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REVERIE

BY SALVADOR DALÍ

AN EBOOK

ISBN 978-1-908694-30-0

PUBLISHED BY ELEKTRON EBOOKS

COPYRIGHT 2011 ELEKTRON EBOOKS

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REVERIE

Port-Lligat, October 17, 1931, 3 o’clock in the afternoon

I have just finished eating and am going to stretch out on the couch, as I must do everyday for an hour and a half, after which, for the rest of the afternoon, I plan to write a part of a very long study on BöckIin, a study which has greatly preoccupied me for some time.

I also want to use this break to think about some points which seem to me particularly contradictory, especially the antagonism between the feeling of death and the absolute lack of distortion with regards to spatial notions, so striking in this painter. I convince myself of the necessity of taking some notes during my rest. So I look for something to write with, which is for me, right now, extremely difficult, not only because of several parapraxes, slips of memory... etc., but also because I won’t let myself write – for reasons none too clear – on the notebook which contains my earlier notes. I therefore would need a new notebook (especially) for imitations of the type which can be formed from simple unelaborated suggestions, otherwise the latter would muddle up the former. In the end I decide that I will be able to remember things very accurately without taking notes, since I am going to start writing as soon as the break is over.

I make all the necessary arrangements in advance, so as not to be disturbed while I lie down. I give orders not to bring me in my mail. I go and urinate and, at the same time, I can’t wait to lie down on the sofa. I then have a very particular notion of the pleasure that awaits me in the bedroom, a notion which opposes itself to the rather painful idea of the contradictions that I have to overcome. So I hurry. I run to my bedroom and on the way I experience a violent erection, accompanied by great pleasure and hilarity.

Reaching my bedroom, I stretch out on the sofa.

Immediately the erection gives way to a very faint desire to urinate, which suffices, in spite of its quasi-imperceptibility, to render fruitless all my efforts of reflection about frontality in The Isle of the Dead. From which spring considerations about this absurdity: that a very faint desire to urinate is capable of becoming very obstructive; an absurdity all the more marked, given my capacity to retain urine for hours on end, whether because I do not wish to disturb myself or because I want to procure for myself the pleasure of pissing up a storm. I am revolted by the thought of having to get up, but I feel there is nothing else to do and I opt for the concessions, I run once again to urinate. A matter of about four or five drops all told. Then, barely have I lain down on the couch when I jump up to dose the curtain which leaves the room in a semi-darkness. I lie down again, and then I feel completely disenchanted, as if I were missing something very important.

I don’t have the slightest idea of what it could be, which provokes in me a malaise that I predict will go away as soon as I know its cause.

All of a sudden and without helping myself along with any associations, I remember that, during dinner, I mentally selected (such as I was formerly in the habit of doing) a heel of bread, which was rather burnt, that I had decided to bring to the couch with me, in order to meticulously pick out the soft part of the bread and transform the crust into a sort of vase. Then, even more meticulously with my front teeth I would have munched, pierced and packed it down into minuscule finely ground pieces until it turned into a fine paste. Before swallowing it, I would have kept this paste parsimoniously on both sides of my mouth, under my tongue, and I would have worked it still more, feeling its faculty of adopting different consistencies in relation to the proportion of saliva. All this, so as to make the crust last longer.

No sooner had I found the representation of the piece of bread, the malaise disappears and I rush to look for the crust in question, which someone has already taken from the dining room and which I finally find in the kitchen.

However, I cut yet another crust which is very small and not burnt, therefore different from the ones I like most, but which I take anyway, especially since its shape is that of a very sweet little horn. I am on the sofa again, but with the two crusts, and this time without anything happening to me that might interrupt my thought.

I try to represent for myself as clearly as possible the famous painting of The Isle of the Dead.

Now I find it careless to have believed in the total absence of spatial distortions in this painter and especially in The Isle of the Dead.

My error lay in the limitation engendered by grossly reducing the idea of spatial disturbances simply to perspectival distortions.

The same sense of frontality that had struck me, in the beginning, in this picture, emphasizes a distinctly spatial “dominant”.

It now seems to me to be essential to my study to establish a system of relativity that would allow me to reduce (at least in passing), the distortions of perspective whose meaning I had studied at length in Vermeer of Delft and G. de Chirico. I think of the analytic insufficiency of the passage in which I claim to prove the unconscious funereal sentiment of these two painters, brought about by perspectival distortions linked to illumination. Here I am thinking concretely about a work by Vermeer entitled The Letter. It becomes impossible for me to picture it to myself in its entirety and with the lucidity that I desire. This is because of the emotional meaning which has just been born or released from the curtain, in the foreground (to the left) of the painting in question.

Then, I make my (very) little penis automatically jerk up, leaving on the sofa the small crust that I had been picking at. With one hand I play with the hair underneath my testicles, with the other, I accumulate a bit of the soft part of the bread, that has been removed from the crust.

Despite several completely sterile efforts to return to my thought, an absolutely involuntary reverie begins. I have just situated the curtain from the Vermeer painting in a dream I had had, several days earlier. Indeed, this curtain is identified in its shape, its position and above all its affective and moral signification with the curtain which, in the dream, was used to hide several little cows, in the back of a very dark stable, where, lying amidst the excrement and the rotting straw, I sodomize the woman that I love, as I’m very much aroused by the stench of the place.

HERE THE REVERIE BEGINS

I see myself as I am now but appreciably older. I have, moreover, let my beard grow just like in the long-buried memory I have of a lithograph of Monte-Christo. Some friends have let me use their large castle-farm for ten days where I intend to finish my study on Böcklin, which will constitute a chapter of a very large work that, for the moment, I’m calling Surrealist Painting Through The Ages.

After these ten days, I have to return to Port-Lligat where I will meet up with the woman I love, who presently is in Berlin, busy with amorous adventures, as in an earlier reverie.

The castle that they are lending me is called The Tower Mill. I had stayed there for two months when I was ten years old, in the company of a couple of intimate friends of my parents.

