Neruda, page 6
During Neftalí’s transformative thirteenth year, he started craving something beyond just the urgent, crucial flight he felt in the basic act of writing. Possibly also as a consequence of Orlando’s influence, Neftalí started to feel strongly—if not desperately—that if others weren’t reading his poetry, it lacked purpose. He became preoccupied with his poetry being shared and promoted, primarily so that both he and his work could be accepted, approved, and validated. Despite his shyness, Neftalí was so certain that poetry was the one positive thing that he had inside of him that he summoned up the courage to submit his work for publication. Encouraged by Orlando, he sent one of his poems to the popular Santiago magazine Corre-vuela (Run-Fly). The magazine was considered by contemporary readers to be somewhat frivolous and vulgar compared with other publications, but it did have a section dedicated to highlighting young poets from the provinces.
When its reply came, Neftalí ran to the offices of La Mañana, yelling, “Tío, Tío, they’re going to publish my poem! They’re going to publish my poem!”
On October 30, 1918, just a few months after his fourteenth birthday, his poem “My Eyes” was published:
I wish my eyes were hard and cold,
that they wounded deep inside the heart,
that they didn’t express anything from my empty dreams or hope, or illusion.
Forever indecipherable to the sacrilegious,
deep blue and smooth with tranquil sapphire
and that they didn’t glimpse human pain or the joy of being alive.
But these eyes of mine are naive and sad:
not how I want them nor how they should be.
It’s that my heart dresses these eyes of mine, and makes them see its pain.
Like many of his poems in these years, “My Eyes” is concerned with finding escape from his personal desolation. He is aware, importantly, that his perception of the world isn’t unfiltered reality. His heart that pumps his blood, his emotions, and his sensitivity add a human element to the vision, which causes the eyes not just to perceive their surroundings but also to cause these scorching sensations.
Within the next two years, before graduating from the liceo, he would publish nearly thirty poems: fifteen more in Corre-vuela, as well as pieces in Selva austral (Austral Forest), Temuco’s own literary journal; the Cultural Review of Valdivia, the biggest city to the south; and Siembra (Sowing) in Valparaíso, the port city seventy-five miles northwest of Santiago. Most of the journals that took his work were of rather radical tendencies.
Neftalí received these successes modestly, but with great satisfaction. His early achievements further drove his determination to be a poet, not only because he wanted to rise above his physical and social awkwardness, but also because he already felt he was on a path to hold the oficio, or vocation, of poet for all his life.
Chapter Four
The Young Poet
I come from a dark region, from a land separated from all others by the steep contours of its geography. I was the most forlorn of poets and my poetry was provincial, oppressed and rainy.
—“Toward the Splendid City,” Nobel lecture, 1971
Chile has a long history of reverence for poetry. From the early sixteenth-century epic poetry of Alonso de Ercilla to the strong roots of oral poetics in indigenous Mapuche culture, Chile has earned its reputation as a “nation of poets,” where poetry is not only enjoyed by the elite, but also recited by campesinos, factory workers, miners, and ordinary people around their campfires or kitchen tables. This unique environment nurtured Neftalí’s passion for poetry from the beginning.* Even though he was extremely timid, he entered poetry competitions throughout the region. Tiny towns in the middle of nowhere would have such contests as part of their fairs. In 1919, at the age of fifteen, Neftalí traveled north some 250 miles by train, probably alone, to read a poem in the tiny, dusty town of Cauquenes. He took third prize for best poem at the Maule Flower Games.
The following year, his poem “Salutation to the Queen” won first place at Temuco’s Fiesta de la Primavera. Teresa León Bettiens won the title of Fiesta Queen. She looked like a Byzantine angel with her large black eyes and curly black hair, complemented by an intelligence apparent in her intriguing speech that immediately attracted Neftalí’s attention. The young queen and her salutation’s scribe were each eccentric in her or his own way. They soon fell in love.
