The World Behind the Door Page 8

  Dali rarely saw Jinx after he moved in, but she showed up twice while Gala was out shopping, once to see what he had painted during the spring and summer, and once to issue him a warning.

  "A warning?" repeated Dali.

  "War is coming," she said. "In fact, many wars. It is time for you to leave the country."

  "Leave Spain?" he replied incredulously. "Are you mad? This is my home."

  "Your art has made you a citizen of the world. I really think you should take up residence in a safe part of it—though soon there will be no place that is totally safe."

  "What do you know of such things?" he scoffed. "You are just a child, and not even a child of this world."

  "You see things no one else can see," said Jinx. "I see things everyone except you can see. War is coming, and it is coming to Spain sooner than to most places."

  "If you are referring to that failed German artist, that Hitler," said Dali, "then you are mistaken. No one who paints that poorly can present any kind of a threat."

  She stared at him for a long moment. "I should not say this to someone who is older than me, and especially to someone who has shown me so many kindnesses—but you are a fool, Salvador. Flee while you still can."

  "I know a few people are unhappy with the government," said Dali, "but you are over-reacting. This is Spain."

  "I tried to warn you," she said unhappily. "If you survive, I hope I will see you again, wherever you end up. If not, I have enjoyed our friendship."

  "No one's dying and no one's leaving," said Dali. Suddenly he heard Gala's footsteps approaching the house. "Except you, right now."

  "Good-bye, Salvador,"

  When he had dinner with Gala he asked her about the current political situation.

  "Who has been discussing it with you?" she demanded suspiciously.

  "No one," replied Dali. "But I hear things."

  "From who?"

  "Damn it!" he snapped. "Just tell me about it!"

  She glared at him angrily. "The poor and the dispossessed are unhappy. The poor and the dispossessed are always unhappy. It is not for you to worry about. You must concentrate on your painting. The government is quite capable of keeping the peasants in their place."

  He believed her, and since it would never occur to him to disobey her, he went back to his painting. It was only when they traveled to Catalonia in October, where Dali was to give a lecture on surrealism, that the real world intruded. The lecture was canceled due to violence in the streets, and the Dalis, hoping it would be rescheduled, spent the night at the home of Gala's friend Josep Dalman.

  But by morning the Spanish Civil War was raging, with pitched battles taking place in Madrid, Barcelona and Asturias. At noon Catalonia declared independence.

  Gala knew they couldn't return to their elegant dwelling in Madrid, and she spent most of the day securing a safe-conduct pass and a driver who was willing to risk taking them to the French border.

  They were stopped a mile short of the border by rebels who took one look at their expensive clothes and declared that they should be shot on general principles. Dali was too terrified to speak, and Gala was so imperious that she did nothing but enrage the gunmen. It was their driver who took charge of the situation, explained what a safe-conduct pass was to the mostly-illiterate rebels, and finally was allowed to cross over into France.

  Dali and Gala made their way to Paris by train and bus, where they received news that their driver had been killed by stray machine-gun fire. They spent the night in a hotel, then hunted up an apartment the next day. It took Dali two more days to acquire the supplies he needed, but soon he was painting again—and this time, although it was still surrealistic, it was done with passion and purpose.

  One day, after they'd been there for two weeks, Gala went out to Coco Channel's to have some dresses designed, and Dali, on a hunch, looked in the back of each closet. He had looked the day they moved in, and there had been no door; he looked now, and the result was the same. He decided that he had lost his friend Jinx forever, and was feeling very morose about it when there was a knock at the door. He opened it and found himself confronting the redheaded girl.

  "You!" he exclaimed.

  "I am glad to see you finally took my advice," she said, walking past him and entering the apartment. "This is very nice. Not as nice as your house in Madrid, but much nicer than the first place we met."

  "How did you get here?" asked Dali.

  "The same way as always."

  He shook his head. "No you didn't," he said. "There are no doors in the back of any of my closets—and you came in through the front door."

  She smiled. "You have a storage closet in the basement."

  "We do?" he said, surprised.

  "Yes."

  "I didn't even know the building had a basement," he admitted.

  "Officially your storage closet is part of the apartment." She paused. "It's quite empty. The door to my world is in the back of it."

  "I shall remember that," he promised. "It has been a long time since I visited your world." A look of anger spread across his face. "There are enough bizarre events happening right here in my own world. You were right about the war."

  "Of course I was. Only someone who was as wrapped up in his work as you were could have missed it."

  "Thank you," he said sardonically.

  "May I see what you are working on now, before Gala returns?" asked Jinx.

  "It will shock you," said Dali.

  "If I wasn't shocked by The Andalusian Dog, or by your pornographic sketches—yes, I found them in one of your notebooks—I won't be shocked by this."

  "It is not entirely finished," said Dali.

  "That didn't stop you from showing me The Persistence of Memory every day when you were working on it."

  He sighed. "All right. Come into the studio."

  She followed him through the living room to the studio. There was a cloth hanging over the easel, obscuring the canvas.

  "It has two titles," he announced.

  "Two?"

