In the next lines, he penetrates her body, her world, connecting with her profoundly:
My savage peasant body plows through you
and makes the son surge from the depths of the earth.
His anguish relied on the hope of carnal relief:
I went alone as a tunnel. Birds fled from me,
I was invaded by the power of the night.
To survive myself I forged you like a weapon,
like an arrow in my bow, like a stone in my sling.
He shoots his phallic arrow, in retaliation for his injured heart:
But the hour of vengeance strikes, and I love you.
Body of skin, of moss, of ardent, constant milk.
The drama echoes his letters to Albertina: vengeance, followed by declarations of love. Here as well, Neruda portrays Albertina as absent as he engages the “chalices” of her breasts. He attempts to fill that absence and she moans:
Ah the chalices of the breasts! Ah the eyes of absence!
Ah the roses of the pubis! Ah your voice slow and sad!
But his orgasm does not satisfy:
Body of my woman, I will persist in your grace.
My thirst, my infinite anguish, my indecisive path!
Dark riverbeds where eternal thirst follows,
and fatigue follows, and infinite sorrow.
Despite an audience to share in his yearnings, and despite the popular acclaim for Twenty Love Poems, fatigue and sorrow continued to follow Neruda. As he turned twenty and embraced a life of literary success, there was another challenge that started to make itself starker, dogging him and his hopes for the future: the need to make a living.
Chapter Seven
Dead Gallop
Every day I have to find money to eat. I have suffered a bit, my girl, and I have wanted to kill myself, out of boredom and desperation.
—Letter to Albertina Azócar, August 26, 1925
When Albertina’s brother, Rubén, returned to Chile from a trip to Mexico in May 1925, he found his friend Neruda in sad shape. Despite the success of Twenty Love Poems and a Desperate Song, “Pablo’s state of mind was anxious, disconcerted,” Rubén wrote.
The frequent letters Neruda sent Albertina during this period demonstrated his disquietude. One missive is especially revealing of his mental state. It was written during a difficult visit to his parents’ in Temuco, on September 24, 1924, “at night, beside the fire.”
These days have been bitter, my little Albertina. Nervous breakdown or accumulation of crap. I can’t bear it alone. At night: insomnia, painful, long. I become desperate, feverish. Last night I read two long novels. I already woke up and I still toss and turn in bed like an invalid . . . Why did my mother give birth to me among these stones? And as exhausted as I am I haven’t the strength to take the train [back to Santiago] . . .
Rubén had noted that Neruda was suffering through a trio of problems: “money, love, and poetry.”
With regard to love, Neruda was still furious at and obsessed with Albertina, who was studying in Concepción. In Temuco on summer vacation in March 1925, Neruda had written her another letter from his boyhood desk. The words he chose for the salutation were “Ugly brat.” He told her that he didn’t know what people were telling her about him, but that it was all meaningless, because he loved her.
Perhaps she’d heard about him sleeping with the young Laura Arrué or other girls: “You know that I like to have fun . . . [but my] heart belongs to you, my little cockroach, thread by thread, all the way down to the roots. Everything else, can it matter to you?”
He asked her what plans she had to return to Santiago. “I believe you need to do this: take advantage of the faith your father has in you, speak to him seriously, and tell him that you inevitably have to study [in Santiago], win it, conquest it.” He urged her to respond, ending the letter, “Think of how I need to hear from you every day, darling bitch.”
No words from Neruda could enable Albertina to challenge her father. Neruda, meanwhile, never seems to have thought to move to Concepción, even though it was home to one of the best universities outside of Santiago.
Albertina still found Neruda intriguing and compelling. While he constantly insulted her in his letters, he would wrap tender expressions of affection around his insults. He had proven his devotion by coming to her bedside every day after her surgery. He had written remarkable poems to her. He had a distinguished mind, a handsome appearance, and, of course, a prominent reputation now as a young, startling poet.
While one part of Neruda’s mind was fixed on the unattainable Albertina, he was still smitten with Laura Arrué in Santiago. After she graduated from high school, they began to see each other frequently. She had a “celestial” beauty and charming disposition, according to his friends; she was bright and embarking on a successful teaching career. Their relationship seems to have been sexual from the start. In 1924, he gave her a copy of Twenty Love Poems. “Hide them under your mattress,” he told her. “They’d better not find them because they’ll tear it up.”
Yet while he and Laura were engaged in their love affair, he was writing frequent letters to Albertina in Concepción. A year after the publication of Twenty Love Poems, his words to her continued to match its verses. “Ah,” he wrote Albertina that April, “if you only knew, my dear little woman, the crazy desire to have you next to me . . . to eat you up with kisses that are greater than this absence.”
Neruda faithfully accompanied Laura to the Ministry of Education as she inquired about her forthcoming teaching appointment, helping her secure the position she deserved.
