A month later, seeking respite, Neruda and Hinojosa set off on an ambitious trip spanning from January to the end of March. It was illuminating and adventurous right from the start, in Saigon, followed by two days in Bangkok, and then the fantastic, classic eleventh-century Cambodian temples and Buddhist statues in Battambang. Before he left Chile, Neruda had been commissioned by La Nación to compile a series of “Reports from the Orient.” In his chronicle for this trip, he paints his observations—absorptions—of these new worlds in such impressionistic imagery, it’s as if everything in front of him is illusory, surrealistic:
How difficult to leave Siam, to never lose the ethereal, murmuring night of Bangkok, the dream of its thousand-boat-covered canals, its tall enameled temples. What suffering to leave the cities of Cambodia, each with its drop of honey, its monumental Khmerian ruin in the grace of a ballerina’s body. But it’s even more impossible to leave Saigon, relaxed, full of enchantments.
Indochina behind, they continued to Hong Kong, followed by Shanghai and Japan. “Glittering” Hong Kong was full of surprises, alive with sounds of “mysterious exhalations, incredible whistling.” In China, he marveled at how the streets of Asia were “always surprising, magnetic . . . what a bag of extravagant tricks, what a setting for exotic colors and customs, in every district.” Everything seemed a strange brew “stirred by the marvelous fingers of the absurd.”
Yet while these mysterious sights would be fodder for his poetry, upon his return to Rangoon the exhilarations he had experienced in the other parts of Asia soon evaporated. In a letter to his sister, Laura, on the way back from Japan, right after noting how hard it was to explain all the rare things, he complains, “Life in Rangoon is a terrible banishment,” and “I wasn’t born to pass my life in such a hell.” “It’s like living in an oven night and day,” he writes. He longed to leave, to continue his studies in Europe. But his banishment was of his own design; he stayed there.
Creatively, Neruda sought inspiration via letter writing and from the letters he received in turn. His epistolary activity provided a release from the suffocation he was feeling. He began a correspondence with the writer Héctor Eandi, after the Argentine wrote a very positive article about him. On May 11, 1928, in the second of a series of raw and revealing exchanges, Neruda ended a note to him:
Sometimes for long stretches I’m like this, so empty, so vacant, without being able to express anything or check anything inside myself, and a violent poetic disposition never stops to exist in me, each time it leads me to a more inaccessible route, so that a great part of my labor I accomplish with suffering, for the need to occupy a rather remote domain with forces that are surely too weak. I’m not talking to you about doubts, or disoriented thoughts, no, rather of an unsatisfied aspiration, of an exasperated conscience. My books are the heaping, the pile, of these anxieties without exit . . .
Upon returning from their trip, Neruda and Álvaro rented a small house on Dalhousie Street in Rangoon. Neruda was not good company. He was in a bitter mood, wanting only to read and write by himself. Álvaro was in a romantic relationship with a local woman. As he noted in a journal-like chronicle around that time:
Our friendship with Pablo was visibly getting colder. All on the part of him. It had gotten to the point that he had converted into my declared enemy. In the things that affected both of us, he acted as if I didn’t exist. One night I came back to the house and was in the mood to chat. Pablo grabbed a book, and answering me with a bad attitude, he looked for a way to end my superficial and somewhat alcoholic chat. I tried to interest him in various subjects. Nada. So I told him, “I’m going to Calcutta tomorrow.” I didn’t have the slightest inclination to make such a trip all of a sudden. But my goal was to make him talk. His only remark was “That’s crazy.” And he kept reading.
Álvaro had been intruding on the irritable poet’s personal space. Having effectively dismissed him—Álvaro did end up going to Calcutta (now Kolkata), where he tried to make it in its film industry—Neruda was now alone, which was what he seemed to want. Shortly, though, he would begin to complain constantly about the solitude he felt. His isolation was caused by his mental state, to a great degree, as much as he would blame the culture and environment. As always, his practice of writing poetry would serve as a balm for the utter desolation of his mind. Neruda sieved his mental currents as he poured his soul into his poetry. He constructed an almost unprecedented, intricate, reflective set of symbols by giving a voice to the unconscious. This work produced the majority of the first book of Residence on Earth.
In August 1928, Neruda wrote to his old FECh friend José Santos González Vera:
I suffer, I’m so anguished with horrible discoveries, the weather burns me, I curse my mother and grandmother, I spend whole days conversing with my cockatoo, I pay an elephant in rent . . . my desires are influenced by storms and lemonade . . .
I’ve already told you: great inactivity, but only on the surface; deep down, I was unable to stop my thoughts from churning . . . My scant latest works, since a year ago, have reached great perfection (or imperfection), but within what I strived for. It’s to say, I have passed a literary limit that I never believed I was capable of surpassing, and in truth
