by Pablo Neruda
But the gray-headed man must have thought that I was much too clever. He started to watch my comings and goings, to make rules about female visitors, to pry into my books and my letters. I would enter my room without warning, to find the occultist going over my scanty furniture, investigating my poor belongings.
I had to look for new lodgings to shelter my threatened independence, so I made the rounds of the unfriendly streets in the dead of winter. I found a place a short distance away, in a laundry. It was obvious to me that here the landlady had nothing to do with the world beyond. Run-down gardens straggled through chilly patios with fountains whose stagnant water the algae covered with solid green rugs. There was a back room with a very high ceiling, and transoms over tall doors; in my eyes, this increased the distance between the floor and the ceiling. I stayed in that house, in that room.
We student poets led a wild life. I kept up my country ways, working in my room, writing several poems every day, and forever drinking cups of tea I prepared for myself. But, away from my room and my street, the turbulent life of writers in those days had its special fascination. They didn’t go to the cafés but to the beer taverns and the regular bars. Conversations and poems were passed around till daybreak. My studies were suffering from all this.
The railroad company supplied my father with a cape of thick gray felt for his outdoor work, but he never wore it. I made it a feature of the poet. Three or four other poets also started wearing similar capes, and these constantly changed hands. This garment used to stir up the fury of good people and of others who were not so good. It was the heyday of the tango, which came to Chile not only with its heavy beat and its thrumming “tijera,” its accordions and its rhythm, but also with its entourage of toughs who invaded our night life and the out-of-the-way places where we got together. These underworld characters—dancers and troublemakers—sniggered at our capes and our way of life. We poets fought back hard.
Around that time I unexpectedly struck up a friendship with a widow who is stamped forever on my mind. She had big blue eyes that became misty with tenderness whenever she remembered her late beloved husband. He had been a young novelist, noted for his handsome physique. Together they had made a striking couple, she with her wheat-colored hair, her irreproachable figure, and her deep blue eyes, and he very tall and athletic. The novelist had been destroyed by what used to be called galloping consumption. Later I’ve felt sure that his blond consort also contributed her share as galloping Venus, and that together the pre-penicillin age and the spirited widow carried off the monumental husband in a couple of months.
The lovely widow had not yet peeled off her dark clothing for me, the black and purple silks that made her look like a snow-white fruit covered with a rind of mourning. That skin slipped off one afternoon in my room, at the rear of the laundry, and I was able to fondle and explore all that fruit of fiery snow. The natural rapture was about to be consummated, when I noticed her eyes closing below mine, as she cried out, sighing and sobbing, “Oh, Roberto, Roberto!” (It seemed to be a ritual performance. The vestal virgin calling on the vanished god before surrendering to a new rite.)
However, in spite of my youth and need, this widow seemed too much for me. Her invocations became more and more urgent and her spirited heart was slowly leading me to a premature destruction. Love, in such doses, is not good for malnutrition. And my malnutrition was becoming more dramatic every day.
SHYNESS
I really lived many of the first years of my life, and perhaps many of the next ones and the ones after that, as a kind of deaf-mute.
Dressed in ritual black since I had been a young boy, like the true poets of the last century, I had the vague impression that I didn’t look bad at all. But, instead of going after girls, since I knew I would stutter or turn red in front of them, I preferred to pass them up and go on my way, showing a total lack of interest I was very far from feeling. They were all a deep mystery to me. I would have liked to burn at the stake in that secret fire, to drown in the inscrutable depth of that well, but I lacked the courage to throw myself into the fire or the water. And since I could find no one to give me a push, I walked along the fascinating edge, without even a side glance, much less a smile.
The same thing happened to me in front of grownups, insignificant persons, railroad or post-office employees with their “señoras esposas,” their lady wives, so referred to because the petite bourgeoisie is shocked, intimidated, by the word “mujer,” woman or wife. I listened to the conversations at my father’s table. But the next day, if I ran into those who had dined at my home the evening before, I didn’t dare greet them, I even crossed over to the other side of the street to avoid embarrassment.
