IAN GIBSON The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí An Excerpt Chapter One CATALUNYA
The Witches of Llers
The remains of the little Catalan town of Llers stand on a hill overlooking the plain of the Upper Empordà region in north-east Spain. They are a gaunt reminder of the ferocious civil war that unleashed itself in July 1936 and raged for almost three years. In February 1939 Llers was bursting at the seams with Republican soldiers and thousands of refugees fleeing from General Franco. When it became obvious that all was lost, the military ordered the civilians out and fused the magazine, installed in the parish church, before hurrying off to cross the French frontier at Le Perthus, an hour's march away. Behind them, the terrific explosion blew most of the town sky-high.1Llers was once reputed to be infested with witches. Perhaps, some locals today will hint ironically, their malign influence was responsible for the place's terrible fate, hardly mitigated by the construction, after the war, of a new quarter further down the hill. Today the town is only a shadow of its former self.
Salvador Dalí's ancestors on his father's side were agricultural labourers from Llers, although the painter never mentions the fact in his misleadingly titled autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, or anywhere else in his work. That he knew about his background there can be no doubt, however; and in 1925 he illustrated a book called The Witches of Llers by his friend, the Empordanese poet Carles Fages de Climent.
The Llers parish registers, which fortunately survived the civil war, enable us to trace these Dalí forbears back step-by-step to the late seventeenth century, but no further.2 Some earlier documentation has come to light in the Historical Archive at Girona, the provincial capital. It shows that, while a census carried out in 1497 mentions no Dalís in Llers, a notarial protocol dated 12 April 1558 lists among its inhabitants a certain Pere Dalí. This man may have been the father of the Joan Dalí who, according to a seventeenth-century Latin document preserved in the same archive, bought an inner courtyard in Llers in 1591 which was in turn inherited by his son, Gregori, and then by his grandson of the same name. The latter, who sold the courtyard in 1699, is the first Dalí to appear in the surviving Llers records.3
Dalí is neither a Spanish nor a Catalan name, and has almost completely disappeared throughout the Iberian Peninsula. The painter repeatedly claimed that his forbears, and accordingly his surname, were of Arab origin. 'In my family tree my Arab lineage going back to the time of Cervantes has been almost definitely established,' he boasts in the Secret Life.4 Other remarks of his show that he had in mind the notorious Dalí Mamí, a sixteenth-century pirate who fought for the Turks and was responsible, among other dubious achievements, for Miguel de Cervantes's period of captivity in Algeria. But there is not a shred of evidence to suggest that the artist was related to that adventurer.5
Insisting on his 'Arab lineage', Dalí once pushed the date of the connection back much further than the sixteenth century, claiming that his ancestors descended from the Moors who invaded Spain in AD 711. 'From these origins,' he added, 'comes my love of everything that is gilded and excessive, my passion for luxury and my love of oriental clothes.'6 Again and again we find him referring to such 'atavisms'. On one occasion a burning summer thirst is ascribed to this origin;7 on another, the 'African desert' featured in his paintingPerspectives (1936-7).8 A later picture gave rise to the commentary: 'I always paint those vast sandy expanses that go as far as the eye can see. I don't know why; I have never been in North Africa. I suppose it's an atavism of the Arab blood.'9 Dalí even liked to think that the readiness of his skin to go almost black in the sun was another Arab trait.10
It seems that Dalí was right to claim Arab blood -- or, at least, Moorish. The surname occurs regularly throughout the Muslim world, and there are several Dalís in the Tunisian, Moroccan and Algerian telephone guides (rendered indifferently Dalí, Dallagi, Dallai, Dallaia, Dallaji and, particularly, Daly).11 Oddly, though, the painter never seems to have delved further into his background. Had he done so, he might have discovered that in the local Catalan of the River Ebro region there used to be an interesting trace of Spain's Muslim past in the noun dalí, from the Arabic for 'guide' or 'leader', which designated a kind of strong staff wielded by thedaliner, or boss, of the men employed to tow boats from the riverbank.12 It might also have dawned on him that from the same Arabic root comes the Catalan adalil and Spanish adalid, a not-too-common term in both languages for 'leader' (and which has given rise to the Arab surname Dalil, also quite frequent in North Africa). Dalí enjoyed saying that the fact of being called Salvador showed that he was destined to be the 'Saviour' of Spanish art. Had he realized that his highly unusual surname coincided with the word for 'guide' or 'leader' in Arabic, he would no doubt have informed the world, just as he liked to tell people that it corresponded phonetically to the Catalan delit, 'delight'. As it was, he hugely enjoyed its extreme rarity, emphasizing its palatal 'l' by energetically pressing his tongue against the roof of his mouth, and coming down hard on the accented 'í'. Salvador Dalí simply could not have had a rarer, or more colourful, surname, and it gave him endless pleasure.13
