González Vera noted that Neruda carried around Jean Grave’s La société mourante et l’anarchie (Moribund Society and Anarchy) under his arm; Grave was a French shoemaker turned anarchist editor and propagandist who disapproved of the violent tendencies of earlier generations.
Soon after González Vera moved to Temuco, in December 1920, Neruda graduated from the liceo, allowing him the freedom to leave behind the provincial frustrations of Temuco and his father’s domination. He was more than ready to take both his activism and his poetry to a real city.
After spending a final summer unsuccessfully courting Teresa in Puerto Saavedra, Neruda prepared for his departure to Santiago. Just before he left, depressed, he wrote:
When I was born my mother died
with a saintly soul in shame.
She was her transparent body. She had
an illumination of stars under her flesh.
For this I carry
an invisible river within my veins,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . This yellow moon of my life
makes me a sprout of death.
—“Moon”
The poem was in a newly prepared notebook along with forty-six others, both old and new. The cover read, “HELIOS, Poemas de Pablo Neruda.” Helios, the Greek god of the sun, gave light to both the gods and man. Neruda prepared the notebook meticulously, in his best calligraphy, even including some artwork in the pages. The product of all the poetry of his youth, it would serve as a calling card, an introductory letter to the capital’s literary types—work so well developed that it almost seemed ready for a publisher.
Notebook in hand, Neruda bought a third-class ticket and boarded a night train to Santiago. He couldn’t sleep; with every passing station, his sense of freedom expanded and the painful memories of his childhood in the provinces seemed to fall away. The pulse of the big city awaited him at daybreak.
Chapter Five
Bohemian Twilights
the long rails continued afar,
following on, following on
the Night Train among the vineyards.
. . . when
I looked backward
it was raining,
my childhood was disappearing.
The thundering train entered
Santiago de Chile, the capital,
I felt the sorrow of the rain:
something was separating me from my blood
and as I went out frightened
to the street,
I knew, because I was bleeding,
that my roots had been cut off.
—“Night Train”
Neruda arrived in bustling Santiago in March 1921 with a metal trunk and “the indispensable black suit of the poet, so skinny and sharp as a knife,” according to his memoirs. Despite his tendency toward shyness, he now asserted his identity quite audaciously through his clothing, including the large, wide-brimmed black sombreros he liked to wear. Over the next three years, the sometimes sullen, introverted yet ambitious student from the south ascended to the apex of the capital’s progressive poetry scene. Inside, though, he harbored a troubled psyche.
Santiago, a city of just over a half million people, was a world away from Temuco. Neruda was intimidated by the “thousands of buildings housing strangers and bedbugs” and was immediately impressed by new sights: the luxurious coaches drawn by elegant horses, their drivers with boots of folded yellow leather or oilcloth, as well as the new electric trams that were starting to crisscross the city.
One of the capital’s outstanding features was reminiscent of Temuco: inequality. The deep divisions between social classes seemed even more punctuated here than in the provinces. In Santiago, the important families had aristocratic roots in Europe, especially Paris, London, and Italy. These families maintained an entrenched elitism, which Neruda mulled over as he walked from their elegant neighborhoods into the surrounding tenements and squalor.
Neruda hoped that Santiago would take him into “her enormous womb, where the expectations, the ideas, the lives, and almost all of our country’s struggles were digested.” Upon his arrival, he took his reference papers to his first lodging in Santiago, a boardinghouse at 513 Maruri Street. He arrived with just the smallest allowance from his father for his studies, but this neighborhood seemed much poorer than he was, a dense block of harsh concrete that made Temuco’s slums seem quaint in comparison. The odor of gas fumes and coffee hung in the air; the barks of old dogs echoed down empty streets.
At least the boardinghouse itself was handsome amid the drab surroundings. It occupied the second floor of an old colonial-style mansion, with an arch in the center and columns on each side. Neruda was fortunate enough to have a room facing west, with windows open to a wide and peaceful sky. The sunsets were prodigiously colorful, enhanced by the coastal mountain range lit up in the distance. In the late afternoons, the view of “magnificent sheaves of colors, partitions of light, immense orange and scarlet fans” unfolded at his balcony.
The colors evoked his creativity but couldn’t do the same for his mood, which, despite his long-sought escape from Temuco, remained fitfully bleak:
I open my book. I write
imagining myself
in a mine
shaft, a humid
abandoned tunnel,
I know that there’s nobody now,
in the house, in the street, in the bitter city.
I’m a prisoner with the door open,
with the world open.
I am a sad student lost in the twilights,
and I climb to the noodle soup
and descend to my bed and the following day . . .
—“The Pension House on Calle Maruri”
On the wall of his room in the pension, Neruda had a print of the oil painting The Death of Chatterton. It depicts the body of the tortured English poet Thomas Chatterton stretched out on a bed. He supposedly poisoned himself with arsenic at the age of seventeen, seemingly unable to escape his despair and dire poverty in a materialistic society that had turned its back on him. The year was 1770. The painting is haunting as it glorifies the pain of the beautiful, prodigious, and radical political writer. Chatterton’s