  He nodded. "My first inclination was to call it Premonitions of Civil War. Then I decided that was too direct, too accurate a description for a Dali painting, so I am also calling it Soft Construction With Baked Beans."

  She laughed aloud. "That hardly sounds like a painting that will shock me."

  "It will shock everyone when I am done with it."

  He pulled back the cloth, revealing the half-finished painting. It was very clearly a Dali painting, yet it was different. Atop all the surrealistic structures was the most hideous face Jinx had ever seen, atop a pile of dismembered bodies and their entrails. She stared at it and shuddered.

  "It isn't suffering," she said at last. "It seems to be almost happy."

  "It is the spirit of war," answered Dali. "It revels in death and destruction. That is another reason I have given it a second title: it may be inspired by the Spanish Civil War, but it is the hideous spirit of all wars."

  "You were right," said Jinx. "It is frightening."

  "It is supposed to be."

  "When will it be done?"

  "I don't know," he replied. "I may wait another year, perhaps even two, to finish it. I need to distance myself from the war to properly represent it. I had to get that face on canvas, but the rest can wait."

  "Not for long," said Jinx. "Not if you stay here."

  "It's the Spanish Civil War, not the French," said Dali.

  She sighed. "How can you be such a genius in some ways, and so uninformed in others?"

  "Are we expecting a French Civil War?" he asked. "I thought they had that in 1789."

  "There will be war, and Paris will almost certainly fall, but it will not be a civil war. In fact, it will be a world war."

  "A world war?" he asked, puzzled.

  "A war fought by all the nations of the world—or almost all."

  "Like the Great War?"

  "Worse."

  "Let me guess," said Dali. "You think it will be caused by th
at German painter."

  She nodded. "And others. Mostly by him."

  "What is going on?" he mused. "How did the world come to be even more bizarre than my paintings?"

  Chapter 15: Big Town

  Dali found a copy of The New Yorker in his studio. He picked it up, thumbed through it, and tossed it in a corner, then went back to painting.

  A few minutes later Gala entered the room.

  "Where is the magazine?" she asked.

  Dali shrugged and pointed to it.

  "What is it doing there?" she demanded.

  "It was in the way."

  "But I wanted you to read it!"

  "The whole thing?" he asked distastefully.

  "Look at the material toward the front," she said. "All the theatre, all the art exhibits, the hundreds of elegant restaurants. Look at the ads for Saks and Brooks Brothers."

  "Why must I look?"

  "It seems a sophisticated and interesting city," she replied. "It is filled with precisely the kind of people we need to meet."

  "All seven million of them?" said Dali.

  "Spare me your feeble attempts at humor. I think we should take a trip to America."

  "Well, we would be farther from that crazy German painter," said Dali.

  "We would meet people of wealth and breeding, people with money."

  "I thought America was responsible for the Depression. Are you suggesting that it is no longer suffering from it?"

  "Not every American is poor and hungry," answered Gala. "And most of those who aren't are living in New York."

  "Fine," said Dali. "Now, what's the real reason?"

  "We need money. You need to expand your audience, and we need to expand our social circle."

  "I thought we were making so much money we could barely count it," said Dali, frowning.

  "We made some poor investments, and some of the exchange rates on the sales of your paintings were very usurious. New York is filled with expensive art galleries and rich patrons."

  "And you base this conclusion upon reading one issue of The New Yorker?" he asked. "Are you sure it's accurate?"

  "Certainly," answered Gala. "It has a worldwide reputation."

  "So does the little German," said Dali.

  Gala's face hardened. "We're going, and that's that."

  And that was that. Almost.

  They had enough for third-class passage on a less than top-of-the-line steamship, but they would have reached America without a penny. Dali refused to ask any of his friends for money, but somehow Gala got word to Pablo Picasso, who sent them a gift of five hundred dollars.

  "This is dreadful!" said Dali upon hearing the news. "How can I ever face him again?"

  "It is wonderful," she corrected him. "Now we can go where there is fresh money, where people will pay to see you."

  "You mean to see my paintings."

  "I mean what I said," she replied. "I have hired an agent to arrange a series of lectures for you."

  "But my English is very poor!"

  "You'll have two weeks to practice it aboard the ship," she said with a total lack of concern.

  "How long will we be there?" asked Dali.

  "I haven't decided," answered Gala.

  "What you are trying to say is that we don't have return fare," said Dali accusingly.

  "Don't worry about it," said Gala. "Your job is painting. Mine is paying the bills."

  He could tell that further discussion was fruitless, so he sighed and began packing.

  The trip was dull and uneventful. Dali kept opening his closet whenever Gala was out on the deck, hoping to find a door to Jinx's world in the back, but there was nothing but the bulkhead. He took to sitting alone in the bar at three in the morning, hoping Jinx would sense that Gala was asleep and show up so he could voice his concerns about the trip to her.

  Well, he thought on his last night at sea, trying to ignore his disappointment, she's got her own life to live. Besides, if I entered her world without her to guide me, I'd never find my way back out.

