Neruda, page 11
His letters to Teresa speak for themselves:
And as you know, I can all of a sudden fall into fits of loneliness, fatigue, and sadness that don’t let me do anything and make me bitter about life. Why would I write you in these moments? Then, in these times that come upon me so unexpectedly, how sweet it is to receive letters from far away, from the woman I love, from you, and return to love life and return to happiness! —Pablo
Another one, written to Teresa from Santiago in 1923:
It rained yesterday, today too. It’s filled me with nostalgia. Oh, my faraway life! Everything I have is so far away, my childhood, my thoughts, now you, and the eternal rains falling on the roof, all of that abandoned world has filled my head with old musings and memories. Love me, Little One. —Pablo
A more desolate missive, in which he professed devotion to only her, runs parallel to his continual profession of the very same to Albertina:
I confess to you my disenchantment with everything, when you have the right—or do you?—to be my only enchantment . . . Tell me, you’ve never thought of these things that smash my heart into a thousand pieces? You’ve never left your girlish thoughts to feel the pain of abandonment of this boy who loves you? —Pablo
Sometime around May 1923, Albertina required urgent surgery. It seemed that a case of appendicitis infected and subsequently inflamed the thin tissue lining the interior of her abdominal wall. This acute condition, called peritonitis, can be fatal. The emergency surgery was especially complicated at the time; she stayed in the hospital for over a month. Her lover proved devoted; Neruda came to her bedside every day throughout her recovery.
During her stay he wrote “Hospital,” a short prose piece for Claridad, part of a series of twelve impressionistic pieces under the title “The Distant Life”:
The sole center of my existence was often just a yellow sliver of sun that pierced the curtains. I watched it glimmer, stretch, and scatter. My roommates’ moans sometimes snapped me out of that obsessive observation, and all the mortal sadness of those sickrooms suddenly leaked out on my defeated heart.
Convalescing, I walked the strangely silent corridors with slow steps. The sisters passed by me with their daily hustle and bustle, and sometimes, a trembling, anguished cry would stop me near a window or against the crack of a doorway . . . In the center of the courtyard the nuns had an altar to the Virgin: a stony grotto, covered in climbing vines. It was the only bright spot in the hospital filled with shadows. Night and day, the candles of that alcove were lit, and I would light my cigarettes one by one in those sacred flames flickering in the wind.
Once Albertina was fully recuperated, her parents commanded her to return home to Lota. Even before her illness they had never liked the idea of her being in such a threatening city, some 350 miles away. Furthermore, the University of Concepción’s School of Education, only twenty-five miles from Lota, had just started a French program of its own. As far as they were concerned, there was no longer any reason for her to be in Santiago. After all of Neruda’s constancy, the swell of so much love, he was suddenly told to keep his distance.
Neruda was crushed by this turn of events. His frustration raged, and he found few ways to ameliorate it. Yet while he often suggested it, he never moved to Concepción, and Albertina’s fate was fixed for now. He turned to poetry, of course, and his despair at her absence led to the most famous poem in Twenty Love Poems.
His exasperation also came out in more than a hundred surprising letters that he wrote to Albertina between 1923 and 1932 (which she saved). Prior to her departure, he had written to her about minute details of daily life and profound thoughts. Yet immediately after she moved to Concepción, nearly every letter desperately and aggressively declared how much he needed her. They became quite nasty. Most of them started with an attack on her, a reproach, almost always followed by placation and a soft expression of how much he loved her. These were combined with cute illustrations, such as patterns drawing out the word beso (kiss). Perhaps he hoped that he could make her feel guilty for inspiring his obsession and causing him such pain. He called her an “ugly cockroach,” simply “ugly” on several more occasions, a “bad woman.” His nicknames for Albertina seemed to harken back to his discovery of the forest as a child: Princess Worm. Pesky little worm. Girl of the secrets. Frog. Snake. Spider. Beetle. Malicious whore. Adored doll. Little scoundrel. My ugly little girl. My pretty little girl. Little rat. Seashell. Bee. Beloved brat of my soul.
