Neruda, p.10
Neruda, page 10
One night Diego had some money in his pocket after getting paid for a short story. He invited Pablo to the cabaret—but only Pablo, not their other friends, so that they’d be able to talk to Sarita and Annie by themselves. They arrived after midnight, just in time for the women’s number of sultry and—especially for Chile—risqué dancing.
After the girls’ performance and the frenetic cheers they received, Diego gave a message to the maître d’ to pass on to the ladies: “Your amigos the painter Muñoz and the poet Pablo Neruda are here. Would you like to come to our table? We’d really like you to.” The girls came over after their second act.
“Are you Pablo Neruda?” Annie inquired of the poet. “May I ask you for something?”
“What would that be?” he answered.
“I want you to recite that pretty verse, named ‘Farewell.’”
When Neruda answered that he couldn’t remember all the lines, Annie, according to Muñoz, recited most of the verses from memory:
I love the love that’s served
in kisses, bed, and bread.
Love that can be eternal
and can be fleeting.
Love that wants to free itself
so it can return to love again.
Exalted love that draws near,
Exalted love that goes away . . .
They all went out to dinner afterward and continued drinking. Diego and Pablo suggested they go dancing, but the two women weren’t interested. Instead, they took some bottles of liquor to Annie’s house. They opened one and had a round of shots, then another, followed by another. Diego sat talking with Sarita while Annie was fastened to Pablo’s lips. Finally, Annie stretched out her arm and turned out the light.
The narrative of the poem Annie loved so much is rooted in betrayal; it is about a man saying “farewell” as he abandons his pregnant lover:
From deep inside you, on his knees,
a sad child, like myself, watches us.
For that life that will burn in your veins,
they would have to tie our lives together.
For those hands, daughters of your hands,
they would have to kill my hands.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
From your heart a child says good-bye to me.
And I say good-bye to him.
* * *
While The Book of Twilights did not have the sensational impact that Twenty Love Poems would the following year, it did much for Neruda’s reputation. At nineteen, such was his stature that he had disciples who would dress like him, copy his metaphors, and, especially when Twenty Love Poems began to garner substantial acclaim, follow him around the city. Younger poets would approach him so frequently in bars that, according to Muñoz, he and other friends prescreened these disciples’ verses to see if they were worth Neruda’s time. The importance of poetry in the Chilean culture allowed Neruda to gain popular recognition early on, which eventually evolved into widespread fame.
Despite all the initial excitement and attention surrounding the publication of Book of Twilights, Neruda’s spirits sank yet again. Adding to the psychological pressure of constant recognition was the fact that, just as his father had predicted, the book did nothing to improve Neruda’s finances. In truth, having discovered how much attention his son was paying to his poetry rather than his studies, José del Carmen reduced Neruda’s allowance. La mamadre (the more-mother), as Neruda called his stepmother, Trinidad, managed to sneak him some much-needed cash through his sister, Laura. Early in 1924, Neruda ran into Pedro Prado, the older poet who had so warmly embraced Neruda when he arrived in Santiago. When Prado asked him where he was currently living, Neruda answered, “In an alley with a lot of people; I’m not going to give you the address, because I haven’t paid the rent and they’re going to kick me out tomorrow or the next day.”
He had just published a significant book of poetry, but he was nervous and forlorn. He saw himself standing at a significant crossroads, unsure and anxious over what direction to free his emotion, to take his poetry, the two always interconnected. In an op-ed that appeared on the front page of Claridad several months after The Book of Twilights had been published, he asked his generation: “What have we done with our life?”
He provided, as the article continued, his own interpretation: “All of you, everyone, the best, the brightest, you have consented to mutually annihilate yourselves,” Neruda answers, “like the person who completes a task, who works toward his destiny. I have seen you kissing, biting, eating away at yourselves, dirtying yourselves, belittling yourselves, always equally monotonous and brutal . . . Water that returned to the earth. Cloud that the gust of wind turned to ashes.”
He, though, is a poet, and turns to explain what has become his personal manifesto of 1923, at the age of nineteen:
And me? Who is this that you challenge, what purity and entirety can you claim? I, too, am like you. Like you belittled, tainted, dirty, wasted, guilty. Like you. We are swallowed by the same ferocious throat, the same terrible monster. But, listen to me, I must free myself. Do you understand? The leap to a great height, the flight into the infinite sky, it will be I who takes it, and before you do. Before I rot I must be different, transform myself, free myself. You can continue the show. Not me. I’m leaving all of this, I’ll tear off these clothes in which you met me yesterday, and, crazy in turmoil, drunk with liberty, convulsed with threats, I shout out to you: Miserables!
He was now fixed on making a decisive turn at this crossroads to take his poetry in a different direction, in search of his true voice; to take the leap out of the misery that his previous work didn’t relieve; to find personal liberation through lyrical transformation. The route he set for himself was “provoked by an intense love passion.” The goal: “to encompass man, nature, the passions, and specific events, all into one work.”
