Neruda, page 20
Batavia is located on the northwestern end of the immense yet relatively narrow island of Java.* The landscape here was unlike where Neruda had been, and was full of volcanic mountains. There were fertile swaths of rice paddies and coffee groves, making the area one of the most profitable of all the Dutch colonies. By 1930 it was also a much more cosmopolitan city than Neruda’s previous posts, with shopping, entertainment, and better roads for exploring the wilder surroundings. Neruda gradually became involved with the Dutch colonial elite. Despite never having been much of a tennis player, it was at a tennis match that he met a tall, attractive blue-eyed Dutchwoman, Maria Antonia Hagenaar Vogelzang. She still lived with her parents, which was not uncommon. Neruda would call her Maruca, the Spanish version of Marietje, the name by which she went in Batavia.
Finally, in the Far East, Neruda kindled a romance with a woman who met his societal requirements. Maruca, with her European blood, was marriageable. Perhaps she felt a maternal affection for him. She did adore him at first, in an exciting, first-love, almost blind kind of way. At the tennis courts and markets and on tropical day trips, they had ample leisure time in which to develop a relationship. They shared a desire to be with someone of their own race with similar social standing. They had little else in common. The year before, Neruda had written to Eandi from Ceylon that he wanted to marry “soon, tomorrow even.” That and to live in a big city were his only persistent wishes.
He would satisfy both. In a postcard marked January 31, 1931, he announced the news: “No longer alone! Dear Eandi, I got married a month ago.” Their wedding took place on December 6, 1930, less than half a year after meeting at the tennis court.
A week later he wrote to his father, announcing the event and stressing that his wife was from a “distinguished family” and that he had wanted to tell him earlier about his decision to marry “and wait for your consent, but due to numerous circumstances, our wedding was certified much earlier than the date we expected.” Neruda placated him, writing, “From now on, you will not have to worry knowing your son is alone and far away from you, for now I have someone who will be with me forever.” He added, “She brings together all the perfections and we are entirely happy.” He also told his father that, as she doesn’t speak Spanish and he doesn’t speak Dutch, they both speak English “perfectly.”
Neruda then wrote to his good friend Ángel Cruchaga Santa María (who would later marry Albertina):
I’ve married. Do me the favor of publishing in good shape this portrait of my wife in Zig-Zag. They have a thing for me there.
Why should I tell you that this is to please her. She knows you very well already . . .
I beg you to send me two copies of the Zig-Zag in which it appears.
But don’t forget, if not you could disturb a home’s peacefulness!
Frantically yours,
Pablo
Neruda
With the freshness of newlyweds, the couple was a handsome pair.
Ten months into the marriage, on September 5, 1931, Neruda penned details to Eandi about his life as a married man in Java. He and his Dutch wife were “extremely close,” “extremely happy,” he begins. Everything that follows seems to contradict that. They lived “in a house smaller than a thimble. I read; she knits. The consular life, the protocol, the meals, dinner jackets, tailcoats, formal tuxedos, uniforms, dances, cocktails, all the time: hell.”
Sometimes they would get away by car, taking a thermos, cognac, and books to the mountains or the coast to look out at “the black island, Sumatra, and the submarine volcano Krakatau. We eat sandwiches. We go back. I don’t write . . . Every day is the same as the next in this land. Books. Films.”
He never wrote a single love poem to Maruca. On the one page that he mentions her in his memoirs, he set her aside in parentheses, saying only, “I had met a creole, or better said a Dutch woman with drops of Malayan blood, whom I liked a lot. She was a tall and gentle woman, a total stranger to the world of arts and letters.” He then, in a manner and format like nowhere else in the book, inserts the following, as if he couldn’t manage to write more than just those two sentences about her in the first person:
(Some years later, my biographer and friend Margarita Aguirre would write, “Neruda returned to Chile in 1932. Two years before, in Batavia, he had married María Antonieta Hagenaar, a young Dutch woman established in Java. She is very proud to be the wife of a consul and has a rather exotic view of America. She doesn’t know Spanish and is starting to learn it. But there is no doubt that it’s not just the language that she doesn’t know. In spite of everything, her sentimental adhesion to Neruda is very strong, and you always see them together. Maruca—that’s what Neruda calls her—is very tall, slow, formal.”)
