The Pillars of Hercules

The heart of Girona is medieval. The cathedral dates from the eleventh century. Guidebook: “It was with stone, from a steeple of this old cathedral, that the clergy of Girona celebrated Easter 1278 by bombarding the adjacent Judería [ghetto].” Yet from the train Girona was like a view of China—the plain brick buildings, the leafless trees, the bright dry hills outside, the harshness, the streets being swept by men with twig brooms, the sticklike trees and tiled roofs; it looked to me like any Chinese town of the same size, even to the turgid river Onyar with its water a dubious color. Outside it, the way the gardens were planted in narrow allotments, the look of the tile roofs of the stucco cottages, the neatness, the fruit-farms, an absence of decoration made it seem intensely Chinese.

There were so many trains on this line that I got off, walked around Girona; caught another train north, went to Figueres, got off, walked around Figueres.

In a cafe in the middle of Girona an Arab—who was perhaps a Moroccan—was sprawled on the floor. He was tangled in the chair legs, as a policeman nagged him and people stared. The Spanish are both very polite and very curious, an awkward combination of traits, and so they have developed an economical and yet piercing way of eavesdropping, an unintrusive way of being nosy. The policeman and another man helped the Arab to his feet and then sat him down. And then the policeman began hitting the Arab on the arm as he questioned him. The Arab looked too drugged and dazed to care. He looked as though he was being picked on, but also in such a provincial town in Spain every outsider looked like a Martian.

On the way to Figueres a little sorority of Japanese girls twittered among themselves. They lacked the characteristic Nipponese submissiveness, but as their giggles grew louder and a bit frenzied an old Spaniard stood up and turned his evil eye upon them and silenced them, and they became enigmatic. They were the first of many young Japanese women who were boldly traveling along the shores of the Mediterranean, some of them taking advantage of the low season, others refugees from language schools in France and Italy.

One of the first buildings I saw in Figueres was the Asilo-Villalonga—the town asylum, for mental cases. In 1904, Salvador Dalí was born in Figueres. This was nine months after his brother (also named Salvador) died, and the second Salvador might have ended up in this asylum if his madness had not also brought forth paintings and sculptures of great ingenuity. As a sixteen-year-old he wrote in his diary, “Perhaps I’ll be misunderstood, but I’ll be a genius, a great genius. I am sure of it.”

Dalí’s parents always kept a huge (“majestic”) painting of the first Salvador (who died at the age of seven) in their bedroom. Dalí said he lived two lives, his brother’s and his own. In Madrid as a young art student he met Federico García Lorca, and later in life Dalí reminisced about his friendship with the distinguished poet and playwright.

“[Lorca] was homosexual, as everyone knows, and madly in love with me. He tried to screw me twice … I was extremely annoyed, because I wasn’t homosexual, and I wasn’t interested in giving in. Besides, it hurts. So nothing came of it. But I felt awfully flattered vis-à-vis the prestige. Deep down I felt that he was a great poet and that I did owe him a tiny bit of the Divine Dalí’s asshole.”

Sentiments of this sort in Dalí’s autobiography shocked George Orwell, who regarded him as abnormal, without any morality, and James Thurber, who jeered at him. Dalí simply laughed: his book had succeeded in upsetting readers. He spent his life attempting to outrage people’s sense of decency; he played at perversion and then came to believe in it, even in the nonsense he uttered. In his eyes there was no portrait or landscape that could not be improved by adding another breast, or a corpse, or a handful of ants.

Yet Dalí was also the consummate Spaniard—a Catalan to boot—and throughout his work are the Spanish preoccupations and iconography: bulls, Christs, Quixotes, Virgins, nakedness, fetishism, eroticism, humor, anticlericalism, dry hills, matadors. A Dalí crucifixion is erotic and pious at the same time. In Dalí’s work as in Spanish life there is no dividing line between the sacred and the profane, between a shrine and a boudoir, a sport and a sacrifice, between sexual passion or spiritual ecstasy. Dalí made the fetishes and relics of the church his own obsessions; and his wife Gala (who had been the wife of the French poet Paul Eluard) was at once virgin, whore, Venus; his mother, his madonna and his coquette.