In the earliest of the letters, we can see the emotional and linguistic ingredients of some of the poems in Twenty Love Poems. While Albertina was in Concepción, in a letter dated September 16, 1923, Neruda confided to her that “spread out on the moist grass, in the afternoons, I think of your gray beret, of your eyes that I love, of you.” Later, in Poem VI, he took that very imagery from the letter and deepened it, turning it into a dynamic, multileveled poem:*
I can feel your eyes, voyaging away, distant as that autumn,
Grey beret, voice of a bird, heart of a huntress—
Where all my deep agony migrated,
Where my happy kisses fell like embers.
The skies from shipboard. Fields from the hills.
Your memory is of light, of smoke, of a still pool.
Deep in your eyes the twilight burned.
The dry leaves of autumn whirled in your soul.
In that same letter in which Neruda mentions her gray beret, he states: “Little One, yesterday you must have received a newspaper, and in it the poem of the absent one. (You are the absent one.)”
The poem he refers to had just been published in Claridad six days before:
This lullaby is for you, Little One, wherever you are, wherever you go.
Trembling warm river, the tenderness wets my voice, my voice that speaks your name.
For you, further than the distant red clouds, and the distant mountains, distant because of you I look farther, farther still.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The absent one, who closes the eyelids, on the other side of the shadow. I speak to you, and my voice calls out to you, Little One. Don’t leave, don’t you ever leave.
This idea, that by invoking her absence he will make them both more present, is evident in the letter after he mentions the poem and her role in it: “Did you like it, Little One? Does it convince you that I remember you? And on the other hand, you. In ten days, one letter.” He admits, “Given that I am very vain, I’m very sensitive [to the fact that she isn’t writing him].”
True to its raw autobiographical nature, Twenty Love Poems seems composed directly from many of these letters, both the words and the psychology. This is evident in a similar, subsequent letter to Albertina, which contains the opening to Poem XV:
Almost always I feel like writing to you, so if I don’t receive your letter I become troubled. It’s as if you were thinking about something else while I talk to you, or as if I talked to you through a wall and didn’t hear your voice.
The beginning of Poem XV:
I like it when you’re quiet. It’s as if you were absent,
and you heard me from a distance, and my voice couldn’t reach you.
It’s as if your eyes had flown away from you,
and that a kiss had sealed your mouth.*
Albertina, years later, would relate that during their days together in Santiago, “when we went for walks, he’d be silent, but I’d be quiet too.”
In the years since the book was published, Poem XV may be considered the most popular poem in the book, alongside Poem XX (“I can write the saddest verses tonight”). Albertina herself said that “I like it when you’re quiet” was her favorite. The poem is powered by Neruda’s glorification of the absence of his lover, which is idealized as we find him, the poem’s speaker, struggling to accept that he and his lover are not together.†
Neruda had several muses/subjects for Twenty Love Poems, though Albertina and Teresa were the two most important and prevalent. In each poem, the loved one is not present; each verse is a failed call to have her right next to him. Those to Teresa express a heartache that became wrung ever tighter as the futility of his desire for her increased with time. By the end of 1923, Teresa’s parents’ opposition to their relationship became too much for her. Neruda sent her one final letter from Santiago with the hope of changing her mind:
Your life, God, if he exists, will want to make good and sweet as I dreamed it would be. Mine? What does it matter? I will get lost on a road, one of the many there are in the world. Your trail won’t be mine, you won’t arrive when I do, and my rare joys won’t arrive to illuminate you, but how much I loved you! And why would this great love not be able to fill the void of this separation?
