This is not the easiest time of year. With all the joy of getting back together, keeping an eye on the world at home and abroad, family obligations and the end of the tax year, there is a massive and resounding sense of worry. I realise every year that worry must come. Because worry is what rips out the inner thoughts and puts them in alphabetical order. Some people draw up lists of the year’s best by category, some make wishes for next year, others write letters and Christmas cards. The idea is always identical: to summarise and contemplate the past 365 days, and to hope for the best in the days to come. If, only a few years ago, it seemed that every following year would be better, we have already moved on from the Hegelian evolution. Next year is a real worry.

I always find myself in a multitude of odd situations during the festive season. Family members who no longer exist and the emptiness they try to fill, friends who have no family left, those who are far from theirs. There are also those who are creating new families, babies on the way, life going on because stopping is not human either. I also inevitably think of friends who are gone, those who wanted to be gone and have left us with their questions and existence; those who left prematurely, mutinously. I wish the very best of health to all those close to me, but, as the wishes are endless and immaterial, I’m manifesting them on a global scale. Why not… In this systematised review of my affections, I’m thinking about the outside world. I think of fundamental rights, of the upcoming collapse. I think about bread. We are at a time in history when people are actually thinking about bread, between wheat fields that have been burnt down for more than two years in what is known as the breadbasket of Europe, and how much it costs to make bread. And I find myself reminiscing about a friend who, one day at my birthday party a few decades ago, spotted a giant loaf of bread on the table and said: ‘What a huge loaf! It reminds me of that Dalí painting’.

Nobody understood what he was talking about, and communication was fast, but not immediate.
The day after I was shown a picture in a Facebook post, which at the time I did not attach the same weight to it as I do today. A dramatic chiaroscuro painting of a loaf of bread, with the following note: ‘’The bread of Salvador‘’. A wonderful joke from this person, referring to my surname and the painter’s first name. These past few days, after writing about butter, and the worry creeping to the surface in this end-of-year countdown, I have been thinking about bread. As I pondered on the subject, as if my birthday had been the day before yesterday, I thought of the bread of Salvador. Mnemonic devices are pervasive and do not appear to be catalogued. I kept thinking about my friend, the things that should be taken for granted, about bread.

The bread of Salvador, whose real and accurate name is The Basket of Bread (La cesta de pan) is a surreal story. And look at me throwing surreal into the mix to tell about an author who was a pioneer of surrealism. This is what made us astonished at the appearance of a loaf of bread on a table that suddenly bore a resemblance to a Dalí painting. Because that’s exactly the shock. No objects outside the frame, no melting surfaces or clocks chiming the hours. This is a refined painting of a realistically depicted loaf of bread, on the edge of a table, with a dark background and a brief flash of light on the loaf’s light crust. Small in size (33 x 38 cm), it is a classic, beautiful, melancholic still life. But two details take the classicism out of this representation. The date and the author. It was painted in 1945 and, according to Dalí, completed the day before the end of the Second World War. The bread is on the edge of a table, in an action that has been left suspended. The bread could be knocked off balance at any moment, fall into the void, the end of an order. Dalí spent two consecutive months working on this painting, four hours a day. During this time, as he himself reveals, ‘the most surprising and remarkable episodes in contemporary history took place’. The painting has a subtitle: Rather Death Than Shame. Hitler killed himself to prevent his downfall. Dalí also claimed that he had been painting this work when the atomic bombs fell on Japanese territory. He wanted the stillness of a pre-explosive object. All of a sudden, this loaf of bread looks like anything but a loaf of bread. A loaf of bread tells the whole history of humanity, if I were willing to be led by Dalí’s narratives. In historical and artistic terms, when bread is represented, it symbolises fertility, abundance and fecundity. This is celebrated in villages all over the world, and it is what terrifies us in the world’s miseries. Bread has an impact on the lives of almost all nations. To have bread is to be given access. Having bread is a sign of assured survival. Suddenly, the bread of Salvador brings to mind the revolutionary and assertive outlook of this friend of mine. He had already seen bread as a metaphor for what must be safeguarded, for the lessons it can hold, and for what is at risk of being lost. A new year is dawning. Let us have bread. Bread that provides us with the lessons we need and bread that teaches us to look and see far beyond our times. We are all in a bread basket on the edge of a table, on our way to the leap in the dark. Dalí knew that. A leap of 80 years of history has been made in the meantime.