerging mustache. Now all I lacked was love, glory, and money. And I knew my destiny held triumph in store for me.

How Dalí Lived Through His Military Service

I did nine months’ military service. It was de luxe service generally referred to as “per diem” – with permission to eat out, wear a tailor-made uniform, and sleep at home. There was a small group of us, theoretically not subject to any duty roster, although a few irritated and jealous noncoms missed no opportunity to ride us, which led some of my comrades to react. For my part, I gladly acceded to all of their demands.

Nothing suited me better than latrine duty, and the stinking regimental toilet bowls were made to shine like brand new living-room vases. I saluted everything in uniform, even firemen: I was a model soldier, and took simplistic sensual pleasure in this easy submission to slavery and constraint. To submit to things of one’s own free will: what could be more delightful!

But, since I hated to stand guard at the prison at night, out of laziness and especially fear (for there were sometimes desperate escapes), I pretended to be subject to nervous fits, while affecting to do all I could to control them, but making sure that each one was seen by some officer. The ruse worked. I was exempted, even when I volunteered. My skill at deception was proving itself once again. That left me a lot of time to think about the future.

“I HAVE HAD THE GIFT FOR PAINTING SINCE THE CRADLE. I HAD A CRIB WITH TWO WOODEN SIDEBARS – SO I WOULD NOT FALL OUT – AND THEY WERE BLACKENED WITH MY DRAWINGS. DRAWINGS THAT WERE ALWAYS REPRESENTATIVE OF HIGHLY IMAGINATIVE FIGURES. IF IT WAS A DOG, IT WAS A
DOG WITH A WOMAN’S BREASTS OR A HUMAN FACE,
NEVER JUST A NORMAL DOG. I PAINTED WITH COLORED CRAYONS BECAUSE I ALWAYS WANTED TO REPRODUCE THE INTRAUTERINE IMAGES THAT WERE SO HIGHLY COLORFUL AND, TO ME, ALWAYS HAD A PARADISIAC FEELING. I ENCOUNTERED THIS PARADISIAC FEELING AGAIN WHEN I READ
THE  TRAUMA OF BIRTH,
WHICH GAVE ME THE KEY TO SUCH CLEAR MEMORIES THAT I WAS IMMEDIATELY ABLE TO PLACE AS COMING FROM MY INTRAUTERINE PERIOD.”

[1] “He has covered so much ground that the present exhibition classes him as one of the most dependable values of the recent generation of Catalan artists.” –
La Publicidad

“His brush is like a sharp surgeon’s scalpel initiating us to the mystery of reality and reveals him, like the philosopher, wrapped in the melancholy of trans-cendency with which humble things are covered.” –
Gaceta de las artes

“Young Salvador Dalí has a strong soul, the gift of materializing his pictorial vision and reflecting things of this world in their corporeal aspect without depriving them of an intensity that never eliminates grace.” –
D’aci i d’alla

Chapter Five: How To Become Erotic While Remaining Chaste

At twenty I was a being of desires, savoring pleasures, all pleasures of the senses and the mind, with refined, exquisite voluptuousness, with an Olympian fulfillment that obeyed a long-nurtured code of hyperlucid discipline. My eye, my intelligence, and my prick were my most delectable media of enjoyment, and the almost infinite variety of combinations among them pleasured me with delights ranging from scatology to exhibitionism, from daydreaming to masturbation (one not excluding the other); the confirmation by action being always the least interesting part, except where voyeurism was concerned, and even then it would happen that the failure, refusal, or accident, interfering with consummation, might give me greater satisfaction than success itself. The point indeed was to remain chaste while becoming erotic. The formula demands a very high degree of self-control. In a word, the mastery of the paranoiac-critical attitude. But the facts speak for themselves.

My love at the age of seven for beautiful Ursulita Matas, who, according to Eugenio d’Ors’ legend, inspired his
La Bien
Plantada,
was not due only to the quality of her beauty, but the orgasmic oral delights I got from Napoleon. The plump flanks of the emperor with the
maté
inside and the big silver sucking-cup that was passed around allowed me to suck in at the same time a honeyed liquid sweeter than my mother’s blood, a bit of Ursulita’s spittle, and the imperial strength of Napoleon that came to me from his guts through the little keg.

For a few moments I was the lover connected by umbilical cord to the bellies of his mother and his beloved, and in my ecstasy this libation made me the all-powerful master of the world. My mouth was the source of a warm but troubling well-being. I turned simultaneously into the embryo-little boy and the jealous lover, who always arranged to be next to beautiful Ursulita so as to capture the most of his beloved’s mouth and the reflections in her fascinating hair.

My desire to return to the nourishment, the warmth, the protection of the preparturient placenta was also combined with an intense taste for the strong odors of the human body: blood, sweat, urine. I liked to hide behind the kitchen doors so as to breathe in the suggestive smells of the maids in heat, whose broad beams went about their business at my eye level.

The preparation of meals also provided me with a source of deep satisfaction, what with the fragrances of kidneys, pots and pans, spices, acids, and deep fries floating out like so many promises, with flies dancing over all. I drooled over eyefuls of creamy froths, beaten egg-whites, oozing, soft, and viscous organic matters. The fact that I was forbidden to go into the kitchen only added to the quality of my savoring.

Somewhat as if I had raised the huge skirts of one of the servant girls that fascinated me, and violated the secrets kept from me under them.

I continued wetting my bed for a long time, not just out of contrariness, but to have the pleasure of feeling my warm urine running down my legs and wallowing in its odor. Adults too quickly forget the intense satisfaction there is in rolling around in one’s own filth and becoming intoxicated with one’s self. Imperative taboos turn us away and condition us against the primal verities of skin and senses. I have been able to keep intact my gifts of organic participation.

One of my memories from this period goes back to about my fifth year. I am out walking with three very beautiful, elegant, and refined young women. Three images of grace. They are speaking in low voices and try to keep a distance from me, but I have my eye on them. One of them stops, as the other two watch. With her two hands, she slightly raises her long skirt. And suddenly a stream of urine comes spurting between her two white shoes, breaks the dust of the path like a little crater, and soon runs off around the two feet, spattered and tainted with a long wet spot that turns gray on the Spanish white. Then two other little rivulets are started in silence.