No, now I can’t write you. I feel a sorrow that grasps my throat or my heart. Everything is over? Say it’s not, it’s not, it’s not. —Pablo
“I no longer love her, it’s true, but how much I loved her,” he convinces himself near the end of Poem XX, which seems to spring right from the letter to Teresa. The cosmic frustration is stretched across a nocturnal landscape in which he could “write the saddest verses” (including “Love is so short, forgetting is so long”). Maybe he does still love her, he’s willing to admit near the end, but he is resigned to live on without her:
Because on nights like this I held her in my arms,
my soul is not at peace with having lost her.
Though this may be the final sorrow she causes me,
and these the last verses I write for her.
He may have lost her, but he still has poetry, still has the power, for whatever it may serve, to write the saddest verses.
Neruda was not, however, resigned to let Albertina go. He was terribly distraught by her absence, perhaps because she had not given him a definitive answer, perhaps because he couldn’t understand or simply accept that she would not be with him. His letters to her show his shattered psyche and blistering frustration:
The only thing that makes others desperate is the hardness of the heart. Imagine how I discover that [hard heart] in you, in you who are a part of me. I want to hit my head against the wall. You think that this is injustice or evil. No, it’s not that, it’s desperation. You’re my last hope. You must understand, it is your job to forgive me. I make it all up to you with the savage love that I feel for you. Isn’t that right, evil whore? Isn’t it true that you’re a bit at fault as well? Frog, snake, spider. I will pinch your nose.
He ends the letter with his customary conflation of deprecation and supplication:
As always, ugly brat, receive a long, long kiss from your —Pablo.
Neruda’s passion invoked a cruelty in him, as seen in these letters, a cringeful combination of scorn, despair, and tender affection. For Neruda at this time, about to turn twenty-one, love, hate, and possession intertwine: “I’ll eat you up with kisses,” he wrote her in April 1925. He rages against abandonment, to which he was certainly sensitized by the loss of his mother, as seen in his early poems. He also demonstrates constant neediness and extreme anxiety, perhaps results of his sickly, fragile, moody childhood. And he rages against authority figures who thwart him, like his father, Albertina’s father, and the parents of other lovers in the past, as well as against the women themselves, like Albertina, whom he blames for his pain.
Albertina later said she would have married Neruda had it not been for the move and the prolonged separation that followed. Neruda, though, did little to find a way to be with her in Concepción. Her brother and his great friend, Rubén, though not in Concepción at the time, surely could have helped him to travel and stay there with mutual friends. But Neruda didn’t try, perhaps because the inability to be with the “absent one,” with all the seething of his nerves that accompanied it, was more fulfilling for him and his poetry than actually being confronted by her presence. As Poem XV opens with “I like it when you’re quiet. It’s as if you weren’t here now,” it moves to:
I like it when you’re quiet. It’s as if you’d gone away now,
And you’d become the keening, the butterfly’s insistence,
And you heard me from a distance and my voice didn’t reach you.
It’s then that what I want is to be quiet with your silence.
Despite Neruda’s alarming and often hostile passion, Albertina was still drawn to him. He now showed a good sense of humor, and he was an enigma with a brilliant mind and imagination, with growing fame and stature as the voice of their generation. Even more so by 1925, he had lost the awkward appearance and developed into a handsome young man, suave, at times even elegant, especially when dressed in a suit once the old railroad jacket and huge sombrero had grown old.
In time, Neruda was able to break through those enraging “square and rigid frames” of conservative society that restricted his potent will to love freely. His partner for this was Laura Arrué, another muse for Twenty Love Poems. She shimmered with an innocent radiance. With a curl to her blond hair, porcelain skin, and refined cheekbones, Diego Muñoz and others thought she resembled a young Greta Garbo. She was intelligent too, with a sharp wit.
Laura had first seen Neruda at the headquarters of the FECh during the 1921 spring fiesta, when he was crowned the top poet. She was only fourteen and had been excited by the energy and fantastic spectacle of the whole festival, including Neruda’s muted eccentricity as he accepted his prize.
