After he returned to Santiago from his first summer vacation, spent in Temuco, Neruda found new lodgings close to the University of Chile’s Pedagogical Institute. He had enrolled there to become a French teacher, a career that pleased his father enough that he would pay the tuition. It would also allow Neruda to connect even more deeply with the spirit of his admired poètes maudits, the “cursed poets” Verlaine, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and others who reflected his own personal demons and romance.
But Neruda was an undisciplined student, just as he had been in high school; he would never graduate from the university. At first he often skipped classes to spend time in his room reading and writing, drinking cup after cup of tea. He took to reading beneath a sugar magnolia tree in Santiago’s main cemetery. Still depressed, still feeling alone, Neruda continued to find respite in the act of writing poetry. The freedom of being a student in Santiago did not ease his mental and emotional distress. Despite being in a more “civilized” setting, he could not escape the “sorrow of the rain” from his youth.
He continued to feel emotionally impotent—creatively as well, despite the rich poetry he was producing. His dreams of establishing himself as an active poet in Santiago were washed out by pessimism. As he walked through the city, deflated, surrounded by endless concrete, any thought of lyrically affecting the drabness around him seemed futile. Meanwhile, building after building filled with offices seemed to shout out his fear of a desk job and a boss. This frustration, this sinking helplessness, is apparent in “Neighborhood Without Light.”
Yesterday—watching the last twilight—
I was a moss stain among the ruins.
The cities—soot and vengeances—
the suburb’s pig-filthy grayness,
the office that bends backs,
the boss with turbid eyes.
Blood of the clouds at sunset above the hills,
blood on the streets and plazas,
sorrow of broken hearts,
pus of weariness and tears . . .
The poem’s speaker seems to long for the purity and tranquility of the rural life he left behind, no snowcapped volcanoes or virgin forests in his view. His move to the city appears to have been detrimental:
Far away . . . the mist of forgets
. . . and the countryside, the green countryside! where
the oxen and sweaty men pant.
And here I am, sprouted among the ruins,
alone, biting all sadness,
as if weeping were a seed,
and I, the only furrow in the earth.
His isolation was relieved by two other poets who had lived alongside Neruda in his first pension house: Romeo Murga, the same age as Neruda, and Tomás Lago, a year older. Lago would become one of Neruda’s close lifelong friends; six years later they would write a book of prose poetry together, and both would be part of the social and intellectual circle that gestated during Neruda’s student days in Santiago. Murga, like Neruda, had just begun his studies in French pedagogy at the University of Chile. Their dispositions were similar; in many ways they mirrored and could be a calming presence for each other. Murga was tall and lean. He often wore a wide-brimmed hat, like Neruda’s, framing his dark brown face and green eyes. When he spoke, he did so gently. He always seemed to be worried about something not of this world. Within a year or so the three poets would be swept up in the whirlwind of their university world, engaging in furious literary discussion, jubilant student bedlam, debates over all the new ideologies, and political protests. But Murga tended to remain on the margins of the activity, as Neruda had in the beginning.
Murga was seen as an enlightened member of what was to be known as the generación poética del año 20 (the poetic generation of 1920), but his time was cut short. He committed suicide in 1925, one month before he would have turned twenty-one years old. Like the French poets who preceded them, this generación poética would be struck with the loss of at least five of its brightest talents, either to suicide or illnesses aggravated by poverty and alcoholism.
Ever so gradually, the camaraderie of his new circle of friends and intellectual sparring partners drew Neruda into his new life. He ventured into the bohemian quarters of Santiago and became absorbed in socializing, discussing radical politics, philosophy, love, and literature in small cafés and smoky bars. Walt Whitman, James Joyce, and Victor Hugo were all subjects of constant conversation, as well as the French poètes maudits and the Bengali Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. The French writer André Gide was also a popular subject, especially his Les caves du Vatican (1914; The Vatican Cellars), an early surrealistic farce of religious moralism. It resonated with Neruda’s generation. Chilean society had become much more secularized over the past decades, yet the Catholic Church’s conservative social values still permeated deeply throughout the country’s culture.
They were eager to dig into the most cutting-edge literature that came out each year. The year 1922, for instance, featured the publication of three modern masterpieces: T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” James Joyce’s Ulysses, and the Peruvian poet César Vallejo’s Trilce. To one degree or another, each work would influence Neruda.
The group also gravitated toward contemporary Nordic literature, as the Chileans in their southern isolation could identify with its characters, snow-covered landscapes, and, increasingly, anti-establishment tendencies. Selma Lagerlöf’s The Saga of Gösta Berling was a fundamental example. Full of magical realism, the Swedish novel touches on themes of emotional depression and economic poverty and features a rebellious pastor-poet out in the countryside. Lagerlöf’s descriptions of the story’s young countess seem narratively parallel to Neruda’s Crepusculario (The Book of Twilights): “What she had hoped, what she had loved, what she had ever done seemed to her also to be enshrouded in the