And the poems’ speaker—Neruda himself—is constantly fearful, sad, fatigued, poor, distant. We see the purity of the youth’s dreams darkened by the unbearable strains of adolescence. From the poem “I’m Scared”:
(In my troubled mind there’s no room for dreams
like the sky that has no space for a star.)
Not all is lost in the depths, though. The lines above are followed by:
But in my eyes a question exists
and there’s a scream in my mouth that my mouth does not scream.
There are no ears on this earth that hear my sad moan
abandoned in the middle of the infinite earth!
The scream stays paralyzed in the mouth, reflecting the generation’s paralyzed state. But the fact that the scream exists, a question exists, that there exists the potential to articulate and move beyond suggests that an escape is apparent on the horizon—the speaker just hasn’t been able to break through to it yet.
Despite the richness of this portrayal, The Book of Twilights’ public reputation rests mainly on the fact that it was Neruda’s first work, with negligible enduring acclaim for the poetry and little attention to how it captured the zeitgeist of his generation. Even then, most of the critical reception—outside the positive promotions from Claridad and Neruda’s friends—was unenthusiastic. “Overall, the work seems to contain more literature than feeling,” wrote Salvador Reyes, a contemporary of Neruda’s, in Zig-Zag.
Except for its most famous poem, “Farewell,” several of the book’s outstanding poems are hardly known today and have been left out of most anthologies. “Railroad Roundhouses at Night,” his lament to Monge (“into the black night—desperate—the souls / of the dead workers run and sob”), is one example. It resounds above the book’s other sociopolitical poems, because here the sympathy with the proletariat Neruda wants to express originates from a true personal relationship with the subject. That connection enables the poem’s sublimity. It became Neruda’s first poem to be published outside of Chile: in 1923, his old mentor Gabriela Mistral, then in Mexico, included it in an anthology.*
Neruda’s Santiago desolation poem, “Neighborhood with No Electricity,” is also in The Book of Twilights, as well as the one-liner “My Soul.” Like many lines in the book, and the next few to follow, it was a mournful description of how he felt at the time:
My soul is an empty carrousel in the twilight.
The one poem that received real popular notice was “Farewell” (Neruda wrote the title in English). The lines that are still often quoted today are the first poetic reveals of Neruda’s machismo:
I love the love of sailors
who kiss, then leave.
Diego Muñoz wrote that shortly after Book of Twilights’ publication, he and Neruda took a liking to two female performers at their favorite cabaret club, La Ñata Inés. Sarita was the mixed-race daughter of a famous black drummer. As a child, she had performed with her father, and Muñoz vividly remembered seeing her dance when they were both young, in Concepción, before he moved to Temuco and entered Neruda’s grammar school. Annie, the other dancer, had Asian ancestry, unusual in Chile at the time, making the two an exotic combination for Chileans, who were most commonly of European descent.
One night Diego had some money in his pocket after getting paid for a short story. He invited Pablo to the cabaret—but only Pablo, not their other friends, so that they’d be able to talk to Sarita and Annie by themselves. They arrived after midnight, just in time for the women’s number of sultry and—especially for Chile—risqué dancing.
After the girls’ performance and the frenetic cheers they received, Diego gave a message to the maître d’ to pass on to the ladies: “Your amigos the painter Muñoz and the poet Pablo Neruda are here. Would you like to come to our table? We’d really like you to.” The girls came over after their second act.
“Are you Pablo Neruda?” Annie inquired of the poet. “May I ask you for something?”
“What would that be?” he answered.
“I want you to recite that pretty verse, named ‘Farewell.’”
When Neruda answered that he couldn’t remember all the lines, Annie, according to Muñoz, recited most of the verses from memory:
I love the love that’s served
in kisses, bed, and bread.
Love that can be eternal
and can be fleeting.
Love that wants to free itself
so it can return to love again.
Exalted love that draws near,
Exalted love that goes away . . .
They all went out to dinner afterward and continued drinking. Diego and Pablo suggested they go dancing, but the two women weren’t interested. Instead, they took some bottles of liquor to Annie’s house. They opened one and had a round of shots, then another, followed by another. Diego sat talking with Sarita while Annie was fastened to Pablo’s lips. Finally, Annie stretched out her arm and turned out the light.
The narrative of the poem Annie loved so much is rooted in betrayal; it is about a man saying “farewell” as he abandons his pregnant lover:
From deep inside you, on his knees,
a sad child, like myself, watches us.
For that life that will burn in your veins,
they would have to tie our lives together.
For those hands, daughters of your hands,
they would have to kill my hands.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
From your heart a child says good-bye to me.
And I say good-bye to him.
* * *
While The Book of Twilights did not have the sensational impact that Twenty Love Poems would the following year, it did much for Neruda’s reputation. At nineteen, such was his stature that he had disciples
