Neruda himself saw this work as crucial to his evolution as a poet: “I have always looked upon venture of the infinite man as one of the real nuclei of my poetry,” he said at the age of fifty, “because working on those poems, in those now distant years, I was acquiring a consciousness that I didn’t have before, and if my expressions, their clarity or mystery, are anywhere measured, it is in this extraordinarily personal little book . . . Within its smallness and minimal expression, more than most of my works . . . it claimed, it secured, the path that I had to follow.”
* * *
Neruda’s friendships were a positive note in his life, as his relationship with Rubén Azócar shows. Rubén was highly intelligent, and so diligent and passionate about his work as a teacher that his friends and students called him a “profesor de profesores.” While he was popular in the FECh crowd, he stayed away from the vices of the bohemian lifestyle. His eyebrows were imposing, so bushy that friends called them “tree brows.” Straightforward and constantly cheerful, Rubén was a steadying presence for Neruda. He was one of Neruda’s closest friends, since before his first encounter with Rubén’s sister Albertina.
After he returned from teaching in Mexico, Rubén received a job in the liceo of Ancud, the small but principal town on Chiloé, a gorgeous green island off the southern Chilean coast. Always generous, Rubén invited Neruda to join him, hoping the refreshing change of scenery from Santiago would ameliorate his friend’s angst. He even offered to help Neruda financially by sharing a little of his teaching salary. Desperate for something different, Neruda accepted Rubén’s offer and went with him to write on that verdant island.
Neruda and Rubén took the train to Concepción. During the few days they were there, Neruda managed to see Albertina alone. Still, she resisted his urgent pressure to join him in Chiloé, or anywhere. There was her father, but there was also her own determination to finish her degree. She wouldn’t abandon her studies to go live with him on an island, especially given that neither of them had a job. Neruda left Concepción terribly frustrated, unable to persuade Albertina even face-to-face. He left for Temuco bitterly, Rubén alongside.
Concepción adjoins Talcahuano, the port city where José del Carmen had worked the dry docks and enjoyed his secret love with Aurelia Tolrá, the mother of Neruda’s half sister, Laura. As Neruda’s train to Temuco left Albertina behind, it followed the same rails that had taken his father from his own lover, so many years before.
It was winter, and rain covered the south, reminding Neruda of his childhood in Temuco. He was about to have another tempestuous run-in with his father. Now twenty-one, Neruda braced himself just as he had when he was a teenager. Inside their pioneer house, José del Carmen exploded at his son, yelling so loud he could be heard from the street. He demanded to know why Neruda had interrupted his studies yet again and refused to support him while he abandoned his path to a steady career and the middle class. And José certainly wasn’t going to pay for him to write poetry. If Neruda insisted on being a writer, he would have to prove that he could support himself.
After a few days in Temuco, while Rubén continued on to Chiloé to begin teaching at his new school, something made Neruda turn back to Santiago. He hadn’t given up on the idea of going to Chiloé entirely; in fact he wrote to Albertina from the capital of how he was imagining “the first night that we sleep together under the stars of Ancud.” (At the same time, true to his nature, Neruda rekindled his relationship with Laura Arrué, even as he kept writing to Albertina.) He wrote that he’d been sick but was thinking of going to Chiloé in October or November, then begged her to go with him, admonished her for not agreeing to join him, for not even writing him. Two years had passed since the publication of Poem XV, about Albertina’s silence and absence, which ends: “A word then is sufficient, or a smile, to make me happy / Happy that it seems so certain you are present.” Now he concludes a letter to her, “One honest word from you, brat, and you wouldn’t make me take this stupid trip.”
No word came from Albertina, though, so he headed back south at the end of November. After a stop in Temuco, Neruda continued on to the town of Osorno. He’d normally be able to see the towering, active, glacier-capped Osorno volcano from town, but it was hidden by a furious rain, making it seem as displaced and dormant as so much of Neruda’s inner workings. The rain covered the town in a tremendous sadness, Neruda told Albertina in a postcard he sent her the following day. On November 23, 1925, he traveled to Puerto Montt, where he took a small steamboat across the Chacao Channel to Chiloé.
The trip was a much-needed escape. His spirits started to lift while on the boat, looking out across the expanse of water in the incessant rain. This was the first time Neruda had left Chile’s mainland, and
