Little Doors (19 page)

The full moon hung in the afternoon sky as Chris and I entered the stadium.

The first two quarters were some of the best football I’ve ever seen. I had to keep cautioning Chris not to stand on her seat. Not only were her high heels dangerous, but looking at her lovely calves at such close range proved rather unnerving.

At halftime I volunteered to go for beers and dogs. “Thanks,” said Chris. “My feet are killing me.”

Standing in line, I thought about how it didn’t really matter what sex a person was. As long as you shared certain interests with them, you could have a good time. Sex didn’t have to come up at all.

The guy ahead of me turned around too fast with his overfull plastic cup of beer and sloshed a little on me.

“Hey, buster, watch it—”

I caught a glimpse of his left hand.

“Jo!”

My fiancée was wearing ripped jeans, a flannel shirt and work boots. She smelled of Brut, but she needed a shave.

“I can explain—” she began.

“Don’t bother. Just come with me.”

“Where are we going?”

“You need to pee.”

“I do?”

“You do.”

After we got out of the men’s room, I was kind of in shock.

Jo looked contrite. “I was going to tell you eventually.”

“I believe you.”

“You see, it all started when I was thirteen—”

“I know.”

“You know? How could you know?”

“Never mind. Just come with me. There’s someone I want you to meet.”

Chris was just finishing touching up her lipstick.

“Chris, meet Jo. Jo, Chris.”

At first they acted embarrassed. After all, they were both in the habit of moving undetected and unrecognized during such times. But after a while, they were chattering away as if they had known each other all their lives.

Which, in a sense, I guess they had.

I get invitations now and then to dinner at Chris and Jo’s house, and since I still like them both a lot and they put on a swell meal, I usually go.

Unless it’s a full moon.

THE DEATH OF SALVADOR DALI

Salvador Dali, the century’s finest madman, the Great Masturbator, the Holiest Goof, the Critical Paranoid, Saint Salvador the Supreme Surrealist, is dying at last.

In the converted castle in Pubol that was one of his last gifts to Gala, twenty miles outside Figueras, the small town where Dali was born, the old painter lies in bed, attended by his court.

He wears a white satin gown. Around his neck on a blood-red sash hangs the Grand Crown of Isabella, an enormous medal given to him by Franco. Across his withered lap lies one of his favoured canes, the one with the gold head that he always maintained once belonged to Sarah Bernhardt.

Sad to say, Dali looks like hell.

The grand rampant moustaches, once lovingly waxed each day, are no more; a few wispy grey hairs, sparsely planted across his upper lip, are the only token they ever existed. Dali’s hair, always worn long, is greasy and lank. Dali’s face, ravaged by the persistence of time, has collapsed. It now resembles a premonitory soft watch, or perhaps the weathered rocks of Cape Creus, not far from Port Lligat, where so much of his best work was done.

A clear plastic tube blocks one nostril and descends down his throat: it carries nutrients and vitamins, for Dali can neither chew nor swallow.

Dali’s court no longer consists of fellow simpatico artists, poets and bizarre nonpareils, but only of museum curators and administrators of his estate, seated or uneasily standing. He has outlived all his old cronies. Breton, Eluard, Picasso, Tanguy, Ernst, Man Ray, Magritte, Gala …

Most especially Gala.

Gala: wife, “sister,” muse, model, protector, companion of fifty years. “Gentle Gala who is also the beautiful Helen of the golden apple … Gala is the one who devours for me, my teeth being very small and feeble … Gala is Trinity … the woman whose glance pierces walls … Gala the indispensable, the vital, the lost …

One final real friend, however, is still present. Antonio Pitxot, who has been Dali’s companion since Gala’s death. Pitxot is a much younger man than Dali, with a head full of dark curls. The Pitxots and the Dalis were neighbours since before little Salvador’s birth. Pitxot is the only one now who can interpret Dali’s feeble Catalan utterances.

The assembled company unanimously stirs at this moment in their vigil, as if blown by an extradimensional wind. They know intuitively that these are Dali’s final minutes of life. The atmosphere in the room is thick with forebodings of transition. The harsh Spanish light the colour of sand streaming in through the thick embrasures is quantified with particles of mortality. The mundane features of the commonplace articles in the room are transfigured as if by a patina of paint.

Dali shifts his head on the pillows, eyeing the seated witnesses to his less than grandiose passage from this world. His dry lips stir, and Pitxot lowers his ear to Dali’s mouth.

“What does he say?” asks a timid goateed man in a conservative dun suit. (This is the local Pharmacist of Ampurdan, invited according to Dali’s express and inviolable—albeit inexplicable—wishes.)

Pitxot replies, “He says, ‘A chair can even be used to sit in, but on the sole condition that one sits on it uncomfortably.’”

The crowd nods solemnly, as if enlightened.

Dali whispers again. Pitxot straightens up and says, “Dali wants us to know that the quicksands of automatism and dreams vanish upon awakening. But the rocks of the imagination remain.”

Once more the deathbed spectators wag their heads sagely.

Dali beckons a final time. Pitxot patiently receives this last message, which is a long one, and passes it on.

“The glove of myself is edible, and even a little gamy. I am the most generous of painters, since I am constantly offering myself to be eaten, and I thus succulently nourish our time. Every morning I experience the supreme pleasure of being Salvador Dali, and wonder what prodigies I will accomplish today.”

After allowing enough time for this stubborn assertion of his stature and of his old will to be digested, Dali waves to an old-fashioned phonograph. Pitxot, knowing full well what Dali wants, gets up and moves to the phonograph. On the turntable sits a record whose label is long gone, and whose grooves are worn down by countless playings. Pitxot turns on the machine and sets the needle on the record.

