Dali is neither a Spanish nor a Catalan name, and has almost completely disappeared throughout the Iberian Peninsula. The painter repeatedly claimed that his forbears, and accordingly his surname, were of Arab origin. `In my family tree my Arab lineage going back to the time of Cervantes has been almost definitely established,' he boasts in the Secret Life. Other remarks of his show that he had in mind the notorious Dali Mami, a sixteenth-century pirate who fought for the Turks and was responsible, among other dubious achievements, for Miguel de Cervantes's period of captivity in Algeria. But there is not a shred of evidence to suggest that the artist was related to that adventurer.
Insisting on his `Arab lineage', Dali once pushed the date of the connection back much further than the sixteenth century, claiming that his ancestors descended from the Moors who invaded Spain in AD 711. `From these origins,' he added, `comes my love of everything that is gilded and excessive, my passion for luxury and my love of oriental clothes.' Again and again we find him referring to such `atavisms'. On one occasion a burning summer thirst is ascribed to this origin; on another, the `African desert' featured in his painting Perspectives (1936-7). A later picture gave rise to the commentary: `I always paint those vast sandy expanses that go as far as the eye can see. I don't know why; I have never been in North Africa. I suppose it's an atavism of the Arab blood." Dali even liked to think that the readiness of his skin to go almost black in the sun was another Arab trait.
It seems that Dali was right to claim Arab blood--or, at least, Moorish. The surname occurs regularly throughout the Muslim world, and there are several Dalis in the Tunisian, Moroccan and Algerian telephone guides (rendered indifferently Dali, Dallagi, Dallai, Dallaia, Dallaji and, particularly, Daly). Oddly, though, the painter never seems to have delved further into his background. Had he done so, he might have discovered that in the local Catalan of the River Ebro region there used to be an interesting trace of Spain's Muslim past in the noun dali, from the Arabic for `guide' or `leader', which designated a kind of strong staff wielded by the daliner, or boss, of the men employed to tow boats from the riverbank." It might also have dawned on him that from the same Arabic root comes the Catalan adalil and Spanish adalid, a not-too-common term in both languages for `leader' (and which has given rise to the Arab surname Dalil, also quite frequent in North Africa). Dali enjoyed saying that the fact of being called Salvador showed that he was destined to be the `Saviour' of Spanish art. Had he realized that his highly unusual surname coincided with the word for `guide' or `leader' in Arabic, he would no doubt have informed the world, just as he liked to tell people that it corresponded phonetically to the Catalan delit, `delight'. As it was, he hugely enjoyed its extreme rarity, emphasizing its palatal `l' by energetically pressing his tongue against the roof of his mouth, and coming down hard on the accented `i'. Salvador Dali simply could not have had a rarer, or more colourful, surname, and it gave him endless pleasure.
