Neruda, p.18
Neruda, page 18
Buried next to the coconut tree you will later find
the knife that I hid there for fear you’d kill me . . .
Yet he longs to return to the scene:
and now suddenly I want to smell its kitchen steel . . .
Neruda cycles perceived threat, desire, and barbarity throughout the poem.
I would give this giant sea wind for your brusque breath
. . . to hear you urinate, in the darkness, in the back of the house,
as if spilling a thin, tremulous, silvery, persistent honey,
how many times would I give up this chorus of shadows that I possess,
and the noise of useless swords that is heard in my heart.
It was revolutionary to write a line like “to hear you urinate, in the darkness” in Spanish, a line that still sings with its provocative sound and substance. It represents the raw reality of daily life and the intimacy that can sweeten urine to honey. He almost elevates her corporal excreta to the divine. Yet there is a dark undertone: the woman in the poem is like a wild animal.
Neruda’s memoirs contain a postscript to Josie Bliss. Supposedly, she discovered the location of his new post and followed him, pitching camp right in front of his house. “As she thought that rice wasn’t grown anywhere but in Rangoon, she arrived with a sack of rice on her back, with our favorite Paul Robeson records, and a long, rolled-up carpet. From the front door she dedicated herself to observe and then insult and attack anybody who came to visit me.” Her public disruption forced the colonial police to warn Neruda that if he didn’t take her in, she’d be thrown out of the country. “I suffered for days, going back and forth between the tenderness that her unfortunate love inspired in me and the terror I had of her. I didn’t dare let her set foot in my house. She was a love terrorist, capable of anything.”
With a long knife (that same kitchen knife, perhaps), she supposedly attacked a sweet young Englishwoman who came to visit the consul. Neruda’s neighbor eventually took her in, and then, with no explicit prompt, she finally left, vociferously begging the poet to come with her on the boat back to Rangoon. Neruda accompanied her to the dock, and as they embraced, she bathed him in tears and kisses, all the way down to his toes, “so that the chalk polish of my white shoes was smeared like flour all over her face . . . That turbulent sorrow, those terrible tears rolling down her floured face, continue to live in my memory.”
Elegant writing aside, even if she did exist, Neruda has Josie appear only as an exotic tale, demonstrating how he saw himself as an exception to imperialistic culture, naive to how his own words indicate his racism. “I went so deep into the soul and the lives of those people that I fell in love with a native,” he begins his story of Josie Bliss in his memoirs, a comment akin to the classic “some of my best friends are . . .” He felt he had known the Burmese culture, almost like an anthropologist, but his relationship with Josie was awash in stereotypes. He congratulates himself for his courageous, righteous interaction, for “going so deep,” while propagating a racist, sexist trope. Neruda was actively promoting social equality and justice at the same time he was composing these memoirs in the 1960s. Yet his dehumanization of nonwhite women certainly undercuts his moral authority when he writes about the “downtrodden.” The contradictions between Neruda’s personal life and attitudes and his future political ideals were revealed glaringly during his time in Asia, and would resurface often throughout his life.*
Chapter Nine
Opium and Marriage
I hear the dream of old friends and lovers,
dreams whose heartbeats break me open:
their carpeted floors I walk in silence,
their poppy light I bite in delirium.
—“Nocturnal Collection”
Neruda moved to Colombo, located on the western side of the great island of Ceylon, into a bungalow outside of the city’s center, near the beach. He had a dog; his mongoose, Kiria; and at least one servant, Ratnaigh. Someone took a posed photograph of him standing against a palm tree, his arms crossed over a dark vest tucked into his white trousers. His black belt sits high on his lanky torso, his legs seem disproportionately long, and his outfit is a bit formal for the occasion. He’s not nearly as skinny as in his student days, though still slim, with some maturity in his face. As the photo is being taken, he stares out into the southern Arabian Sea, as if he doesn’t want to be there. Beside him, Ratnaigh, dressed in white, sits crouched on the sand, his arms draped over his knees, seemingly relaxed and at ease.
