Convalescing, I walked the strangely silent corridors with slow steps. The sisters passed by me with their daily hustle and bustle, and sometimes, a trembling, anguished cry would stop me near a window or against the crack of a doorway . . . In the center of the courtyard the nuns had an altar to the Virgin: a stony grotto, covered in climbing vines. It was the only bright spot in the hospital filled with shadows. Night and day, the candles of that alcove were lit, and I would light my cigarettes one by one in those sacred flames flickering in the wind.
Once Albertina was fully recuperated, her parents commanded her to return home to Lota. Even before her illness they had never liked the idea of her being in such a threatening city, some 350 miles away. Furthermore, the University of Concepción’s School of Education, only twenty-five miles from Lota, had just started a French program of its own. As far as they were concerned, there was no longer any reason for her to be in Santiago. After all of Neruda’s constancy, the swell of so much love, he was suddenly told to keep his distance.
Neruda was crushed by this turn of events. His frustration raged, and he found few ways to ameliorate it. Yet while he often suggested it, he never moved to Concepción, and Albertina’s fate was fixed for now. He turned to poetry, of course, and his despair at her absence led to the most famous poem in Twenty Love Poems.
His exasperation also came out in more than a hundred surprising letters that he wrote to Albertina between 1923 and 1932 (which she saved). Prior to her departure, he had written to her about minute details of daily life and profound thoughts. Yet immediately after she moved to Concepción, nearly every letter desperately and aggressively declared how much he needed her. They became quite nasty. Most of them started with an attack on her, a reproach, almost always followed by placation and a soft expression of how much he loved her. These were combined with cute illustrations, such as patterns drawing out the word beso (kiss). Perhaps he hoped that he could make her feel guilty for inspiring his obsession and causing him such pain. He called her an “ugly cockroach,” simply “ugly” on several more occasions, a “bad woman.” His nicknames for Albertina seemed to harken back to his discovery of the forest as a child: Princess Worm. Pesky little worm. Girl of the secrets. Frog. Snake. Spider. Beetle. Malicious whore. Adored doll. Little scoundrel. My ugly little girl. My pretty little girl. Little rat. Seashell. Bee. Beloved brat of my soul.
In the earliest of the letters, we can see the emotional and linguistic ingredients of some of the poems in Twenty Love Poems. While Albertina was in Concepción, in a letter dated September 16, 1923, Neruda confided to her that “spread out on the moist grass, in the afternoons, I think of your gray beret, of your eyes that I love, of you.” Later, in Poem VI, he took that very imagery from the letter and deepened it, turning it into a dynamic, multileveled poem:*
I can feel your eyes, voyaging away, distant as that autumn,
Grey beret, voice of a bird, heart of a huntress—
Where all my deep agony migrated,
Where my happy kisses fell like embers.
The skies from shipboard. Fields from the hills.
Your memory is of light, of smoke, of a still pool.
Deep in your eyes the twilight burned.
The dry leaves of autumn whirled in your soul.
In that same letter in which Neruda mentions her gray beret, he states: “Little One, yesterday you must have received a newspaper, and in it the poem of the absent one. (You are the absent one.)”
The poem he refers to had just been published in Claridad six days before:
This lullaby is for you, Little One, wherever you are, wherever you go.
Trembling warm river, the tenderness wets my voice, my voice that speaks your name.
For you, further than the distant red clouds, and the distant mountains, distant because of you I look farther, farther still.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The absent one, who closes the eyelids, on the other side of the shadow. I speak to you, and my voice calls out to you, Little One. Don’t leave, don’t you ever leave.
This idea, that by invoking her absence he will make them both more present, is evident in the letter after he mentions the poem and her role in it: “Did you like it, Little One? Does it convince you that I remember you? And on the other hand, you. In ten days, one letter.” He admits, “Given that I am very vain, I’m very sensitive [to the fact that she isn’t writing him].”
True to its raw autobiographical nature, Twenty Love Poems seems composed directly from many of these letters, both the words and the psychology. This is evident in a similar, subsequent letter to Albertina, which contains the opening to Poem XV:
Almost always I feel like writing to you, so if I don’t receive your letter I become troubled. It’s as if you were thinking about something else while I talk to you, or as if I talked to you through a wall and didn’t hear your voice.
The beginning of Poem XV:
I like it when you’re quiet. It’s as if you were absent,
and you heard me from a distance, and my voice couldn’t reach you.
It’s as if your eyes had flown away from you,
and that a kiss had sealed your mouth.*
Albertina, years later, would relate that during their
