It was completely disconnected from Neruda’s familiar terrain, especially Santiago: full of wide lakes and dense forests; tapestried with wild berries; dotted—if you could catch a glimpse of them—with tiny pudú deer, not even two feet tall; and with dolphins swimming off the coast. Chiloé is encircled by an archipelago of smaller islands. Some sixty unique wooden churches line the coast, placed like lighthouses to guide sailors home, their symmetrical tower facades and arched entrances painted in colors ranging from bright yellows to deep blues. In the towns, tiny houses painted in heart-tapping tones of blue, yellow, and red hug the shore, with the majority extending out on stilts over the free real estate of the water.
Rubén had rented a “very passable” room for the two of them in the Hotel Nilsson. It cost only about a tenth of his salary, so Rubén treated Pablo to everything and, on that first night, they ate like kings: the best lamb from Patagonia and fresh thick salmon caught right off the coast. They stayed up late smoking the best tobacco, and they sent sacks of oysters and some drinking money up to their friends in Santiago. The town took a liking to the bohemians from the capital. They made many friends and read their poetry aloud in Ancud’s main plaza. In Chiloé Neruda found the enrichment, rest, diversion, and creative inspiration he needed.
After Nascimento had received the manuscript for venture of the infinite man, he gave Neruda a small advance to start a new project.* Wondering what might become of the experiment, he asked Neruda to write a book of fiction, with the only condition that it be some type of crime story. As he started to compose this new book on Chiloé, the island’s dreamscape surroundings began to inspire the novella’s images and feel (to some degree, a continuation of venture’s oneiric atmosphere). Furthermore, the coastal geography in the story’s setting mirrors the area around Puerto Saavedra, the coast of his youth.
Entitled El habitante y su esperanza (The Inhabitant and His Hope), it is a passionate prose adventure of love and crime in the darkness of the Chilean frontier. Neruda called it, in parentheses under the title, a “novel,” but it definitely is not one. It is closer to a novella, made up of short chapters that stretch over just seventy-six pages. Nascimento published it at the end of the year, just after the author turned twenty-two. It was his fourth book. Like venture of the infinite man, it was received with little enthusiasm. Some found merit in it, though: Alone, in his positive review for La Nación, called it “a triumph.”
In the book’s prologue, Neruda writes:
I’ve got a dramatic and romantic outlook on life; what doesn’t completely enter into my awareness doesn’t belong.
It was very difficult for me to combine this spiritual constant with a way of expressing it that was more or less my own. In my second book, TWENTY LOVE POEMS AND A DESPERATE SONG, I already had something of a masterpiece. The levelheaded imbeciles that form part of our literary lives will never know the happiness that comes from being self-reliant.
As a citizen, I am a quiet man, enemy of established laws, governments, and institutions. I am disgusted by the bourgeois and love the lives of the restless and unsatisfied, be they artists or criminals.
In El habitante, right after the prologue, we delve into a rich, dreamy world set in Cantalao, inspired by Puerto Saavedra, setting the sensory tone for the entire book, which is written in the first person.
Now, my house is the last one in Cantalao, facing the roaring sea, tucked in against the mountains.
Summer is sweet, languid, but winter emerges suddenly from the sea like a net of sinister fish striking the sky, piling on top of one another, jumping, spitting, and grumbling. The wind makes its sterile noises, different ones depending on whether it is whipping along, whistling through metal fences, or spinning its dark boleadora above the village, or coming from the ocean sweeping along in an infinite line.
Many times I have been alone in my home when a storm whips the coast. I’m calm because I don’t fear or love death, but I like to watch the morning, which almost always arises clean and gleaming. It’s not rare for me to sit down on a tree trunk watching the immense ocean from afar, smelling the fresh air, watching each cart crossing toward town with its merchants, Indians, workers, and travelers. A sort of waiting power has seeped into my way of living that day, a way superior to indolence, superior to my indolence precisely.
One of El habitante’s qualities is Neruda’s juxtaposition of poetic prose against realistic narration, so that its style and imagery almost supersede the plot. As Alone put it, “It’s a story and it’s not a story.” The story: A horse thief finds his lover dead, naked on the bed, cold like a great silver fish from the sea. She was killed by her husband, the thief’s partner, after he discovered their affair. The horse thief then avenges his lover’s death by murdering her husband, and then he escapes into the dark countryside of the frontier.
The “nonstory” is conjured through layers of surrealistic images. It all takes place in silence, slipping through a raging rain in the woods, with a river that collides with a crying black sea, the blackness enveloping everything. The underlying structure of Neruda’s novella is based on the surrealistic idea of creating two disparate realities, and thus besides the “story,” he creates an emotional power and poetic reality, which is the “nonstory,” the force and the value in the book.
It was not, however, a success with the public,