In Batavia, after sending the necessary letters announcing their marriage, Neruda was eager to return to Chile with Maruca on his arm. He wouldn’t have to wait long to show her off in person. The Chilean government drastically cut back its consular positions due to the tremendous economic effect the Great Depression was having on the country. As commodity prices plunged, so did the Chilean government’s treasury, and as world trade dwindled, so did the amount of revenue from trade that consuls such as Neruda depended on. While Maruca’s family could perhaps have arranged something for them in Batavia, he was ready to return home anyway and now had his impetus. The long-love-scorned poet was coming home with a woman by his side.
Chapter Ten
An Interlude
Blood has fingers and it opens tunnels
beneath the earth.
—“Maternity”
Neruda and Maruca arrived in Chile on April 18, 1932, after a dreary two-month journey aboard a cargo ship, the Forafic. The fact that they could afford to cross the seas only on such an uncomfortable ship, with few cabins meant for passengers and a diesel engine drastically slower than a steamship’s, was a sign that marriage to Maruca did not suddenly resolve Neruda’s financial situation. This left them with Neruda’s meager consul salary, which had virtually disappeared during his last days in Asia. The voyage was tedious, with no decks designed for passengers, only a main deck full of open pipes, chimneys, cables, and additional cargo. The seemingly endless isolation with his new wife, for whom he quickly realized he had no real passion and little patience, thwarted whatever excitement Neruda had mustered to begin his new life in Chile. His energy evaporated, replaced by the terrible moods he thought he had put behind him.
Throughout that passage from the Indian Ocean, across the Atlantic, and up along Chile’s Pacific coast, he had little else to do but write. He wrote a brutal, haunting, hypnotic poem, “The Ghost of the Cargo Ship.” The speaker is the only passenger on board, perhaps the phantom of the poem’s title. The boat becomes phantasmal as well, and its engines echo the locomotive engines in “Railroad Roundhouses at Night.” Here, the “tired machinery that howls and weeps” is
pushing the prow, kicking the sides,
mumbling low groans, swallowing and swallowing distances,
making a noise of sour waters over the sour waters,
moving the old ship over the old waters.
Time, notably, is “still and visible like a great disgrace.” Neruda seems stuck, ghostlike, completely alone, despite his new marriage. Interestingly, in ordering the poems in Residence on Earth’s first volume, he placed “The Ghost of the Cargo Ship,” full of his disenchantment with his white wife, right before “Widower’s Tango,” which expresses his desire to be with Josie Bliss again. A poem titled “Josie Bliss” closes the second volume of Residence on Earth.
Finally, on April 18, 1932, Neruda and Maruca disembarked in Puerto Montt, where Patagonia begins. Had they arrived at Valparaíso, the ship would have navigated through a port full of empty boats with nothing to load and nowhere to go. At the same time that the country was suffering from the repercussions of the global economic depression, Chile’s critical saltpeter industry crashed as well. The Atacama Desert, which covers the northern part of the country, is the world’s largest source of salitre—sodium nitrate, or saltpeter. It became known as “white gold” due to worldwide demand; its two principal uses were as a fertilizer, raising crop yields as the global population was surging, and as an ingredient in gunpowder, especially at the start of World War I. Export taxes on the foreign-owned mines helped fund the government, and the mines were a major source of employment. But just as the war was ending, a synthetic replacement was developed. The price of saltpeter fell by half between 1925 and 1932. International demand for Chile’s copper also dropped steeply.
