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In June 1926, Neruda was ready to return to Santiago from Chiloé. Always a dapper dresser, he wanted to return in style, which meant wearing oxford pants. Nobody on the isolated island knew of them, so he had to sketch out a model himself to take to the tailor. Once they were ready, a dinner was thrown for him on the evening of his departure at the Hotel Nilsson. Rubén claimed that around 150 people showed up to send Neruda off, including local dignitaries.
Just as Neruda’s spirits had lifted on the ferry out to Chiloé, they sank as he took up his old life in Santiago. The new paths he had explored may have produced richness on the page, but they did not prove helpful with his mood.
Upon his return, he rented a room with two friends, Tomás Lago and Orlando Oyarzún—none of them could afford a room of his own. In that room over several months, Neruda and Lago collaborated on a small volume of twenty-one expressionistic, experimental prose pieces that would be published by Nascimento that same year, 1926. The book’s title, Anillos (Rings), reflected the successful fusion of the pair’s styles, diverse writing backgrounds, and avant-garde intentions. Their relationship was so well bonded that it is hard to tell whose story is whose, and no notations are given to convey individual authorship.
The book is heavily rooted in the landscape, weather, and seasons of the south. Along with the familiar themes of melancholy, anguish, and solitude, autumn, wind that dries out the soul, and the sea return over and over again. Produced by free association, the prose swells with potent eloquence as Neruda, with Lago, broke through to yet another poetic style. Some passages seem far out, even today:
The southern skies keep the guards awake and move by great blue leaps and reveal the jewels of the sky. I will say that I remember her; I remember her; she came barefoot so as not to break the dawn, and the sea in her eyes still did not retreat. The birds flew away from her death like they do from winters and metals.
The book never received significant attention, though its publication demonstrates how prolific Neruda was. Although none of his first books was especially lengthy, he had published five works within three years.
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The room Neruda, Lago, and Oyarzún shared was up a set of narrow stairs above a small produce shop and cafeteria. Their landlords were the Edelmiras, a humble and kindhearted couple. La señora Edelmira served Neruda abundant plates of food and lots of coffee when Neruda finally came down the stairs in the afternoon. Oyarzún slept on a pile of newspapers, and Neruda and Lago shared the same wire-spring bed—with no mattress. In Neruda’s inimitable style, he hung some old umbrellas on the wall in which he hid letters and poems.
One day Laura Arrué came to deliver the news to Pablo that she was leaving Santiago. Her mother had shown up all of a sudden at the “request” of her older sister, Berta. Neruda, it seemed, had gained the reputation of being something of a Don Juan, and Berta wanted to rescue her little sister from the danger of the bohemian avant-garde love poet as quickly as possible. Laura’s mother was to take her back to San Fernando. Laura had come to say good-bye.
She managed to leave Santiago without a chaperone, which allowed Neruda to accompany her to the train station. In the waiting room, he recited lines to her he had just composed, a good-bye letter of sorts, saying how hard it would be to get used to never seeing her:
Autumn appears in the corner of town and the broken leaves signal that it’s the abandoned one’s time of year. The loneliness is sad. You are in the doorway, you, doll with round eyes, ships of painful minerals, blue flower, daybreak between bracelets and despairs; from afar I throw you my anxiety striped with difficult lines of fire that will surprise you when you go leave, when you go out, the girl with her mother from San Fernando . . .
The lines continue with free-associative vanguard imagery and thoughts he had been using in his recent books. It was rather strange language for a good-bye note, completely different in tone from the antagonistic, in-your-face letters to Albertina. There were no signs of desperation in his words to Laura, whom he cherished, who became yet another lover separated from him by her parents.
There was no reprieve, however, from the angry angst he expressed in his letters to Albertina. He was still writing to her, a bit manically. “I’ve been through so much!” he exclaimed to her in one. He had published new books, but “I’ve come out of all this so tired, eager to rest in you. That is the impatience, the despondency you cause in me.” He later writes, “For me it’s as if you didn’t exist . . . It’s as if you weren’t here now,” again right out of Poem XV. However, as he does so often in his correspondence to her, the next line completely contradicts that sentiment: “And [yet] you are an anchor, the only one in my life.” That positivity is once again followed by an ugly reproach in his strange psychological game of persuasion: “Really, sometimes I would like for you to die.”
Neruda was notably tired upon his return to the city from Chiloé. The publication of his works and his growing fame and stature failed to offset his despondency. “I’m bored of everything[,] I’m thinking about dying at the first opportunity,” he wrote to Albertina on May 12, 1926. Lyrically, with the new voice he had been developing, Neruda dove deep into the well of
