Chapter Twelve
Birth and Destruction
Oh child among the roses, oh press of doves,
oh presidio of fish and rosebushes,
your soul is a bottle of dried salts
and a bell filled with grapes, your skin.
Unfortunately, I’ve nothing to give you but fingernails
or eyelashes, or melted pianos,
or dreams that bubble up from my heart,
dusty dreams that gallop like black riders,
dreams charged with dash and disfortune.
—“Ode with a Lament”*
The Nerudas’ daughter was born prematurely on August 18, 1934. The baby, named Malva Marina Trinidad (in homage to Neruda’s stepmother), had hydrocephaly, an enlarged head due to the accumulation of fluid in the cranium. She could not stand any light and had to be kept in a dark room. She would live for only eight years.
Four weeks after her birth, Neruda wrote to his dear Buenos Aires friend Sara Tornú:
My daughter, or at least that’s what I call her, is a perfectly ridiculous creature, a semicolon species, a vamp of three kilos. Everything’s okay (now) (but) everything was very bad. The girl was dying, she didn’t cry, she didn’t sleep. We had to give her probes, with little spoons, with injections, and we spent whole nights, the whole day, the week, without sleeping, calling the doctor, running to the abominable houses of orthopedics, where they sell terrifying baby bottles, scales, medical drinking glasses, funnels full of degrees and regulations. You can imagine how much I’ve suffered. The girl, the doctors tell me, was dying, and that little thing has suffered horribly, from a hemorrhage that had opened in her cerebrum at birth. But be happy, Rubia, because all goes well, the girl has started to nurse, and the doctors come around less, and she smiles and she puts on grams every day . . .
Not once in this long letter does Neruda refer to Maruca.
Vicente Aleixandre, who would win the 1977 Nobel Prize in Literature, noted Neruda’s somewhat manic affection for his daughter when he came to see the child at La Casa de las Flores:
Pablo was leaning over what seemed to be a cradle. I saw it from afar while I heard his voice. Malva Marina, do you hear me? Come, Vicente, come. Look how marvelous. My daughter. The most beautiful in the world. The words kept sprouting out as I came closer. He called me with his hand and looked with happiness toward the bottom of that cradle. He was full of happy smiles, with a blind sweetness in his thick voice . . . I arrived. He stood up, radiating these things, while I spied. Look, look! I came close to it all and then I saw what until then had been hidden within the lace. An enormous head, an implacable head . . .
Pablo, full of light and dreams, “radiated unreality.” His fantasy was as firm as a stone, according to Aleixandre, marveling at the joy Neruda derived from his pride in appreciating his daughter.
While Neruda fluctuated in his gestures of both sorrow and denial, he wrote only a few disturbed poems that dealt with his daughter. One, “Maternity,” was written before she was born, in Buenos Aires. In another, “Illness in My Home,” he seems to complain more of the suffering he has to endure because of her than of her suffering itself. Another poem, the sublime “Ode with a Lament,” appears to be a reaction to Malva’s condition and his helpless inability to remedy it. However, it was also written before her birth, in Buenos Aires. “Melancholy in the Families” was written in early 1935, several months after her birth. It combines the blood of the Spanish Civil War outside the walls of their apartment with the eerie somberness within them. Again, it is narcissistically centered around his own emotions, ignoring those of his family, fixating on how:
above all there is a terrible,
terrible abandoned dining room
with the cruets broken
and the vinegar spilling beneath the chairs,
a frozen ray of moonlight,
something dark, and I seek
a comparison within myself:
perhaps it is a shop surrounded by the sea
and torn rags dripping brine.
It is only an abandoned dining room,
and around it are additions,
submerged factories, timbers
that only I know,
because I am sad and I travel,
and I know the earth, and I am sad.
The one time in all his writings that he mentions her name is in a celebratory poem, in his “Ode to Federico García Lorca,” written before his death. She is listed along with Maruca, Delia, Rafael Alberti, María Luisa Bombal, and fifteen others in a section envisioning the whole group coming to visit Lorca’s house (even then, his wife and daughter are secondary, as he first states that “here I come with Oliverio, Norah, / Vicente Aleixandre, Delia”; it’s not until the third line of names that he lists them: “Maruca, Malva Marina, María Luisa, and Larco.”) Lorca had written his own mournful poem on being unable to help, “Lines on the Birth of Malva Marina Neruda.” In Granada when he wrote them, he sent them to Neruda in fraternal consolation, frustrated at the hopelessness of the situation:
Malva Marina, if only I could see you,
dolphin of love over ancient waves,
when the waltz of your America distills
poison and blood of a mortal dove!
To just break the dark feet
of the night that howls through the rocks
and stop the immense melancholy wind
that carries away the dahlias, leaving shadows behind!
After her birth, Neruda’s mentions of his daughter ebb out of his correspondence. He does not mention her once in his memoirs, as if she never existed.
Shortly after the birth and initial shock, Neruda’s spirits and activity seemed to be as vibrant as ever, as if he were oblivious to the seriousness of his newborn daughter’s condition. He was reluctant to be bound to Malva and the distressed Maruca by anything more than duty. His life entwined evermore with Delia’s as war loomed over Europe.
* * *
By the beginning of 1935, Pablo and Delia were inseparable. “I adore Delia and cannot live without her,” Neruda