But, in the reverie, the castle is changed. It seems extraordinarily aged, and in places even seems in ruins. The pond in the garden has become twenty times bigger. I am not satisfied by its real location in the garden either, surrounded by enormous oaks hiding the sky. Now, I have transported the pond to the back of the house so that it can be seen from the dining room, together with the Böcklinian sky of clouds and storms that I remembered having contemplated from the same spot, which dominates a very vast and open horizon. The pond has also changed place, because I was always used to seeing it length in perspective and, in my fantasy, it appeared to me crosswise. I see myself from behind, in the dining room, finishing my snack made up of the heel of a loaf of bread and chocolate. I am dressed in a black velvet suit, similar to the one that my friend the owner of the castle wore during my childhood visit, the only difference being an extrordinarily clean little white linen cape, attached to my shoulders by three little safety pins. The remains of the bread in my hand, I descend very slowly the main staircase of the castle which faces the courtyard. The staircase is in semi-darkness, due to the pre-twilight hour aggravated by the densely cloudy weather. As I descend, I hear the sound of very light, almost imperceptible, rain. I think: “Why bother going down, it’s raining,” but I go down. There I am in the entrance full of dry leaves that emit a strong odor of decay which, mixed with the odour of animal excrement coming from the courtyard, send me into a mild confusion that leaves me dreamy.

Suddenly, I leave this state of ecstasy through a very erotic emotion.

It occurs when my drowsy gaze encounters the half-open door of the stable which I recognize, without the slightest doubt, as being the one in the dream.

But this emotion becomes extraordinarily accentuated as soon as I notice the well-known presence of the oscillating tops of the cypresses, which in reality form a group separating the courtyard (right after the stable) from the prairie where, in my reverie, my fantasy has placed the vast pond.

The emotion caused by the cypress tops results from the instantaneous association with another group of cypresses situated in a public place near Figueres, called “Log-Fountain”.

This group of very old, bushy cypresses surrounded a paved circle at the centre of which, amidst well-worn stone seats, flows a ferruginous fountain. A little aluminum glass was attached to a small chain. The foliage of the cypresses, starting almost at ground level, and their tops joined together with iron rings, formed a cupola, in such a way that the fountain was enclosed inside the cypresses.

Whence an enormous shadow and a great coolness which earned this spot my family’s favour. After the Sunday walk, they would take me there to drink on hot spring evenings, after having sat and rested on the cool and worn-down seats. I wasn’t allowed to get close to the water until I had eaten the bread and chocolate. This fountain was still strictly forbidden, outside of the hot season, for, come autumn, we had to pass in front of it without stopping, because of the dangerous humidity of the place. In pursuit of my reverie, it is essential that the cypresses from behind the wall of the courtyard be substituted with those of the “Log-Fountain”. In the almost total darkness of the night that had suddenly fallen, I see the extremities of the cypresses from “behind the yard” come together and form a single thick, black flame. From the moment I noticed the odour in the yard till now, I abandoned myself to the following automatic acts: several times I introduced the soft part of the bread, amassed over a long time, into the holes in my nose. I removed it slowly with my fingers, while simulating a certain difficulty, as if it were a bit of snot.

Sometimes, quite the contrary, I would project the soft bread just by exhaling. It was especially pleasant when I was under the illusion that it was a piece of snot, an illusion which, almost always, was bolstered by and in direct relationship to the time lapse between the initial introduction of the bread into the nose and its subsequent expulsion.

The procedure of expulsion by exhalation was not without its inconvenience. The bread ball might fall anywhere and looking for it amongst the folds in my clothes or on the sofa sometimes managed to disturb and almost interrupt my reverie, especially when (and this happened frequently) the soft bread rolled under my body in such a way that in order to pick it up, I was obliged to arch my back. And thus would I pull away from the sofa. I would prop myself up on head and feet alone, enabling myself to grope around on the sofa. I would end up finding the soft bread ball. The closer it had rolled towards my feet, the harder it was to pick it up by the convulsive procedure, which many times, after painful efforts, I had to give up to go sit down on the sofa, all the while looking all around myself and lifting my buttocks, in anticipation of the possibility that the ball might be right where I was sitting.

But then I would raise my buttocks in a rather inexplicable fashion, an operation that is always carried out rather brusquely, in little jumps that rarely gave me the time to pick up the ball.

I was obliged to repeat these leaps several times, fearing with each jerk that the ball would end up jumping on to the floor, launched by the sofa springs. Each time this risk made me shake with fear, a very sensitive fear, localized in my heart.

Sometimes, when the ball had come out of my nose, I would keep it a while between my nose and my top lip.

All the while projecting hot air from my nostrils, in such a way as to make the bread-ball lukewarm, and then slowly start oozing and softening.

All these operations I perform out of preference with one hand (the left hand), while the right mobilizes my penis which is considerably heavier, without having yet reached the state of erection.

At the exact moment in which I had had the representation (of an extraordinary visual clarity, it must be noted) of the aluminum goblet attached to the chain, I had hurriedly removed the ball which was in my left nostril and inserted it with care, as deeply as I could, under the prepuce that my fingers are holding, because all of a sudden there is a slight erection which is over at once.

CONTINUATION OF THE REVERIE

The very day that I encountered the stable of the dream in the castle courtyard, after the evening meal, while I am having coffee and a glass of cognac, I conceive, in the form of a reverie, a project to be carried out in my general reverie. I very quickly expose this sub-reverie portion. It is extremely long and complex and I consider it more suitable for a special expose. I therefore note here only general details that are essential to the continuation of the general reverie, which, in their absence, would be a lot more difficult to follow. In short I want to realize the dream act of sodomy in the stable that I have just identified with the one in the dream. But this time, the woman I love is replaced by a young girl of eleven, named Dulita, whom I met five years ago. This girl had the very pale face of an anemic, light-coloured eyes that are very sad and vague, making a very violent contrast with a body exceptionally developed for her age, very well shaped; her gait and lazy gestures are extremely voluptuous to me.

To fulfill my fantasy of sodomizing Dulita in the stable, I had to invent several stories which would create the conditions of dream, this similarity being indispensable to the development of my reverie. Here is the one I adopt.

Dulita’s mother, a rather beautiful woman, about forty, a widow and alway dressed in black, falls madly in love with me and accepts, out of masochism, my fantasy of sodomizing her daughter, even consenting to help me with all her strength, all her devotion.

