The first time Neruda came to the Hinojosas’ house, Álvaro warned everyone not to worry about conversing with him, because he simply didn’t like to talk. Everybody agreed, naturally, though his mother found this to be a rather strange trait for a guest. However, one night when Neruda arrived at the house alone after an evening out, he found Señora Hinojosa still up and began talking spontaneously with her. They chatted for a long while. When Sylvia asked her later what they talked about, she answered, “About business. He’s an enchanting muchacho.”
Although his mental state was lethargic, Neruda could walk for hours. Strolling through the hills, he’d peer into the alleyways that wove horizontally across the streets, never knowing what he’d find behind the lapis lazuli or aqua-green houses. Sometimes he would just sit in one of the city’s plazas with the seafolk or go down the cobblestones to look at the sea and breathe it in. He could spend the rest of the day strolling through the markets, the antique shops, the huge open plazas down on the flats with the sea breeze, seagulls, wharf fish markets, and long orange customhouses. Then he would walk back up through the hills, climbing lines and lines of steep stairs up, then back down, here and there, and taking a funicular and looking out at the view. In the late afternoon he would stand on a pier as the sun dropped down into the ocean in front of him, displaying the same colors that he had seen five years before in the pension on Maruri Street, colors that inspired The Book of Twilights and still absorbed him with sadness.
Nevertheless, he saw some relief and hope in the sinking of that persimmon orange down into the water every evening. At those hours the sun cast a soft haze of light onto the multicolored hills; Neruda would try to absorb some of that art as he watched the sailors from Chile’s navy or those working the cargo boats, doing the same job his father had done at the dry docks in Talcahuano. With his lonely eyes, he’d watch them drink and talk among themselves, or with women, the images in front of him seemingly drawn from his first well-known poem, “Farewell,” published a few years ago now:
I love the love of sailors
who kiss, then leave.
“The Valparaíso night!” he wrote a half century later, “a point on the planet lit up, infinitesimal, in the empty universe.” With the hills glowing like a golden horseshoe above the water, Neruda went out with Álvaro and sometimes other friends to experience the nightlife of the port and the forbidden districts. When they came home, he would often write until he fell asleep. Other days, however, when his gloom overcame him, he might barely manage to move out of the house.
Years later, Neruda built his own unconventional home in the hills above the enchanted port—one of three treasured homes he would eventually own. But in the mid-1920s he was still struggling for every peso. Consequently, Neruda and Álvaro concocted at least two business schemes to come up with some cash, finally acting on Señora Hinojosa’s prompting and entrepreneurial ideas. Their most successful venture was designing and printing “comic postcards” accompanied by simple rhyming lines, which they tried to sell to people in the streets, on trains, and in restaurants. Their only successful postcard had a cutout face of an apache—gangsters of the Parisian underworld during the Belle Époque were named after the Native American tribe—that moved against the postcard thanks to a tiny metal chain. Accompanying it was the text:
Place the card horizontally,
Shake it or tap it lightly,
And you’ll start to laugh uncontrollably.
They managed to convince an owner of several cinemas to use the card as publicity for a film he was then showing starring Lon Chaney, and he bought two hundred. Neruda then quickly wrote to Albertina that he was “thinking about getting involved in the movie business.” Predictably, nothing came of that, and no more cards were sold. He had only just managed to stay afloat ever since he first arrived in Santiago, and now his economic situation was becoming more precarious than ever. On October 8, 1926, he wrote to his sister, Laura, in Temuco, begging her to ask Papá to send money, as the cheapest pension cost a hundred pesos that he didn’t have. Despite the fact that José del Carmen had been adamantly against giving him any money, Neruda implored his sister to have him send it by telegraph “because I’m eating only once a day.” He also needed all kinds of clothes, “especially shirts (N.° 37) and underwear, 87 cm. [34.25 in.] waist.” He asked for socks and handkerchiefs too.
As his father had warned, Neruda needed an actual job with a stable income. He also wanted to escape the tight boundaries of Chile, ideally to Paris, the cultural epicenter of the contemporary avant-garde, where he could write—and just be—in the footsteps of Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Mallarmé. Novelists, philosophers, linguists, painters, musicians, sculptors, and poets from all over the world were moving to Paris’s Left Bank. The great Peruvian poet César Vallejo moved there, as did the Spanish painters Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró and U.S. writers such as Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Ernest Hemingway, Hilda “H.D.” Doolittle, and Ezra Pound. Where else would Neruda want to be?
If not Paris, well, anywhere other than Temuco or Santiago. Even Valparaíso, which was a good momentary escape, couldn’t offer him extended mooring or occupation. His peers were coming and going from distant parts of the world: Spain, Russia, Colombia. Neruda too longed to travel. But how? Several managed to get