The small bungalow was just outside of all the hustle and bustle of Colombo. “Have I told you about Wellawatta, the neighborhood I live in?” he wrote Eandi. “Ocean and palm trees, waters, leaves. The ocean encircles me, quickly, with fury, leaving nothing around me . . . Eandi, there is no one more alone than me.”
Indeed, at first there seemed to be little difference from Rangoon. “Caught between the Englishmen dressed in dinner jackets every night and the Hindus [actually, most were Buddhists], unreachable in their fabulous immensity, I could only choose solitude, and so that time was the loneliest in my life.”* It is unclear why he persistently isolated himself from others. Just as he expresses disdain for the British, he also shows entitlement and imperiousness toward the locals, as seen in his correspondence in Burma and now in his new post. “If you, my dear mother, passed by my house in Colombo, you’d hear how I yell from morning to night to the servant to pass me cigarettes, paper, lemonade, and to have ready my pants, shirts, and all the artifacts needed to live.”
And he didn’t isolate himself from the locals of European descent. “I never read with such pleasure and such abundance like in that suburb of Colombo,” Neruda wrote in 1968, from the comforts of Isla Negra, for a magazine article. “I had a friend outside of town, Lionel Wendt, a pianist . . . Since I was so eager to read English books as I arrived in Ceylon, he took it upon himself to let me borrow his in continual succession.” Every Saturday, a cyclist would bring a fresh supply in a potato sack from Wendt’s house in Colombo “to my bungalow in Wellawatta.”
The potato sacks contained the latest poems by T. S. Eliot out of London and Hemingway’s newly published A Farewell to Arms. There were two now-classic novels published the year before (1928), both known for their shocking portrayals of relationships and sex: D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (a copy from Florence, as it was still banned in the United Kingdom) and Aldous Huxley’s innovative Point Counter Point.*
He also revisited Rimbaud, Quevedo, Proust, and other classics Wendt had available.
Besides his new pianist friend, Neruda had more social interaction with Europeans than ever before. He spent time with Wendt’s childhood friend George Keyt. All three were no more than four years apart in age. Wendt and Keyt were both born in Ceylon and had mixed European and Asian blood. Educated in British schools, the two were part of the colonial elite.
Yet while they may have come from and been raised in that society, they were both very unconventional members of the group. Besides being a concert pianist, Wendt was an important avant-garde art patron and an eclectic, experimental photographer.
Keyt had become a Buddhist; as a painter, his synthesis of European modernist innovations with ancient South Asian traditions would gain him world renown. Neruda even wrote a review for the Times of Ceylon of a 1930 art exhibition his friend was a part of: “Keyt, I think, is the living nucleus of a great painter . . . These figures take on a strange expressive grandeur, and radiate an aura of intensely profound feeling.”†
Though, as he had back home, he found camaraderie with like-minded intellectuals and artists, it didn’t seem to pull him out of his mental isolation. Neruda was never an excessive drinker (though he’d always enjoy his vino tinto and whiskeys) except at this time, when it seemed he had nothing else better to do, other than write to Eandi: “I’m alone; every ten minutes my servant comes, Ratnaigh, he comes every ten minutes to fill my glass.” He felt lonely despite this constant presence of another human being: “I feel anxious, restless, banished, moribund.” After pleading for Eandi to come join him, in capital letters even—“¡VENGA!”—he soon returns to his compulsiveness over his particular sense of banishment, almost a self-imposed exile: “You remember those novels by José Conrads [sic],” he asks Eandi, “with those strange beings who’ve been banished, exiled, with no possible restitution? Sometimes I feel like them, just that; this is just so long.” Later he wrote: “Two days ago I interrupted this letter, falling down, full of alcohol.”
He had the option of returning to Chile but did nothing to change his circumstances. Instead, he wallowed in self-pity.