In its World Economic Survey, 1932–33, the League of Nations ranked Chile as the nation most devastated by the Depression. The signs were clear and alarming: rampant unemployment, a severe depletion of the money supply, the government’s desperate efforts to bring in revenue, thousands of homeless, repression of protests, and the onset of social anarchy. The dictatorial Carlos Ibáñez was pressured into resigning, and the next elected president was toppled in a coup that created the Socialist Republic of Chile, though twelve days didn’t go by until there was another coup, this one from within. Ibáñez loyalists sent the more liberal leaders off to Easter Island. Lacking support and legitimacy, the new government lasted only three months before it too was overthrown. That led to a new election in October 1932 in which Arturo Alessandri, backed by a coalition of liberals, democrats, and radicals, was elected president for the second time. (Another event that took place the year Neruda returned to Chile would have an even greater influence on the course of his life. Adolf Hitler became a German citizen in 1932, mainly so he could run in elections. He became the Führer in 1934.)
Perhaps because of the breakdown of basic services in the country, Neruda’s telegram to his parents didn’t arrive in time to warn them of his arrival. Laura happened to be looking out the window when she saw her half brother and new sister-in-law getting out of a car with their suitcases. José del Carmen greeted them calmly, while Doña Trinidad embraced both of them with her inherent warmth. His father went from calm to contentious quite quickly, unable to resist railing at his son about his poor choices, and now there was his daughter-in-law and perhaps grandchildren his son would have to provide for. The wintry cold and rain falling down on Temuco worsened the mood, frustrating Neruda, who had been so free from these confrontations while in the warmth of his posts; he had left those tropics and spent all those weeks on a cargo ship only to be faced with this. He took Maruca to Santiago within a week.
Neruda’s old bohemian world waited in Santiago. The couple found an apartment on Catedral Street, where his friends would visit constantly. Maruca’s first impression of the Chilean capital was of the grimy dark stones of the apartment building walls, the gray facades of the buildings on each side of their narrow street. Having just come from the open green landscapes of Java, this colorless scenery must have been suffocating, as her life in Chile would be.
Neruda, finally back on his own turf, assumed his place as king of “Neruda’s gang,” as the group would be known. Members took an immediate disliking to Maruca. “She was a hostile being,” Diego Muñoz remembered. She “didn’t show any interest in knowing any of Pablo’s old friends.” Diego thought that Maruca was a most inappropriate wife for a poet. She would close the door to Pablo’s friends, so he just went out with them without her. During that first long winter, she would wait for him most evenings, watching out the window until he came home late at night. When he did, Maruca would “launch into a tirade in English, telling him off like a bucket of cold water,” as Muñoz put it.
Neruda remained calm, if not indifferent, in the midst of this discord. He didn’t care about the pain that was hardening her, the gulf between them growing wider. He had resigned himself to the fact that the level of elegance, education, and worldliness he had first perceived in her was not nearly enough to sustain an emotional and physical attraction, now that he’d accomplished coming home with a woman by his side and, at the same time, having escaped his alienation in Asia.
Muñoz, however, also wrote that he and his friends all found Neruda a noticeably changed man upon his return: “Now he wasn’t the somber, melancholic, absent muchacho” they remembered. “Now he talked a lot, laughing for whatever reason.” José María Souvirón, a Spanish poet who was in Santiago at the time, wrote that Pablo was at that point a rather lanky young man “with a melancholy air,” yet happy with what was going on in his life. Neruda was pleasant and entertaining once he got to know you, “resolute in his likes and dislikes, skeptical but respectful, a good drinker and enjoyer of life”—even “hedonistic.” His eyes, his friend insisted, were set on Spain.
His eyes were also still set on Albertina. Soon after he had returned to Chile from Asia, Neruda wrote to her in Concepción:
You know by now that I have been married since December of 1931 [sic, 1930]. The loneliness that you didn’t want to remedy has become more and more unbearable . . .
I would love so much to kiss you softly on your forehead, to caress your hands that I have loved so much, to give you a fraction of the friendship and affection that I still have for you in my heart.
Do not show this letter to anyone. I will not tell anyone that you write to me.
He quickly wrote to her again, overexplaining his decision to marry another woman:
My telegrams, my letters, told you that I was going to marry you when you arrived at Colombo. Albertina, I already had the marriage license, and I had asked for the necessary money. You know this, I have repeated it to you with patience in each one of my letters, in great detail.
