On July 12, 1927, Neruda wrote to his sister two hours before arriving in Lisbon. It was his twenty-third birthday, though he makes no reference to it in the letter. Instead, he announces his itinerary: Portugal, Spain, and then France. While so many of his generation from around the world were in Paris long-term, he would stay for less than two weeks before heading on to Burma.
When he wrote Laura, Neruda was not thinking of the rich experiences that awaited him on the Left Bank but, rather, was focused on his anxiety:
I’m a little scared of arriving, because here on board I’ve learned that life is extremely expensive there, that the cheapest boardinghouse costs $1.600 a month, and I’m going with very little money. Even more there’s plague, tertian fever, fevers of all types. But what is there to do! We have to submit to life and struggle with it, thinking that nobody else will take care of you.
After a brief stay in Lisbon, they arrived in Madrid on July 16. Neruda would stay there for just three days. It was a chance to introduce himself as a poet in the land from which his mother tongue originated, but the experience was disturbing. Of the very few people he saw in the city, which in five years’ time would become a beloved home, one was the critic and poet Guillermo de Torre, who happened to be Borges’s brother-in-law. He had become a leading spokesperson for the Spanish avant-garde flourishing then in Europe and Latin America, especially of its experimental branch, ultraísmo.
There are two very different accounts of the visit. In 1950, Neruda claimed:
When I arrived in Spain for the first time in 1927 . . . I met Guillermo de Torre, who was the literary critic with modern tendencies, and I showed him the first originals of the first volume of Residence on Earth. He read the first poems, and when he was done he told me, with all the frankness of a friend, “I didn’t see or understand anything, and I didn’t know what you proposed with them.” I thought I would stay longer. But then, seeing the impermeability of this man, I took it as a bad symptom and I went to France . . . I had just turned twenty-three and it was natural that Spain in the last days of ultraísmo was not the place for me.
Ultraísmo favored fragmentation and surprise, a rejection of the traditional representations of reality and its “impurities,” and exalted the mechanical and the scientific, everything “modern” and innovative, over the intimate, the transcendental, and the human. It was not what Neruda was about. In fact, during his return to Spain seven years later, he would write a famous essay defending his “impure poetry.”
In a friendly and open letter to Neruda, Guillermo de Torre replied with his own version of their encounter, saying that they had talked cordially at a café until dawn. He didn’t remember reading any of the poems from Residence on Earth, but “the only thing I can be certain of is that I did not pronounce the word that you perhaps hoped to hear: genial [‘full of genius; brilliant’].”
Just two weeks after their encounter in Madrid, de Torre wrote “Panoramic Sketch of Chilean Poetry.” Published in the journal La Gaceta Literaria (which de Torre helped found), it named Neruda “the undeniable head of the lyrical advances currently occurring in Chile,” the “profound star that his young colleagues followed.” He admired Twenty Love Poems, “a point of perfection and harmony,” but imperfection and instability followed, as Neruda was “unsatisfied” with that book and “tried to outdo himself.” In Madrid he had given de Torre his most recently published books, such as venture of the infinite man. In them, de Torre wrote, Neruda leaped far forward, “banishing all coercive norms.” Yet while his ambition created “an abstract, naked lyricism,” he seemed to have tried too hard, this poetry not working nearly as well as when he was writing more in tune. Despite de Torre’s slight reservations about the later work, the article, especially given that it appeared in a prestigious European journal, was a significant acknowledgment of Neruda’s importance.
Four days after they arrived in Spain, Neruda and Hinojosa were off to Paris, the city of Neruda’s dreams. All of Paris, all of France, all of Europe, seemed contained in “two hundred meters and two street corners: Montparnasse, La Rotonde, Le Dôme, La Coupole, and three or four other cafés.” It was the zenith of the Montparnasse scene, and Neruda, dipping his toes in for the first time, was profoundly impressed. He also met one significant and talented Latin American poet present at the time in the City of Light:
During those days I met César Vallejo, the great cholo [indigenous]; poet of wrinkled poetry, difficult to the touch like a jungled skin, but it was magnificent poetry with superhuman power. Incidentally, we had a little run-in right after we met. It was in La Rotonde. We were introduced, and in his exquisite Peruvian accent, he greeted me by saying: “You are the greatest of all our poets. Only Rubén Darío can compare with you.” “Vallejo,” I said, “if you want us to be friends, don’t ever say anything like that to me again. I don’t know where we’d end up if we started treating each other like writers.”
Neruda was also able to enjoy a particular aspect of Parisian nightlife, at least for a few hours. Alfredo Cóndon, a mediocre writer and the wealthy son of Chile’s biggest shipping magnate, invited Neruda and Álvaro out for an adventurous night on the town. He was crazy but kind and well liked. He
