With a long knife (that same kitchen knife, perhaps), she supposedly attacked a sweet young Englishwoman who came to visit the consul. Neruda’s neighbor eventually took her in, and then, with no explicit prompt, she finally left, vociferously begging the poet to come with her on the boat back to Rangoon. Neruda accompanied her to the dock, and as they embraced, she bathed him in tears and kisses, all the way down to his toes, “so that the chalk polish of my white shoes was smeared like flour all over her face . . . That turbulent sorrow, those terrible tears rolling down her floured face, continue to live in my memory.”
Elegant writing aside, even if she did exist, Neruda has Josie appear only as an exotic tale, demonstrating how he saw himself as an exception to imperialistic culture, naive to how his own words indicate his racism. “I went so deep into the soul and the lives of those people that I fell in love with a native,” he begins his story of Josie Bliss in his memoirs, a comment akin to the classic “some of my best friends are . . .” He felt he had known the Burmese culture, almost like an anthropologist, but his relationship with Josie was awash in stereotypes. He congratulates himself for his courageous, righteous interaction, for “going so deep,” while propagating a racist, sexist trope. Neruda was actively promoting social equality and justice at the same time he was composing these memoirs in the 1960s. Yet his dehumanization of nonwhite women certainly undercuts his moral authority when he writes about the “downtrodden.” The contradictions between Neruda’s personal life and attitudes and his future political ideals were revealed glaringly during his time in Asia, and would resurface often throughout his life.*
Chapter Nine
Opium and Marriage
I hear the dream of old friends and lovers,
dreams whose heartbeats break me open:
their carpeted floors I walk in silence,
their poppy light I bite in delirium.
—“Nocturnal Collection”
Neruda moved to Colombo, located on the western side of the great island of Ceylon, into a bungalow outside of the city’s center, near the beach. He had a dog; his mongoose, Kiria; and at least one servant, Ratnaigh. Someone took a posed photograph of him standing against a palm tree, his arms crossed over a dark vest tucked into his white trousers. His black belt sits high on his lanky torso, his legs seem disproportionately long, and his outfit is a bit formal for the occasion. He’s not nearly as skinny as in his student days, though still slim, with some maturity in his face. As the photo is being taken, he stares out into the southern Arabian Sea, as if he doesn’t want to be there. Beside him, Ratnaigh, dressed in white, sits crouched on the sand, his arms draped over his knees, seemingly relaxed and at ease.
The small bungalow was just outside of all the hustle and bustle of Colombo. “Have I told you about Wellawatta, the neighborhood I live in?” he wrote Eandi. “Ocean and palm trees, waters, leaves. The ocean encircles me, quickly, with fury, leaving nothing around me . . . Eandi, there is no one more alone than me.”
Indeed, at first there seemed to be little difference from Rangoon. “Caught between the Englishmen dressed in dinner jackets every night and the Hindus [actually, most were Buddhists], unreachable in their fabulous immensity, I could only choose solitude, and so that time was the loneliest in my life.”* It is unclear why he persistently isolated himself from others. Just as he expresses disdain for the British, he also shows entitlement and imperiousness toward the locals, as seen in his correspondence in Burma and now in his new post. “If you, my dear mother, passed by my house in Colombo, you’d hear how I yell from morning to night to the servant to pass me cigarettes, paper, lemonade, and to have ready my pants, shirts, and all the artifacts needed to live.”
And he didn’t isolate himself from the locals of European descent. “I never read with such pleasure and such abundance like in that suburb of Colombo,” Neruda wrote in 1968, from the comforts of Isla Negra, for a magazine article. “I had a friend outside of town, Lionel Wendt, a pianist . . . Since I was so eager to read English books as I arrived in Ceylon, he took it upon himself to let me borrow his in continual succession.” Every Saturday, a cyclist would bring a fresh supply in a potato sack from Wendt’s house in Colombo “to my bungalow in Wellawatta.”
The potato sacks contained the latest poems by T. S. Eliot out of London and Hemingway’s newly published A Farewell to Arms. There were two now-classic novels published the year before (1928), both known for their shocking portrayals of relationships and sex: D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (a copy from Florence, as it was still banned in the United Kingdom) and Aldous Huxley’s innovative Point Counter Point.*
He also revisited Rimbaud, Quevedo, Proust, and other classics Wendt had available.
Besides his new pianist friend, Neruda had more social interaction with Europeans than ever before. He spent time with Wendt’s childhood friend George Keyt. All three were no more than four years apart in age. Wendt and Keyt were both born in Ceylon and had mixed European and Asian blood. Educated in British schools, the two were