To this end, I send Mathilde, Dulita’s mother, to Figueres. She must contact Gallo, an old prostitute I met way back when, who is extraordinarily perverse and experienced. Putting her in touch with Dulita, it seems to me, is essential for the latter’s coming initiation.

As soon as Mathilde, Dulita and la Gallo are settled in the château, they are formally forbidden to talk to me and even to communicate with me, whether by gesture or writing. Dulita must believe me to be deaf and dumb and a great scholar whom the slightest troublesome gesture might seriously disturb. Every evening, after the meal, the table is entirely cleared and coffee and cognac are brought out. It is the only meal, the only moment in the day when I am with Dulita and the two women, because, the rest of the day, I stay shut up in my office where I am writing my study on Böcklin and where I take all my other meals.

It is at this time of the evening, in complete silence and meditation, that I transmit, through writing, all my decisions regarding the accomplishment of my fantasies, with the most microscopic details and nuances.

It is Gallo who is the first to receive my communications, and it is to her that befalls the entire responsibility for accomplishing (exactly to the point of mania) all my orders, which she, in her turn, sometimes communicates to Mathilde. Depending on the situation, she can also content herself with giving the latter certain indications she considers essential.

This is the way it should go for five days. Dulita must not suspect anything; on the contrary, she should even be prepared by extremely chaste and edifying readings, surrounded with great gentleness and tenderness as if she were preparing for her first communion, which moreover, she is to take in a short while from now. On the fifth day, Dulita will be taken to the cypress fountain two hours before sunset. There she will have a snack of bread and chocolate, and la Gallo, with help from Mathilde, will initiate Dulita, in the most brutal and coarse manner. As visual aids she will use a profusion of pornographic postcards, from which I will have earlier made a precise choice of overwhelming pathos.

The same evening, Dulita will have to learn everything from la Gallo and her mother, namely that I was not a deaf-mute, that in three days I will sodomize her amid the excrement of the cow stable. For three days, she will have to act as if she knew nothing about any of this. She is rigorously forbidden to make the slightest allusion to anything that has just been revealed to her (that is to say that she, Dulita, would know that I knew that she knew).

Everything, right until the precise moment of the stable, must continue in silence and with the appearance of the everyday.

In order to fulfill the program of fantasies that I have just lived through in general reverie, one of the essential conditions that had to be met was the completely inescapable necessity, for me, in watching Dulita’s initiation, by the cypress fountain, through the dining-room window, which, in reality, is impractical, because of various conflicts that are perfectly physical in nature, such as, for example, the cypresses, which completely surrounded the fountain. Thus was I prevented from observing Dulita’s initiation, which was to take place precisely inside the fountain. The small front door that you had to bend your head to pass through would not do. But a new fantasy, which appears particularly exciting to me, comes, bringing a solution to this first conflict. A fire, caused by an enormous pile of dry leaves improperly extinguished, had partly burnt the cypresses in front of the fountain, leaving it exposed, but in such a way that a badly burnt branch could still present a very weak and almost non-existent difficulty to the contemplation of the scene with Dulita.

Actually, the same fire burnt all the surroundings, thick shrubs and trees alike.

This is what will cause Dulita to get dirty, and to blacken her white smock and legs, the day that her mother and Gallo force her to pass through this spot in order to go and picnic at the fountain. The idea that Dulita has to get dirty seems to me from that moment on essential, and is elaborated upon to perfection in the following fantasy. I see Dulita, who reaches the fountain and dirties her feet with a kind of pestilential mud mixed with decomposed moss, which, in reality, covers the paving of the fountain, each time that the pipe gets blocked with leaves and prompts one of those frequent inundations, especially in autumn. Even though the spot was closed off, dry leaves nonetheless managed to get in, swept in by gusts of wind on stormy days. But the cypress fountain, whose interior the fire enabled me to see, still remains invisible from the dining room. A section of wall behind the stable hides it.

Displacing the fountain enough to return it to my field of vision seems to me to be an insufficient solution, and one that would destroy the sense of my reverie. On the contrary, I see very clearly the end of the fire which had burnt the cypresses and thus destroyed the partition wall which, moreover, allows for “the absolutely direct communication between the stable and the cypress fountain”.

The desolate and ruined aspect of the environs of the fountain, heightened by the pile of charred stones from the wall, affords me an atmosphere perfectly suited to my designs. I suddenly think, with a strange emotion, a mixture of anguish and pleasure, that the disappearance of the wall wiII permit, towards the end of the afternoon, the shadows of the cypress to spread slowly the length of the yard, which up till then were continuously in the shade. The sun will hit the first steps of the entrance stairwell which at that time of the year is covered with dry leaves.

Thus, the sun, at the moment prior to its setting, will penetrate, in a cadmium line, this first-floor room with its half-closed shutters and furniture without dust covers, to the parquet floor which is covered with corn that is drying out there, and will illuminate for half a minute, with all its bedazzlement, the tip of the finger of a greenish marble statue, arm raised, hair masking its eyes, and which, along with the pond, is at a remove from the fountain group.

Despite the disappearance of the wall hiding the cypress fountain, it is impossible to see it from the dining room, because it is still hidden, far to the left, by the window.

After several insufficient fantasies which lead me little by little to the solution, I decide to imagine the scene of Dulita’s initiation reflected in the big mirror in Dulita’s room which is contiguous with the dining room. Thus could I observe everything from my own chair, with the advantage of a certain complication and a certain blur of images that is absolutely desirable and already experienced as a result of the slightly incomplete burning of the cypresses. And also, due to the distance which separates me from the place where the scene is to be played, images will reach me in a state of imprecision which is particularly disturbing to me.

I see with a very particular clarity and precision this new phase of the reverie which is to follow.

