Page 87 of In the Garden of Monsters

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“He’s so deeply selfish, yet completely vulnerable and insecure. Before my spirit found its way to the Underworld, I watched him sketch my lifeless body. It was as if he was trying to capture something he himself was afraid of losing—his essence, his mortality. Yet the act itself showed how disconnected he was from the human experience, how consumed by his own mind.” She sighed, her gaze still fixed on Dalí. “It’s a strange mix of emotions, watching him now. I feel pity for him, for his eternal struggle to seize something he could never fully grasp...” She trailed off.

“But?” I prompted.

“But—” she smiled, her eyes meeting mine “—I also feel warmth. It’s strange, isn’t it? To feel warmth for someone who violated such a private moment? But he has a special sort of charisma, the kind that makes it very hard to dislike him for long. You cannot help but to be drawn toward him.”

I knew exactly how she felt.

Putting an arm over my friend’s shoulders, I hugged her tight. “Genius often comes with its own set of damning flaws, and Dalí is clearly no exception. But here’s the thing, Lillian. We’re all flawed beings, even gods. Perhaps that’s what makes us eternally fascinating to each other.”

Dalí struck the bottom of his staff against the floor, its sound turning every head toward him. He was talking with a young reporter who held a notebook in his hand. “When someone important dies, I can feel it, sometimes very intensely. It is a monstrous and reassuring feeling. Because that dead person has become one hundred percent Dalínian. From now on, they will watch over me, over the great fulfillment of my work.”

He sauntered over to one painting. “This is a poem about death.”

Lillian gasped. “I thought you destroyed them all.”

I chuckled. “All except that one. It isn’t a painting of me, but it’s about me.”

She jabbed me in the ribs with her elbow. “A muse, not an artist.”

“This time Dalí was right. But remember what I said about him being flawed.”

The painting wasn’t large, about three feet wide and two and a half high. It had a typical stark, Dalínian landscape, where sparse trees with tiny leaves decorated a desert scene. An abnormally large, bizarre floating box broken into four corner quadrants comprised the focal point of the painting. Hovering in its center was a massive pomegranate, its crown forward. On the top of the box was a tiny figure of a man playing a trumpet, his legs dangling off the side, just like the musician that night in theboschetto.

A man next to us lectured his bejeweled wife about the musician. “The trumpeter challenges our notion of scale,” he said.

“No, he challenges our perception of reality,” Lillian said, leaning conspiratorially toward the man.

The couple was startled at Lillian’s interjection. They gave her a funny look and backed off, making their way to another corner of the gallery.

“They don’t know what to do with me, do they?” Lillian observed.

I nodded. “You are the one challenging their perception of reality. Seeing the dead is unsettling for them, even though when you are with me you appear real enough in the flesh. It’s strangest for them when they hear you speak.”

Dalí had painted a skeleton of some horned creature into the foreground of the image. “You see death, but this is not death. Look into the center, at this jewel of a fruit, the most perfect fruit ever devised by the gods. It floats, a key into a door, a door of death.”

He paused for dramatic effect. The reporters and gallery visitors hung on his every word. “And you all want to snatch it out, to open it.”

Dalí suddenly noticed me standing there. His mouth opened, and his eyes bulged. He broke through the crowd, moving toward me.

“Proserpina...” he said. “Oh, Proserpina!”

When he came close, I leaned toward him and brought his face to mine. I kissed him softly on the forehead and let him go. He turned around. He would not remember seeing me. “This painting. It is the heart of Proserpina herself!” The crowd began murmuring, not entirely sure if they knew who Proserpina was, but then someone shouted out “Persephone!” and the crowd murmured with approval.

“Paolo is here,” Lillian said, her voice full of joy.

“I know. That’s why I brought you. I thought you might want to say goodbye. He will only know you for a minute, so do not tarry.”

Lillian threw her arms around me. She kissed my cheek and then went to where Paolo stood at the side of the room, camera in hand. His leg had healed, and he, like his employer, remembered nothing about the week in Bomarzo, save that they visited and filmed a short movie, complete with a white cat on Dalí’s shoulder as he entered a simple, whitetempietto.

I watched as Lillian put her hand on Paolo’s cheek. His eyes brightened, and a smile bloomed on his lips. He reached into his pocket and handed her a piece of paper. She broke into a broad grin when she saw what was written on it. Then she tucked it back into his hand before kissing him deeply. “May the gods always find you in favor,” she said when she broke away. He lost the moment, but a smile remained as he snapped photos of Dalí mesmerizing the crowd.

“What was on the piece of paper?” I asked when she was once more by my side.

She sighed. “It was the haiku he wrote for me.”

We watched the scene in the gallery for a moment before she asked, “Whatever happened to Jack?”

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