Neruda, page 22
Neruda came to admire her kitchen writing so much that he started to join her there. They would work side by side, she on her novel, he continuing on with new Residence poems. Such a move—to prefer to write in another’s presence instead of in isolation—signaled a change in Neruda’s disposition; his mood elevated once more, on a trend toward greater stability.
He called María Luisa the “bee of fire,” referring to the passion he felt burning in her and the creativity by which she seemed to take flight. “We adored each other,” María Luisa recalled in 1973, right after Neruda’s death. “Our friendship had shades of intellectualism, but it was very emotive. We were so incredibly young and passionate. He was like a brother to me.”
She described Maruca as the complete opposite of Pablo. “What would Maruca do without the daily company of María Luisa, as intelligent as she was mild, never pretending or trying to know more than she knew?” Bombal’s biographer Agata Gligo asked.
To María Flora Yáñez, “Neruda’s Javanese wife looked like a giant blond police officer” when they first met in the Buenos Aires apartment. María Flora was a Chilean novelist, the sister of Neruda’s good friend Juan Emar, a.k.a. Pilo, though she and Neruda hadn’t met in person until her recent arrival in Argentina. Neruda had gone to her hotel to greet her and invited her to a cocktail party in her honor at his “ultramodern apartment,” as she described it. He wanted to introduce her to the city’s greatest writers. María Flora, as accustomed as she was to being in the presence of important literary figures, was indeed struck by the depth of talent Neruda had assembled in the room. She became breathless, in fact, upon seeing the sublime Alfonsina Storni, a leading voice of modern feminism and writer of hauntingly beautiful poetry.* Most left early, at nine, but Neruda asked María Flora to stay, along with Storni.
María Flora wrote that when they finished eating (rather late, in accordance with Argentine custom), Neruda proposed ending the night at the underground peña El Signo. María Flora saw Maruca make a gesture to Neruda as she disappeared into her bedroom. He followed his wife, and soon the shouts of a heated argument filled the apartment. When they returned, Neruda seemed deflated, Maruca still convulsing with rage. “Let’s go to the Signo,” he ordered, and they left, without Maruca.
El Signo had just opened that year in the basement of El Hotel Castelar. At night it functioned as a tertulia de arte, or a salon, a gathering place to talk about the arts. It became a top place to go for many of those involved in that world. José González Carbalho and Norah Lange, among other friends who had just embraced Neruda, were the first to get it going.
Neruda began having affairs behind his wife’s back. Bombal knew about them, especially because of his admiration for her sister Loreto. There were also suspicions that something more than friendship occurred between Neruda and the avant-garde Norah Lange, despite her relationship at the time with the poet Oliverio Girondo. Norah and Neruda had a lot of fun together. One night at the trendy restaurant Les Ambassadeurs, without Maruca, they made the band play “Wedding March,” and the two approached the orchestra parodying the marriage ritual. Later, everyone quite drunk, they walked down the great Corrientes Street shouting and singing. At some point Norah laughed and in a loud voice said, “Pablo, tonight I’m going to sleep with you,” to which Pablo, in the same tone of mirth, replied: “With pleasure.” Girondo was there, just as drunk, and he also laughed, with his pipe in mouth. There were whispers, however, that it was more than just a joke.
María Luisa Bombal had her own take on Neruda’s relationship with women, with whom he “always had good luck”:
And he didn’t really try very hard. He let them love him, seduce him, and sometimes this resulted in tremendous relationships, very romantic and full of problems, which he loved . . . He needed to be with a woman who could tame him and spoil him. Poor Maruca was a good person, but she was so distant from Pablo’s world. She didn’t understand it at all. She was also cold and remote, and Pablo was so eager for affection. He always looked for a mother figure in women, and we aren’t all cut out to be mothers.
And then Maruca discovered that she was pregnant. The news did not bring the couple closer together. Neruda was nervous, already feeling he had made a terrible mistake by marrying her. He continued to keep his distance and allowed himself to be swept up in events outside of the pregnancy.