Teresa’s family vacationed in Puerto Saavedra, a primitive, misty town on the Pacific coast with just about fifteen houses braced by high cliffs. It was approximately fifty miles west of Temuco. As it happened, that year Neftalí’s family would be summering in Puerto Saavedra too. On the first day of vacation, Neftalí’s father blew his whistle at four in the morning to wake everybody up. Preparation was prodigious work, as Neruda would describe in his memoirs, with each family member scurrying around the house gathering what was needed, a candle in hand to see in the predawn darkness, the flames flickering with each burst of wind in the drafty house. The family stayed in a house owned by a friend of José del Carmen’s, Señor Pacheco. The house was large but didn’t have enough beds for all five of them, so they carried their own mattresses with them on the train, rolled into giant balls.
The train took them as far as the little town of Imperial, where they took a small steamship down the Imperial River. When Neftalí finally stood in front of the ocean for the first time, it held him in thrall, with its immense waves and its colossal roar that seemed, to him, the heartbeat of the universe itself: “There’s nothing more stirring to a fifteen-year-old heart than navigating down a wide and unknown river, among mountainous banks, on the mysterious path to the sea.” The ocean would take an important place in both Neruda’s heart and his poetry; it would serve as a principal vehicle in many of his metaphors. One of the first times we see this is in “The Desperate Song,” which ends Twenty Love Poems, written at a time when he had lost all hope for Teresa during his university days:
You swallowed everything, like distance.
Like the sea, like time. In you everything sank!
Later in the same poem he reminisces on their first days:
It was the happy hour of assault and the kiss.
The hour of the spell that blazed like a lighthouse.
Up until then, Neruda’s poetic expression of nature had focused on the forest, which, in contrast to the constant motion of the churning ocean, was steadfast and immovable, a soliloquy of ancient trees and rotted trunks. It could make Neftalí feel as if nothing else existed except for himself and the orange-throated chucao bird’s coos, nothing “but that cry of all the wilds combined / like that call of all the wet trees.” The only movement was the occasional rush of leaves from a flutter of wind or the flow of a waterfall.
Conversely, in the sea, Neftalí discovered a masculine model, a vortex of aggression and accelerated action, a paternal figure, as the noted Neruda scholar Hernán Loyola has suggested.
By the time he was fifteen or sixteen, Neftalí’s restlessness and sense of self, tightly confined by Temuco’s smallness, provoked him to write lines like these:
This lead-colored city wraps me in its
disease, makes me suffer in my solitude
giving me the bitter sip
of remaining in life with neither love nor kindness
. . . gray and monotonous city beneath my disappointments,
beneath the turbulent rain of my first tears,
in the desolation of the first path.
. . . City which by the song of the blue spring
is hostile and tired like any day
with its men whose stunted spirits have left me
to bleed out all of my hopeful tears.
—“Hate”
The escape to Puerto Saavedra and his relationship with Teresa León Bettiens thus brought Neftalí a kind of liberation. “Puerto Saavedra had the smell of honeysuckle and the ocean wave,” Neruda reminisced in an article he wrote for the magazine Ercilla on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday. “Behind every house there were gardens with arbors that delivered the aroma of the solitude of those transparent days.” Teresa wore flamenco dresses as they talked and walked and flirted on the shore and in the woods, Neftalí almost always with his black cape and wide-brimmed black sombrero (inspired by his uncle Orlando’s dress, that of the poet). Once, Teresa dressed up as an indigenous Mapuche woman—scandalous. Like the piano-playing, heartbreaking Amelia Alviso, Teresa was artistic. She’d break out in song, recite poetry; she was spontaneous and intellectual. In Teresa, Neftalí had finally found requited love. He called her “Marisol,” as in mar (sea) and sol (sun).
