The prototypical “Oriental Woman,” in a Western writer’s eyes at the time, as laid out by the eminent postcolonial theorist Edward Said, was docile, graceful, and sexually pliant. Or, in the words of Kantor, Oriental women were seen as “‘wise,’ but paradoxically intellectually innocent to the point of naïveté or even stupidity, while animalistic in her hygiene and living arrangements, and emotionally volatile, leading to outbursts of violent, masochistic, and ‘fatal’ behavior.” This is Josie Bliss, as Neruda portrays her, to a tee.
The prose poem “The Night of the Soldier” is the first piece thought to have a relation to Josie Bliss. The speaker approaches native “girls with your eyes and hips, beings in whose hair shines a flower yellow as lightning.” As if he never had such a chance back in Chile, he uses their bodies as a classroom, a laboratory, a mirror. He wants to remove their colored necklaces “and examine, because I want to discover myself before an uninterrupted and compact body, and not to mitigate my kiss.”
It does seem from his poems and other expressions that the approximately two-month period during which the supposed Josie Bliss affair took place was one of furious, raw, and uninhibited sexual activity for Neruda, with at least one woman, opening up a new level of eroticism within himself. These experiences, combined with his new environment, affected his poetry, heightening the explicitness of both its content and its imagery.
“The Young Monarch” features a clear view of the Josie Bliss character. In this short prose poem, he “wants to marry the most beautiful woman in Mandalay.” (Mandalay was the capital of Burma before the British took over, the epicenter of the country’s culture.) She is “a lovely girl with little feet and a big cigar.” She has amber flowers in her “cylindrical” black hair. She lives dangerously; she is the daughter of the king; she is his “tiger.” Yet after he kisses her coiled hair, the speaker weeps right away for his “absent one”—not this woman, but Albertina, perhaps. It is left uncertain whether the speaker ever marries his bride, or whether he really wants to.
As the narrative progressed, through the poems he wrote and later in his memoirs, by the time Neruda left Burma he was calling himself a widower. The separation from Josie Bliss is marked by the fantastical poem “Widower’s Tango,” where Josie is no longer the enhanced princess; now she is the “malignant”—and she hasn’t actually died.
Josie Bliss would have “ended up killing me,” Neruda wrote in his memoirs. When he received official notice to transfer to a new post in Ceylon, he used it as his chance to flee from her. He prepared for his departure in secret, and then, “abandoning my clothes and my books” so she wouldn’t detect that something was awry, “I left the house as usual and boarded the ship that was to carry me far away.”
In the literary sense, at least, the poem “Widower’s Tango” acts as a letter of explanation to Josie that he never sent. After receiving his transfer from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, before he took the boat to Ceylon, he spent “two months of life” in Calcutta, from November 1928 until the end of that year. (He reunited there with Hinojosa.) “Widower’s Tango” was dated “Calcutta, 1928.” It became something of a cult classic among those familiar with Neruda’s work. Shortly after Residence on Earth was published in Madrid, Guillermo de Torre highlighted “Widower’s Tango” as “profound.” In 2004, Mario Vargas Llosa, Peruvian winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote that the poem sends “a shock down my spine,” producing that “elated sense of disquiet and felicitous astonishment into which all absolute masterworks plunge us.”
It is the potency of this poem that more than anything has perpetuated the myth of Josie Bliss, enthralling reader after reader, generation after generation. The poem is intricately structured, combining compelling sentiment with provocative imagery. It is similar to many of his letters to Albertina, in that he weaves statements of his lingering passion for her with harsh words of degradation.
The poem begins with “Oh Maligna”—the Malignant, the Evil One—
by now you must have found the letter, you must have cried with fury,
and you must have insulted the memory of my mother,
calling her rotten bitch and mother of dogs,
you must have drunk alone, all by yourself, the twilight tea,
looking at my old shoes empty forever . . .
As the poem continues, the distance he’s put between them becomes troubling. He misses the domestic life they shared: “there are no hangers in my room, no pictures of anyone on the walls.” Then reflections of his projections of her as the classic masochistic, violent “fatal woman”:
Buried next to the coconut tree you will later find
the knife that I hid there for fear you’d kill me . . .
Yet he longs to return to the scene:
and now suddenly I want to smell its kitchen steel . . .
Neruda cycles perceived threat, desire, and barbarity throughout the poem.
I would give this giant sea wind for your brusque breath
. . . to hear you urinate, in the darkness, in the back of the house,
as if spilling a thin, tremulous, silvery, persistent honey,
how many times would I give up this chorus of shadows that I possess,
and the noise of useless swords that is heard in my heart.
It was revolutionary to write a line like “to hear you urinate, in the darkness” in Spanish, a line that still sings with its provocative sound and substance. It represents the raw reality of daily life and the intimacy that can sweeten urine to honey. He almost elevates her corporal excreta to the divine. Yet there is a dark undertone: the woman in the poem is like a wild animal.
Neruda’s memoirs contain a postscript to Josie Bliss. Supposedly, she discovered the location of his new post and followed him, pitching camp right in front of his house. “As she thought that rice wasn’t grown anywhere but
