The Best Book in the World

CHAPTER 10

The Bottom on the Crutch


Titus stands before The Enigma of Wilhelm Tell. He has more-or-less run all the way from his little flat in S?der. He breathes heavily and he doesn’t get any calmer when he sees the painting before him. He must gasp for breath to get any air down into his lungs at all.


It’s an enormous painting. Enormous in size, and enormous in the way it blows your mind. Titus has a memory from the first time he saw it. He is five years old and on a Sunday family outing to the museum. He runs around amidst all the happenings and paintings at his own speed and without really having to keep an eye on mum and dad. Then suddenly he finds himself in front of the big Salvador Dali painting. He doesn’t know how long he stands there staring at the painting. Perhaps time has stopped. Every detail is etched into his retina, for all eternity it feels like. Even though he is only five years old, Titus knows that he is having a great art experience. These few minutes will haunt him for the rest of his life. His senses are wide open and filled to the brim with experiences just as if somebody had stood there and poured adventures into him from a bucket. Suddenly, after a few minutes’ staring from his five-year-old worm’s eye view, he sees his dad’s grey trouser legs flap past in front of him. He stretches out for dad’s hand to make sure that dad sees the painting too. They must share this great art experience. Look dad! Can you see the bottom? He gets hold of the hand. Holds it firmly. Lifts the linked hands towards the picture to point and show it to dad. There! Can you see it? Dad doesn’t answer. So Titus must look away from the picture to see what dad thinks. What? A complete stranger is standing there holding his hand! A totally alien dad who gives him a friendly but wondering smile. Shame washes over Titus. He has got hold of the wrong hand. Wrong dad. Titus can’t understand that the man just thinks that he is a cute boy. He can’t understand that this is the sort of thing that five-year-olds do all the time. Get me out of here! He lets go of the man’s hand with a start, and looks up at the picture again. Staring intently, he loses himself in the only thing that feels safe just now.

The work of art.

It is just as fantastic now as it was then, Titus realises. A man is half-kneeling in front of a marble plinth on a brown floor. You can’t see his facial expression because it is shaded by a peak cap with a peak that must be more than one metre long. The peak hangs over the whole of the left side of the picture and rests on a crutch so as not to droop. The man has turned his side and most of his back to Titus. On a marble plinth between the crutch and the man there is a little clock that is sort of melting towards the man. Or is it time that is oozing from him? It’s hard to say. On the foot closest to Titus, the man has a grotesque sandal and large knotted toes. On the further leg, which is kneeling on the ground, he has a grey-black sock with a tight garter round his leg just beneath the knee. He is not wearing underpants. His shirt hangs down like a heavy long scrotum between his legs. His further bottom-half is far too long. It is enormously long! That too is supported on a crutch, almost at the very far right-hand side of the picture. It is inconceivable (at least for Titus) that the bottom could represent anything other than a giant penis. Does it need help to be able to support its weight, or to retain its stiffness? Whatever, the bottom-cum-penis sticks out about half a metre from the crutch like a glans inside foreskin without an opening. Gosh, what happens if he has to pee? Titus wonders. On the extended buttock, between the actual crack in his bottom and the crutch, hangs a bloody steak. And on one of the man’s sleeves there is another sort of beef steak, a sort of tennis-ball steak with a lid. Like a secretive meat cream bun, Titus thinks. The man’s other sleeve is just a sharp cone, a shirt spear which points backwards, into the black background of the picture. Under the bottom-cum-penis and the beef steak, some sweet little birds are pecking at the brown floor. Are they licking up the drops of blood from the beef, do you think? Meat-eating birds?

Titus has felt an affinity with Dali ever since that first acquaintance. As an artist, you can hardly be more obsessed than Dali. Dali knew what was what. Better to be obsessed than dependent. Me and Salvador, we are kindred spirits, Titus thinks. I must be just as merciless towards the surrounding world as he was. The world’s best painting must be related to The Best Book in the World.

Suddenly, Titus is surrounded by a group of schoolchildren who look about ten to twelve years old, together with a female museum guide in her thirties. You can see from far off that this is a guide who takes her job seriously. She touches the children and bends down to them when they ask questions. And most important of all: she laughs and smiles at their eyes.

‘This, dear children, this is The Enigma of Wilhelm Tell. An enigma means a mystery. This is one of the most famous paintings in the museum, a painting that actually contains lots of paintings and stories. It was painted in 1933 by a Spanish artist called Salvador Dali. What do you think about when you see this painting?’

‘He’s got his prick on his back!’ a boy calls out.

‘Yes… perhaps… what else do you think?’

‘He’s spooky,’ says a girl who giggles, slightly embarrassed.

‘I think he’s funny!’

Several children think the same. They giggle, laugh and shout ‘yuck’ and ‘urgh how horrid’ in turn. But they are without doubt more amused than worried.

‘What is it meant to be?’ another girl asks.

‘There is no simple answer,’ says the guide. ‘Shall I tell you a little about it?’

‘Yeees!’ all shout.

‘One of Salvador Dali’s aims with his life was to become a living legend. A celeb. For example, he twisted his moustaches so that they reached all the way out here,’ says the guide and shows with her fingers how they stretched across the cheeks. ‘This is how he started his autobiography: “When I was six years old I wanted to be a chef. When I was seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And, since then, my ambition has grown all the time.” That was quite something, wasn’t it?’

‘Who was Napoleon?’ a thin voice calls out from the very back of the group.

‘He was the emperor of France. A warrior who conquered lots of countries which he wanted to make part of France.’

‘Was Salvador a warrior too?’

‘No, he was an artist. But he was just as mad as Napoleon, perhaps. Shall I tell you about The Enigma of Wilhelm Tell?’

‘Yeees!’