One such event was his introduction, in mid-October 1933, to Federico García Lorca. The thirty-five-year-old dreamy-eyed Spanish poet, experimental playwright, and puppeteer had come to Buenos Aires for the Latin American premiere of his play Bodas de sangre (Blood Wedding). He became the talk of the town, profiled in the press. Neruda met Lorca at a reception, and so began a profound friendship. Neruda considered him to be the happiest person he had ever met, an indispensable radiance of joy. Each had a great respect for the other’s writing, Lorca reading much of what Neruda wrote just after they met. Lorca inscribed a copy of his Romancero gitano (Gypsy Ballads), “For my dear Pablo, one of the few great poets I’ve had the good fortune to love and know.” Whenever Lorca heard Neruda begin to recite his poems, he’d cover his eyes and shake his head, crying, “Stop! Stop! That’s enough, don’t read any more—you’ll influence me!”
As for Neruda’s praise of Lorca, he would one day describe his plays as if describing all of Lorca’s essence: that the tragedies “reinvigorated the eternal Spanish drama, claiming a new phosphoric brilliance, love and death locked in a furious dance: love and death, masked or naked.”
Lorca’s verse, like his personality, was startling: often so spontaneous, often dark, often vibrant. The poet Robert Bly describes Lorca’s rather magical style as “leaping poetry”—all of a sudden images leap unexpectedly, passionate to the core.
They talked nonstop, but they also listened to each other. This continued for nearly six months in Buenos Aires before Lorca returned to Spain. Neruda would remember Lorca as a torrent of motion and delight, “an effervescent child, the young channel of a powerful river . . . in his hands a prank became a work of art. I have never seen such magnetism and such constructiveness in a human being.” Lorca’s great appetite for life helped reinvigorate Neruda’s, or perhaps invigorate it like it never had been.
In his memoirs, Neruda narrates an evening spent at the vast home of the millionaire owner of a newspaper empire, Natalio Botana, where Lorca was also present. At the party, Neruda supposedly met an “ethereal” poet who, especially as they sat across the dinner table from each other, “fixed her green eyes on me more than Lorca.” Afterward, all three poets went up to a shimmering lighted swimming pool. The chemistry between Neruda and his new friend was growing. A tower rising above the pool beckoned adventure; its white lime-washed walls glowed in the nocturnal light; they climbed it. With the sound of the party’s guitars and singing in the distance, Neruda “took the tall, golden girl in my arms. As I kissed her, I realized she was a carnal and compact woman, with curves in all the right places.” Soon they were on the watchtower’s floor, Neruda undressing her, when he realized Lorca was staring down at them, completely surprised at what he was seeing. (Lorca was homosexual.)
Neruda wrote, long after Lorca had died in Spain, that he had yelled at his friend, “Get out of here! Go and make sure no one comes up the stairs!” while he offered his “sacrifice to the starry sky and to nocturnal Aphrodite” by having sex with the female poet. Lorca ran off in such a hurry to complete his mission, Neruda wrote, that he fell in the darkness of the tower’s stairwell and rolled down it. “My friend and I had to help him, with great difficulty. His limp lasted fifteen days.” This story wasn’t all invention at least. A young niece of two immigrants from Lorca’s hometown stopped by his hotel for visits now and then. On one occasion she found him propped up in bed, his leg in bandages. “There has been an accident at a party,” he explained sheepishly.
Neruda did return the favor, in a sense, helping Lorca when he was in a precarious position with women. Neruda had begun to suspect Lorca’s homosexuality, though he never had an issue with it. In fact, he benefited from it: as he described it years later, Lorca told him how women—“almost always fledgling poets”—would fill his Buenos Aires hotel room, to the point that he couldn’t breathe. Discovering Lorca’s “panic about the feminine siege,” Neruda immediately offered his services to his friend. They agreed that in moments of true alarm, Lorca would call Neruda, who’d rush over “to take charge of the agreeable mission of steering one of his admirers off elsewhere.” Neruda was quite pleased with this arrangement: “With a certain degree of efficiency I reaped some unexpectedly exquisite results from my collaboration. Some of those doves, misled by Federico’s light, fell into my arms.”
