Eandi worked toward finding someone to publish Residence on Earth in Buenos Aires, but for Neruda, Argentina “seems to me still too provincial . . . My greatest interest is to publish them in Spain.” Not only did he want to get published in Spain, but he wanted to live there too, to be transferred out of his “banishment” in the Far East and obtain a post in Europe. Though he had never met him, Neruda began writing the Chilean writer-diplomat Carlos Morla Lynch, who served in a variety of positions in the Chilean embassy in Madrid. Their mutual friend Alfredo Cóndon, of the Russian bar incident, put them in touch. Neruda’s letters were open and intimate from the start:
Carlos Morla, about me feeling lonely, I feel lonely. I would like to be taken to Spain. Is there any prospective consulate there? What do I have to do for the department to transfer me? Life here is so terribly dark. For years I have been dying of asphyxia, from disgust. Where’s the remedy? I’d like to live in some little town in Europe, eternally, as long as my body cooperates. Is that possible? Could you and the ambassador do something for me?
The ministry heard Neruda’s plea and assigned him to a post in Ceylon.
According to Neruda, that exit was expedited by a dangerous turn in a dramatic relationship he had with a Burmese woman in Rangoon a couple of months before he left. Her name was Josie Bliss. She dressed like an Englishwoman, and, in his memoirs, Neruda described her as “a species of Burmese panther” and a “love terrorist.”
Josie Bliss was one of the most intriguing and exciting characters in Neruda’s life, especially as described in his memoirs. Seven or eight of his poems allude to her. She was one of six women to have an entire chapter devoted to her in a book called Los amores de Neruda (The Loves of Neruda), by Inés María Cardone, spanning his entire life. Yet there’s a possibility that she was nothing more than an eccentric invention. Josie Bliss may not have existed at all, except in Neruda’s writings and a few anecdotes he told friends later on.
Perhaps Neruda invented her evocative name to embellish his story, or perhaps her name was of her own choosing; locals of that generation often adopted English names so they could assimilate more into the colonial economy. To this day no one knows her real name, and there is no official trace of any “Josie Bliss.” She was supposedly an erratic woman, and at that time in Burma, she could have fallen through the “official” cracks. But no one has ever come forward with proof of her existence. There are no photographs. And while it is not surprising that he wouldn’t mention her in any of his letters to his sister and mother, it is puzzling that someone who took up so much of his emotional time and energy didn’t even once appear in all the frank correspondence he had with Héctor Eandi.
In her study “Chasing Your (Josie) Bliss: The Troubling Critical Afterlife of Pablo Neruda’s Burmese Lover,” Roanne Kantor writes, “Neruda and generations of critics analyzing his life and work have filled reams of paper with descriptions of Josie as exotic, passionate, animalistic and homicidally jealous. Behind all these descriptions, however, is an absolute void: we lack not just the archival evidence to corroborate this particular version of Josie, but the evidence to suggest that there was ever any Josie at all.”
Their romance was one of furious physical chemistry. Neruda’s descriptions of Josie Bliss, mainly in his memoirs written decades after the encounters, stretch credulity: her obsessive jealousy and possessiveness, how she would erupt into tantrums when he received telegrams from back home and sometimes find them first and hide them without opening them, how “she glowered at the air I breathed.”
Sometimes a light would wake me up, a ghost moving behind the mosquito net. It was she, dressed in white, brandishing her long and sharpened indigenous knife. It was she, passing entire hours pacing around my bed without having decided to kill me yet or not. “When you die my fears will end,” she said to me. The next day she would celebrate mysterious rites to guarantee my fidelity.
It is not impossible that there was an extremely tempestuous, young, emotionally unstable woman whom he appealed to. However, Neruda exaggerated and invented a great deal throughout his writings, throughout his life. Also, her depiction fits into problematic narratives concerning race, gender, and the Orient that developed during those years, showing fundamental aspects of how he saw himself and the world around him at the time. Josie is eccentric and exotic and of the same skin color as all the other local women he slept with, but she also has some standing, wears English clothes, and has her own place for them to live. He describes her as a true lover, someone he seriously would have considered marrying, unlike the way he perceived other native Burmese women. In other words, she embodies a fantasy, an acceptable woman on which Neruda can project all his racialized—and racist—fetishes.
George Orwell’s debut novel, Burmese Days, published in English in 1934, is a model from which Neruda may have further developed the character in later years. Orwell’s Burmese femme fatale character, Ma Hla May, closely matches Josie. Wrapped in animalistic comparisons as well, at times Ma Hla May is like a kitten; other times she’s a worm. Just like Josie, who uses Western clothes to try to hide her true identity, Ma Hla May uses white
