Maniac Eyeball by Salvador Dalí Read Free Book Online Page B

father had playfully slipped into it. I was never without my Art -Gowens, a collection of masterpieces of painting that my father had given me as a present. And a pad of sketch paper was always at hand: I drew the belltower, the lake, portraits, and soon took to singing as I worked, almost buzzing through my closed lips. “He sings like a golden hornet,” García Lorca would later say.
    I was nine. My parents sent me on vacation to the Pichots’, at their estate two hours away from Figueras: The Mill Tower. They were a family of gifted artists, comprising six brothers and sisters. Ramón Pichot was a painter, his brother Ricardo a violoncellist, Luis a violinist, Maria an opera singer, Pepito, though having no specialty, was gifted in many ways, and Mercedes was to marry the poet Eduardo Marquina.
    Pepito Pichot, his wife, their adopted daughter Julia, and I left by horse and buggy. We got there by evening, when there was just enough light for us to make out the tower that gave the place its name; it seemed magical to me, what with the regular gnawing sound of the mill mechanism like the inexorable noise of the passage of time, and the massive vertical stoniness that seemed crushing to me. I had to wait two days for a key to be brought so I could get into the edifice, which had charmed me in advance.
    I rushed out finally on to the terrace above the abyss. I spit as far as I could out over the bushes and gazed at my realm: the ribbonl-ike stream that fed the dam, the vegetable garden, and the forest stretching out to the mountains. I was intoxicated with dizziness and power.
    But breakfast time was when I felt most intensely moved, as I noted the paintings on the walls. I was eating buttered honeyed toast steeped in café au lait, all by myself, when I suddenly saw the pictures. They were the work of Ramón Pichot, who at the time was painting in Paris and much involved with Impressionism. I gazed in fascination at the spots of paint, apparently put on without any order, in thick layers, that suddenly shaped up magnificently, if one got the right distance away, into a dazzling vision of colors that communicated a deep, sun-soaked image of a stream, a landscape, or a face. I think my eyes were popping out of my head. Never had I experienced such a sensation of enchantment and magic. That, then, was art! Both precision – I was beside myself at the red hairs in the armpits of a dancing-girl – and the radiance of reality in all its splendor.
    The pointillist technique especially aroused my admiration. The re-creation of real life by way of the decomposition of particles into minuscule spots of color seemed pure genius to me. I grabbed the cut-glass stopper of a carafe to use as a monocle so as to de compose reality into its elements and then reassemble them into the Impressionist images of the pictures. The game turned into a method; I spent entire days re-thinking the world through my own eyes. This frenzied interest possessed me completely – or almost, for I did not at the same time cease to indulge other desires, the source of more sensual pleasures.
     
    How Dalínian Sensitivity Manifested Itself
    First thing in the morning, I put together an exhibitionistic show. Each time, I had to dream up a pose in which my nakedness might arouse Julia, whose job it was to wake me.
    I would pretend to be asleep while the young lady opened the shutters. Completely motionless, I would wait with bated breath for her to come and pull the sheet up over my genitals, which I had made sure to have in evidence, either between my spread legs or in rear view. I then tried to exploit the situation by making her look more closely at me on the most varied excuses: an itch, a pimple, or a scratch... At breakfast, which I gulped down greedily, I did my best to let some of the café au lait spill down my chin, along my neck and on to my chest, where it dried in sticky patches. I sometimes even got it to go all the way down my belly. One day,