María Luisa Bombal recalled that in those wonderful days in Buenos Aires, far removed from her suicidal thoughts:
We were happy and carefree. Pablo would come back from the office and say, “The consul is done.” And then he would ask me if we could go find Federico . . . “so that he can sing and dance for us, and make us laugh.” Life with Federico was a constant party. I never met another man with a more enchanting spirit and heart. He was completely irresistible. He was always the life of the party, with his contagious smile. Pablo always liked to be the center of attention, but [with Federico] he was different; he stepped aside.
His favorite thing was to play the piano for us.
He would say, “María Luisa is like this,” and he would play some light, buoyant notes.
And he would say, “Pablo is this way,” and the slow, profound chords epitomized Pablo.
Two weeks after they met, on October 28, 1933, the PEN Club of Buenos Aires held a luncheon in honor of Lorca and Neruda: “Spain and America Together.” It was held on the top floor of the elegant Hotel Plaza, with more than a hundred writers in attendance. When it came time to thank their hosts, they stood up and began a tribute to Rubén Darío, who had been a leader of such transformations in Spanish poetry in the decades just before these two poets were born. While Neruda admired him, Lorca revered him—the Nicaraguan had been a major influence on his poetry. They knew that Darío had lived in Buenos Aires at one point and had even written a long “Canto a la Argentina.” But the city seemed devoid of any public recognition of him—no monuments, no parks, no memory of not only one of the greatest Latin American poets, but one who had sung the country’s praises in immortal verse. The two friends did not think this was right. So they decided to deliver their customary toasts, as honorees, in a manner a bit out of the ordinary (though not so extraordinary for those who knew the pair).
Lorca was passionate about bullfighting in his native Spain, and his idea was to divide the talk between himself and Neruda, as he explained to the crowd, “like bullfighting al alimón, in which two toreros, holding one cape between them, outwit the bull together.” The talk would be on “the great poet of America and of Spain.” Lorca called, “Rubén . . .” “. . . Darío!” Neruda responded.
They continued alternating, speaking antiphonally, stressing their debt to tradition as well as their generation’s need to transcend it. In 2004, the legendary author Jim Harrison described the event as a “transcendent poetry slam. That evening both poets stood athwart poetry’s third rail.” Neruda said they spoke as if “linked by an electrical wire,” as each spontaneously continued the other poet’s line of thinking:
NERUDA: Where in Buenos Aires is the Rubén Darío plaza?
LORCA: Where is the statue of Rubén Darío?
NERUDA: He loved parks. Where is the Rubén Darío park?
LORCA: Where is the Rubén Darío flower shop of roses? . . .
NERUDA: Where is the oil, the resin, the swan of Rubén Darío?
LORCA: Rubén Darío sleeps in his natal Nicaragua below his awful marble lion, like those lions that the rich put at the entrances to their houses.
The exchanges grew even longer and more complex, continuing to play off one another, ending in a toast in homage to Darío’s glory, whose “lexical fiesta . . . crashing consonants, flights and forms,” as Lorca put it, had enriched the Spanish language forever.
At literary salons in homes that opened their doors to him or which he hosted at his own apartment; at bars, restaurants, and cafés; and on sidewalks, Neruda was nourished and enlivened by the warmth of his new friends. Unlike his first three postings, this one was certainly no “banishment,” literally or psychologically. In fact, it was the first time outside of Chile that he had experienced such fellowship, with such intellectual and cultured friends, such creators of new thinking and art.
Maruca’s experience of Buenos Aires was considerably different. Bombal couldn’t help at times overhearing the couple’s arguments while they were all in the apartment. Maruca was opposed to his endless nights out in the city and was terribly bored. She had little talent for making friends, at least within Neruda’s circle.
Lorca returned to Spain in March 1934. Right before he left, he was shaken by a haunting premonition of his impending death. “María Luisa, I don’t want to leave. I’m going to die. I feel very strange.”
A few months later, Neruda’s aspirations were realized when he was transferred again to a new post, one eminently suitable for a literary man and friend to Lorca: he would be consul to Spain.