Around the time he published that exposition in Claridad, feeling especially anxious about his poetry, Neruda made another trip to Temuco to restore his strength; his hometown served as a refuge, despite the ever-present tension with his father. One night, in the second-floor bedroom he grew up in, Neruda had what he’d later call a “curious experience.” Sometime past midnight, just before going to bed, he opened the window and looked out into an extraordinarily silent night. Then, as he described it in his memoirs, “The sky dazzled me. The entire sky was alive with a swarming multitude of stars. The night was newly cleansed by the rain and the Antarctic stars unfurled above my head.”
As if possessed by some sort of cosmic euphoria, he went to his desk, the same desk where he wrote his first poems in his math books. He wrote a poem, deliriously, as if trying to transcribe a dictation. The next morning he read it over with pure joy. Neruda felt he had discovered the new style he had been searching for: dramatically more exuberant, more open, just like the night sky under which it was composed.
When he returned to Santiago, he showed one of the new poems to his friend Aliro Oyarzún, who was well respected for his literary knowledge. “Are you sure those lines haven’t been influenced by Sabat Ercasty?” Oyarzún asked. Anxious, but ready to roll the dice, Neruda sent the poem to the Uruguayan poet himself, the man he had so boldly written to soon after he arrived in Santiago. He was just as bold this time:
Read this poem. It’s called “The Enthusiastic Sling-Shooter.” Someone told me that he saw your influence in it. I am very content with the poem. What do you think? I’d burn it [if it were true.] I admire you more than anyone, but how tragic is this racking my brain for words and symbols and turns of phrase. It is the greatest pain, greater still, more than ever, and for the first time (like in other things that I sent you) I thought I was in uncharted territory, in a place [land] that was destined to be mine alone.
The reply from Montevideo, according to Neruda, was: “Seldom have I read such a poem so significant, so magnificent, but I have to say it: yes, there is something of Sabat Ercasty in your verse.”
Sabat’s letter contained high praise, yet to Neruda, his hero’s words sounded a death knell for the new voice he had been pursuing. He carried around Sabat’s reply in his pocket for days until it fell apart. Neruda was at a crossroads with his writing, and, as he would one day explain in his memoirs, “Sabat Ercasty’s letter ended my cyclic ambition for an expansive poetry. I closed the door on an eloquence that I could never go on with; I deliberately toned down my style and my expression. Looking for more sensitive traits, for my own harmonic world, I began to write another book. Twenty Love Poems was the result.”
Chapter Six
Desperate Songs
You hear other voices in my aching voice.
The weeping of old mouths, the blood of old prayers.
Love me, compañera. Don’t abandon me.
Follow me. Follow me, compañera, on that wave of anguish.
—Poem V
Along with Teresa León Bettiens in Temuco, Neruda’s muse for the majority of Twenty Love Poems was Albertina Rosa Azócar. She was the sister of his new friend Rubén, a brilliant and charming student he’d met through the student scene. Albertina was studying French at the Pedagogy Institute. Although she was two years older than Neruda, she had entered the school just a year before. In the autumn of 1921, Neruda’s first year, they had classes together. Neruda was instantly attracted to her. Albertina knew of his intelligence, his reputation in the student circles, and his poetry.
Ninety-six female and eighty-eight male students, including Neruda, were enrolled in the French pedagogy program that year, all ensconced in the one brick building. Neruda could not have avoided Albertina if he had wanted to. She was affectionate, comforting, calm, sensual yet reserved, smart, and engaged. She ignited romantic and sexual fantasies in him that would explode in his heart, mind, and poetry.
They saw each other at the Saturday get-togethers where student poets would read their poetry. Albertina often attended with her friends. Reluctantly, Neruda began to participate. Albertina enjoyed his “sleepy reading voice,” which she and a friend would imitate afterward. They liked him, and Albertina was physically attracted to him too, despite the fact that he often “looked ill.” She found charm in how he was “always delicate,” in his wistfulness and melancholy. “He was so young, so romantic,” Albertina recalled a half century after they met. “I don’t know, a lot of girls like poets.” Neruda had, in fact, outgrown his adolescent gawkiness. While his thinness and gaunt face were remarkable, Neruda was developing a handsomeness, looking tall and smooth in his thin dark ties and the railroad worker’s jacket from his father. Confident from the prestige of winning the festival prize and the respect he had from her brother, Neruda made the move to sit next to her in class.
Soon after, on the rainy autumn afternoon of April 18, 1921, Neruda walked Albertina home to her boardinghouse and their romance began. They strolled down Avenida Cumming, through the heart of the university neighborhood. He continued to walk her home after classes, sometimes delighting her with fantastic tales. He gave her French books with yellow bindings, at least one by the writer Colette, which Albertina kept her entire life. Most often, though, the two walked silently, sometimes for hours, through the narrow Parque Forestal that lined the statuesque downtown streets of Santiago alongside the Mapocho River. He was very tender with her. He would love her like few others in his life.
