The Pickpocket - My Fiction Story

Since I restarted going to the Gym recently, I feel quite fit and fine. That's the only advantage of being unemployed. I never had the time before to go to the Gym. After being in my mini van all day making rounds with the daily delivery, visiting the Gym seemed more a chore than relaxation to me.

For the job interview today for a supermarket, I chose a white shirt, clean and pressed, but with jeans. I didn't want to give them the impression I have no strength to even lift up a couple of cardboard boxes of whatever, in starched trousers like an accountant. All set. I picked up my keys and my wallet which I put in my back pocket and wished myself luck silently when I left the apartment.

In the metro jam packed with people all going to work, the smell of perspiration and deodorant created another indescribable smell, not sure whether it's better or worse. While going through the tunnel the window glass became a mirror, that's how I noticed that boy, about 20 or so, a hippy and pale as though he had just been let out from a life behind bars. He seemed to fix his attention on me a lot. I automatically put my hand on my back pocket and, damn, my wallet wasn't there any more. Nor was it in the other pockets. Somebody had stolen it while we jostled onto the train.

I looked around and caught the boy casting me another suspicious look before getting off at a stop. I followed him off and when he noticed me behind him, he quickened his steps. Near the end of the passage when there were just the 2 of us for a whole stretch, I ran up and grabbed him by the shoulders pushing him against the wall.

"Give me the wallet." I shouted at him.

"I ... No..." He protested weakly, his voice trembling. I almost felt sorry for him.

"Give me the wallet or I'll smash your face in!"

He took the wallet out from his pocket and gave it to me without a word, hurrying to join a group of noisy adolescents now appearing at the end of the passage.

I shoved the wallet in my pocket and started to run as I was by then a little late for the interview. I arrived breathlessly. The chap who did the interview must have a thousand forms of application just like mine before him on the table.

"Can you give me your documentation?" He ordered.

I took out the wallet, too late to notice that it was not mine, and the things spilled out of it were an innocent preservative and a small pack of marijuana.

Tags:wallet,pickpocket,fiction

Current Mood: Awake

Dali' Gala - Small But Beautiful

The portrait Dali did in 1931 of his beloved Gala, then wife of the poet Paul Eluard, is very small, barely 13,9 x 9,2 centimeters, but it has the added value of it being the very first picture he had painted of her. The Dali foundation had acquired it from Sotheby's in New York for 542,000 dollars.

It was an oil-collage painted on carton, based on a photo of Gala, with the image appearing as if emerging from cigarette smoke. Appeared in this painting all the Dali iconography: the lobster, the bird, the squirrel, the seashell and the ants. All that accompanied Gala with her very full and long hair, symbolising a perfect woman, who observes the spectator with fixed, clear and inquisitive eyes. In the lower part of the carton, one can read 'pour l'oliveta Salvador Dali, 1931'. (Oliveta is diminutive of Oliva), one of the twenty or so endearing names he called her. Amongst them there's this one 'Lionette' (Little Lion) because he said, she roared when she was angry.

He gave this painting to the then couple Gala-Eluard, at that time Gala had stayed with Dali with her husband's knowledge and permission. This fact was confirmed later in their correspondence. But the painting is kept by Eluard. It was later passed onto the hands of Albert Field, a professor in Manhattan, who had seen it in the joint exhibition with Joan Miro in the MOMA. In 1941. He was so impressed by the work of Dali that he decided to dedicate his studio with body and soul, and he soon became a collector of Dali's work.

Dali had given him in that same year an autograph and Field conserved it as a sign of destiny, and he began to compile a catalogue of Dali's art, published in 1996. The portrait of Gala was one of the first 2 Dali painting he bought. When he died in 2003, his collection passed on to his sons, one of them just sold the Gala portrait in the Auction at Southeby's.

Tags:dali,gala

Current Mood: Artistic