Chapter Eleven
Spain in the Heart
For me, Spain is a great wound and a great love. That period was fundamental in my life. Therefore, almost everything that I have done since (almost everything I have done in my poetry and in my life) has the gravity of my time in Spain.
—Barcelona, June 1970
The Pablo Neruda who entered Spain in the springtime of 1934 was a different person from the Pablo Neruda who fled a bleeding Spain in 1937. A year before he left for Spain, Neruda had written to Héctor Eandi from Santiago:
I don’t feel any distress for the world at this moment.
I still feel myself reintegrating into Western life, I just want to enjoy all the pleasures I’ve been denied for years.
A wave of Marxism seems to be traveling across the world; letters from my friends urge me toward that position. Really, politically right now you can only either be a communist or anticommunist . . .
I still keep that anarchist’s distrust of forms of the state, of impure politics . . .
There’s an invasion of odes to Moscow here, tanks, etc. I continue to write about dreams . . .
Neruda’s experience of the Spanish Civil War would emotionally affect him to the core; its horrors would rekindle his political engagement. Soon he too would write odes to the Soviets and Stalin.* Neruda would become a member of the Chilean Communist Party, joining many of his friends there. Spain ignited in him a lifetime of ardent activism for peace, justice, and the rights of the proletariat.
His three years there forged a new voice. The war compelled him to make a personal commitment to bring injustices to light. It would be some twenty years until Neruda returned to writing again “of dreams, of the leaves, of the great volcanoes of his native land.” Even then, a great deal of that verse had social and political themes. After Spain, Neruda had a new sense of the poet’s calling, never before having felt such a vital and immediate duty to use his poetry as a tool for social change. Spain would push Neruda toward becoming the people’s poet.
Neruda prepared eagerly for his departure to Spain, where Lorca and other artists and writers awaited him, a generation that many say rivaled Spain’s Golden Age. Madrid was becoming known as the new Paris. Yet he was also leaving behind the Paris of South America, Buenos Aires, and a group of friends and an experience that had shaped him as he moved into this new chapter of his life. At the farewell dinner, held at a classy restaurant in the neighborhood of La Boca, twenty of his friends posed for a cheery group photograph. Maruca, now pregnant, doesn’t look directly into the camera; her gaze is almost sheepish, looking down and off to the right. It appears she is uncomfortable and does not want to be there.
The Nerudas set sail on May 5, 1934, seven years after Neruda had crossed the Atlantic en route to the Far East. Yet Neruda’s move to Spain began with a bad omen: a letter from his old roommate Tomás Lago with the heartrending news that their beloved friend Alberto Rojas Jiménez had just died. Rojas Jiménez and a friend had been thrown out of a bar for not having enough to pay the tab. They had walked through Santiago to his sister’s house, under a cold rain, with a bottle of wine, the impoverished poet without a jacket. He caught bronchial pneumonia and died two days later. When Neruda wrote about his death to Sara Tornú in Buenos Aires, he described Rojas Jiménez as “an angel full of wine.”
Neruda cried when he learned the news. He and the painter Isaías Cabezón, a friend from Chile who was in Barcelona at the time, took huge candles down to the fourteenth-century Basílica de Santa María del Mar. The church is known for its splendid stained glass, though its brilliance wasn’t apparent in the darkness as they each drank a bottle of white wine, kneeling in the pews. “I didn’t know how to pray,” Neruda admitted to Sara Tornú, so he felt grateful for Cabezón, a Catholic, who went and “prayed at every one of the countless altars.” Neruda didn’t even believe in God, but there on his knees, watching their candles dance in the darkness as Cabezón performed the rituals, he felt glad that the setting of this silent ceremony drew him closer to his lost friend.
Neruda then wrote a remarkable elegy, “Alberto Rojas Jiménez Comes Flying”: viene volando (comes flying) because one of Rojas Jiménez’s games was making paper birds, often with a freshly written poem on them. The elegy would be published in the second volume of Residence. “It’s a funeral, solemn hymn,” he wrote to Tornú, “and if you read it in your house, to our friends, have Amado Villar do it, with a heartbroken voice, because that’s the only way it can be done right.”
