Yet while they may have come from and been raised in that society, they were both very unconventional members of the group. Besides being a concert pianist, Wendt was an important avant-garde art patron and an eclectic, experimental photographer.
Keyt had become a Buddhist; as a painter, his synthesis of European modernist innovations with ancient South Asian traditions would gain him world renown. Neruda even wrote a review for the Times of Ceylon of a 1930 art exhibition his friend was a part of: “Keyt, I think, is the living nucleus of a great painter . . . These figures take on a strange expressive grandeur, and radiate an aura of intensely profound feeling.”†
Though, as he had back home, he found camaraderie with like-minded intellectuals and artists, it didn’t seem to pull him out of his mental isolation. Neruda was never an excessive drinker (though he’d always enjoy his vino tinto and whiskeys) except at this time, when it seemed he had nothing else better to do, other than write to Eandi: “I’m alone; every ten minutes my servant comes, Ratnaigh, he comes every ten minutes to fill my glass.” He felt lonely despite this constant presence of another human being: “I feel anxious, restless, banished, moribund.” After pleading for Eandi to come join him, in capital letters even—“¡VENGA!”—he soon returns to his compulsiveness over his particular sense of banishment, almost a self-imposed exile: “You remember those novels by José Conrads [sic],” he asks Eandi, “with those strange beings who’ve been banished, exiled, with no possible restitution? Sometimes I feel like them, just that; this is just so long.” Later he wrote: “Two days ago I interrupted this letter, falling down, full of alcohol.”
He had the option of returning to Chile but did nothing to change his circumstances. Instead, he wallowed in self-pity.
* * *
Neruda was also writing constantly to Albertina and Laura Arrué, perhaps Teresa as well.* There was not one response from Laura. She in fact had not received even one of the letters he had promised to write and had become disillusioned. Anticipating possible censorship by Laura’s mother, Neruda had been sending her letters through his friend Homero Arce, who worked for the Chilean postal service. But Homero had fallen deeply in love with Laura; he never gave her any of Neruda’s letters.
Finally, a long-awaited letter came from Albertina. She was in Paris, en route to Brussels, on a fellowship to learn a new system for teaching French to children. The poet wrote back quickly, desperately, as always, saying this would be the last chance they’d have to be together, adding, “I’m very tired from the loneliness, and if you don’t come, I’ll try to marry someone else.” He gave her all the details of a ship that would take her from France to Colombo and told her, “Every day, and every hour of every day, I ask myself: Will she come?”
She never did. Albertina’s fellowship was revoked when the school’s director opened Neruda’s letter to her and demanded an explanation about why she was seemingly entertaining such a proposal from Ceylon while she was there to study. Albertina refused to answer and was forced to return home. She did love him, but as she later related, “In those days, more than fifty years ago, you have to understand that things were not as they are now. I had to go back to my university, and besides that, my parents were fairly strict—I didn’t dare go.”
From a later letter to Héctor Eandi, written on February 27, 1930:
A woman, whom I have loved a lot (it was for her that I wrote almost all Twenty Poems), she wrote me three months ago, and we worked out her coming, we were going to marry, and for a while I lived full of her arrival, arranging my bungalow, thinking in the kitchen, well, in everything. And she couldn’t come, or at least not for the moment, for reasonable circumstances, perhaps, but I had a fever for a week and couldn’t eat, it was like something inside me burned me up, a terrible pain . . .
At least seven of the first fifteen poems of Residence on Earth are about Albertina or Laura Arrué, or both. Albertina takes on the presence of a ghost, where she is the “dazzled, pale student” who “surges up from yesteryear,” but she is not real, only a “phantom.” In these verses Neruda reaches a darkness only hinted at in Twenty Love Poems. His narrators are stuck in the past, unable to exist in the present, which in any case offers only remorse and dread:
In the depths of the deep sea,
in the night of long lists,
your silent silent name
runs past like a horse.
Lodge me on your back, oh shelter me,
appear to me in your mirror, suddenly,
upon the solitary, nocturnal pane,
sprouting from the dark behind you.
Flower of sweet total light,
bring your mouth of kisses to my call,
violent from separations,
that resolute and delicate mouth . . .
—“Madrigal Written in Winter”
Echoing his letters to her, Neruda accuses “Oh heartless lady” Albertina of “tyranny” over his emotions in his poetry. As we have seen before, he blames the women in his life for his psychic pain and seems impotent to do anything about it.
Sexually, meanwhile, he was comfortable in the role of aggressor—even predator—the role he played with Josie Bliss. As he wrote in his memoirs, “Female friends of various colorings visited my campaign cot, leaving no more history than the physical lightning. My body was a solitary bonfire burning night and day on that tropical coast. My friend Patsy came by a lot with some of her friends, morena and golden muchachas, girls of Boer, English, Dravidian blood. They went to bed with me sportingly with little interest.”
The most beautiful woman Neruda saw in Ceylon was a Tamil of the pariah caste, an “untouchable,” who cleaned out the tin box that was the bottom of his waterless toilet. “She walked solemnly toward the latrine, without so much as a side glance at
