Gala

and other Fourth of July thoughts

Yesterday, my day off from teaching, I swallowed my pride and booked a tour. It was the only way I could think of to see lots of Salvador Dalí’s art without getting hopelessly lost. Seven people—from Malaysia, Portugal, and Australia—and I piled into a van with a guide and traveled from Barcelona to the city of Figueres, where Dalí was born, and where he spent the last years of his life building his own museum.

Part of a ceiling he painted.

As we drove, the guide told us about the beautiful Russian muse, Gala, who left her husband, the surrealist poet Paul Éluard (whom she’d met when they were tuberculosis patients in the same sanatorium!) for Dalí.