It is the night of Dulita’s initiation, the night before the Day of the Dead; we have just finished eating, and everything has been cleared from the table, on which only three cups of coffee, three liqueur goblets and a bottle of cognac remain. Dulita is to my left in front of the half-open door of her room. She occupies the same place that I myself had occupied at the time of my childhood stay. Like myself at that time, she is in the middle of doing her school homework. In front of her are her books and an open pencil box, where I see an eraser with a lion drawn on it. It is the exact atmosphere of my first stay at the château. Gallo occupies the place of the owner, smoking in silence and reading her newspaper. Mathilde occupies the place of the wife and knits. This evening the silence is greater, disturbing, suffocating. Finally, I make the daily gesture, the exact copy of the one which the owner made to me: I dip a sugar cube in the last of my cognac and stretch a hand forward to Dulita. Dulita, head bent over an exercise book notices my gesture and takes the sugar with her teeth. This is the signal for going to sleep. I drain the cognac with one very slow gulp from my glass. Behind Dulita’s head, through the half-open door in her room, in the mirror, the black cypresses of the fountain must sway.

It is the solemn afternoon of the insipid Day of the Dead. I prepare myself to watch the scene of Dulita’s initiation.

I put the shoes Dulita wears every day on the dining-room table. I take my penis out of my pants and wrap it in dirty linen. Eyes fixed on the fountain and its surroundings reflected in the mirror, I see, advancing between the two women, Dulita clad in white, with a very tight short skirt, new espadrilles. Gallo is dressed in a very bright and luminous sweater and Mathilde in black. I run to the window in Dulita’s bedroom because I want to see every detail of the trip to the fountain, through the burnt bushes. They advance very slowly and with difficulty, to avoid the large burnt branches, but Gallo and Mathilde push Dulita into the dirty places, as if for fun. With each step, the sometimes spiky and stiff bushes cling to Dulita’s legs and buttocks, leaving her with long black streaks. They stop from time to time to see where they can pass through.

Gallo spanks Dulita, feigning to dust off some spots, but with so much violence and savagery that she has to pretend that she is playing.

Dulita tries to escape Gallo, after she hurls her against a wall covered with burnt ivy. Dulita now runs straight ahead recklessly, through the bushes that scratch her till she bleeds. She rushes towards the fountain, gets there. She slips on the frothy mud which covers the paving and falls. She gets up, dirty all over, spattered everywhere.

She smiles to excuse herself, wipes herself with a handkerchief, fixes her hair, pulls up her stockings, all the while holding her skirt with her teeth and showing off her dirty thighs.

Gallo and Mathilde arrive later, Gallo has become gentle again and kisses Dulita on the forehead. Mathilde cuts slices of bread and keeps the heel of the loaf for Dulita who sits down between the two women. With each passing moment, the group has for me more and more transcendence and solemnity.

Dulita combs her hair now with a very red celluloid comb which, in the light of the setting sun, shines so bright as to be blinding. The shadow of the château advances towards the fountain, leaving the whole front row of burnt bushes that have just covered the three figures in shadow.

And Dulita is eating (a mouthful of chocolate, a mouthful of bread crust) very slowly. She swings her right foot which is close to Gallo.[1]

I think that the sun at this moment illuminates the tip of the finger of the statue in the bedroom on the first floor, and the corn, on the ground, for a moment, becomes the color of fire. I see a dazzling image, me sodomizing Dulita, who lies on the corn in the said room. This vision motivates a new element in my central reverie, to which I return via the image of Dulita getting up to dust the white bits of bread from her skirts and then leaning over to drink some water.

From that moment, the gestures of Dulita who cleans the aluminum goblet attached to the chain and three times throws water across the exact and relative position of Gallo and Mathilde, the illumination, the buttocks showing through Dulita’s transparent clothing, as she bends forward, kneels, etc., all this, I say, acquires a lucidity and an exacerbated visual concretion, quasi-hallucinatory. The time it takes for the three consecutive gestures of emptying the glass[2] creates the illusion of a very clear and exact “déjà-vu” which coincides with a strong erection. The moment in which Dulita cleans the glass, before drinking, is by far the most moving. It is also the one which has the greatest visual power of the entire reverie up to the end.

Then very indistinctly, I see Dulita, whom I couldn’t see drinking, wipe her mouth with her hand. Gallo very gently makes Dulita sit down again between her and Mathilde. I foresee the beginning of the initiation. The shadow of the castle extends as far as Dulita’s knees.[3] Terribly disturbed, I wait for Gallo’s signal which will announce the beginning for me. Gallo puts the album of pornographic photos on her knees. Mathilde caresses Dulita’s head and Dulita leans her head over the album, tries to open it, but Gallo restrains her hand, and, in so doing, looks at her face and puts a finger in front of her mouth, as a sign of silence and respect.

Then Gallo raises her head and in her face I see a great surviving beauty. I am very moved when Gallo slowly begins opening the album. I can’t take any more and I go in, towards the dining-room table, eyes closed, filled with this last image.

Seated on the chair that I occupy every evening at suppertime, I continue to contemplate the fountain scene reflected in the mirror, all the while masturbating suavely with the linen which envelops my penis. I now see the group from the fountain, smaller, further away. Their faces and their expressions are very gently abstracted, which gives an almost complete leeway to my fantasy.

I observe nothing particular in the group. Dulita doesn’t show a single sign of reacting. Her head is held very low and motionless, her face, a mixture of shame and attention. From time to time, Gallo turns the page and murmurs something very close to the tilted face hidden by Dulita’s hair. Very indistinctly, I see the group descend by way of the courtyard, because it gets dark very quickly after the sun goes down. I run and place an ear of corn on Dulita’s chair which she will have to sit on for the three following days without noticing it being there. On the third evening, the eve of the “manifest” act of the reverie, everything has just been removed from the table.

Three coffees are brought out, the cognac. The same deep silence as on every evening. I am overtaken by a great emotion which would surely prevent me from speaking.

Dulita shifts imperceptibly on the ear of corn. I give the details for the following day, short, necessary, totally precise. Finally, as happens every night, I stretch out my hand with the sugar dipped in cognac. Dulita momentarily stays still then takes it by her teeth. I see her gaze through tears, while my meatus gives birth to a large drop.

The following day is a Sunday. We must very quickly take advantage, around four o’clock, of the fact that everyone goes to the village. I await a sign from Mathilde in the prairie and rush, covered only by my burnoose, first into the room where the ear of corn is lying then to the first floor. There I find Dulita, Gallo and Mathilde, entirely naked. For a moment Dulita masturbates me very awkwardly, this excites me a lot. The three women cross the courtyard and go inside the stable. In the meantime, I run to the cypress fountain, sit down on the wet stone bench and with all my strength erect my penis with my two hands, then head for the stable where Dulita and the two women are lying naked, in the midst of the excrement and the rotten straw. I take off my burnoose and throw myself on Dulita, but Mathilde and Gallo have suddenly disappeared and Dulita has turned into the woman I love, concluding the reverie with the same images of the memory of the dream.