Like Amelia, Teresa came from a family of a higher social rank than Neftalí’s; her parents were well respected among Temuco’s upper crust. The young lovers were doomed from the start, because Teresa’s parents didn’t want their daughter to have anything to do with him. They called him un jote, a vulture, because of his buzzard-like look with his hat and cape, the flaps, the wings. And if he continued his sole pursuit of being a poet, “they’d both starve to death.” Teresa’s parents ordered her not to see Neftalí anymore.
This time, despite his pain, Neftalí showed a new level of resolution that he would continue to demonstrate in years to come. The teenagers continued to see each other, if not on moonlit beaches, then by the exchange of poems when apart.
Neftalí made other new friends that summer. The Parodi family had made their money by using their sawmill to process the virgin forests around Puerto Saavedra into timber. Their home, in which they lived year-round, was a hub for social gatherings among the rich and influential families who came to summer in the increasingly fashionable seaside community. No one needed an invitation; the town was small enough that everyone knew when the gatherings would be. Sometimes they would read poetry or have intellectual discussions about society or art. Neftalí would show up and take in the flow of ideas as he sat off in a corner.
He was surprised and struck by the “black and sudden eyes” of the Parodis’ youngest daughter, Maria. They exchanged little pieces of paper, folded up so as to disappear in the hand. Neruda would write what would be the nineteenth poem in Twenty Love Poems for her.
Girl morena and agile, the sun that grows the fruits
that plumps the grains, that twists the seaweed
made your joyous body, your luminous eyes
and your mouth that has the smile of water.
A black and eager sun is braided into the strands
of your black mane, when you stretch your arms.
You play with the sun like with a little creek
and it leaves two dark pools in your eyes.
In Puerto Saavedra, Neftalí also began a great friendship with Augusto Winter, widely considered to be Chile’s first ecological poet. His venerability was accented by his beautiful beard, which cascaded like the stacks of bookshelves along the walls of his library, a tiny room in his house crammed with books from floor to ceiling. Winter had the best library Neruda ever knew. He so loved literature and wanted to share his passion with others that he simply lent his books to everyone. On his first visit, Neftalí was immediately drawn to books by Jules Verne and the Italian adventure and science fiction author Emilio Salgari. There was a sawdust-burning stove in the center of the room, and he would settle himself next to it as if he were “condemned to read in the three summer months all the books that were written through the long winters of the world.” “Have you read this one yet?” Winter would ask, passing him one of Pierre Alexis Ponson du Terrail’s nineteenth-century adventure novels, starring the intrepid hero Rocambole. Or perhaps Winter would press on him Vargas Vila’s latest novel, Ante los bárbaros: Los Estados Unidos y la guerra (In the Face of the Savages: The United States and the War), in which the radical Colombian writer denounced the United States for its imperialism in the Spanish-American War. Whatever book Neftalí was reading, this library by the sea was a sanctuary where he found new ideas and myths, which would inflame his imagination and richly inform his writing.
Neftalí spent plenty of time exploring the local wilderness in Puerto Saavedra, including the sublime green shores of the expansive Lake Budi, often stippled with swans (as long as no one was hunting them). He might sit on the hillside above Señor Pacheco’s second house, where he was staying, and watch the light blue ocean pulse its universal heartbeat for hours. From that slope, he could pivot from watching the waves hit the beach to an overhead view of the river meeting the sea, as he first did upon his arrival, miniature boats like toys in the distance. He rode his horse through rolling fields, sometimes daring into the limits of the Mapuche lands. Or he headed down to town, near Winter’s library, and walked to where the river met the sea, sand dunes sloped smooth, small to huge. Riding his horse on the beach, he could lose himself in the backdrop of deep green pines, which complemented the colors of sand and sea. Neruda once noted in an interview that in his twenties, when home alone composing, he couldn’t write without seriously thinking of the sound of Temuco’s rain and the waves crashing on the sand of Puerto Saavedra.