A couple of years later, her older sister, who was also studying at the Pedagogy Institute, brought her to one of Neruda’s first big readings at the University of Chile’s main hall. Two poems in particular struck chords in her young heart: “Farewell” (“deep inside you, on his knees, / a sad child, like myself, watches us”; “I love the love of sailors / who kiss, then leave”) and Poem VI, about Albertina:
I remember you as you were in that last autumn
You were the grey beret and the heart in calm
Deep in your eyes the twilight burned
The dry leaves of autumn whirled in your soul.
Laura, now seventeen, thought his voice sounded like a goose’s, a bit whiny, with almost a stubborn lament. Just like Albertina and her amigas, Laura would imitate it with her friends, always making them laugh. She felt that the whine in his thin reading voice must be somewhat characteristic of his personality. Still, there was something endearing about it.
Laura’s father was a learned, sensitive, and popular poet who possessed an ample spirit and, as she put it, rejoiced in all of nature’s manifestations. Perhaps it was from him that she acquired an enduring interest in art in all its forms. She sought out conferences, readings, concerts, and art expositions all around Santiago.
In 1923, Laura was in her third year at an experimental boarding school, the progressive Normal School (No. 1). Its founding was a breakthrough in Latin America, a model training setting that allowed women to become teachers (though without improving their stature in society). The school vigorously promoted art and literature, and invited writers, artists, and intellectuals to present and share their work and ideas.
The school decided to ask Neruda to give a reading, and it fell upon Laura and her classmate Agustina Villalobos to deliver the invitation to him on behalf of the director and the faculty. At the time, Neruda was living in a tiny room in a run-down boardinghouse at 330 Echaurren Street. He had been moving from one shabby residence to another, living on a shoestring. Laura and Agustina found him in his room, lying on a mattress atop a cheap box spring. There was an old sugar crate that served as a nightstand, and next to it was a chair with his clothes piled and hanging from it. That was all the furniture he had, as he’d sold the rest to finance the printing of The Book of Twilights.
When Laura and Agustina timidly entered the room, Neruda smiled, slowly putting the book he was reading atop the pile of others on the sugar crate. They handed him the invitation, along with a bouquet of white carnations. He asked their names, what grade they were in, and where they were from. Laura answered San Fernando, a tranquil town between the Andes and the coast, about ninety miles south of Santiago. San Fernando is in the province of Colchagua—Mapudungun for “valley of small lakes.” The name moved Neruda. The region boasts some of the country’s most fertile soils. Laura’s grandparents owned a large hacienda where they grew everything from grains to onions. Laura’s grandmother was adamant that their family not mix their blood with strangers’; they were supposedly of pure Spanish descent. Laura’s mother, though, wanted something different for her daughters. To experience the cosmopolitan city and to attain a good education, Laura and her older sister had moved into their cousin’s large house in Santiago.
Neruda might have loved to hear all of this, but the conversation that night was limited to brief remarks before the girls left, their mission completed. Neruda was immediately lured by Laura’s extraordinary beauty. Due to the brevity of the encounter, he wasn’t yet able to appreciate how bright and insightful she truly was. Nor did he know that even though Laura thought his style of dress somewhat pretentious, she also found him handsome.
As a result of the invitation Laura delivered, Neruda started to visit her school, in particular her history teacher, María Malvar de Leng, who lived there as well. During these visits, the teacher would call out for Laura to accompany Neruda in great shouts from the second-floor balcony that overlooked the patio. Soon Laura and Neruda began to see each other outside of school. Laura’s older cousin had to chaperone. Her parents were definitely not happy about the interaction between their young daughter and this “atrocious troubadour.”
It was the spring of 1923. Albertina had just left for Concepción. Little is known about the relationship between Laura and Neruda. Neruda didn’t write about her later, out of respect for his friendship with Laura’s future husband, Homero Arce, who would become his faithful secretary. Arce died in 1977, after agents from the dictatorship cracked his skull. Five years later, Laura opened up—to a degree—in a moving memoir: “I loved Pablito for a short and violent time.”
