The essence of Pablo Neruda at this time of his life was his suffering—his suffering in pursuit of his ego’s desires. Buddhism advocates the release of desire in order to alleviate one’s suffering. Neruda basked even in yearnings gone by—the awe he felt under the stars in Puerto Saavedra, for example, and his pining for Albertina. Embracing Buddhism was anathema for a man who clung to his desires and clung equally to his suffering, who defined himself by them. To reject them would not have meant freedom and enlightenment, as Buddhism proposes, but death. Buddhism, he realized, while fascinating, was almost antithetical to who he was.
In “It Means Shadows,” the third of the four quatrains illustrates this:
Oh, let what I am keep on existing and ceasing to exist
and let my obedience align itself with such iron conditions
that the quaking of deaths and of births doesn’t shake
the deep place I want to reserve for myself eternally.
The crux of Neruda’s problem, according to Buddhism, is in the last line. He asks for eternal self, while the Buddhist believes that nothing is eternal. The poem, appropriately, ends in the subjunctive, a prayer for the opposite of what Buddhism preaches. He emerges confident that he wants to continue attached to his ego. Buddhism turns worthless, like every other experience: the women, the exotic, the opium. He can’t find what he needs from it and kicks it to the curb. He embraces the very cycle Buddhism seeks to release:
Let me, then, be what I am, wherever and in whatever weather,
rooted and certain and ardent witness,
carefully, unstoppably, destroying and saving himself,
openly engaged in his original obligation.
In 1964, as a strident Socialist atheist, he writes in his poem “Religion in the East” that in Rangoon he
realized that the gods
were every bit the enemies
to the poor human being as was God.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
serpent gods coiled
around the crime of being born,
naked and elegant buddhas
smiling at the cocktail party
of empty eternity
like Christ on his horrible cross,
all of them capable of anything,
of imposing on us their heaven,
all of them with wounds or a pistol
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
fierce gods made by men
to conceal their cowardice,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
the whole earth reeked of heaven,
of celestial commodities.
* * *
In 1929, nearly a year into his residence on Ceylon, Neruda was in a state of bewildering flux. “Sometimes I’m happy here, but what demonic solitude,” he wrote Eandi during a monsoon.
This storm rained hard on Neruda’s psyche. “Water that doesn’t stop . . . an evil humidity that penetrates to the bones”: it was “the saddest period in the tropics.” While it rained, he read. Along with “los Hogares,” the Argentine magazine Eandi sent him, he read English novels borrowed from Wendt.
Solitude, Neruda wrote, was becoming:
[A] humid room around me, it poisons me, because the small passing wounds become gaping: there’s no way to stop the bleeding and they hemorrhage all the way to the soul. But what a beautiful fresh day it is, after a terrible tempest last night in which my house filled with water and two coconut trees fell in the garden, struck by lightning. Today is green and transparent: the sea is thick and detained, blue.
This last sentence suggests that the psychological bleeding may have been slowing, allowing room for optimism. He was opening further but was growing tired of his life in Ceylon, worried about getting stuck within its “inactivity of death.” Fortunately, good news arrived: he would be transferred to Singapore, a much more cosmopolitan and enticing country, with jurisdiction over equally appealing Java. Animated, Neruda wrote to Eandi of stretching out his senses to finally experience and rejuvenate in the beauty of the post-monsoon mornings for the first time since he had been there. Something was “soothing him.” Somehow, Neruda seemed to emerge from his doldrums just as the 1920s ended and the ensuing global depression began.
* * *
Wellawatta, Ceylon, February 27, 1930:
The consul general of Calcutta has recommended that I go to Singapore and Java; it’d be good if they appoint me there.
Yes, naturally, sometimes I’m crazy with happiness, not because of Patsy and her ilk, but rather because I’ve recovered my health, and my skin is still young. Stretched out in the sand, alone, in the mornings I shout with joy “EANDIIII” and anything else that occurs to me, the fishermen look at me astonished, and I help them throw out their nets.
Neruda was apparently escaping the inferno at last. He departed to Singapore with lifted spirits in early June 1930, ready to take up his new post, accompanied by his “good servant Dom Brampy,” whom he referred to as “my Sinhalese boy,” who at some point seemingly replaced Ratnaigh. The consul also brought his “extremely friendly” mongoose. Upon his arrival he went straight to the world-famous Raffles Hotel and checked in. He had started to do his laundry when he got the alarming news that there hadn’t been a Chilean consul in Singapore for some time—there was nothing there for him. He ran back to the port, supposedly with his still-wet clothes, hoping that if the Singapore post didn’t exist, the Java one did. The Dutch boat he had come on from Colombo, luckily, was still there, ready to head to the Dutch colony of Batavia (now Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia). Neruda got on board.
Batavia is located on the northwestern end of the immense yet relatively narrow island of Java.* The landscape here was unlike where Neruda had been, and was full
