Neruda simply couldn’t get her off his mind, so “one morning, I decided to go all the way. I got a strong grip on her wrist and stared into her eyes. There was no language I could talk with her. She let me lead her, without a smile, and she was soon naked on my bed. Her skinny waist, her full hips, the brimming cups of her breasts, made her like one of the millennial sculptures from southern India. The encounter was of a man with a statue. Her eyes stayed open the whole time, impassible. She was right to despise me. The experience was not repeated.”
In his and others’ writings, there is no evidence that Neruda ever committed another assault of this nature, but here he describes his exercise of power and privilege with little shame. During the act of rape, he perceives her as inhuman, a piece of stone. Then he projects divinity on her, comparing her to a sublime goddess like one of the “millennial sculptures from southern India.”* Perhaps he feels that he absolves himself to some degree through such exaltation.
While he may have understood class in the Marxist sense, Neruda never connected that abstraction to the institutional realities of racism, sexism, or social caste, all of which were keenly at play in this act of violence. His version of events is not unrelated to his interpretation, in the same chapter, of his experiences with his “Burmese panther,” Josie Bliss. The woman is not a woman, but a caricature of submissiveness and cultural inferiority that he can dominate.
Neruda’s behavior, both here and throughout his time in Asia, was imperialism perpetrated on a human scale, an exact replica of the imperialism perpetrated on a geopolitical scale against which he ranted both while in Asia and while writing his memoirs. His rape of a person based on his sense of entitlement and inherent superiority was a perfect expression of the rape of one nation by another based on these same presumptions of merit and worth. In his narcissism, he could not see the connection.
His narcissism is further expressed in the way he integrates the woman’s duty of cleaning his personal excrement into the story of his violation of her. It amounts to the divinization of his excrement, as it is a sublime goddess who empties his chamber pot. This goddess merits less consideration than even a prostitute, whom Neruda would at least have paid for her services. Or as the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek put it, as part of a larger study, the relationship Neruda proposes should be taken very seriously: “elevating the exotic Other into an indifferent divinity is strictly equal to treating it like shit.”
Did Neruda tell the world this story in the 1960s because he consciously or unconsciously felt it had to be told? Or had he maintained the same sense of entitlement that had allowed him to commit the rape in the first place? Even later in life, he would not recognize the inhumanity of his actions. There is no true repentance, no explanation for that behavior. If perhaps he felt a twinge of regret, it passed quickly.
* * *
Amid speculation about a possible transfer to Singapore, Neruda expressed his excitement to Eandi for the “magical Malay Archipelago, beautiful women, beautiful rituals.” “I’ve already been to Singapore and Bali twice and I’ve smoked many pipes of opium there. I’m not sure I like it, but it’s different, anyhow,” he wrote, placing emphasis on the word “anyhow” by writing it in English.
Yet his memoirs describe a divergent, distinctly unpleasant experience with opium. He actively used it in Ceylon, though years later, in his memoirs, he would disavow his enjoyment of it, perhaps to better reflect upon his mature career as a world-renowned poet.
“I smoked one pipe . . . It was nothing . . . The smoke was warm, gloomy, misty, and milky . . . I smoked four pipes and was sick for five days, with nauseas that came up my spinal cord, which descended from my brain.
“So much had been said, so much had been written. There had to be more to it than this.”
The literature of opium has a long history, from Homer and Virgil to Shakespeare. But Neruda was most compelled by works that portrayed actual experiences with the drug, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “vision in a dream” in his poem “Kubla Khan,” Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, and, perhaps above all for Neruda, his hero Baudelaire’s 1860 classic Les Paradis artificiels. Opium appeared in many works of nineteenth-century British literature,* especially in the English romantics’ poems. Not only did they lyricize the mysteries of the Oriental drug, but they also used it heavily. As M. H. Abrams argued in The Milk of Paradise (1934), opium’s effects caused the romantics to be “inspired to ecstasies.” A nonuser could never experience the realm of dreams and sensations that led to some of the era’s best writing.
There are many positive references to opium in Western literature that Neruda must have read, yet his experience was negative. Once again, there is a disjuncture between what he wanted from Asia and what he found in its reality. “I had to experience opium, know about opium, in order to provide my testimony . . . I smoked many pipes, until I knew . . . There are no dreams, no images, no paroxysm . . . There is a melodic debilitation, as if a smooth, infinite note lingered in the atmosphere . . . There’s the fainting, a cavity within oneself . . .” He felt