It may be, in view of what has been said, that the first Dalís to settle in Llers in the fifteenth century were moriscos, the pejorative term for the Spanish Muslims who opted for forced conversion to Christianity rather than expulsion after the fall of Granada in 1492 to Ferdinand and Isabella, the event that marked the end of the so-called Christian 'Reconquest' of Spain and inaugurated centuries of harsh religious and racial repression. But if so we do not know from where they came. In the extant parish registers of Llers the first reference to the family occurs in 1688 when Gregori Dalí, described in the Girona Latin document already mentioned as 'laborator Castri de Llers' ('labourer of the stronghold of Llers') and here, in Catalan, as a 'young labourer' ('jove trebellador'), married Sabina Rottlens, daughter of a carpenter from the nearby and much larger town of Figueres, today capital of the Upper Empordà.14 Like Gregori Dalí and his father before him, the subsequent generations of Dalí menfolk are classified in the records almost invariably as 'labourers', although a few were blacksmiths, including the painter's great-great-grandfather, Pere Dalí Raguer, born at Llers in the 1780s.15Among the ruins of the town there is a wall with a bricked-up doorway which the locals claim was the entrance to the Dalí forge, 'Can Dagué' ('The House of the Dagger-Maker'). They also point out the site of a solid stone house erected by another Dalí forbear: only the site, though, because 'Can Dalí' ('Dalí's House') was blown to pieces in the 1939 explosion.16
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, for reasons unknown, Silvestre Dalí Raguer, the elder brother of Pere, the blacksmith, moved from Llers to the isolated fishing village of Cadaqués, forty miles away on the other side of the mountains flanking the sea. The first reference to him in the Cadaqués parish records comes in 1804, when the baptism of his son Felipe is registered.17 Silvestre's profession is not stated. After losing his first wife in Llers, Pere Dalí followed his brother to Cadaqués where, in 1817, he married a local girl, Maria Cruanyes.18 Several entries in the parish registers describe him as 'blacksmith', so it seems safe to assume that on arrival in Cadaqués he continued the profession he had practised in Llers.19 Pere Dalí and Maria Cruanyes had three sons: Pere, Cayetano and, in 1822, Salvador, the future painter's great-grandfather.20 In 1843 the latter married Francisca Viñas, whose father, according to the wedding certificate, was a 'labourer',21 although in another document he is described as a sailor.22 According to gossip transmitted years later to the Catalan writer Josep Pla, Salvador Dalí Cruanyes and his wife led a turbulent life together and petitioned, unsuccessfully, for a divorce.23
November / ISBN 0-393-04624-9 / 736 pages / ART/BIOGRAPHY
The Witches of Llers
The remains of the little Catalan town of Llers stand on a hill overlooking the plain of the Upper Empordà region in north-east Spain. They are a gaunt reminder of the ferocious civil war that unleashed itself in July 1936 and raged for almost three years. In February 1939 Llers was bursting at the seams with Republican soldiers and thousands of refugees fleeing from General Franco. When it became obvious that all was lost, the military ordered the civilians out and fused the magazine, installed in the parish church, before hurrying off to cross the French frontier at Le Perthus, an hour's march away. Behind them, the terrific explosion blew most of the town sky-high.1Llers was once reputed to be infested with witches. Perhaps, some locals today will hint ironically, their malign influence was responsible for the place's terrible fate, hardly mitigated by the construction, after the war, of a new quarter further down the hill. Today the town is only a shadow of its former self.
Salvador Dalí's ancestors on his father's side were agricultural labourers from Llers, although the painter never mentions the fact in his misleadingly titled autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, or anywhere else in his work. That he knew about his background there can be no doubt, however; and in 1925 he illustrated a book called The Witches of Llers by his friend, the Empordanese poet Carles Fages de Climent.