* * *
Neruda was also writing constantly to Albertina and Laura Arrué, perhaps Teresa as well.* There was not one response from Laura. She in fact had not received even one of the letters he had promised to write and had become disillusioned. Anticipating possible censorship by Laura’s mother, Neruda had been sending her letters through his friend Homero Arce, who worked for the Chilean postal service. But Homero had fallen deeply in love with Laura; he never gave her any of Neruda’s letters.
Finally, a long-awaited letter came from Albertina. She was in Paris, en route to Brussels, on a fellowship to learn a new system for teaching French to children. The poet wrote back quickly, desperately, as always, saying this would be the last chance they’d have to be together, adding, “I’m very tired from the loneliness, and if you don’t come, I’ll try to marry someone else.” He gave her all the details of a ship that would take her from France to Colombo and told her, “Every day, and every hour of every day, I ask myself: Will she come?”
She never did. Albertina’s fellowship was revoked when the school’s director opened Neruda’s letter to her and demanded an explanation about why she was seemingly entertaining such a proposal from Ceylon while she was there to study. Albertina refused to answer and was forced to return home. She did love him, but as she later related, “In those days, more than fifty years ago, you have to understand that things were not as they are now. I had to go back to my university, and besides that, my parents were fairly strict—I didn’t dare go.”
From a later letter to Héctor Eandi, written on February 27, 1930:
A woman, whom I have loved a lot (it was for her that I wrote almost all Twenty Poems), she wrote me three months ago, and we worked out her coming, we were going to marry, and for a while I lived full of her arrival, arranging my bungalow, thinking in the kitchen, well, in everything. And she couldn’t come, or at least not for the moment, for reasonable circumstances, perhaps, but I had a fever for a week and couldn’t eat, it was like something inside me burned me up, a terrible pain . . .
At least seven of the first fifteen poems of Residence on Earth are about Albertina or Laura Arrué, or both. Albertina takes on the presence of a ghost, where she is the “dazzled, pale student” who “surges up from yesteryear,” but she is not real, only a “phantom.” In these verses Neruda reaches a darkness only hinted at in Twenty Love Poems. His narrators are stuck in the past, unable to exist in the present, which in any case offers only remorse and dread:
In the depths of the deep sea,
in the night of long lists,
your silent silent name
runs past like a horse.
Lodge me on your back, oh shelter me,
appear to me in your mirror, suddenly,
upon the solitary, nocturnal pane,
sprouting from the dark behind you.
Flower of sweet total light,
bring your mouth of kisses to my call,
violent from separations,
that resolute and delicate mouth . . .
—“Madrigal Written in Winter”
Echoing his letters to her, Neruda accuses “Oh heartless lady” Albertina of “tyranny” over his emotions in his poetry. As we have seen before, he blames the women in his life for his psychic pain and seems impotent to do anything about it.
Sexually, meanwhile, he was comfortable in the role of aggressor—even predator—the role he played with Josie Bliss. As he wrote in his memoirs, “Female friends of various colorings visited my campaign cot, leaving no more history than the physical lightning. My body was a solitary bonfire burning night and day on that tropical coast. My friend Patsy came by a lot with some of her friends, morena and golden muchachas, girls of Boer, English, Dravidian blood. They went to bed with me sportingly with little interest.”
The most beautiful woman Neruda saw in Ceylon was a Tamil of the pariah caste, an “untouchable,” who cleaned out the tin box that was the bottom of his waterless toilet. “She walked solemnly toward the latrine, without so much as a side glance at me, not bothering to acknowledge my existence, and vanished with the disgusting receptacle on her head, moving away with the steps of a goddess.” “She was so lovely . . . despite her humble job.” For him she was not human, but an exotic “other”: “Like a shy jungle animal, she belonged to another kind of existence, a different world.” She wore a red-and-gold sari of the cheapest cloth, heavy bangles on her bare ankles; a tiny dot glittered on each side of her nose. He called to her, “but it was of no use.”