‘Well, Salvador Dali wanted people to be able to interpret his paintings in lots of different ways. His paintings could include almost anything: reality and things which only happen in dreams. There was room for it all. So this is what I think: this man in the painting can be all the gods, fathers and sons in the world, in one and the same person. The whole of mankind perhaps. And all the dreadful oppression in the world too. You can see how mutilated and imprisoned he is. He is stuck there, he is bent, you can’t see his face, and so on. Yes, he is dreadfully oppressed. Probably the painting is also about when dads treat their sons badly, because Salvador’s dad was almost always horrid to Salvador. Although he was a bit proud that Salvador was clever at drawing, he always thought that Salvador was silly and weird. He questioned everything that Salvador did, from what Salvador wanted to work with to what he was like as a lover. That alone should be enough for a whole life as an artist! Don’t you think?’

The children don’t really know what a lover does. Nor do they know what is necessary to be an artist. And round about now, the guide loses contact with the children for a few moments. What started as an exciting story soon gets lost in psychological explanations and incomprehensible references to Freud, Schiller and Nietzsche. She slowly notices that the children have dropped out, realises her mistake and gets back in line.

‘…but the people who have studied which things influenced Dali during this period say that The Enigma is also about political oppression and class conflicts. Workers and peasants against the growing middle class. There was a lot of anger in the world too. Do you think Salvador was an angry uncle?’

Some children nod. What else can they do? The group starts to break up at the edges and some kids sneak away to explore the surroundings on their own. A girl who is leaning against the wall looks dead. Suddenly she shows signs of life by blowing a big bubble with her chewing gum. Pop! The bubble bursts, and she is once again as stiff as a corpse. But the guide continues unabashed:

‘As I said, Salvador Dali had decided already when he was young that he would become a myth. An extremely complicated and totally fantastic myth that the world would never forget. He even lived in his own museum with giant eggs on the roof. He would NEVER be satisfied with a painting unless it had lots of different levels. Now listen to this: in Dali’s family there were several people who had suffered from mental illness – paranoia, schizophrenia, manic depression, indeed the whole works. But nobody was allowed to talk about it. So Salvador decided to both live and paint those behaviours that were forbidden. For example: when Salvador was going to ask Gala to marry him, he smeared himself with goat poop so that she wouldn’t choose him just because of his appearance! And she actually said yes.’

That saved the situation for the guide. Now the children wake up again, the few who are left. Poop works in every case and some of the kids even start to laugh out loud. Titus observes the spectacle with increasing amazement. The guide feels the wind in her sails and throws in more:


‘But his marriage became extremely weird even though they always loved each other. Perhaps Salvador’s dad was right when he said that his son was a rotten lover. It was said that his wife, Gala, who had a house in a little fishing village on the Costa Brava, welcomed the fishermen when they came home every day after their day’s fishing. She made love to them all, wildly and beautifully, every day. She was a nymphomaniac of grand proportions. Do any of you know what a nymphomaniac is?’

The museum guide looks at the children. They shake their heads. A vacant look on their faces. Now she has them where she wants them. They are wide open. They will remember this moment for the rest of their lives.

‘If you think this sounds weird, it’s nothing compared to what’s going to come. Right: we have learnt that The Enigma of Wilhelm Tell is about Salvador Dali’s wish to get revenge on his dad and on narrow-minded middle-class attitudes. But we’re not going to have it as easy as that. The Enigma of Wilhelm Tell is perhaps most of all about the darkest side of human behaviour. Our uncontrolled desire to eat and – cannibalism! Who knows what cannibalism is?’

A little boy sticks his hand up.

‘I have seen The Silence of the Lambs…’

Others have seen it too. Titus, who is watching the performance from the sidelines, can’t believe his eyes and ears. That film is X-rated! These children have seen The Silence of the Lambs but have never heard of Napoleon.

‘Bravo!’ the guide shouts. ‘The film is about the same thing! People who suffer, people who are afraid to die, people who force themselves to do horrible deeds because of their guilt about their own inadequacies. Do you remember the mass-murder boy in the cellar? The one who sews clothes from the skin of his victims? He could just as well be the boy at the bottom on the crutch. Both of them suffer from an extreme inferiority complex. Just like Napoleon did! And Salvador Dali with his stupid dad! Do you get it? Everybody has an inferiority complex at some time. Everybody has the same feelings deep inside. We are all like Salvador! All of us have our bottoms on a crutch!’

The children look at each other with wrinkled foreheads and puckered noses. They don’t have their bottoms in crutches, do they? What does she mean?

‘Now we’ll move along! Can you see the goat with a car tyre around its tummy over there?’

The group of children disappears as quickly as it turned up.

Titus remains standing in front of The Enigma of Wilhelm Tell for a few more moments. He is on the right track, his mind is in overdrive. The bottom on the crutch, the bottom on the crutch… then he suddenly gets it. Yes, of course! The serial killer in The Best Book in the World must naturally hang up the body parts of his victims on crutches. As a protest against his dad, the brusque middle-class dad who never let him come into full bloom. Who, on the contrary, belittled him and ill-treated him mentally and physically. And when the heroic detective eventually gets on his track then the arch villain is of course given the nickname Salvador, or perhaps even Serial Salvador. And Serial Salvador leaves clues that demand that you must analyse Dali’s paintings according to a new pattern in order to trace him. In that way, The Best Book in the World will be a revolutionary book about art history too! Perfect! Now all Titus has to do is read lots of books about Dali and then he’ll have cracked it.

Just what the doctor ordered, Titus thinks, satisfied. A good title for a book too, The Bottom on the Crutch… must go to the café and write it down!

He just has time to turn towards the exit when somebody grabs hold of his earlobe, pulls Titus’ head towards him and screams right into his ear:

‘COCK IN YOUR EAR!’