An irritating storm of white noise—which Dali has said resembles “the most beautiful sound in the world, that of sardines frying in oil”—fills the room.

Pitxot returns to Dali’s side.

The old man’s face has relaxed, losing some of its lines of pain. The white noise seems to be facilitating his departure from life.

Dali reaches out. Pitxot grabs his parchment hand—has the man become canvas itself?—and squeezes. The witnesses cease to breathe, as if, drawn by the force even of Dali’s waning charisma and wishing to follow him beyond life, they are ready to commit a kind of spontaneous mass yogic suicide.

“Gala,” says Dali, plainly enough for all to understand. “Gala, Gala—”

Then Dali dies.

* * *

Everything is black. There is confinement. The universe seems infinitely small, like Hamlet’s walnut shell, its bounds located just a few inches beyond Dali’s skin, as he floats in foetal suspension.

The air is stale, and smells of a sun-dried tidal pool in which things have died.

This situation is not without interest. What is going on? Where is he? How does he exist, if exist he does? He remembers dying … Is this heaven or hell, or something else? For once, Dali has no ready answers.

But, being Dali, this does not deter him.

It is amazing how well he feels. Not for decades has his body radiated such healthy messages. He feels like a forty-year-old again. Dali flexes his limbs tentatively in the enclosure. No, make that a twenty-year-old!

The new bodily vigour inspires him. He must escape this prison—assuming it is not the whole of his new existence.

Dali pokes hesitantly at the walls of his unseen shapeless box. They reveal themselves to be rubbery, organic, slimy. Dali thrusts a foot into the shell and extends his bent leg straight out. He can feel the membrane wrap his foot, mimicking its shape. But it refuses to tear.

The resistance frightens him—is he doomed to spend post-mortal eternity in this confinement?—and he begins to flail wildly. He grabs handfuls of the wall and pulls, he butts his head into the shell, deforming it to his own personal contours …

Something finally gives.

Dali’s right hand juts through the shell, into what feels like open air. He extends the rip, producing a crack that propagates with a noise like rotting fabric tearing.

A shaft of light, accompanied by fresh air, enters, spurring Dali on. His arm is free to the shoulder. Somehow, though, in his haste to escape, his head has become enfolded in the membrane. He cannot see the new worlds beyond his shell yet. Desperately, he pulls free of the pliable material, and falls through the crack to the ground.

Dali stands.

He looks around. He has emerged from an egg-shaped globe on which the familiar continents stand in impasto relief, Tierra del Feugo melting off, and the Cape of Good Hope levitating away. The globe rests on a white cloth. Above it floats a curdled shadowed canopy. Dali’s destruction of the globe has caused it to bleed: an unchanging bright crimson globule lies on the cloth, connected to the globe by a viscous thread.

Dali smiles. How droll. Of all possible afterlives, that he should find himself here … Impossible to say if such a fate is heaven or hell. Or is this all only the phantasm of his dying mind, an illusory eternity in a few milliseconds …?

“Are you ready now?” says a voice behind Dali.

Dali turns.

It is—as he instantly knew it must be—a naked little boy with a shaved head: Geopoliticus Child. The child watches Dali with calm unconcern.

“Ready for what, tiny avatar of my magnificent self?”

“You mistake me,” says the child. “But no matter. Ready to travel, of course.”

“Where?”

“To Gala.”

Dali feels faint. Vertigo overwhelms him, and he falls backward against the egg, his hand smearing Barcelona and all of Spain. Amid all the excitement of being reborn, he neglected to conceive this possibility. If this is indeed the true world beyond death, then Gala must be here also. To be reunited with his beloved—! It seems too rich a possibility.

Yet faced with this intimate landscape, what alternative does he have but to believe, and act on that belief?

“Are you going to guide me?” asks Dali.

“Yes,” says Geopoliticus Child. “For part of the way. The journey is not long, but neither is it easy.”

Dali reaches up instinctively to preen his moustaches. They are there, splendid in their stiff glory! Sensitive feelers aquiver to the numinous passage of pi-mesons! Yes, he is his old self, Dali the invincible! He is ready to travel indeed.

Pushing himself boldly away from the globe, Dali notices for the first time that he is naked. However, he does miss his old favourite red felt hat.

“We must attempt to find some headgear for me,” says Dali to the child. “The painter must officiate with headgear, preferably a model which conceals an electronic and cybernetic apparatus by means of which televised information could be communicated.”

“We shall see. Meanwhile, let us be off.”

“With a will. I am ready to encounter all phantasms of deification which my own deluded brain may project. But be forewarned: the only difference between a madman and myself is that I am not mad.”

Dali steps off the white cloth that lies beneath the World Egg, and onto the gritty, hard desert floor where Geopoliticus Child stands. The glossy bead of blood has not altered, and seems pregnant with a hematinic foetus, ready to give birth to bloody terror.

With the Egg no longer obscuring the foreground, Dali is able to take in the landscape.

The desert stretches away, uninterestingly featureless, to the western horizon. A square tower, dark with shadows on its northern side, looms some distance away in the east. Beyond the structure are mountains. Between the mountains and tower, across the illimitable plain, are scattered mystic figures of indescribable half-humanity, engaged in alchemic conversations and cryptic intercourse. The sky is grey.

“Marvelous,” exclaims Dali. “Although I have never been here, I remember so much!”

The child takes Dali’s hand, and they set off for the tower.

The plain is hot and pebbled beneath Dali’s bare soles, but he does not object to the discomfort, so enthralled is he with his renewed youth and this translation to the scene of his most private imaginings.

“How is it, dear child, that life after death resembles the peculiar prophetic visions of one Salvador Dali? I always realised that, as a genius, I was exalted and privileged in my communications with alternate planes of existence, but even I never dared conceive that heaven’s architecture would spring from my brush.”