Chapter Six
Desperate Songs
You hear other voices in my aching voice.
The weeping of old mouths, the blood of old prayers.
Love me, compañera. Don’t abandon me.
Follow me. Follow me, compañera, on that wave of anguish.
—Poem V
Along with Teresa León Bettiens in Temuco, Neruda’s muse for the majority of Twenty Love Poems was Albertina Rosa Azócar. She was the sister of his new friend Rubén, a brilliant and charming student he’d met through the student scene. Albertina was studying French at the Pedagogy Institute. Although she was two years older than Neruda, she had entered the school just a year before. In the autumn of 1921, Neruda’s first year, they had classes together. Neruda was instantly attracted to her. Albertina knew of his intelligence, his reputation in the student circles, and his poetry.
Ninety-six female and eighty-eight male students, including Neruda, were enrolled in the French pedagogy program that year, all ensconced in the one brick building. Neruda could not have avoided Albertina if he had wanted to. She was affectionate, comforting, calm, sensual yet reserved, smart, and engaged. She ignited romantic and sexual fantasies in him that would explode in his heart, mind, and poetry.
They saw each other at the Saturday get-togethers where student poets would read their poetry. Albertina often attended with her friends. Reluctantly, Neruda began to participate. Albertina enjoyed his “sleepy reading voice,” which she and a friend would imitate afterward. They liked him, and Albertina was physically attracted to him too, despite the fact that he often “looked ill.” She found charm in how he was “always delicate,” in his wistfulness and melancholy. “He was so young, so romantic,” Albertina recalled a half century after they met. “I don’t know, a lot of girls like poets.” Neruda had, in fact, outgrown his adolescent gawkiness. While his thinness and gaunt face were remarkable, Neruda was developing a handsomeness, looking tall and smooth in his thin dark ties and the railroad worker’s jacket from his father. Confident from the prestige of winning the festival prize and the respect he had from her brother, Neruda made the move to sit next to her in class.
Soon after, on the rainy autumn afternoon of April 18, 1921, Neruda walked Albertina home to her boardinghouse and their romance began. They strolled down Avenida Cumming, through the heart of the university neighborhood. He continued to walk her home after classes, sometimes delighting her with fantastic tales. He gave her French books with yellow bindings, at least one by the writer Colette, which Albertina kept her entire life. Most often, though, the two walked silently, sometimes for hours, through the narrow Parque Forestal that lined the statuesque downtown streets of Santiago alongside the Mapocho River. He was very tender with her. He would love her like few others in his life.
Albertina was smart but not brilliant, and there was a charm to her but not an overwhelming allure. Her personality wasn’t as dynamic, exciting, and eccentric as others who had slipped in and out of his life, or those he would encounter over the next two decades. Her demeanor, in fact, made her seem almost “absent,” as Neruda would describe her in his famous Poem XV: “a butterfly in mourning,” “as if you weren’t here now.” She seemed especially flat compared with the naturally vibrant Teresa León Bettiens, whom he still loved and longed for. Albertina’s beauty was subtle as well: pale skin, almost ceramic; a refined, large nose; shapely lips; cheekbones that sat high near her sad, dark eyes; and tightly curled black hair that was often held in some type of chignon. Her figure, though, was strong and seductive.
Neruda saw her as a delicious, delicate lover who excited his sexual urges, conquering his timidity. And unlike Amelia and Teresa, those daughters of wealthy Temuco families who’d crushed his heart, Albertina was present and available.
Albertina’s significance for Neruda went beyond their romance. Neruda was still struggling to find his personal poetic path, to find his own language, and in this struggle his need for sexual release had become a driving force. As a primary object of his sexual desire at the time, Albertina became a source of poetic energy, and this only intensified when he lost her.
But her role in his writing went beyond that of the basic muse. At first, he may have been writing poems that were sympathetic in nature, like hymns or odes. But her absent answers to his desperate craving would convert her from muse to antagonist, provoking in him a terrorizing sensation of being caught in a tragedy. Just as he took to pen and paper to write about his desperation as a schoolkid, so he did now. He found release in his lyricism, saving him from emotional implosion, while also creating a medium for self-reflection.
At first, their relationship was limited to silent walks with only limited acts of physical intimacy. Albertina’s older sister, Adelina, kept a watchful eye on the two, worried about the bad influence of a rawboned bohemian poet. Adelina was repressive, almost tyrannical in her oversight of her little sister, whom she perceived as delicate, who was only in the big city because the University of Concepción was not yet teaching French pedagogy. Rubén interceded to help the couple. He would accompany Albertina, walk with her until they were out of sight of the house, and then depart so she and Pablo
