Throughout that passage from the Indian Ocean, across the Atlantic, and up along Chile’s Pacific coast, he had little else to do but write. He wrote a brutal, haunting, hypnotic poem, “The Ghost of the Cargo Ship.” The speaker is the only passenger on board, perhaps the phantom of the poem’s title. The boat becomes phantasmal as well, and its engines echo the locomotive engines in “Railroad Roundhouses at Night.” Here, the “tired machinery that howls and weeps” is
pushing the prow, kicking the sides,
mumbling low groans, swallowing and swallowing distances,
making a noise of sour waters over the sour waters,
moving the old ship over the old waters.
Time, notably, is “still and visible like a great disgrace.” Neruda seems stuck, ghostlike, completely alone, despite his new marriage. Interestingly, in ordering the poems in Residence on Earth’s first volume, he placed “The Ghost of the Cargo Ship,” full of his disenchantment with his white wife, right before “Widower’s Tango,” which expresses his desire to be with Josie Bliss again. A poem titled “Josie Bliss” closes the second volume of Residence on Earth.
Finally, on April 18, 1932, Neruda and Maruca disembarked in Puerto Montt, where Patagonia begins. Had they arrived at Valparaíso, the ship would have navigated through a port full of empty boats with nothing to load and nowhere to go. At the same time that the country was suffering from the repercussions of the global economic depression, Chile’s critical saltpeter industry crashed as well. The Atacama Desert, which covers the northern part of the country, is the world’s largest source of salitre—sodium nitrate, or saltpeter. It became known as “white gold” due to worldwide demand; its two principal uses were as a fertilizer, raising crop yields as the global population was surging, and as an ingredient in gunpowder, especially at the start of World War I. Export taxes on the foreign-owned mines helped fund the government, and the mines were a major source of employment. But just as the war was ending, a synthetic replacement was developed. The price of saltpeter fell by half between 1925 and 1932. International demand for Chile’s copper also dropped steeply.
In its World Economic Survey, 1932–33, the League of Nations ranked Chile as the nation most devastated by the Depression. The signs were clear and alarming: rampant unemployment, a severe depletion of the money supply, the government’s desperate efforts to bring in revenue, thousands of homeless, repression of protests, and the onset of social anarchy. The dictatorial Carlos Ibáñez was pressured into resigning, and the next elected president was toppled in a coup that created the Socialist Republic of Chile, though twelve days didn’t go by until there was another coup, this one from within. Ibáñez loyalists sent the more liberal leaders off to Easter Island. Lacking support and legitimacy, the new government lasted only three months before it too was overthrown. That led to a new election in October 1932 in which Arturo Alessandri, backed by a coalition of liberals, democrats, and radicals, was elected president for the second time. (Another event that took place the year Neruda returned to Chile would have an even greater influence on the course of his life. Adolf Hitler became a German citizen in 1932, mainly so he could run in elections. He became the Führer in 1934.)
Perhaps because of the breakdown of basic services in the country, Neruda’s telegram to his parents didn’t arrive in time to warn them of his arrival. Laura happened to be looking out the window when she saw her half brother and new sister-in-law getting out of a car with their suitcases. José del Carmen greeted them calmly, while Doña Trinidad embraced both of them with her inherent warmth. His father went from calm to contentious quite quickly, unable to resist railing at his son about his poor choices, and now there was his daughter-in-law and perhaps grandchildren his son would have to provide for. The wintry cold and rain falling down on Temuco worsened the mood, frustrating Neruda, who had been so free from these confrontations while in the warmth of his posts; he had left those tropics and spent all those weeks on a cargo ship only to be faced with this. He took Maruca to Santiago within a week.
Neruda’s old bohemian world waited in Santiago. The couple found an apartment on Catedral Street, where his friends would visit constantly. Maruca’s first impression of the Chilean capital was of the grimy dark stones of the apartment building walls, the gray facades of the buildings on each side of their narrow street. Having just come from the open green landscapes of Java, this colorless scenery must have been suffocating, as her life in Chile would be.
Neruda, finally back on his own turf, assumed his place as king of “Neruda’s gang,” as the group would be known. Members took an immediate disliking to Maruca. “She was a hostile being,” Diego Muñoz remembered. She “didn’t show any interest in knowing any of Pablo’s old friends.” Diego thought that Maruca was a most inappropriate wife for a poet. She would close the door to Pablo’s friends, so he just went out with them without her. During that first long winter, she would wait for him most evenings, watching out the window until he came home late at night. When
