However, there is evidence both in his correspondence and his poetry from the time that his usage may not have been as limited as he describes in his memoirs. “Pablo sleeps, pulls an opium pipe, and only wakes up to take care of his official duties,” Hinojosa scribbled in a postscript to a letter Neruda wrote to Eandi. What had started out as exotic allure became an escape from his “banishment,” self-medication for his incessant isolation, depression, and frustration. Opium went beyond a connection to Baudelaire and became a way to leave behind his suffering.
He describes the setting in the sixth of the twelve dispatches he wrote for La Nación back home. Titled “A Day in Singapore,” it is dated October 1927:
There are blacksmiths who squat to forge their metal, street vendors selling fruit and cigarettes, troubadours who make their mandolins quiver. Hair salons where the clients’ heads transform into a hard castle, varnished with lacquer. There are [exotic] fish for sale [for food] inside jars; passageways and shaved ice and peanuts; puppet shows; howls of Chinese songs; opium dens with their sign on the door:
Smoking room.
Blind beggars announce their presence with clanging bells. Snake charmers coo their cobras with their sad, intoxicating pharmaceutical music.
Not surprisingly, while at first seeming to form communal bonds with the Singaporean opium users and the culture that surrounded the drug, he’d later write about them with repulsion. In the end, the only community he was interested in connecting with through his opium use was the predominantly European literary community that preceded him. He never discovered the way to do that.
It’s impossible to understand how Neruda’s use of opium exactly affected his writing, if at all. Yet examining a few of the poems, it does seem, as Professor Francisco Leal puts it, that opium’s “exercising effect on his body, the senses and the perception of time” is apparent in some of the poems’ visions—“visions at times horrible and surprising.”*
Most opiate writers craft their words once they’re down from their dream states, but lethargy and other hangover effects of the drug can hinder the writers’ ability to garner the will and energy necessary to articulate what they experienced while under the influence of “enhancements,” as Coleridge described it. Nonetheless, Neruda did show that, despite his mental withdrawal, he was motivated enough to paint those images and sensations in a framework that holds up on the page.
There are five prose poems in the first volume of Residence on Earth. They allow Neruda the room for more narration, to relate what he sees from a distance, as opposed to the verse poems in the book that are so often based on internal observation. Three of them seem to describe experiences and settings related to opium.
In the poem “Nocturnal Collection” (which had been the working title of the book), the speaker, apparently alone in the world, has come upon the “angel of sleep.” “He is the wind that shakes the months, the whistle of the train.” He is “perfumed with sharp fruits,” “a repetition of distances,” “a wine of confused color.” The angel’s “substance” is “prophetic food he propagates tenaciously.” In the seventh stanza, that substance is referred to as the “bland fruits of the sky.” As Roanne Kantor, lecturer in comparative literature at Harvard, points out, the images “all seem to refer to a comestible substance associated with an altered state of consciousness beyond mere sleep.” The substance, furthermore, is delivered to the speaker in a “black hamper,” just as the black resin of opium usually comes in a dark casing. In one line we see two qualities: “he gallops in the breath [nausea] and his step is kiss-like [addictive enticement].” Toward the end, the speaker breaks from the nocturnal and emerges into the collective of other opium users, and then he turns his attention to the city he is in, far away from the embrace of the angel of sleep where he began.
“Contradicted Communications” depicts someone in an opium-induced state with corollary images and senses. The poem defines the atmosphere in which he’s living now, a world opaque with opium’s “milky” smoke, surrounded by a mute and motionless chorus, his bones supported by a cement armchair, subdued, where he awaits “time militarily with the foil of adventure stained with forgotten blood.”
“Nocturnal Establishments” is the third prose poem that is clearly influenced by opium. The “establishments” are neither whorehouses nor bars; they are opium dens, with distinct wooden floors, no decoration, no noise. (Neruda never used the word “opium” in these poems.) “With difficulty I call to reality, like the dog, and I too howl,” the poem begins, almost as an evocation, carrying his efforts to conjure up something for his mind to hold on to from “Dead Gallop” to the opium dens. He’s submerged in his own confusion and needs something to help him move forward, out of the milky haze of his mental state.
The first images are repulsive, reflecting the general atmosphere. The inhabitants of the opium joint that surround the poet-speaker are animallike and grotesque: “how many frogs accustomed to the night, whistling and snoring with throats of forty-year-old human beings.” He wants to engage them, “to establish the dialogue of the nobleman and the boatman, to paint the giraffe, to describe the accordions, to celebrate my naked muse.” Instead, he condemns them. There is no mention of salvation from the depths of these confusions: “Execration for so many dead who do not look, for so many wounded by alcohol or misfortune, and praise for the night
