Comes a time I’m tired of being a man.
Comes a time I check out the tailor’s or the movies
shriveled, impenetrable, like a felt swan
launched into waters of origin and ashes.
A whiff from the barber shops has me wailing.
All I want is a break from rocks and wool,
all I want is to see neither buildings nor gardens,
no shopping centers, no bifocals, no elevators.
Comes a time I’m tired of my feet and my fingernails
and my hair and my shadow.
Comes a time I’m tired of being a man.*
* * *
María Luisa Bombal’s presence in Buenos Aires was comforting for Neruda, and the feeling was mutual, in a platonic way for both. Her smooth, natural creativity and warmth helped him, as he, likewise, helped her. She poured herself into her writing, retracing her agony and desires of the past years in La última niebla (The Final Mist). A precursor to magical realism, it put her on the path to becoming one of the few globally recognized female Latin American novelists. It is the first book in Latin American literature that narrates the experience of an orgasm from the perspective of a woman, the author herself. The novel was published in 1935, two years after she moved in with the Nerudas.
She wrote most of it in the apartment’s bright, enormous kitchen. The floor was marble, edged in fine blue ceramic. Both the floor and the walls were brilliant white—an ideal workspace. “What do you think?” María Luisa would ask, reading a few sentences from her manuscript. Neruda hesitated to give her advice, for he understood how her mind worked. When he did make suggestions, she would consider them, but she was clear on what she wanted to express, just as Neruda had sensed. “Don’t ever let anyone correct you,” he told her. Bombal’s accounts give a rare insight into Neruda, the disinterested (and objective) friend and editor.
Neruda came to admire her kitchen writing so much that he started to join her there. They would work side by side, she on her novel, he continuing on with new Residence poems. Such a move—to prefer to write in another’s presence instead of in isolation—signaled a change in Neruda’s disposition; his mood elevated once more, on a trend toward greater stability.
He called María Luisa the “bee of fire,” referring to the passion he felt burning in her and the creativity by which she seemed to take flight. “We adored each other,” María Luisa recalled in 1973, right after Neruda’s death. “Our friendship had shades of intellectualism, but it was very emotive. We were so incredibly young and passionate. He was like a brother to me.”
She described Maruca as the complete opposite of Pablo. “What would Maruca do without the daily company of María Luisa, as intelligent as she was mild, never pretending or trying to know more than she knew?” Bombal’s biographer Agata Gligo asked.
To María Flora Yáñez, “Neruda’s Javanese wife looked like a giant blond police officer” when they first met in the Buenos Aires apartment. María Flora was a Chilean novelist, the sister of Neruda’s good friend Juan Emar, a.k.a. Pilo, though she and Neruda hadn’t met in person until her recent arrival in Argentina. Neruda had gone to her hotel to greet her and invited her to a cocktail party in her honor at his “ultramodern apartment,” as she described it. He wanted to introduce her to the city’s greatest writers. María Flora, as accustomed as she was to being in the presence of important literary figures, was indeed struck by the depth of talent Neruda had assembled in the room. She became breathless, in fact, upon seeing the sublime Alfonsina Storni, a leading voice of modern feminism and writer of hauntingly beautiful poetry.* Most left early, at nine, but Neruda asked María Flora to stay, along with Storni.
María Flora wrote that when they finished eating (rather late, in accordance with Argentine custom), Neruda proposed ending the night at the underground peña El Signo. María Flora saw Maruca make a gesture to Neruda as she disappeared into her bedroom. He followed his wife, and soon the shouts of a heated argument filled the apartment. When they returned, Neruda seemed deflated, Maruca still convulsing with rage. “Let’s go to the Signo,” he ordered, and they left, without Maruca.
El Signo had just opened that year in the basement of El Hotel Castelar. At night it functioned as a tertulia de arte, or a salon, a gathering place to talk about the arts. It became a top place to go for many of those involved in that world. José González Carbalho and Norah Lange, among other friends who had just embraced Neruda, were the first to get it going.
Neruda began having affairs behind his wife’s back. Bombal knew about them, especially because of his admiration for her sister Loreto. There were also suspicions that something more than friendship occurred between Neruda and the avant-garde Norah Lange, despite her relationship at the time with the poet Oliverio Girondo. Norah and Neruda had a lot of fun together. One night at the trendy restaurant Les Ambassadeurs, without Maruca, they made the band play “Wedding March,” and the two approached the orchestra parodying the marriage ritual. Later, everyone quite drunk, they walked down the great Corrientes Street shouting and singing. At some point Norah laughed and in a loud voice said, “Pablo, tonight I’m going to sleep with you,” to which Pablo, in the same tone of mirth, replied: “With pleasure.” Girondo was there, just as drunk, and he also laughed, with his pipe in mouth. There were whispers, however, that it was more than just a joke.
María Luisa Bombal had her own take on Neruda’s relationship with women, with whom he “always had good luck”:
And he didn’t really try very hard. He let them love him, seduce him, and sometimes this resulted in tremendous relationships, very romantic and full of problems, which he