Neruda simply couldn’t get her off his mind, so “one morning, I decided to go all the way. I got a strong grip on her wrist and stared into her eyes. There was no language I could talk with her. She let me lead her, without a smile, and she was soon naked on my bed. Her skinny waist, her full hips, the brimming cups of her breasts, made her like one of the millennial sculptures from southern India. The encounter was of a man with a statue. Her eyes stayed open the whole time, impassible. She was right to despise me. The experience was not repeated.”
In his and others’ writings, there is no evidence that Neruda ever committed another assault of this nature, but here he describes his exercise of power and privilege with little shame. During the act of rape, he perceives her as inhuman, a piece of stone. Then he projects divinity on her, comparing her to a sublime goddess like one of the “millennial sculptures from southern India.”* Perhaps he feels that he absolves himself to some degree through such exaltation.
While he may have understood class in the Marxist sense, Neruda never connected that abstraction to the institutional realities of racism, sexism, or social caste, all of which were keenly at play in this act of violence. His version of events is not unrelated to his interpretation, in the same chapter, of his experiences with his “Burmese panther,” Josie Bliss. The woman is not a woman, but a caricature of submissiveness and cultural inferiority that he can dominate.
Neruda’s behavior, both here and throughout his time in Asia, was imperialism perpetrated on a human scale, an exact replica of the imperialism perpetrated on a geopolitical scale against which he ranted both while in Asia and while writing his memoirs. His rape of a person based on his sense of entitlement and inherent superiority was a perfect expression of the rape of one nation by another based on these same presumptions of merit and worth. In his narcissism, he could not see the connection.
His narcissism is further expressed in the way he integrates the woman’s duty of cleaning his personal excrement into the story of his violation of her. It amounts to the divinization of his excrement, as it is a sublime goddess who empties his chamber pot. This goddess merits less consideration than even a prostitute, whom Neruda would at least have paid for her services. Or as the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek put it, as part of a larger study, the relationship Neruda proposes should be taken very seriously: “elevating the exotic Other into an indifferent divinity is strictly equal to treating it like shit.”
Did Neruda tell the world this story in the 1960s because he consciously or unconsciously felt it had to be told? Or had he maintained the same sense of entitlement that had allowed him to commit the rape in the first place? Even later in life, he would not recognize the inhumanity of his actions. There is no true repentance, no explanation for that behavior. If perhaps he felt a twinge of regret, it passed quickly.
* * *
Amid speculation about a possible transfer to Singapore, Neruda expressed his excitement to Eandi for the “magical Malay Archipelago, beautiful women, beautiful rituals.” “I’ve already been to Singapore and Bali twice and I’ve smoked many pipes of opium there. I’m not sure I like it, but it’s different, anyhow,” he wrote, placing emphasis on the word “anyhow” by writing it in English.
Yet his memoirs describe a divergent, distinctly unpleasant experience with opium. He actively used it in Ceylon, though years later, in his memoirs, he would disavow his enjoyment of it, perhaps to better reflect upon his mature career as a world-renowned poet.
“I smoked one pipe . . . It was nothing . . . The smoke was warm, gloomy, misty, and milky . . . I smoked four pipes and was sick for five days, with nauseas that came up my spinal cord, which descended from my brain.
“So much had been said, so much had been written. There had to be more to it than this.”
The literature of opium has a long history, from Homer and Virgil to Shakespeare. But Neruda was most compelled by works that portrayed actual experiences with the drug, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “vision in a dream” in his poem “Kubla Khan,” Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, and, perhaps above all for Neruda, his hero Baudelaire’s 1860 classic Les Paradis artificiels. Opium appeared in many works of nineteenth-century British literature,* especially in the English romantics’ poems. Not only did they lyricize the mysteries of the Oriental drug, but they also used it heavily. As M. H. Abrams argued in The Milk of Paradise (1934), opium’s effects caused the romantics to be “inspired to ecstasies.” A nonuser could never experience the realm of dreams and sensations that led to some of the era’s best writing.
