And then Maruca discovered that she was pregnant. The news did not bring the couple closer together. Neruda was nervous, already feeling he had made a terrible mistake by marrying her. He continued to keep his distance and allowed himself to be swept up in events outside of the pregnancy.
One such event was his introduction, in mid-October 1933, to Federico García Lorca. The thirty-five-year-old dreamy-eyed Spanish poet, experimental playwright, and puppeteer had come to Buenos Aires for the Latin American premiere of his play Bodas de sangre (Blood Wedding). He became the talk of the town, profiled in the press. Neruda met Lorca at a reception, and so began a profound friendship. Neruda considered him to be the happiest person he had ever met, an indispensable radiance of joy. Each had a great respect for the other’s writing, Lorca reading much of what Neruda wrote just after they met. Lorca inscribed a copy of his Romancero gitano (Gypsy Ballads), “For my dear Pablo, one of the few great poets I’ve had the good fortune to love and know.” Whenever Lorca heard Neruda begin to recite his poems, he’d cover his eyes and shake his head, crying, “Stop! Stop! That’s enough, don’t read any more—you’ll influence me!”
As for Neruda’s praise of Lorca, he would one day describe his plays as if describing all of Lorca’s essence: that the tragedies “reinvigorated the eternal Spanish drama, claiming a new phosphoric brilliance, love and death locked in a furious dance: love and death, masked or naked.”
Lorca’s verse, like his personality, was startling: often so spontaneous, often dark, often vibrant. The poet Robert Bly describes Lorca’s rather magical style as “leaping poetry”—all of a sudden images leap unexpectedly, passionate to the core.
They talked nonstop, but they also listened to each other. This continued for nearly six months in Buenos Aires before Lorca returned to Spain. Neruda would remember Lorca as a torrent of motion and delight, “an effervescent child, the young channel of a powerful river . . . in his hands a prank became a work of art. I have never seen such magnetism and such constructiveness in a human being.” Lorca’s great appetite for life helped reinvigorate Neruda’s, or perhaps invigorate it like it never had been.
In his memoirs, Neruda narrates an evening spent at the vast home of the millionaire owner of a newspaper empire, Natalio Botana, where Lorca was also present. At the party, Neruda supposedly met an “ethereal” poet who, especially as they sat across the dinner table from each other, “fixed her green eyes on me more than Lorca.” Afterward, all three poets went up to a shimmering lighted swimming pool. The chemistry between Neruda and his new friend was growing. A tower rising above the pool beckoned adventure; its white lime-washed walls glowed in the nocturnal light; they climbed it. With the sound of the party’s guitars and singing in the distance, Neruda “took the tall, golden girl in my arms. As I kissed her, I realized she was a carnal and compact woman, with curves in all the right places.” Soon they were on the watchtower’s floor, Neruda undressing her, when he realized Lorca was staring down at them, completely surprised at what he was seeing. (Lorca was homosexual.)
Neruda wrote, long after Lorca had died in Spain, that he had yelled at his friend, “Get out of here! Go and make sure no one comes up the stairs!” while he offered his “sacrifice to the starry sky and to nocturnal Aphrodite” by having sex with the female poet. Lorca ran off in such a hurry to complete his mission, Neruda wrote, that he fell in the darkness of the tower’s stairwell and rolled down it. “My friend and I had to help him, with great difficulty. His limp lasted fifteen days.” This story wasn’t all invention at least. A young niece of two immigrants from Lorca’s hometown stopped by his hotel for visits now and then. On one occasion she found him propped up in bed, his leg in bandages. “There has been an accident at a party,” he explained sheepishly.
Neruda did return the favor, in a sense, helping Lorca when he was in a precarious position with women. Neruda had begun to suspect Lorca’s homosexuality, though he never had an issue with it. In fact, he benefited from it: as he described it years later, Lorca told him how women—“almost always fledgling poets”—would fill his Buenos Aires hotel room, to the point that he couldn’t breathe. Discovering Lorca’s “panic about the feminine siege,” Neruda immediately offered his services to his friend. They agreed that in moments of true alarm, Lorca would call Neruda, who’d rush over “to take charge of the agreeable mission of steering one of his admirers off elsewhere.” Neruda was quite pleased with this arrangement: “With a certain degree of efficiency I reaped some unexpectedly exquisite results from my collaboration. Some of those doves, misled by Federico’s light, fell into my arms.”
María Luisa Bombal recalled that in those wonderful days in Buenos Aires, far removed from her suicidal thoughts:
We were happy and carefree. Pablo would come back from the office and say, “The consul is done.” And then he would ask me if we could go find Federico . . . “so that he can sing and dance for us, and make us laugh.” Life with Federico was a constant party. I never met another man with a more enchanting spirit and heart. He was completely irresistible. He was always the life of the party, with his contagious smile. Pablo always liked to be the center of attention, but [with Federico] he was
