Without Laura or Albertina by his side, Neruda feared the solitude that awaited him in Burma. As much as he wanted the post, he remained timid in many ways and felt afraid of traveling abroad for the first time to such a distant destination, and one so terribly different from everything he knew. So when his eccentric friend Álvaro Hinojosa suggested that Neruda change his first-class ticket on the ocean liner for two in third class so that he could join him, Neruda immediately agreed and named Hinojosa the consulate’s chancellor. The position may have sounded important, but it was an imaginary title; Neruda’s own position was at the bottom of the hierarchy, too low to merit any chancellery characteristics. There would barely be enough work and money for Neruda alone. But Neruda looked up to Álvaro and was relieved by the prospect of having his companionship in this leap into the unknown.
Before he left, his band of friends gave him a spirited good-bye party, the climax of several celebrations that started as soon as the minister gave him the job. “While eating and drinking,” Diego Muñoz recalled, “we would exchange information about Burma, about Rangoon, its weather, its inhabitants, of the beautiful Burmese with their Oriental garments. We painted quite an exotic picture and we all dreamed about that distant country where our friend was going to live.”
On June 15, 1927, a month before Neruda’s twenty-third birthday, he and Hinojosa boarded the Transandino train to Argentina. In Buenos Aires, Neruda met the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, five years his elder, whose first two books of poetry and first two books of essays had been published within the past four years. It would be the only time these titans of Latin American literature and culture would meet face-to-face. Borges already respected Neruda; a year before, he had included a piece of venture of the infinite man in an important anthology he had coedited. When they met, Neruda gave him a copy of the book, simply addressed, “A Jorge Luis Borges, su compañero Pablo Neruda. Buenos Aires, 1927.”
Although Walt Whitman’s influence on Neruda was still light, they talked about his importance to both of them. They also spoke of the Spanish language. Borges declared, tongue in cheek, that it was “a hopeless, clumsy language in which no one had achieved anything,” referring to the sound of Spanish, with its long words and, relative to English, its rigidity for writing poetry. Smiling, they decided it was too late to start writing in English all of a sudden. They would “have to make the best of our second-rate literature,” Borges said, recalling the conversation years later.
Their meeting was much more diplomatic than intimate; they would never develop a fraternal relationship. In fact, the two would become distant though relatively respectful rivals, mainly due to political differences. There was also an element of ego, as for most of the twentieth century they were considered the top two South American writers. Two years after the encounter in Buenos Aires, Neruda would write to an Argentine friend, “Borges really seems to be a ghost from an old library . . . Borges, who you’ve mentioned, seems too preoccupied with issues of culture and society, which don’t totally interest me, as they are not human issues. I prefer good wines, love, suffering, and books as consolation for the inevitable solitude . . . I even feel a certain disdain for culture as a way to interpret things . . . In my world I see fewer ideas, always more bodies, sunlight, and sweat.”
In a 1975 interview, Borges said that Neruda “wrote all those silly sentimental love poems, you know . . . When he became a Communist his poetry became very strong. I like Neruda the Communist.” He may have liked Neruda the Communist poet, but he certainly did not like Neruda the Communist idealist. One of the reasons they never met again was that Borges’s conservatism and Neruda’s communism were incompatible.
They made special efforts to avoid further encounters. On one occasion, when Borges visited Chile, Neruda chose that time to go on vacation. It seems to have occurred to both of them that, except for the Spanish language, they had very little in common as writers.
In a 1970 interview for the Paris Review, Neruda was prompted by the statement: “Some people accuse you of being antagonistic toward Jorge Luis Borges.”
“The antagonism toward Borges may exist in an intellectual or cultural form because of our different orientation,” Neruda answered. “One can fight peacefully. But I have other enemies—not writers. For me the enemy is imperialism, and my enemies are the capitalists and those who drop napalm on Vietnam. But Borges is not my enemy . . . He understands nothing of what’s going on in the contemporary world; he thinks that I understand nothing either. Therefore, we are in agreement.”
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Neruda and Hinojosa boarded the Badén, the boat that would take them first to Rio de Janeiro and then on to Lisbon, Portugal. “This German ship supposedly had just one class, but this ‘one class’ must have been the fifth,” Neruda