Albertina was smart but not brilliant, and there was a charm to her but not an overwhelming allure. Her personality wasn’t as dynamic, exciting, and eccentric as others who had slipped in and out of his life, or those he would encounter over the next two decades. Her demeanor, in fact, made her seem almost “absent,” as Neruda would describe her in his famous Poem XV: “a butterfly in mourning,” “as if you weren’t here now.” She seemed especially flat compared with the naturally vibrant Teresa León Bettiens, whom he still loved and longed for. Albertina’s beauty was subtle as well: pale skin, almost ceramic; a refined, large nose; shapely lips; cheekbones that sat high near her sad, dark eyes; and tightly curled black hair that was often held in some type of chignon. Her figure, though, was strong and seductive.
Neruda saw her as a delicious, delicate lover who excited his sexual urges, conquering his timidity. And unlike Amelia and Teresa, those daughters of wealthy Temuco families who’d crushed his heart, Albertina was present and available.
Albertina’s significance for Neruda went beyond their romance. Neruda was still struggling to find his personal poetic path, to find his own language, and in this struggle his need for sexual release had become a driving force. As a primary object of his sexual desire at the time, Albertina became a source of poetic energy, and this only intensified when he lost her.
But her role in his writing went beyond that of the basic muse. At first, he may have been writing poems that were sympathetic in nature, like hymns or odes. But her absent answers to his desperate craving would convert her from muse to antagonist, provoking in him a terrorizing sensation of being caught in a tragedy. Just as he took to pen and paper to write about his desperation as a schoolkid, so he did now. He found release in his lyricism, saving him from emotional implosion, while also creating a medium for self-reflection.
At first, their relationship was limited to silent walks with only limited acts of physical intimacy. Albertina’s older sister, Adelina, kept a watchful eye on the two, worried about the bad influence of a rawboned bohemian poet. Adelina was repressive, almost tyrannical in her oversight of her little sister, whom she perceived as delicate, who was only in the big city because the University of Concepción was not yet teaching French pedagogy. Rubén interceded to help the couple. He would accompany Albertina, walk with her until they were out of sight of the house, and then depart so she and Pablo could be together.
Sexual relations between lovers in Neruda’s generation were not uncommon. In fact, the anarchist students were practically advocating a free-love movement, as shown in some of the pieces published in Claridad. A couple of months after his relationship with Albertina began, Neruda wrote an article that was typical not just of his own nature, but also of the predominating chauvinistic attitude in the male-dominated socialist circles. It lashed out against “bourgeois” traditions like marriage and chastity while designating women as means for sexual gratification.
His piece, simply entitled “Sex,” opened with a prefatory note from the editors of Claridad: “We publish this article because it reflects a fatal state of mind in all young people and because it contains a manifestation of protest against Christian morality.”*
The article begins: “He is strong. And young. The ardent flash of sex courses through his veins in electric shocks.” After his “first friend” shared with him the secret of masturbation, “the solitary pleasure went on corrupting the purity of his soul and opening him up to unknown pleasures.” But that time has passed. “Now, strong and young, he searches for an object in whom to empty out his goblet of virility. He is the animal that simply searches for an outlet for his natural potency. He is a male animal and life must give him the female in whom he’s made complete, growing stronger.” (Just two months earlier, he had found that female in Albertina, though she thus far insisted on remaining chaste.)
When the man finds a woman to be with, he “discovers that the arrival of one of these women brings with it something curious and strange: the dishonor of the one he wanted, like him, enjoying a pleasure for which nature gave him an organ. So the young male, who is honorable, becomes aware of the hypocritical morality they’ve invented to impede the full blooming of his physical inclinations.”
Seemingly with no other recourse, he goes to a “house of pleasure,” but the young male, “who is pure, limits his natural need and spurns, pitying the machine that delivers pleasure for an hourly rate.” Despising the laws, “he feels an urge to vent his rage against those who gave him the ancestral desire that ties him, like a giant hook, to life.”
About two months after the article was published, Albertina agreed to consummate their relationship. His eyes fixated on her entire length, seeing that body of woman, as he’d pen later in Twenty Love Poems, with her white hills, white thighs spreading open for the first time. He attempted to plow through her and reach the depths of the earth.
Yet, in what would become a pattern, while he had one lover he still longed for another in a distant location: in this case, Teresa León Bettiens, still living in Temuco. The queen of that town’s 1920 spring fiesta was still intrigued by the curious poet, despite the fact that her parents had called him a “vulture.” They would sometimes see each other when Neruda returned south for vacation, as he did over the first months of 1923 (the summer season in South America).
That would be a pivotal year for Neruda: he had fully established himself in the capital and was entering into the profound production of Twenty Love Poems. Yet nearly half of them pertained to Teresa, verses fostered by their time together in Puerto Saavedra and the longing that followed. Because of his time with her there, Neruda had elevated Puerto Saavedra to near-mythic stature in his poetry. Dreams, love, and sex combined in this landscape, ocean and forest fused, as Teresa’s body and womanhood bloomed. She was poetic, natural, eccentric, almost exotic in her Andalusian spirit, so different from the women he knew in the sprawls of Santiago. She defied her parents to be with him, on patios full of poppies, where the river that first took him to the sea flowed into the waves of the ocean.
