On November 28, 1988, depressed and with his strength depleted since Gala’s death six years earlier, Dalí was admitted urgently suffering from the beginning of pneumonia at the Quirón Clinic, where some time before he had had a pacemaker implanted. He has now turned 84 years old and the prognosis of the doctors treating him is not particularly encouraging. But, unpredictable even in the trance between life and death, his state of health improves significantly. Three days later, when there are a few minutes left before the daily press conference with the medical report begins, a nurse notifies the mayor of Figueres, Marià Lorca. “Mr. Dalí calls him.” The artist expresses his desire to be buried under the dome of the Teatre-Museu. But he still made a second request, which the councilor had never wanted to reveal publicly, to the point that what was discussed there has been baptized as “the second Dalinian mystery.”
Marià Lorca, a privileged witness of the turbulent last years of the painter’s life and a key figure in Figueres becoming the great capital of Dalí, has finally decided to tell that bedroom secret that could have changed the course of history, to the journalist. Josep Playà Maset, who without knowing what was happening behind closed doors, was at Quirón that same day. Both, in a head-to-head in which the journalist contextualizes the politician’s vivid confidences with a profusion of data and anecdotes, explain it in Els últims secrets de Dalí (Editorial Gavarres), a book that seems like a thriller and among whose protagonists we find from the King Emeritus to Jordi Pujol, passing through Jorge Semprún, Tierno Galván and Pasqual Maragall.
And good? “Dalí asked me to bring a notary to the clinic,” Lorca now discovers. For what purpose did you request the presence of a notary? Everything suggests that he wanted to change a will that, at that time it was not yet known, he established the Spanish State as universal heir. “That remains up in the air, although it is likely,” says Playà, “the only thing he asked her was not to tell anyone.” And this is where the story begins to go awry. Despite the fact that Dalí had asked him for discretion, the mayor could not avoid telling the painter Antoni Pitxot, and the lawyer Miguel Doménech, who together with the photographer Robert Descharnes, were known as the troika, who were accused of having him kidnapped. Shortly after, when he was leaving for the notary’s office, still in the hospital, the mayor heard Doménech say to Pitxot: “This bird is going to leave us with our asses in the air.” “Everyone can interpret what they want,” says Playà Maset, “but the fact is that when he arrived with the notary, Doménech left the room and Dalí told him to come back later. They tried several more times, always with the same result and given this attitude they decided to wait for him to ask again. Never happened”.
Playà Maset, who for years was part of La Vanguardia and is one of the great specialists on the Empordà artist, whom he followed day by day in his final and turbulent years, speculates that Dalí perhaps wanted to revoke the will precisely thanks to Lorca, who since his arrival as mayor, and even as a councilor, had begun a process of getting closer to the artist, without which it is not difficult to think that his legacy in Catalonia would be negligible. “From intellectual sectors, both Catalan and left-wing, they saw Dalí as a Francoist painter and that caused many misgivings,” argues the writer, for whom the figure of Lorca, a fruit businessman, who was part of the first democratic city council, As a councilor, it was key.
“He was left practically alone when the Figueres City Council, then socialist, decided to change the name of the Gala i Salvador Dalí square to the Theatre. He got the Generalitat to grant a subsidy for the purchase of what would later be called Torre Galatea and was even willing to put money out of his pocket in case the City Council did not make the payment. Lorca got the Center for Dalinian Studies to stay in Figueres. And, above all, he begins to take care of Dalí. He makes him the city’s favorite son, he gives him gifts, he fixes Galatea Tower for him so that he can move there when his room in Púbol Castle catches fire… And that explains why at the moment when he looks very sick he goes to him to ask him to be buried in the Teatre-Museu and to call a notary.” He died two months later.
His last will, in which he bequeathed all his assets to the Spanish State, was signed in 1982, revoking a previous will, from two years earlier, in which he distributed his assets between Catalonia and Spain. What happened during that time? “After Gala’s death, the State turns to Dalí. He grants him the Carlos III medal, returns Dalí’s work that was in Paris and New York, regularizes his tax situation, buys two works worth 100 million pesetas, he is named Marquis of Púbol… “
The Generalitat of Jordi Pujol, meanwhile, moves timidly, granting him his gold medal, but relations with Minister Max Cahner are not good. The final blow could have been the frustrated purchase of La Madonna de Portlligat for 100 million pesetas. But after the floods in the Pyrenees in the autumn of 1982, which caused losses of 6,000 million pesetas, the Generalitat canceled the operation.
