Dalí y sus cuadros

Nil rushes into a postcard shop. He wants a normal beach photo for his grandmother, whose birthday is tomorrow, before he catches a train. He does not want a strange painter. Rosa, the shopkeeper in Figueres, puts one card on the counter. It shows The Persistence of Memory, by Salvador Dalí: clocks that do not tell the time, some of them hanging soft like cloth, with a dry landscape and rocks behind. Nil says a clock must be hard. Rosa reads the back. Dalí was born in Figueres in 1904, in Catalonia. In his pictures an impossible thing sits beside a real one. In many paintings he shows Cap de Creus, the rocks, the sky, and the beaches of the Costa Brava. The rocks in this picture look like that cape. The soft clocks are the dream. Nil steps outside and sees the Teatro Museo Dalí across the street, a building Dalí designed in his own town. He comes back because his grandmother knows Figueres and will ask why the clock looks like cloth. Rosa says he can answer: the painter was born here, the rocks are real, and the soft clock is not. Nil also sees Dalí’s face, with the long pointed mustache that was his mark. He pays for the clock card, leaves the beach photo, and says that if his grandmother asks for the sea he will talk about the rocks of the cape. Rosa says nothing more, and Nil leaves for the train with the card kept straight.