Mustache Intact, Salvador Dalí’s Remains Are Exhumed in Paternity Suit
Marta Felip, the mayor of Figueres, told RAC1 that the exhumation was "grotesque." She warned
that the city hall, alongside the foundation, could in turn start legal action against Ms. Abel to get her to cover the full cost of the exhumation, should her paternity lawsuit falter.
"Finding this out was a very emotional moment." Narcís Bardalet, who had embalmed Dalí’s body in 1989, told the Catalan radio station RAC1
that finding the mustache intact was "a miracle." He added: "Salvador Dalí is forever." The discovery of the mustache was a striking, if unintended, outcome of the opening of Dalí’s tomb, in a crypt beneath the museum that he had designed for himself in his hometown, Figueres, which has also become one of the Catalonia region’s main tourism destinations.
"The mustache kept its classic 10-past-10 position," Lluís Peñuelas, the secretary general of the foundation
that oversees Dalí’s estate, told reporters on Friday, referring to the artist’s waxed and gravity-defying bristles, which Dalí kept pointed upward, like the hands of a clock.
Ms. Abel wants to be recognized as Dalí’s daughter, born as a result of what she has called a "clandestine love affair"
that her mother had with the painter in the late 1950s in Port Lligat, the fishing village where Dalí and his Russian-born wife, Gala, built a waterfront house.
At the time, Ms. Abel explained that she, rather than her mother, Antonia Martínez de Haro, filed the lawsuit
because the mother was in poor health and experiencing the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.