Now my sister tells me that I asked you to come live with me, without marrying you, and that you have said this.
Never! Why do you lie? I feel a horrible bitterness, not only because you have not understood me, but also because you slander me.
I have loved you so much, Albertina, you know this, and you have behaved badly, silent when I needed you most . . .
A third letter showed he still could not reconcile himself to her silence:
My dear Albertina, I answered your letter about a month ago now, and you haven’t said anything about what I asked you . . . I need so badly to talk to you, to reproach you, to tell you. I remember you every day, I thought that you would write to me every day, but you are as thankless as always.
I still cannot understand what happened to you in Europe. I still don’t understand why you didn’t go.
Albertina recognized his marriage as legitimate, even if he did not. She did not give in. She would, however, become friends with him again when she married his friend Ángel Cruchaga Santa María, five years later.
Neruda’s attention also had returned to his inability to create a sustainable income as a poet. Through a fellow writer, he was able to get some work at the Ministry of Labor’s Cultural Extension. While the pay was minimal, it was great to have any work at all as the Depression deepened in Chile. He worked on the ministry’s Libraries for the People project. It was a progressive initiative that was under constant threat from conservatives, who hated these populist programs, especially during the economic crisis, which demanded austerity.
* * *
During this time back in Chile, works Neruda had long awaited publishing finally found their light. At the beginning of 1933, El hondero entusiasta (The Enthusiastic Sling-Shooter) was published, drawing on older poetry from the period when he was visibly influenced by the style of Sabat Ercasty. In his preface, Neruda admitted that Sabat’s influence did indeed lead him to suppress the book for a time and that in the end it contained only a portion of the original poems. This collection, he warned, was “a document of an excessive and burning youth.” The poems received minimal attention from critics and readers alike.
At the same time, Neruda had been suppressing the publication of the book that was of his greatest concern, Residence on Earth. Neruda was certain that this publication would be a smashing success across the Spanish-speaking world, and he pinned his literary future on it, to the point that he would not settle for it to come out anywhere other than Spain. Anywhere else, in its author’s hubristic view, would be a failure in relation to all he had put in, all he felt he had achieved. Chile still seemed like a backwater country to him in the context of the great literary tradition of Europe.
But more than three years had passed since he had written to Eandi from Colombo that he had “realized yesterday that it is time to publish my long detained book of poems.” “I have a publisher in Chile who would pay me and would take great care of the book, but I don’t want it [to just be published there].” A few months later it seemed that while nothing was happening with the book finding a home in Spain, Eandi brought up the possibility that Residence could be published in Argentina, with a decent advance. But Neruda refused, insisting on Spain. He followed that proclamation with an insinuation that the poems were simply too good for any other fate: “I have been writing these poems for nearly five years . . . I feel that I have achieved that requisite essence: a style; it seems to me that each of my lines is saturated with my very self, they drip.”
In the meantime, he had gotten a manuscript into the hands of Alfredo Cóndon, the aspiring Chilean writer who hosted Neruda in Paris, only to pass out on the floor of the Russian bar. What Cóndon lacked in literary talent he made up for with his personal wealth and contacts. He had already connected Neruda with Carlos Morla Lynch, the writer-diplomat based at the Chilean embassy in Madrid, where Cóndon was now a secretary. While Morla Lynch wasn’t able to get Neruda transferred to Spain, he did get him to Java.
Now Cóndon came to him with the Residence manuscript, entreating him to find a publisher, so Morla Lynch passed the manuscript and the charge on to Rafael Alberti, a leading figure in the exciting, influential generation of young writers in Spain at the time. “From the very first reading,” Alberti recalled, “those poems surprised and astonished me, so distant, as they were, from the tenor and atmosphere of our poetry.” He passed the book all around Madrid, believing that “such an extraordinary book of new revelations had to come out in Spain. I proposed it to my few friends who were editors—failure. I then began a correspondence with Pablo. His replies were anguished . . . In one of his letters, he asked me for a dictionary and for my forgiveness for the grammatical errors that his letters might contain.”