Then the reverie comes to an end, because I have just realized that for some time I have been analyzing in an objective fashion the reverie under whose influence I have just been and that I am directly annotating with the most scrupulous regard.

Notes

[1] Right then I experience an erection and masturbate by banging my penis against my stomach. I uncover my penis, the ball of bread bounces to the ground and rolls a long way. This distracts me for a moment because I hesitate about going to look for it.

I can no longer recall where I was in my reverie. Which plunges me into a deep feeling of anguish which disappears the moment I recover the image of Dulita swinging her fool. I carry on with the reverie while keeping my hands motionless behind my buttocks, a rather uncomfortable position, and one which gives me a cramp in my arms. I stay that way without moving, however, and even for ten minutes after the reverie ends.

[2] I tried some time after this to masturbate with the representation of this image, but, approaching ejaculation, the image transformed into that of the woman I love, squatting next to a rabbit-cage.

[3] At this very moment I uncover my penis, remove the ball of bread I had been keeping under my prepuce for so long and put it between my nose and my upper lip, so I can smell it, It is very warm and has a slight seminal odour. I put it back again from where I had taken it, with the hope that the longer I keep it there, the stronger it will smell.

HOW TO BECOME EROTIC WHILST 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. Wild-eyed, I look at the three streams that soil the soil, splattering shoes and petticoats, and each splash hits me like a prickling of shame. I am fascinated by the simmering foamy yellowness that makes such cracklets in the ground. One of the young women sees me – the petrified witness – and all three laugh at once, relieved, and provocative. I stand motionless, haggard-eyed... The blood rushes from my head, and my eyes rise slowly toward the veil of one of the women, whose mocking eyelids crinkle.

I let the three ladies walk ahead of me, and follow them, sensually aroused with a voluptuous feeling of having violated their secret. I have picked up a firefly and my closed fist is full of sweat. A drop falls to the ground and cuts like acid through the thin crust of the path. I feel gooseflesh popping up on my arms.

At that time, first out of awkwardness, but later out of pleasure, I liked to splotch my undershirts with cafe au lait that made spots all the way down to my belly. One of my games was biting into the fruits in the Pichots’ garden and letting the juice run down my chin, while I gargled it in my mouth. I bit a different type of fruit each time, in order to vary the sensations, spoil as many fruits as possible, and especially not fill myself up.

One of the girl lime-blossom pickers at the Pichots’: blooming, heavy, solid breasts. She is up on a ladder. I have my fetish-crutch in hand, and feel a violent, immanent urge to lift her breasts with the fork of the crutch. So I perform an admirable example of paranoia c-critical transfer, with natural deceptiveness, although this is long before I conceived the method.

Completely absorbed by my will to satisfy my fantasy, I note that in the vestibule of the house there is a transom, and if she were to set her ladder up before that little window, at a given time her breasts would be framed right in the transom, as if artificially cut off for my special delectation, and from the inside I would be able to contemplate them without fear of being seen. While looking at the two turgescent mammaries, I would use my crutch to raise the melon hanging from the ceiling, and slowly crush it, thus gaining the full enjoyment of my act through substitution. To get the woman to come over to the transom, I leaned out of the second-storey window, and got my Diabolo tangled in a rosebush that climbed the wall there, so that, in order to free it, one would have to climb up to the transom level; then I begged the girl to come to my assistance. I contemplated her up on the ladder, sexually excited at the view of her tits, and further aroused by seeing her hairy armpits, from which a drop of sweat rolled and fell on my forehead like manna that was a harbinger of the pleasure that lay before me.

She finally moved the ladder, which gave me time to take refuge in the vestibule, get undressed – for I planned to do all this naked – and don the ermine cape that was my royal uniform. As I had anticipated, her fine breasts fitted through the transom. I shed the royal ermine, and as she made efforts to release the Diabolo I raised the crutch and slowly squashed one of the hanging melons as my eyes feasted on those gorgeous tits. My pressure crushed the melon completely, and its fragrant sticky juice ran down in a long stream that I tried to catch in my mouth. My whole face was flooded with sweet effusion.

My eyes, moist with sublime tears, went constantly from the breasts to the melon, until they no longer could tell them apart in the dim light. When the woman came down from her ladder, light suddenly flooded into the vestibule.

The squashed melon came tumbling down on my head, and I collapsed haggard on my ermine cape, broken, enchanted, spent. For a moment, I was sorry that as she came down the ladder the woman had not been able to see me naked and sticky. But I was so weary that soon I had but one desire: to stretch out on my bed. I had just experienced a mental orgasm that I was never to forget.

From those hours, I have retained a sharp taste for armpits and the strong smell of their sweat (but I have since divested the precious place of its hairy attributes. Today, I prefer depilatoried or shaved armpits, with a slightly bluish tint), and the ample, plethoric, turgescent breasts of my childhood remain very powerful erotic archetypes. Certainly, the creative process of my genius developed during these intensely pleasurable moments, and among them the games that I would call intra-uterine are the most precious of all.

My tub-game was one of the most important contributions to the crystallization of my paranoiac-critical delirium. At the Mill Tower, I would place a chair in the middle of a tub that I filled with warmish water that had been long in the sun, and I worked that way, soaked almost to the armpits, painting on hatbox lids that I placed on a washboard set on the rim of the tub. I was reconstructing the warm ambience and protective isolation of a belly.

I painted Helen of Troy or sketched Venus de Milo with delicious little erotic thrills. By playing the embryo-genius in that way, I gave birth to the genius; setting up the conditions for its birth, I created its cause. My paranoia reversed the order of physical values, for to me effects can just as well be causes. I shortcircuit the logic of reactions by introducing irrational elements into the chain so as to cause mutations. Salvador Dalí was invented inside a belly created by Salvador Dalí. I am at once my father, my mother, and myself – and perhaps bit of a deity, too.

