Neruda prepared eagerly for his departure to Spain, where Lorca and other artists and writers awaited him, a generation that many say rivaled Spain’s Golden Age. Madrid was becoming known as the new Paris. Yet he was also leaving behind the Paris of South America, Buenos Aires, and a group of friends and an experience that had shaped him as he moved into this new chapter of his life. At the farewell dinner, held at a classy restaurant in the neighborhood of La Boca, twenty of his friends posed for a cheery group photograph. Maruca, now pregnant, doesn’t look directly into the camera; her gaze is almost sheepish, looking down and off to the right. It appears she is uncomfortable and does not want to be there.
The Nerudas set sail on May 5, 1934, seven years after Neruda had crossed the Atlantic en route to the Far East. Yet Neruda’s move to Spain began with a bad omen: a letter from his old roommate Tomás Lago with the heartrending news that their beloved friend Alberto Rojas Jiménez had just died. Rojas Jiménez and a friend had been thrown out of a bar for not having enough to pay the tab. They had walked through Santiago to his sister’s house, under a cold rain, with a bottle of wine, the impoverished poet without a jacket. He caught bronchial pneumonia and died two days later. When Neruda wrote about his death to Sara Tornú in Buenos Aires, he described Rojas Jiménez as “an angel full of wine.”
Neruda cried when he learned the news. He and the painter Isaías Cabezón, a friend from Chile who was in Barcelona at the time, took huge candles down to the fourteenth-century Basílica de Santa María del Mar. The church is known for its splendid stained glass, though its brilliance wasn’t apparent in the darkness as they each drank a bottle of white wine, kneeling in the pews. “I didn’t know how to pray,” Neruda admitted to Sara Tornú, so he felt grateful for Cabezón, a Catholic, who went and “prayed at every one of the countless altars.” Neruda didn’t even believe in God, but there on his knees, watching their candles dance in the darkness as Cabezón performed the rituals, he felt glad that the setting of this silent ceremony drew him closer to his lost friend.
Neruda then wrote a remarkable elegy, “Alberto Rojas Jiménez Comes Flying”: viene volando (comes flying) because one of Rojas Jiménez’s games was making paper birds, often with a freshly written poem on them. The elegy would be published in the second volume of Residence. “It’s a funeral, solemn hymn,” he wrote to Tornú, “and if you read it in your house, to our friends, have Amado Villar do it, with a heartbroken voice, because that’s the only way it can be done right.”
Beyond blood and bones,
beyond bread, beyond wine,
beyond fire,
you come flying.
Beyond vinegar and death,
among putrefaction and violets,
with your celestial voice and your damp shoes,
you come flying.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Oh marine poppy, oh my kinsman,
oh guitar man dressed in bees,
it can’t be true how much shadow is in your hair,
you come flying.
The poem continues with this same form lyrically pounding out his pain, strophe after strophe, all twenty-four of them dramatic, ripe, and quite affecting.
* * *
The fellowship of intellectuals, political activists, and visual, literary, and performance artists within the progressive culture of the Second Spanish Republic would soon mitigate the pain from Rojas Jiménez’s untimely death. Neruda became an integral part of that circle. Spain transformed not only his politics and poetry, but his personality as well; there he truly, finally, overcame his struggle with depression. He eventually lost all traces of melancholy; even the outbreak of the war, rather than dispiriting him, energized him to action. No more desperate letters to Albertina or other past lovers; no more desolate surrealism. Never again would he write of the acute mental anguish of his first thirty years.
From the first, Neruda simply loved being in Spain:
Spain was taut and dry, a daily
drum of opaque sound,
plains and eagle’s nest, silence
of whipped inclemency.
How, until weeping, until the soul,
I love your hard earth, your poor bread,
your poor people, how until the deep site
of my being there is the lost flower of your wrinkled
villages, motionless in time,
and your mineral countrysides
extended in moon and age
and devoured by an empty god . . .
—“What Spain Was Like”
Spain’s social and political situation, however, was complicated when Neruda arrived in 1934. In 1898, Spain had lost the vestiges of its overseas empire after losing the Philippines and Cuba to the United States. Using the remaining strength of the army to save the throne, King Alfonso XIII consolidated his domestic power while renewing military activity in Spain’s last colonial battlefield, Spanish Morocco. But he faced fierce resistance on the home front too.
In 1909, in Morocco’s Rif mountains, the Spanish were vastly outnumbered by the local tribesmen in a series of battles for territory rich in iron ore. The army decided to call on thousands of Catalan reservists to serve as reinforcements in Morocco; they started with working-class Catalans. Five hundred and twenty of them had already completed their active-duty service six years earlier, never expecting to serve again. This was not the army’s wisest move; there already was widespread, pent-up anger against the government across Catalonia. Just a decade earlier, at the same time women-led bread riots were breaking out, a well-organized tax boycott started by shopkeepers and small-business men made Barcelona seem so explosive it was put under a “state of war.” In 1901, a workers’ general strike paralyzed the city; union ranks doubled by the end of the next decade.
In July 1909, the government seemed aloof to the city’s transforming political paradigm. As the grudging reservists boarded the ship,