  They docked in the morning, and a few moments later they were in a taxi, heading to their hotel. Dali was stunned by the size, the sheer energy, of the city. London had been as big, but nothing he'd ever experienced was as vibrant.

  He felt small and lost, but Gala was in her element. She dragged him to one social function after another. He was so annoyed at having to attend that his behavior was more aberrant than usual—but his reputation had preceded him and everyone expected him to act like a mad artist.

  He gave his lectures, and found that he enjoyed the power he had over his audience. After all, he knew what he was trying to say, but he mangled the language so much that they had to pay close attention in order to understand him. And at least once each lecture, he'd pull something out of his pocket—a mouse, a snake, something—and treat it like a pet to give them something further to talk about when they spoke to their friends of the lecture.

  Gala convinced a few galleries to display his work, and in the first week alone he sold twelve paintings for more than five thousand dollars at a time when the average American was making fifteen dollars a week. He wanted to send Picasso his five hundred dollars, but he had never learned how to write a check, and Gala wouldn't let him mail cash.

  The first thing Gala did with the money was move them to better quarters—a suite at the Waldorf Astoria. After the bellhop had brought their luggage to the room and waited for Gala to tip him, she announced that she was going out to wrangle an invitation to a very posh party the next night.

  Dali waited until she'd been gone for five minutes—long enough to make sure she wasn't coming back for something she'd forgotten—and then opened the door to the walk-in closet in the bedroom. Sure enough, there was the door to Jinx's world.

  He didn't want to enter it alone, so instead he opened it in the hope she would see it. He sat down on an easy chair to wait for her. Belatedly it occurred to him that one of the stranger and more dangerous creatures he'd seen in her world could simply walk through the door into the Waldorf suite. He got up to close the door, but just as he got to his feet Jinx stepped through it.

  "Hello, Salvador," she said. "I am so glad to see that you've moved to America. It's the safest place to be." Suddenly she smiled. "Well, except for Antarctica."

  "We're returning to France the day after tomorrow," said Dali.

  "That is foolish. Can't you see what's going to happen?"

  "That's for politicians and generals to worry about," he replied. "My only concern is my painting."

  "I would think a major concern would be to live long enough to keep on painting."

  "If you're just here to argue, forget it," said Dali. "Gala does it better."

  "No," she said. "I am here to show you a painting I am very proud of, and to get your honest opinion."

  "Then I shall be happy to evaluate it for you," said Dali. "Where is it?"

  "I'll get it," she said. "I wasn't sure you'd be here."

  She walked back through the door to her own world, then returned a moment later with a small canvas in her hand.

  "All right," said Dali. "Let me see it."

  She handed it to him. He took it, glanced at it, frowned, and studied it carefully.

  "Why did you choose to paint Gala?" he asked at last.

  "You paint her all the time," answered Jinx. "Why shouldn't I?"

  "Because you are not married to her."

  "Have you never painted anyone you are not married to?"

  "You have done a very fine, very naturalistic painting of her," said Dali, still frowning. "But why does she appear so harsh? Why those lines in her face? Why the hint of a sneer about her lips? Have you ever seen her look like this?"

  "No. It is merely the way I imagine her."

  "Well, it is all wrong."

  "That's why I am here," she said, handing him a charcoal. "Show me how to correct it."

  Dali took the charcoal, seemed about to draw a line, paused, thought better of it, held
the charcoal above another part of the painting, considered it again, then finally sighed and handed both the charcoal and the painting back to her.

  "I was mistaken," he said. "It requires no improvement. That is the way she looks—from time to time, anyway."

  "Thank you."

  "You are becoming quite good, you know."

  "I have a good teacher," said Jinx. "I wish he had enough brains not to return to Europe."

  "The Spanish Civil War took place in my homeland," explained Dali, "but what is going on in Europe doesn't concern me. I am a non-combatant."

  "I don't think bullets and bombs differentiate between combatants and non-combatants."

  "France possesses the Maginot Line, the most impenetrable military defense in the world, and England possesses a fleet second to none. Mussolini has made Italy's trains run on time." said Dali. "I think you are being an alarmist. There is no cause for worry."

  "I've been studying American history since you came here," said Jinx. "I'll bet America's General Custer said those very words right before he reached the Little Big Horn."

  Chapter 16: Alternatives

  The world didn't get any safer. Dali and Gala moved to France, then to Mussolini's Italy. They didn't stay long in either place, and finally they fled to the United States to sit out the war in relative comfort.

  They took up residence in Virginia, where Dali kept turning out paintings. Some were brilliant, more weren't, but all of them bore his distinctive touch and all sold, some for truly outrageous prices.

  Gala kept up all her society contacts, and encouraged Dali to behave even more outrageously, which served to make him even more of a celebrity—and if there was one thing Americans loved, it was a celebrity. After all, Gala explained, far more Americans admired Babe Ruth and Billy the Kid than Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, and Dali's wildly eccentric behavior, some of it legitimate, much of it staged, proved that she was right.

  As for Dali himself, he was reasonably happy. He had his safety, he had his painting, he had his celebrity, he was making money even faster than Gala could spend it—and he had his closet.