Mr. Truiter’s optical theater and the appearance of Galushka coincide with a period when I might have enjoyed being a girl. The Narcissus in me was surprised to find beneath his hand a scrawny, moist, and limp appendage, a kind of useless excrescence that I tried sometimes to hide by squeezing it between my thighs, when I donned the ermine and crown of my royal panoply.

I was the less proud of being a boy for the fact that my elder brother, Salvador, vied with me for first place in my parents’ memory. But the situation called for my having male organs. And in my daydreams, Galushka was virtually sexless, with a flat chest and a crotch that could hardly be divined beneath her dress, even when she fell down and her legs spread. At one time, I might even have fallen in love with Butxaques and his little rear end so clearly marked out by his tight-fitting pants, had he been willing not to behave like a violent, brutal boy who was already sex-conscious.

The girls of my own age that I saw on the street, alive, laughing and chattering girls, scared me, paralyzed me, and I even felt ashamed when my eyes met theirs. Not one of them would ever be able to understand me. What good would it do to talk to them? I did not belong to any sex, I was neither boy nor girl, but perhaps angel or demon. Seated in my vaginal tub, I was remaking a sex for myself.

Dali Faces Solitude

I accentuated my solitude by reducing to the minimum contacts with others. Meals were knocked off in short order. I took refuge in the toilet on the slightest of pretexts.

I have almost always had, at home or at my parents’ friends’, one room that was mainly my isolation booth and studio. I avoided boys of my age, even at school recess.

Along with my aggressiveness – of which I have given many examples – self-destructive tendencies were also developing. I was fascinated by empty spaces. While I adored high places that let me dominate situations, I experienced dizziness that both scared and excited me. I would repeatedly jump into space from the top of a stairway or wall, whether alone or for the excitement of doing it before everyone. I was aware of the danger and of my strength, of the headiness of death and the narcissistic voluptuousness of my body. Galushka was in a way my enchanted double, a perfect image of myself that I could love, re-create, adore, till my eyes streamed sublime tears.

She was my spiritualized accomplice, the part of my soul that I was lacking because Salvador the First had taken it with him into the grave.

With Dulita, my narcissism bloomed. I often found I had my hand on my genitals, surprised by the sweet, burning sensation born from that contact. I was really not precocious when it came to sexual understanding; the conversations I had overheard among my schoolmates had taught me little, and I was yet to discover the joys of solitary or group onanism. My sexual exasperation first took the form of incoherent speeches; the profusion of the words that poured out of my mouth was like an orgasm and in no way expressed the sublimeness of my thoughts.

My sharp-as-a-blade intelligence seemed to penetrate the mysteries of the laws of the world through the intoxication of my genius, on which I sold myself with fanatical pride.

But, toward myself, I was filled with deep tenderness, while also subjecting myself to real suffering, experiencing a masochistic voluptuousness in forcing down on my head the royal crown that was too small and tortured my temples, or keeping my two ears pinned under my schoolboy cap, in order later to free myself and let the wind blow around my suddenly bare head, closing my eyes to savor the ecstasy of the delicious caress. When I had a nosebleed, a big metal key was applied to my back, and I forced it into my flesh like a hair-shirt. At the same time, I considered myself inordinately handsome, and loved to look at my nude body whenever I got the chance.

I had invented Dulita in order to test my new power, taking as archetype a little girl whom I had seen in back view on the street, urged along by two girl friends who held her by the waist. I only heard her name and did not see her face. The mere memory of her wispy waistline brought tears to my eyes. But I also dreamed of making my beloved suffer, making her my slave, forcing her to lean out over empty space in order to terrify her. And with perverse joy I longed to torture her mentally. I finally one day did meet a little girl, who had come along with her mother to gather lime-blossom leaves at the Pichots’, and right off, touching her with my fetish-crutch, I dubbed her Dulita.

My passion turned fanatical, despite the upsurging anguish at having to share my narcissistic exaltation. I would have wanted to make her an angel so as to read my reflection in her eyes, and drink my own saliva from her mouth. I would have wanted her to die of love, as my very own luxury, and become the plaything of my caprice. I dragged her along into my wide-awake dreams, and with her lived through a dangerous and magnificent existential experience.

I courted her first by skillfully manipulating my Diabolo before her, creating the finest poses to show myself to advantage, sending the Diabolo into such extreme configurations that finally it got away from me.

Dulita rushed to pick it up. She immediately asked if she could play with me. I reacted to her request as if it were a provocation. How dared she? When she could just stand there and admire me. I resented her lack of submission.

And when, out of coquetry, she tried to hold on to the Diabolo for a moment, I got angry and grabbed her so roughly I made her cry.

Later, alone in my tower, I watched the approaching storm, and saw the clouds attacking the sky in a terrifying tumult threaded through with lightning.

Swallows in the van, mere lines in the sky, announced the tempest ahead. The entire countryside, consenting, submitting to the forces that electrified it, thrilled with the thirst of desire. The rain unfurled with erotic violence. The entire humus surrendered its odors like a woman fully possessed. Dulita, pressed against me, in the tower loft, was frightened by the thunderclaps and furious rain squalls. The darkness grew deeper. And to feel this little bird nestled against me in the isolation that made her wholly dependent on my strength, allowed me to savor the instant with ravishing delight.

But Dulita lay on her back and closed her eyes. As I bent over her to observe her tense face, she suggested we play at sucking each other’s tongues, and forthwith stuck out toward me a little pointed tongue. I pushed her violently away, feeling wounded with shame at this salivary exchange which would perhaps have enchanted me had I conceived it myself as an evidence of Dulita’s subjugation. But this sharing horrified me as if it were a profanation of my own person. I showed my anger so threateningly that she became frightened. I would have liked to take her by her narrow waist and break her in two.

The rain stopping, I suggested we go to the top of the tower, and ran headlong for the stairs. She did not follow immediately. Fearing my prey might escape me and being impatient, I doubled back, furious, and grabbed her by the hair, painfully forcing her to come on up the steps. When I was sure she was obeying my wishes, I let her go on alone continuing up the calvary of her enslavement. Obviously, she could not know that each movement of hers corresponded to the scenario I had mentally conceived days before, as I dreamt of taking Dulita to the top of my tower, like the master of the world revealing his domain to his queen, drunk with power and perfectly capable, as the absolute tyrant, of hurling her from the top of the dungeon – his whim being the only law.