At the end of summer, Neftalí would leave Winter and his library, the relaxed time spent with Teresa in the open air, and all the other wonders of the coast. He dreaded the start of another anxiety-provoking school year. But in 1920 Neftalí found a fascinating new teacher who would become another essential mentor for him, opening up new literary worlds while inspiring his writing and intellect. The poet Gabriela Mistral had left her teaching post in Punta Arenas, at the southern tip of Patagonia, and moved to Temuco to head its girls’ liceo. Twenty-five years later she would become the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. When she arrived in Temuco, at the age of thirty-one, she was already one of the country’s best-known poets. Mistral’s “Sonetos de la muerte” (“Sonnets of Death”) had won first place in the most important national poetry competition in Santiago in 1914. Neftalí was thrilled that a poet of her stature had come to Temuco.
Shortly after her arrival in town, he dressed himself in a white collared shirt, black vest, and black cloth pants, and knocked on the door to her house, hoping that she would read some of his poetry. A young artist, just nineteen, answered the door. She was Laura Rodig Pizarro, who had met Mistral in Punta Arenas and became her assistant, while Rodig herself developed into a nationally acclaimed activist painter and sculptor. Neftalí wasn’t the only one in Temuco who had called on Mistral; many other writers, intellectuals, and pseudo-intellectuals wanted the attention and blessing of such an accomplished poet living in the isolation of the frontier. Rodig told Neftalí that Mistral wasn’t in, so Neftalí waited for three hours, saying nothing. Finally, saddened, he walked back home, poetry in hand. But he returned the next day. Rodig informed him that Mistral had a terrible headache and could not see him. Impressed by his persistence despite his obvious shyness, however, she told him to leave his notebook and she’d give it to Mistral. He could come back later that day to see if her headache had passed and they could meet.
When he returned that afternoon, it was Mistral who opened the door. She was tall and wore a long dress. He bowed to her. “I have fixed myself up to receive you,” Mistral said. “I was sick, but I began to read your poems and I’ve gotten better, because I am sure that here there is indeed a true poet. I have never made a statement like that ever before.”
The two became lifelong friends. Neftalí often ran to her house in the afternoon after classes were finished for the day. The two would drink tea together next to the wood-burning stove in her modest house. “Here, read this,” Mistral would say. She would introduce him to the “terrible vision” of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Chekhov.
Neftalí’s young, colorful French teacher, Ernesto Torrealba, was another important literary influence. A writer and critic himself, he told Neftalí, “If you want to write, don’t just read Spanish and follow its rules, because you’ll never free yourself of the pedagogy.” Instead, he pushed Neftalí to read, among others, Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, and Paul Verlaine; reading French would help him write better Spanish. Like Mistral, Torrealba also promoted the importance of Russian literature and lent him several books by Maksim Gorky.
Neftalí’s special skills with language could be seen in the translations from French to Spanish that he was doing in school, which greatly impressed Torrealba, though none of these survives today.
Neftalí and his classmates were inspired by Torrealba’s persona as well as his intellectual prowess. He was a flamboyant man for the southern frontier who dreamed of Paris; he dressed in an elegant tie and with suede gaiters over his high boots, and he always used an ornamental cane. Torrealba would eventually make it to Paris, where he’d publish a few daring books, including Paris sentimental y pecador (Sinful and Sensual Paris). He died at the age of thirty-five in Santiago from unknown causes. Neruda would dedicate his Nobel Prize in part to him: “my French teacher now up in heaven.”
Neftalí first publicly referred to himself as not just a poet but the poet in a sonnet written on July 30, 1919: “The Poet Who Is Neither Bourgeoisie nor Humble.”
A kid who just turned fifteen,
who writes verses punctuated by bitterness
who tasted the salts of disappointment
when many others know laughter and kindness.
and goes on sadly through life
(The men haven’t discovered that in him exists
the poet who as a child was not childish.)
and he waits proudly with his pains,
unknown and alone, for better days
which he imagines, crazily, are to come.
