The Secret Life of Salvador Dali by Salvador Dalí Read Free Book Online Page A

this exercise having convinced me of the danger of dying of suffocation. “Practical activity” was my enemy and the objects of the external world became beings that were daily more terrifying.
    Senor Traite, too, seated on the height of his wooden platform, wove his chain of slumbers with a consciousness more and more akin to the vegetable, and if at times his dreams seemed to rock him with the gentleness of reeds bowing in the wind, at other moments he became as heavy as a tree-trunk. He would take advantage of his brief awakenings to reach for a pinch of snuff and to chastise, by pulling their ears till they bled, those going beyond the limit of the usual uproar who either by an adroitly aimed wad of spittle or by a fire kindled with books to roast chestnuts managed to anticipate his normal awakening with a disagreeable jolt.
    What, I repeat, did I do during a whole year in this wretched school? One single thing, and this I did with desperate eagerness: I fabricated “false memories.” The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant. Already at this period I remembered a scene which, by its improbability, must be considered as my first false memory. I was looking at a naked child who was being washed; I do not remember the child’s sex, but I observed on one of its buttocks a horrible swarming mass of ants which seemed to be stationary in a hole the size of an orange. In the midst of the ablutions the child was turned round with its belly upward and I then thought that the ants would be crushed and that the hole would hurt it. The child was once more put back into its original position. My curiosity to see the ants again was enormous, but I was surprised that they were no longer there, just as there was no no longer a trace of a hole. This false memory is very clear, although I cannot localize it in time.
    On the other hand, I am perfectly sure that it was between the ages of seven and eight while I was at Senor Traite’s school, forgetting the letters of the alphabet and the way to spell my name, that the growing and all-powerful sway of revery and myth began to mingle in such a continuous and imperious way with the life of every moment that later it has often become impossible for me to know where reality begins and the imaginary ends.
    My memory has welded the whole into such a homogeneous and indestructible mass that only a critically objective examination of certain events that are too absurd or clearly impossible obliges me to consider them as authentic false memories. For instance, when one of my memories pertains to events happening in Russia I am after all forced to catalogue it as false, since I have never been in that country in my life. And it is indeed to Russia that certain of my false memories go back.

    It was Senor Traite who revealed to me the first images of Russia, and this is how it happened:
    When the so-called study-day was over, Senor Traite would sometimes take me to his private apartment. This has remained for me the most mysterious of all the places that still crowd my memory. Such must have been the room where Faust worked. On the shelves of a monumental bookcase, spasmodically depleted, great dusty volumes alternated with incongruous and heterogeneous objects. Some of the latter were covered or half-concealed by cloths, sometimes exposing a part of their enigmatic complexities, which was often just the detail necessary to set off at a gallop the ever-ready Arab cavalry 3 of my “phantastic interpretations,” holding themselves in with frenzied impatience, and waiting only for the silver spurs of my mythomania to prod their bruised and bloody flanks in order to dash into an unbridled race.
    Senor Traite would seat me on his knees 4 and awkwardly stroke my chin with its fine, glowing skin, grasping it with the forefinger and large thumb of his hand which had the lustreless skin, the