I had set my fetish-crutch and my Diabolo out like flagpoles to welcome her. The clattering, shattering tempest above our heads supplied a decor out of the Apocalypse. To get her to the exact place I wanted her to be, I pretended the opposite of what I wished, knowing that her desire to provoke me would make her react in reverse: I told her that if she did not go near the edge, I would give her my Diabolo. Naturally, she mockingly rushed over there and sat down on the parapet, her legs dangling over the side, to defy what she took for my concern and protectiveness toward her.

I moved stealthily away and grabbed my crutch. I was fascinated by Dulita’s frail back as, innocent as the lamb, she swung her legs while her eyes followed the last skirmishes of the winds driving away the clouds.

Softly, lovingly, with the sublime courage of Abraham raising his knife against Isaac in the name of Jehovah, I set the fork of my crutch against her narrow waist, and pressed slightly so it would fit in well. I was experiencing unprecedented pleasure. I was the celebrant holding the Eucharist above the bowed heads of the faithful. By a sort of sublime misunderstanding, my Dulita, totally unaware of my intentions, saw me and, falling in with what she thought to be a game, coquettishly herself tightened her hips against the fork of the crutch and settled in with the satisfaction of a woman offering her charms.

She smiled, and her face had an expression of intense contentment. This charming grace was a sign from heaven.

I inserted the end of the crutch into the opening of a flagstone, then, suddenly taking the Diabolo from her hands, flung it from the top of the tower, down into the darkness that was beginning to envelop the ground.

I had just killed the dream-image of Dulita by exorcising all that haunted me through this symbolic act that transformed the impulses of death into spirituality.

This transfer made her memory into a sublime image which would one day incite me to resurrect her through artistic re-creation.

This sacrifice had definitely tempered my narcissistic soul by revealing to me all the resources I might anticipate from the wonderful lode that in my eyes the limitless blossoming of my personality now was.

At What Point Did Dalí Become An Adolescent?
Drying in the sun, after bathing, one morning at the Gulf of Rosas, I noticed a light black down, prolonged by a few longer hairs outlining my pubis. I delicately grasped one of those hairs and pulled on it, causing the flesh to rise as the hair doubled in length. With a sharp tug I pulled it out and looked at it in the sun, surprised at this new part of me which I had not seen coming into existence. I wet it with saliva, and the light became iridescent on it. Rolling it around my finger, I made it into a band the ends of which stuck together perfectly. Then, with my saliva, I made a kind of bubble that turned into a little rainbow through which I could see the beach and the sea. I hardened one of my thickest hairs by wetting it and letting it dry in the sun, then used it as a pin to prick the bubble.

I had less innocent games, too, having discovered the joys of masturbation in the toilets at the Drawing Institute, but it had not given me any true pleasure yet, supplying mainly astonishment at seeing my penis grow big, then suddenly blossom and spew out its sperm. My hand quickly gained expertise in this caress, and I found more delight in the gestures of adoration addressed to this living part of my body than in the rapid ecstasy that revulsed me at the termination of the exercise. I was seized with the view of this physical transformation of my sexual organ, as it went from a soft appendage to being a long hard one, the tip of which turned into a red and then purple glans until its little lips spread and projected their semen.

The whole of this operation fascinated me as an extraordinary process of possession. I was vaingloriously proud of being able to know and live this phenomenon and also full of consternation at what I was doing, realizing how reprehensible it might be considered. In truth, I was very backward by comparison to my schoolmates who had long since become addicted to onanism, and whose bits of overheard conversation on the subject I had been intrigued by. I had been totally unaware of how one went about procuring such pleasure. I only knew it could be done alone or in twos, but my singularity kept me from asking any of my fellows to explain it to me. My ignorance, the secrecy in which this was carried on, and the belated revelation of its ecstasy all endowed me with a painful feeling of guilt. I remember that, after the first time I experienced this solo pleasure, feeling let down and guilty, I determined I would never do it again – a resolution that lasted only three days. After that, the practice became almost automatic.

This period of the discovery of my sexual proclivity was also characterized by dreams in which I lost all my teeth, while I became subject to violent nosebleeds.

My guilt feelings increased the more. Then, to overcome my remorse, I devoted myself to drawing with unequaled attention and energy, and my progress was constant. And each work session was generally followed by a masturbation session. I had by now perfected the caress so as to increase and refine the enjoyment. I quickly came to associate the pleasures of masturbating and drawing. And further to enhance the voluptuousness of it, I invented a method: rather than feel guilty or fight the temptation, I decided to set one day aside for “doing it”, Sunday.

The week now went by in anticipation, exaltation, and a restraint that almost made me dizzy. The anticipation became more voluptuous than the consummation. It was these hours of my adolescence that taught me one of the key principles of my method: exacerbation of desire until it is immobilized, with anticipation becoming an ascesis, and refusal to take what one can possess, a source of delectation. What we call pleasure, moreover, the quick ejaculation, soon appeared to me as a mere wink of voluptuousness, quickly gone, compared to the deeper satisfactions I could get from the complex display of my will power; postponing my desire, molding it, stretching it, working it to suit my imaginative fantasy. I could live “in” pleasure that way for a whole week and constantly impart to my whole body the feeling of my desire, whereas the spasm wore out my muscles, dispelled my enchantment, and left me swollen with regrets.

This was when I started looking girls in the eye.

Until then, they had intimidated me, made me blush, and I had been able to watch them calmly only from my balcony.

I had never been involved in the evening games that sent boys and girls together out into the streets of Figueras, in chases punctuated by laughter and cries; and I reveled in my moroseness, my originality, intoxicating myself with my chimeras, cultivating my latent masochism as if it were some rare plant.

