When writing my recent book Amables personajes, I had serious doubts about whether to include Gala among the 42 portrayed characters. Obviously, Gala was not ’amable’, at least not in the common sense of the term. But if we consider ‘amable’ as worthy of being ‘amado’, the issue is not so clear. In the end, I decided not to include her: being ‘amada’, loved, —except by Dalí and his very young, occasional lovers— mattered very little to Gala, and she made this very clear to all the Maestro’s friends.

The relationship between the painter and that fascinating woman (who abandoned her tumultuous relationship with Paul Éluard, her role as a muse of surrealism, and her personal artistic ambitions to dedicate herself exclusively to educating, polishing, and pampering the supreme creation that would make her go down in history: Salvador Dalí) was of an extreme complexity that is not easy to analyze and even less to summarize. But I can explain an anecdote that will give an approximate idea of what she was like, and it’s the one that, one summer afternoon, in the garden of Portlligat, Dalí himself told Beatriz de Moura —my first wife and the soul of Tusquets Editores— and me:

“One day, at the beginning of summer, Gala and I were walking through the most beautiful landscape in the world, which, as you know, is Cap de Creus, when we found a litter of tiny, skeletal rabbits that had been abandoned by their mother. Moved by a piety not common in us, we brought them to this house to try to save their lives, and through bottles and infinite patience, we were getting them through. But one night, as they escaped from the basket on the kitchen table, they fell to the ground and all died except for one, to which we devoted, from that moment on, all the care and attention possible.”

“The rabbit grew up beside us, we gave him a name, he recognized us and got really happy when he saw us. He even started sleeping in our bed and eating with us at the table, on the tablecloth. But fall came, and as every year, we had to leave to spend a few months at the Meurice in Paris and the Saint Regis in New York. Gala and I realized it was impossible to take the little rabbit with us. Faced with the problem, Rossita and Caterina, who took care of the house during our absence, assured us that they would take care of the rabbit during the winter and that we would find him when we returned. But the night before we were to leave, Gala told me that we couldn’t leave such a beloved being in the hands of the servants for so many months, that she had thought it over carefully and that the only coherent solution was... to eat him.”

“And so it was. She had him sacrificed and cooked, amid the weeping of Rossita and Caterina that reached us from the kitchen. We dressed in gala attire to have dinner —in gala, a term that could never have been better applied— and, in the dim light of the candles and with deep emotion, we devoured the beloved little animal.”

That’s how Salvador told us, in a rare moment of intimacy. I don’t know what impressed us more, the terrible story or the absolute and almost emotional seriousness with which Dalí recalled it. I’m convinced that the event (which I have only found mentioned, in passing, in Amanda Lear’s book, and which impressed Milan Kundera so much when Beatriz told him that he turned it —a little distorted— into the opening and justification for his book Immortality) is what best illustrates the character of Gala and her influence on Dalí.

Gala did nothing more than take one of Dalí’s fixations to the extreme with radical coherence: the recurring obsession of humanity to ingest, digest, and defecate the most beloved, and the Christian sacrament of the holy communion as a transparent metaphor for this obsession, since the sacramental miracle is supposed to transform the unleavened bread into the real body of Jesus: it is Him that we really devour when we partake. Naturally, the host is only a symbol, a metaphor for the real body of the Beloved, but Gala decided to bypass the metaphors and other symbolic nonsense. They would eat the real body, the corpse, the beloved friend.

I am convinced that, if it weren’t for the fear of legal consequences, Gala would have gone as far as devouring one of her young lovers... She was perfectly capable of doing so, such were her convictions. Dalí loved her as much as he feared her, probably because all passionate love must, by definition, be terrifying. And what is beyond any doubt is the indestructible passion they felt for each other, which chained them together for life.