Neruda remained calm, if not indifferent, in the midst of this discord. He didn’t care about the pain that was hardening her, the gulf between them growing wider. He had resigned himself to the fact that the level of elegance, education, and worldliness he had first perceived in her was not nearly enough to sustain an emotional and physical attraction, now that he’d accomplished coming home with a woman by his side and, at the same time, having escaped his alienation in Asia.
Muñoz, however, also wrote that he and his friends all found Neruda a noticeably changed man upon his return: “Now he wasn’t the somber, melancholic, absent muchacho” they remembered. “Now he talked a lot, laughing for whatever reason.” José María Souvirón, a Spanish poet who was in Santiago at the time, wrote that Pablo was at that point a rather lanky young man “with a melancholy air,” yet happy with what was going on in his life. Neruda was pleasant and entertaining once he got to know you, “resolute in his likes and dislikes, skeptical but respectful, a good drinker and enjoyer of life”—even “hedonistic.” His eyes, his friend insisted, were set on Spain.
His eyes were also still set on Albertina. Soon after he had returned to Chile from Asia, Neruda wrote to her in Concepción:
You know by now that I have been married since December of 1931 [sic, 1930]. The loneliness that you didn’t want to remedy has become more and more unbearable . . .
I would love so much to kiss you softly on your forehead, to caress your hands that I have loved so much, to give you a fraction of the friendship and affection that I still have for you in my heart.
Do not show this letter to anyone. I will not tell anyone that you write to me.
He quickly wrote to her again, overexplaining his decision to marry another woman:
My telegrams, my letters, told you that I was going to marry you when you arrived at Colombo. Albertina, I already had the marriage license, and I had asked for the necessary money. You know this, I have repeated it to you with patience in each one of my letters, in great detail.
Now my sister tells me that I asked you to come live with me, without marrying you, and that you have said this.
Never! Why do you lie? I feel a horrible bitterness, not only because you have not understood me, but also because you slander me.
I have loved you so much, Albertina, you know this, and you have behaved badly, silent when I needed you most . . .
A third letter showed he still could not reconcile himself to her silence:
My dear Albertina, I answered your letter about a month ago now, and you haven’t said anything about what I asked you . . . I need so badly to talk to you, to reproach you, to tell you. I remember you every day, I thought that you would write to me every day, but you are as thankless as always.
I still cannot understand what happened to you in Europe. I still don’t understand why you didn’t go.
Albertina recognized his marriage as legitimate, even if he did not. She did not give in. She would, however, become friends with him again when she married his friend Ángel Cruchaga Santa María, five years later.
Neruda’s attention also had returned to his inability to create a sustainable income as a poet. Through a fellow writer, he was able to get some work at the Ministry of Labor’s Cultural Extension. While the pay was minimal, it was great to have any work at all as the Depression deepened in Chile. He worked on the ministry’s Libraries for the People project. It was a progressive initiative that was under constant threat from conservatives, who hated these populist programs, especially during the economic crisis, which demanded austerity.
* * *
During this time back in Chile, works Neruda had long awaited publishing finally found their light. At the beginning of 1933, El hondero entusiasta (The Enthusiastic Sling-Shooter) was published, drawing on older poetry from the period when he was visibly influenced by the style of Sabat Ercasty. In his preface, Neruda admitted that Sabat’s influence did indeed lead him to suppress the book for a time and that in the end it contained only a portion of the original poems. This collection, he warned, was “a document of an excessive and burning youth.” The poems received minimal attention from critics and readers alike.
At the same time, Neruda had been suppressing the publication of the book that was of his greatest concern, Residence on Earth. Neruda was certain that this publication would be a smashing success across the Spanish-speaking world, and he pinned his literary future on it, to the point that he would not settle for it to come out anywhere other than Spain. Anywhere else, in its author’s hubristic view, would be a failure in relation to all he had put in, all he felt he had achieved. Chile still seemed like a backwater country to him in the context of the great literary tradition of Europe.
But more than three years had passed since he had written to Eandi from Colombo that he had “realized yesterday that it is time to publish my long detained book of poems.” “I have a publisher in Chile who would pay me and would take great care of the book, but I don’t want it [to just be published there].” A few months later it seemed that while nothing was happening with the book finding a home in Spain, Eandi brought up the possibility that Residence could be published in Argentina, with a decent advance. But Neruda refused, insisting on Spain. He followed that proclamation with an insinuation that the poems were simply too good for any other fate: “I have been writing these poems for nearly five