The Llers parish registers, which fortunately survived the civil war, enable us to trace these Dalí forbears back step-by-step to the late seventeenth century, but no further.2 Some earlier documentation has come to light in the Historical Archive at Girona, the provincial capital. It shows that, while a census carried out in 1497 mentions no Dalís in Llers, a notarial protocol dated 12 April 1558 lists among its inhabitants a certain Pere Dalí. This man may have been the father of the Joan Dalí who, according to a seventeenth-century Latin document preserved in the same archive, bought an inner courtyard in Llers in 1591 which was in turn inherited by his son, Gregori, and then by his grandson of the same name. The latter, who sold the courtyard in 1699, is the first Dalí to appear in the surviving Llers records.3
Dalí is neither a Spanish nor a Catalan name, and has almost completely disappeared throughout the Iberian Peninsula. The painter repeatedly claimed that his forbears, and accordingly his surname, were of Arab origin. 'In my family tree my Arab lineage going back to the time of Cervantes has been almost definitely established,' he boasts in the Secret Life.4 Other remarks of his show that he had in mind the notorious Dalí Mamí, a sixteenth-century pirate who fought for the Turks and was responsible, among other dubious achievements, for Miguel de Cervantes's period of captivity in Algeria. But there is not a shred of evidence to suggest that the artist was related to that adventurer.5
Insisting on his 'Arab lineage', Dalí once pushed the date of the connection back much further than the sixteenth century, claiming that his ancestors descended from the Moors who invaded Spain in AD 711. 'From these origins,' he added, 'comes my love of everything that is gilded and excessive, my passion for luxury and my love of oriental clothes.'6 Again and again we find him referring to such 'atavisms'. On one occasion a burning summer thirst is ascribed to this origin;7 on another, the 'African desert' featured in his paintingPerspectives (1936-7).8 A later picture gave rise to the commentary: 'I always paint those vast sandy expanses that go as far as the eye can see. I don't know why; I have never been in North Africa. I suppose it's an atavism of the Arab blood.'9 Dalí even liked to think that the readiness of his skin to go almost black in the sun was another Arab trait.10
It seems that Dalí was right to claim Arab blood -- or, at least, Moorish. The surname occurs regularly throughout the Muslim world, and there are several Dalís in the Tunisian, Moroccan and Algerian telephone guides (rendered indifferently Dalí, Dallagi, Dallai, Dallaia, Dallaji and, particularly, Daly).11 Oddly, though, the painter never seems to have delved further into his background. Had he done so, he might have discovered that in the local Catalan of the River Ebro region there used to be an interesting trace of Spain's Muslim past in the noun dalí, from the Arabic for 'guide' or 'leader', which designated a kind of strong staff wielded by thedaliner, or boss, of the men employed to tow boats from the riverbank.12 It might also have dawned on him that from the same Arabic root comes the Catalan adalil and Spanish adalid, a not-too-common term in both languages for 'leader' (and which has given rise to the Arab surname Dalil, also quite frequent in North Africa). Dalí enjoyed saying that the fact of being called Salvador showed that he was destined to be the 'Saviour' of Spanish art. Had he realized that his highly unusual surname coincided with the word for 'guide' or 'leader' in Arabic, he would no doubt have informed the world, just as he liked to tell people that it corresponded phonetically to the Catalan delit, 'delight'. As it was, he hugely enjoyed its extreme rarity, emphasizing its palatal 'l' by energetically pressing his tongue against the roof of his mouth, and coming down hard on the accented 'í'. Salvador Dalí simply could not have had a rarer, or more colourful, surname, and it gave him endless pleasure.13
It may be, in view of what has been said, that the first Dalís to settle in Llers in the fifteenth century were moriscos, the pejorative term for the Spanish Muslims who opted for forced conversion to Christianity rather than expulsion after the fall of Granada in 1492 to Ferdinand and Isabella, the event that marked the end of the so-called Christian 'Reconquest' of Spain and inaugurated centuries of harsh religious and racial repression. But if so we do not know from where they came. In the extant parish registers of Llers the first reference to the family occurs in 1688 when Gregori Dalí, described in the Girona Latin document already mentioned as 'laborator Castri de Llers' ('labourer of the stronghold of Llers') and here, in Catalan, as a 'young labourer' ('jove trebellador'), married Sabina Rottlens, daughter of a carpenter from the nearby and much larger town of Figueres, today capital of the Upper Empordà.14 Like Gregori Dalí and his father before him, the subsequent generations of Dalí menfolk are classified in the records almost invariably as 'labourers', although a few were blacksmiths, including the painter's great-great-grandfather, Pere Dalí Raguer, born at Llers in the 1780s.15Among the ruins of the town there is a wall with a bricked-up doorway which the locals claim was the entrance to the Dalí forge, 'Can Dagué' ('The House of the Dagger-Maker'). They also point out the site of a solid stone house erected by another Dalí forbear: only the site, though, because 'Can Dalí' ('Dalí's House') was blown to pieces in the 1939 explosion.16
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, for reasons unknown, Silvestre Dalí Raguer, the elder brother of Pere, the blacksmith, moved from Llers to the isolated fishing village of Cadaqués, forty miles away on the other side of the mountains flanking the sea. The first reference to him in the Cadaqués parish records comes in 1804, when the baptism of his son Felipe is registered.17 Silvestre's profession is not stated. After losing his first wife in Llers, Pere Dalí followed his brother to Cadaqués where, in 1817, he married a local girl, Maria Cruanyes.18 Several entries in the parish registers describe him as 'blacksmith', so it seems safe to assume that on arrival in Cadaqués he continued the profession he had practised in Llers.19 Pere Dalí and Maria Cruanyes had three sons: Pere, Cayetano and, in 1822, Salvador, the future painter's great-grandfather.20 In 1843 the latter married Francisca Viñas, whose father, according to the wedding certificate, was a 'labourer',21 although in another document he is described as a sailor.22 According to gossip transmitted years later to the Catalan writer Josep Pla, Salvador Dalí Cruanyes and his wife led a turbulent life together and petitioned, unsuccessfully, for a divorce.23
November / ISBN 0-393-04624-9 / 736 pages / ART/BIOGRAPHY