Sexual relations between lovers in Neruda’s generation were not uncommon. In fact, the anarchist students were practically advocating a free-love movement, as shown in some of the pieces published in Claridad. A couple of months after his relationship with Albertina began, Neruda wrote an article that was typical not just of his own nature, but also of the predominating chauvinistic attitude in the male-dominated socialist circles. It lashed out against “bourgeois” traditions like marriage and chastity while designating women as means for sexual gratification.
His piece, simply entitled “Sex,” opened with a prefatory note from the editors of Claridad: “We publish this article because it reflects a fatal state of mind in all young people and because it contains a manifestation of protest against Christian morality.”*
The article begins: “He is strong. And young. The ardent flash of sex courses through his veins in electric shocks.” After his “first friend” shared with him the secret of masturbation, “the solitary pleasure went on corrupting the purity of his soul and opening him up to unknown pleasures.” But that time has passed. “Now, strong and young, he searches for an object in whom to empty out his goblet of virility. He is the animal that simply searches for an outlet for his natural potency. He is a male animal and life must give him the female in whom he’s made complete, growing stronger.” (Just two months earlier, he had found that female in Albertina, though she thus far insisted on remaining chaste.)
When the man finds a woman to be with, he “discovers that the arrival of one of these women brings with it something curious and strange: the dishonor of the one he wanted, like him, enjoying a pleasure for which nature gave him an organ. So the young male, who is honorable, becomes aware of the hypocritical morality they’ve invented to impede the full blooming of his physical inclinations.”
Seemingly with no other recourse, he goes to a “house of pleasure,” but the young male, “who is pure, limits his natural need and spurns, pitying the machine that delivers pleasure for an hourly rate.” Despising the laws, “he feels an urge to vent his rage against those who gave him the ancestral desire that ties him, like a giant hook, to life.”
About two months after the article was published, Albertina agreed to consummate their relationship. His eyes fixated on her entire length, seeing that body of woman, as he’d pen later in Twenty Love Poems, with her white hills, white thighs spreading open for the first time. He attempted to plow through her and reach the depths of the earth.
Yet, in what would become a pattern, while he had one lover he still longed for another in a distant location: in this case, Teresa León Bettiens, still living in Temuco. The queen of that town’s 1920 spring fiesta was still intrigued by the curious poet, despite the fact that her parents had called him a “vulture.” They would sometimes see each other when Neruda returned south for vacation, as he did over the first months of 1923 (the summer season in South America).
That would be a pivotal year for Neruda: he had fully established himself in the capital and was entering into the profound production of Twenty Love Poems. Yet nearly half of them pertained to Teresa, verses fostered by their time together in Puerto Saavedra and the longing that followed. Because of his time with her there, Neruda had elevated Puerto Saavedra to near-mythic stature in his poetry. Dreams, love, and sex combined in this landscape, ocean and forest fused, as Teresa’s body and womanhood bloomed. She was poetic, natural, eccentric, almost exotic in her Andalusian spirit, so different from the women he knew in the sprawls of Santiago. She defied her parents to be with him, on patios full of poppies, where the river that first took him to the sea flowed into the waves of the ocean.
His letters to Teresa speak for themselves:
And as you know, I can all of a sudden fall into fits of loneliness, fatigue, and sadness that don’t let me do anything and make me bitter about life. Why would I write you in these moments? Then, in these times that come upon me so unexpectedly, how sweet it is to receive letters from far away, from the woman I love, from you, and return to love life and return to happiness! —Pablo
Another one, written to Teresa from Santiago in 1923:
It rained yesterday, today too. It’s filled me with nostalgia. Oh, my faraway life! Everything I have is so far away, my childhood, my thoughts, now you, and the eternal rains falling on the roof, all of that abandoned world has filled my head with old musings and memories. Love me, Little One. —Pablo
A more desolate missive, in which he professed devotion to only her, runs parallel to his continual profession of the very same to Albertina:
I confess to you my disenchantment with everything, when you have the right—or do you?—to be my only enchantment . . . Tell me, you’ve never thought of these things that smash my heart into a thousand pieces? You’ve never left your girlish thoughts to feel the pain of abandonment of this boy who loves you? —Pablo
Sometime around May 1923, Albertina required urgent surgery. It seemed that a case of appendicitis infected and subsequently inflamed the thin tissue lining the interior of her abdominal wall. This acute condition, called peritonitis, can be fatal. The emergency surgery was especially complicated at the time; she stayed in the hospital for over a month. Her lover proved devoted; Neruda came to her bedside every day throughout her recovery.
During her stay he wrote “Hospital,” a short prose piece for Claridad, part of a series of twelve impressionistic pieces under the title “The Distant Life”:
The sole center of my existence was often just a yellow sliver of sun that pierced the curtains. I watched it glimmer, stretch, and scatter. My roommates’ moans sometimes snapped
