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
