Finally, in the Far East, Neruda kindled a romance with a woman who met his societal requirements. Maruca, with her European blood, was marriageable. Perhaps she felt a maternal affection for him. She did adore him at first, in an exciting, first-love, almost blind kind of way. At the tennis courts and markets and on tropical day trips, they had ample leisure time in which to develop a relationship. They shared a desire to be with someone of their own race with similar social standing. They had little else in common. The year before, Neruda had written to Eandi from Ceylon that he wanted to marry “soon, tomorrow even.” That and to live in a big city were his only persistent wishes.
He would satisfy both. In a postcard marked January 31, 1931, he announced the news: “No longer alone! Dear Eandi, I got married a month ago.” Their wedding took place on December 6, 1930, less than half a year after meeting at the tennis court.
A week later he wrote to his father, announcing the event and stressing that his wife was from a “distinguished family” and that he had wanted to tell him earlier about his decision to marry “and wait for your consent, but due to numerous circumstances, our wedding was certified much earlier than the date we expected.” Neruda placated him, writing, “From now on, you will not have to worry knowing your son is alone and far away from you, for now I have someone who will be with me forever.” He added, “She brings together all the perfections and we are entirely happy.” He also told his father that, as she doesn’t speak Spanish and he doesn’t speak Dutch, they both speak English “perfectly.”
Neruda then wrote to his good friend Ángel Cruchaga Santa María (who would later marry Albertina):
I’ve married. Do me the favor of publishing in good shape this portrait of my wife in Zig-Zag. They have a thing for me there.
Why should I tell you that this is to please her. She knows you very well already . . .
I beg you to send me two copies of the Zig-Zag in which it appears.
But don’t forget, if not you could disturb a home’s peacefulness!
Frantically yours,
Pablo
Neruda
With the freshness of newlyweds, the couple was a handsome pair.
Ten months into the marriage, on September 5, 1931, Neruda penned details to Eandi about his life as a married man in Java. He and his Dutch wife were “extremely close,” “extremely happy,” he begins. Everything that follows seems to contradict that. They lived “in a house smaller than a thimble. I read; she knits. The consular life, the protocol, the meals, dinner jackets, tailcoats, formal tuxedos, uniforms, dances, cocktails, all the time: hell.”
Sometimes they would get away by car, taking a thermos, cognac, and books to the mountains or the coast to look out at “the black island, Sumatra, and the submarine volcano Krakatau. We eat sandwiches. We go back. I don’t write . . . Every day is the same as the next in this land. Books. Films.”
He never wrote a single love poem to Maruca. On the one page that he mentions her in his memoirs, he set her aside in parentheses, saying only, “I had met a creole, or better said a Dutch woman with drops of Malayan blood, whom I liked a lot. She was a tall and gentle woman, a total stranger to the world of arts and letters.” He then, in a manner and format like nowhere else in the book, inserts the following, as if he couldn’t manage to write more than just those two sentences about her in the first person:
(Some years later, my biographer and friend Margarita Aguirre would write, “Neruda returned to Chile in 1932. Two years before, in Batavia, he had married María Antonieta Hagenaar, a young Dutch woman established in Java. She is very proud to be the wife of a consul and has a rather exotic view of America. She doesn’t know Spanish and is starting to learn it. But there is no doubt that it’s not just the language that she doesn’t know. In spite of everything, her sentimental adhesion to Neruda is very strong, and you always see them together. Maruca—that’s what Neruda calls her—is very tall, slow, formal.”)
In Batavia, after sending the necessary letters announcing their marriage, Neruda was eager to return to Chile with Maruca on his arm. He wouldn’t have to wait long to show her off in person. The Chilean government drastically cut back its consular positions due to the tremendous economic effect the Great Depression was having on the country. As commodity prices plunged, so did the Chilean government’s treasury, and as world trade dwindled, so did the amount of revenue from trade that consuls such as Neruda depended on. While Maruca’s family could perhaps have arranged something for them in Batavia, he was ready to return home anyway and now had his impetus. The long-love-scorned poet was coming home with a woman by his side.
Chapter Ten
An Interlude
Blood has fingers and it opens tunnels
beneath the earth.
—“Maternity”
Neruda and Maruca arrived in Chile on April 18, 1932, after a dreary two-month journey aboard a cargo ship, the Forafic. The fact that they could afford to cross the seas only on such an uncomfortable ship, with few
