How pure you are in sunlight or at nightfall,
how boundlessly triumphant your white orbit,
and your bosom of bread, atmospheric height,
your crown of black trees, beloved,
and your solitary animal’s nose, a wild sheep’s nose
that smells of shadow and sudden flight.
The reading went on for over an hour, Neruda using little inflection, speaking in “a monochord deep moan,” as one witness described it. After Neruda was done, everyone waited eagerly for the poet to appear onstage. But he didn’t come out to greet the mixture of applause and indifference; he remained behind the mask.
Generally, besides de Rokha, Residence’s first volume found favorable reviews in Chile. Despite some monotone and monotony, readers embraced this surprising poetry’s high-strung intensity, an intensity spun tight by the grips of the new rhetoric, the new way to express oneself in a poem—an intensity that was a driving force through the book and into the readers’ emotional receptors. Neruda had returned to the forefront. His friends considered it a precedent-breaking success. However, it was hard to find a formal nonpartisan review, the most prominent, other than de Rokha’s, being written by either his friends or his devotees.* In 1935, after the second volume was printed, Alone, whose reputation as a literary critic had continued to grow through the years, gave his first full review of the work. It was positive. Alone’s main point was that Neruda’s ability to achieve such an earnest level of authenticity and transparency came from the fact that he had written it with true conviction. Neruda was not afraid to leave his comfort zone, he believed, and this new level of confidence is evident in the poetic forms’ impenetrability. Neruda is no longer seeking clarity in order to be understood. His poetic maturity is evident; his raw evocation comes out complex and dissonant, yet completely naked.
The critical and social reception the limited edition achieved was just what Neruda had envisioned. Now he just needed to take the next step: find a publisher in Spain. And now Neruda needed to take another step as well: find a job. While he was still hoping to work in Spain, with the achievement of Residence under his belt, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs named him to a post in Argentina in August 1933. Four years earlier, he had written to Eandi from Ceylon; two lines after describing how life in Colombo was like death, he asked, “Buenos Aires, isn’t that the name of paradise?”
* * *
The Chilean writer María Luisa Bombal would be a central character in Neruda’s life in Buenos Aires. She had returned to Chile from Europe around the same time that Neruda came back from Asia. Twenty-three at the time, glowing, with short hair, she had become one of Chile’s greatest fiction writers. While studying literature at the Sorbonne, she began experimenting with acting, taking classes at the celebrated École de l’Atelier. When word got back to her family that she had been onstage, which they considered improper, they pressured her to return to Chile. As she disembarked, she spotted her mother and twin sisters in their winged hats and, behind them, a tall and hefty man, twenty-eight years old. This was Eulogio Sánchez Errázuriz, the wealthy grandson of a former president and a pioneer of Chilean aviation. Every move he made seemed to be full of conviction; his voice was firm. He greeted María Luisa and offered to get her luggage. Her sisters explained that he was a new friend of the family. Almost immediately, like many other women, María Luisa fell madly in love with him.
A short but intense romance began, but Sánchez soon withdrew from María Luisa’s aggressiveness. She wrote him letter after letter, tried to approach him again, but it was clear to all but her that Sánchez definitively and irrevocably did not love her and would never love her. He even showed her sisters her letters and asked them to convince María Luisa to lay her passions to rest.
María Luisa was tormented by the loss. One night, trying to normalize relations, Sánchez invited her and her sister Loreto to dinner. He clearly conveyed his desire to have nothing more than a friendship with María Luisa. She left the table, went to his bedroom, searched through his drawers until she found his revolver, and then shot herself in her left shoulder. She would spend a month recovering in Santiago’s Hospital del Salvador.
The Bombal twins had met Neruda shortly after his return from the Far East. One day they brought María Luisa to his house, believing the two might get along. They were right. A friend who was at the encounter said, “Pablo adored her immediately.” He quickly came to feel that she was “the only woman with whom I can seriously talk about literature.” Despite her suffering over Sánchez, her intelligence, culture, humor, and youth captivated Neruda. (He was also impressed by her sister Loreto. In this case, the feelings weren’t platonic. According to María Luisa and others, he had fallen in love with her. And there was talk that the two had an affair that lasted until he left for Argentina.)
Having been away in Paris, and rarely in Santiago before she left, María Luisa knew little of the city’s writers and intellectuals who congregated around Neruda as if he were royalty. He introduced her to his friends, who found her elegant, gracious, bright, and creative.
María Luisa also became good friends with Maruca (Maruca’s only friend, other than Juanita Eandi in Argentina). As María Luisa’s mental instability coincided with Neruda’s new consular appointment to Buenos Aires, the poet invited her to live with them in Buenos Aires, thinking a fresh start and some distance would do her good. It did.
While his position still had the tag of consul “of choice, by election,” it was beginning to look like he was establishing an