How Dalí Remembers His First Love
One afternoon, at the Institute, after an elective philosophy lecture that was held out-of-doors, I exchanged a long look with one of the girl students. When our eyes met they recognized immediate agreement in each other. Without hesitation, we left together. Running, the better to hide our emotion, we were soon outside the town. The countryside was not far away. I pointed to a wheatfield. A few more steps, and we were lying down in a little nest made by the bent wheatstalks. Her fine firm tits attracted me. I put my hands on them and felt them moving under her dress. I took her mouth at length, wildly, almost choking off her breath. And since she had a cold, she sniffled hurriedly, unable to hold back the mucus that smeared over her cheeks. As soon as I released her, she would dab at her nose with her little hankie, then with the hem of her skirt.

She did not stop sniffling during our whole date, and seemed terribly embarrassed. I took her in my arms, rubbing my lips against her blond hair to wipe off the streaks of dried snot that tickled my lips and try to inhale the little-lamb fragrance that came up from her armpits.

It was on this novia that for five years I was to essay the keyboard of my egotistic, narcissistic, paranoiac, and sexual feelings, and bring out the various aspects of my sexual perversity.

First, to fascinate her. Through my vocabulary, my kisses, my attitudes, my ambitions. She was easy prey. My natural lying and hypocrisy quickly created a spell that conquered her. Then, to break any resistance she might have. From the very first afternoon, I had hit her with a terrible truth that dumbfounded her: “I’m not in love with you.”

Very quickly, I let her know that I would go with her for only five years, without ever falling in love. Our love affair was chaste: caressing of breasts and much tongue-kissing. This continence, my contemptuous tones, my rude attitude wove the artful net of moral slavery I wanted to impose upon her.

Servitude, far from decreasing her love, made her even more devoted, and confirmed to me that the natural masochism of people was a lode to be exploited as one of the true sources of my delight. My coldness made her have an even greater feeling of guilt, inferiority, raising even higher the level of her unrequited desires, that I aimed to bring to “white heat.”

At each of our meetings, I set the dialogue in such a way that every sentence I spoke became a dart aimed at her heart and her love. I wanted to get her to experience the sensation of a complex pleasure, based on the single fact that she suffered from knowing her love for me was hopeless and that I battened on her suffering.

Her beauty was an ideal instrument for me to test my desire on. I had decided there would be no love between us. This sentiment had to remain in the domain of daydream, the imaginary and absolute. I used her as a totem whose tits I could squeeze, whose spit I could drink, whose mouth I could bite; as a guinea pig I would inoculate with love before placing it in the center of a maze of traps set to test it, to measure its susceptibility to suffering, and study the evolution of its illness. I would have been delighted had the experi ment not had to halt this side of death.

She was incessantly reborn out of my worst wickednesses and responded with immeasurable docility to my whims: show me your tits, lower down, lie down, play dead, stop breathing, kiss me. The comedy went on at each meeting without her obedience ever flagging. Sometimes she had weeping fits that I coldly cut off. Each of her moments of weakness made me the more demanding. I even ordered her to stop seeing any of her friends, so she might be entirely devoted to me alone. She acquiesced. I destroyed in her mind any esteem she had for her kin by demolishing them with bitter criticisms. I created a desert around her, and her sadness grew deeper by the minute. I tortured her by counting out the months that remained until we were to separate, as I had irrevocably decreed. I finally made it so she was unable to sleep, and she lost that healthy look that disgusted me so. She became waxen, sorrowful, and love-hungry. Our daily half hour together was a torture ever renewed, but that she could not live without. I started skipping days. She wrote me letters of exquisite banality, but overflowing with passion, which I left in my pockets. I soon had her weeping every time so I could drink her tears in with the kisses. I alternated tenderness and violence the better to keep her off balance.

When she was reduced to the state of a mental and sentimental wreck, I said farewell. The deadline had come, anyway: I was leaving for Madrid.

Our affair had lasted for five years. I had gotten her into a kind of state of mystical exaltation. I had imposed my cynicism, my violence, and my lies on my Nina, and especially I had perfected the principle of my system: maximization of sensual pleasure through the deliberate unfulfillment and subjugation of one’s partner. Naturally, I was not really in love with her, but I got all the satisfaction I could from her subjection, her veritable bestialization. I regretted only that the end of the affair did not also signify the death of my mistress. We were both virgins when we separated.

Love seemed to me a kind of sickness, somewhat like seasickness, with the same annunciatory symptoms: shivers, anxiety, and loss of balance. I said at that time that the feeling of falling in love might be mistaken for the need to vomit. But this made me no less susceptible to the beauty of women, and the image of the broad-buttocked cooks with their turgescent tits, stiff hairs, and strong smells that had awakened my childhood senses, was being slowly transformed. At eighteen, I was taken with elegance, paid no more attention to breasts, but insisted on an elongation of the iliac bones which beneath the dress had to appear like the aggressive handle of a basket. I liked shaved, bluish armpits, and wanted even the stupidest of women to have an intelligent look in the eye, for appearances were all my eroticism cared about.

Wholesomeness seemed to me to be in bad taste, except where hair was concerned.

My eroticism found its fodder in three elements: angelicism, i.e., an expression that was seemingly asexual; cold, crude, refined, cruelty that killed sentiment; and a scatology which, as in the paintings of Gustave Moreau, is reflected by the accumulation of jewels, chains, buckles, raiment. Gold and shit, as is well known, represent the same thing to psychoanalysts. A woman in the grip of the shimmering tyranny of jewels is as if covered with excrement, and makes my mouth water.

Two things haunted me, and paralyzed me, at the time. One, a panic fear of venereal diseases. (My father had bred in me a horror of microbes. It is something I have never gotten over, and at times it has led me to fits of madness.)

But, more especially, I long suffered from the terrible ache of believing myself impotent. Naked and trying to compare myself to my schoolmates, I found my cock small, pitiful, and soft. I have never forgotten a pornographic novel I once read in which a Don Juan effected new holes in female bellies with ferocious delight, stating that what he loved was to hear women crack open like so many watermelons. I was sure I would never be able to make any woman crack open like a watermelon.

And that weakness gnawed at me. I tried to hide this aberration from myself, but I was often overcome by fits of uncontrollable laughter, reaching the point of hysteria, which were like the external sign of the great shifts that were taking place deep inside me. It was time for me to meet Gala.

“REPUGNANCE IS THE SENTRY STANDING RIGHT NEAR THE DOOR TO THOSE THINGS WE DESIRE THE MOST.”