Capitulo uno del libro de Ian Gibson
The remains of the little Catalan town of Llers stand on a hill overlooking the plain of the Upper Emporda 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.
Llers 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 Dali’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 Dali, 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 Dali forbears back step-by-step to the late seventeenth century, but no further. 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 Dalis in Llers, a notarial protocol dated 12 April 1558 lists among its inhabitants a certain Pere Dali. This man may have been the father of the Joan Dali 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 Dali to appear in the surviving Llers records.
Dali 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. Other remarks of his show that he had in mind the notorious Dali Mami, 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….
