In the years since the book was published, Poem XV may be considered the most popular poem in the book, alongside Poem XX (“I can write the saddest verses tonight”). Albertina herself said that “I like it when you’re quiet” was her favorite. The poem is powered by Neruda’s glorification of the absence of his lover, which is idealized as we find him, the poem’s speaker, struggling to accept that he and his lover are not together.†
Neruda had several muses/subjects for Twenty Love Poems, though Albertina and Teresa were the two most important and prevalent. In each poem, the loved one is not present; each verse is a failed call to have her right next to him. Those to Teresa express a heartache that became wrung ever tighter as the futility of his desire for her increased with time. By the end of 1923, Teresa’s parents’ opposition to their relationship became too much for her. Neruda sent her one final letter from Santiago with the hope of changing her mind:
Your life, God, if he exists, will want to make good and sweet as I dreamed it would be. Mine? What does it matter? I will get lost on a road, one of the many there are in the world. Your trail won’t be mine, you won’t arrive when I do, and my rare joys won’t arrive to illuminate you, but how much I loved you! And why would this great love not be able to fill the void of this separation?
No, now I can’t write you. I feel a sorrow that grasps my throat or my heart. Everything is over? Say it’s not, it’s not, it’s not. —Pablo
“I no longer love her, it’s true, but how much I loved her,” he convinces himself near the end of Poem XX, which seems to spring right from the letter to Teresa. The cosmic frustration is stretched across a nocturnal landscape in which he could “write the saddest verses” (including “Love is so short, forgetting is so long”). Maybe he does still love her, he’s willing to admit near the end, but he is resigned to live on without her:
Because on nights like this I held her in my arms,
my soul is not at peace with having lost her.
Though this may be the final sorrow she causes me,
and these the last verses I write for her.
He may have lost her, but he still has poetry, still has the power, for whatever it may serve, to write the saddest verses.
Neruda was not, however, resigned to let Albertina go. He was terribly distraught by her absence, perhaps because she had not given him a definitive answer, perhaps because he couldn’t understand or simply accept that she would not be with him. His letters to her show his shattered psyche and blistering frustration:
The only thing that makes others desperate is the hardness of the heart. Imagine how I discover that [hard heart] in you, in you who are a part of me. I want to hit my head against the wall. You think that this is injustice or evil. No, it’s not that, it’s desperation. You’re my last hope. You must understand, it is your job to forgive me. I make it all up to you with the savage love that I feel for you. Isn’t that right, evil whore? Isn’t it true that you’re a bit at fault as well? Frog, snake, spider. I will pinch your nose.
He ends the letter with his customary conflation of deprecation and supplication:
As always, ugly brat, receive a long, long kiss from your —Pablo.
Neruda’s passion invoked a cruelty in him, as seen in these letters, a cringeful combination of scorn, despair, and tender affection. For Neruda at this time, about to turn twenty-one, love, hate, and possession intertwine: “I’ll eat you up with kisses,” he wrote her in April 1925. He rages against abandonment, to which he was certainly sensitized by the loss of his mother, as seen in his early poems. He also demonstrates constant neediness and extreme anxiety, perhaps results of his sickly, fragile, moody childhood. And he rages against authority figures who thwart him, like his father, Albertina’s father, and the parents of other lovers in the past, as well as against the women themselves, like Albertina, whom he blames for his pain.
Albertina later said she would have married Neruda had it not been for the move and the prolonged separation that followed. Neruda, though, did little to find a way to be with her in Concepción. Her brother and his great friend, Rubén, though not in Concepción at the time, surely could have helped him to travel and stay there with mutual friends. But Neruda didn’t try, perhaps because the inability to be with the “absent one,” with all the seething of his nerves that accompanied it, was more fulfilling for him and his poetry than actually being confronted by her presence. As Poem XV opens with “I like it when you’re quiet. It’s as if you weren’t here now,” it moves to:
I like it when you’re quiet. It’s as if you’d gone away now,
And you’d become the keening, the butterfly’s insistence,
And you heard me from a distance and my voice didn’t reach you.
It’s then that what I want is to be quiet with your silence.
Despite Neruda’s alarming and often hostile passion, Albertina was still drawn to him. He now showed a good sense of humor, and he was an enigma with a brilliant mind and imagination, with growing fame and stature as the voice of their generation. Even more so by 1925, he had lost the awkward appearance and developed into a handsome young man, suave, at times even elegant, especially when dressed in a suit once the old railroad jacket and huge sombrero had grown old.
In time, Neruda was able to break through those enraging “square and rigid frames” of conservative
