SEXIS WRONG

Gala’s Divine Beauty Mark
Salvador Dalí
Editor’s Note: When Surrealist painter Salvador Dalí met Russian
intellectual Gala in 1929, she had already served as a
muse for several members of the movement, including her
then-husband, poet Paul Eluard. She eventually became Dalí’s
muse, wife, agent, and reason for living. “She calms me. She
reveals me. She makes me,” he wrote. In this worshipful excerpt
from his 1973 autobiography, Comme on Devient Dalí
(published in English as Maniac Eyeball), the master writes
about their early two-month sexathon and the part of Gala’s
body that gave him the most pleasure.
our love, that I am as if prepared for that tragedy. Gala today,
as on that first day, goes on saying that her death would be
the finest day of her life. Perhaps I would say, despite my immense
sorrow, as I did the day after our first coming-together,
in Figueras when I saw her to the train as she was departing
for Paris, despite my love and my sorrow at seeing her leave,
“Alone at last.” For nothing is greater than to discover one’s
true dimensions and put up with one’s solitude. Gala taught
that to me, so it would be one more way of paying deep tribute
to her by going on living as she had wanted.
Had Dalí Already Made
Love To Another Woman?
Dalí cannot come with any other woman. It is impossible.
You cannot be unfaithful to your shadow, and to lose it is to
lose your soul. That is quite enough for me, and I do not think
either of having children. Those embryos disgust me. Their
fetal aspect bothers me wildly. Nor could I ever, like any genius,
give birth to anything but an idiot.
I kneaded them in my hands,
smelled them with delight, trying to
recapture a bit of her presence and
her life.
I also do not want to face up to the reality of Gala’s death. My
mind would need to call on all of its resources to survive that.
But with the training she has put me through I am certain I
could maintain my intelligence at the level of my love of life.
Though henceforth I could overcome the most abysmal of
misfortunes, she would remain irreplaceable. I have moreover
so often thought of her death, from the very first day of
At that time, I was hardly inured despite my pride, and like one
obsessed I had to look for my strength and courage among
the things she had imprinted with her mark, her odors, her
memory: an old pair of rope sandals, a swimsuit, a pebble. I
kneaded them in my hands, smelled them with delight, trying
to recapture a bit of her presence and her life, and warming
my heart with the magnetism they still radiated.
I had my work. I locked myself in my Figueras studio for a
month. I finished The Great Masturbator and Portrait of Paul
Eluard. I felt it incumbent on me to fix forever
the face of the poet from whose Olympus I
had stolen one of the muses.
I left for Paris at the end of the summer, to
arrange for my first show, which was to open
in November at the Galerie Goëmans. That period
remains for me a series of strong images that embody
the voluptuousness of deliberate defeat.
I am in a florist’s shop and do not have enough money to pay
for the hundred roses I have just ordered for Gala.
I wait until the very last moment before going to see Gala,
whom I am dying to see again.
18 EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT SEX IS WRONG