After they unloaded Cóndon at his luxurious hotel, the two Chileans turned their attention to a young woman from the bar who had accompanied them in the cab. They invited her to onion soup at dawn at Les Halles, the vibrant and immense market, always active, which dated back to the twelfth century. Neruda and Hinojosa conferred: they found the young woman neither pretty nor ugly. Her upturned nose conformed to what they thought was a Parisian style. They invited her to their seedy hotel. Neruda maintains he was so exhausted that he just went to his room and fell into his bed, while she followed Álvaro to his room. Later, though, Neruda woke to Álvaro shaking him urgently. “Something’s going on,” he said. “There is something exceptional, extraordinary, about this woman that I couldn’t explain to you. You’ve got to try her right away.”
Neruda wrote:
A few minutes later, the stranger got into my bed, sleepily but obligingly. Making love to her, I received proof of her mysterious gift. It was something indescribable that sprang from deep down inside her, something that went back to the very origins of pleasure, to the birth of a wave, to the genetic secret of Venus. Álvaro was right.
The next morning he pulled me aside during breakfast and warned me in Spanish: If we don’t leave this woman immediately, our trip will be a failure. We wouldn’t shipwreck at sea, but in the bottomless sacrament of sex.
Neruda and Álvaro then decided to shower her with small gifts. Not only did these include flowers and chocolates, but also “half of our remaining francs.” Describing this scene in his memoirs, nearly fifty years later, Neruda notes that the young woman “confessed” that she didn’t work at the Russian bar, “that she had gone there the previous night for the first and only time.” Then, after the soup, flowers, chocolates, and francs, “we got into a taxi with her. The driver was taking us through a nondescript neighborhood when we asked him to stop. We bid her farewell with big kisses and left her there, disoriented but smiling. We never saw her again.”*
* * *
Leaving Paris behind, Neruda would never forget the train that took them to Marseilles, “loaded like a basket of exotic fruit, with a motley crowd of people, country girls and sailors, accordions and songs chorused by everyone in the coach.” From Marseilles, they were off to sea again, across the Mediterranean and down through the Suez Canal. During the trip, Neruda and Hinojosa, who were carrying typewriters, passed the time composing love letters for the sailors to send to their amants back in Marseilles.
The poet had taken a liking to being on the road, and it was mitigating his mood, for now. Travel would become a constant refuge throughout his life. The ship sailed into the Indian Ocean, stopping at Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka); Sumatra, Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia); Singapore; and finally Rangoon, where Ricardo Neftalí Reyes, a.k.a. Pablo Neruda, assumed the position of Chilean cónsul in October 1927.
At that time, Rangoon was the capital and administrative center of the British colony of Burma, situated opposite India on the northeast corner of the Bay of Bengal in between Bangladesh and Thailand (known as Siam until 1949).
The British in Rangoon and throughout Burma frustrated Neruda. He saw them as imperialistic exploiters overwhelming the colony, “monotone” and ignorant. He could talk to them in his mostly self-taught English, in which he was relatively fluent by this time, but he preferred to engage as little as possible. The British tried to make others feel inferior, Neruda thought. He knew nothing of the native Burmese language, and for the most part it was prohibited throughout the colony, so many Burmese spoke English.
On October 28, shortly after he arrived, Neruda wrote to his sister that Rangoon was boring him terribly. “The women here are black,” he laments, “there’s nothing to worry about, I’m not going to marry.” Despite the progressive class politics he had demonstrated in Claridad and his poetry, Neruda held the conviction of the time and place that nonwhites were beneath him. But that didn’t mean they weren’t sexually interesting; perhaps it made them even more so:
a woman to love, to bed,
silvery or black, virgin or whore,
heavenly orange-colored carnivore,
it mattered not.
Neruda would be more promiscuous during his time on the shores of the Bay of Bengal and later the Arabian Sea than at any other point in his life.
But aside from the thrill of the chase, Neruda was disillusioned. The tropics were sweltering for the Chilean, he knew no one, and his job was devoid of inspiration or stimulation. As Neruda explained in 1971:
At that time, like now, Chile needed raw material to make candles. This raw material is called paraffin wax—I’ll remember its name all my life—and it came from the Petroleum Harmat Oil Company, from Burma. Because of this, Chile needed someone in Burma to take care of the paperwork, to stamp documents. Later that consular invoice system was eliminated and I could go back. But nobody ever went to see me, to consult me on anything, since there were no Chileans and no connections—neither economic nor intellectual—in that country.
This may have been one reason why the Ministry of Foreign Affairs let young poets hold these outposts.
On December 7, he wrote to Yolando Pino Saavedra, a Pedagogy Institute classmate who later became a foremost researcher of Chilean folklore: “The women, indispensable material to the organism, are dark skinned; they wear their hair up, stiff with lacquer; rings in their nose, and a distinct smell. Everything is wonderful the first week. But the weeks, time, passes on!” Five