Shyness is a kink in the soul, a special category, a dimension that opens out into solitude. Moreover, it is an inherent suffering, as if we had two epidermises and the one underneath rebelled and shrank back from life. Of the things that make up a man, this quality, this damaging thing, is a part of the alloy that lays the foundation, in the long run, for the perpetuity of the self.
My rain-haunted backwardness, my long-drawn-out retreat into myself, lasted longer than it should have. When I came to the capital, I slowly acquired new friends of both sexes. The less attention people paid to me, the easier it was for me to make friends. I was not particularly curious about mankind then. I can’t get to know all the people in this world, I said to myself. Still and all, a faint curiosity was stirred up in certain circles by this new poet, just over sixteen, a reticent boy, a loner, whom they saw come and go without so much as a good morning or goodbye. Aside from the fact that I’d be wearing a long Spanish cape that made me look like a scarecrow. No one suspected that my striking attire was made-to-order for my poverty.
Among the people who sought my company were two big snobs of the day: Pilo Yáñez and his wife, Mina. They were the perfect embodiment of the beautiful idle life I would have loved to live, more remote than a dream. It was my first time in a house with heat, soft lighting, pleasant furniture, walls covered with books whose multicolored spines were like a springtime that was inaccessible to me. Kindly and discreet, overlooking my various layers of silence and withdrawal, the Yáñezes often invited me to their home. I used to leave their house in a happy mood, and they noticed and invited me again.
I saw cubist paintings for the first time in that house, a Juan Gris among them. They told me that Juan Gris had been a friend of the family’s in Paris. But what intrigued me most was my friend’s pajamas. Whenever I could, I examined them out of the corner of my eye with intense admiration. It was winter, and the pajamas were made of a heavy material, like the baize on billiard tables, but a deep-sea blue. In those days I couldn’t imagine any kind of pajamas except striped ones, like prison uniforms. Pilo Yáñez’s were like nothing I had ever seen. Their heavy fabric, their resplendent blue, aroused the envy of the poor poet who lived in the Santiago suburbs. And in fifty years I have not come across any pajamas quite like those.
I lost sight of the Yáñezes for many years. She gave up her husband, and she also gave up the soft lighting and excellent armchairs, for an acrobat in a Russian circus that passed through Santiago. Later on, she sold tickets, all the way from Australia to the British Isles, to help out the acrobat who had swept her off her feet. She ended up as a Rosicrucian or something like that, with a group of mystics in the South of France.
As for Pilo Yáñez, the husband, he changed his name to Juan Emar and in time became a powerful, though still undiscovered writer. We were lifelong friends. Silent and kindly but poor, that’s how he died. His many books have yet to be published, but they are sure to take root and blossom someday.
I’ll leave Pilo Yáñez, or Juan Emar, and take up my shyness again, recalling that during my student days my friend Pilo was set on introducing me to his father. “I’m sure he’ll get you a trip to Europe,” he told me. At that moment, all Latin American poets and painters had their eyes riveted on Paris. Pilo’s father was a very important ma
n, a senator. He lived in one of those enormous ugly houses on a street near the Plaza de Armas and the presidential palace—where no doubt he would have preferred to live.
My friends stayed in the anteroom, after stripping off my cape to make me look more normal. They opened the door to the senator’s study for me and shut it behind me. It was an immense room, and may have been a great reception hall at one time, but it was just about empty now, except deep inside, at the far end, where I could make out an armchair, with the senator in it under a floor lamp. The pages of the newspaper he was reading hid him completely, like a screen.
Taking my first step on the murderously waxed and buffed parquet, I slid like a skier. I picked up speed dizzily. I tried to brake myself, only to lose my footing and fall several times. My last spill was right at the feet of the senator, who was observing me now with cold eyes, without letting go of his paper.
I managed to sit down in a small chair next to him. The great man inspected me with the eye of a bored entomologist to whom someone brings a specimen that he already knows inside out, a harmless spider. He questioned me vaguely about my projects. After my spill, I was even more timid and less eloquent than ever.
I don’t know what I told him. At the end of twenty minutes he put out a tiny hand toward me, as a sign of dismissal. I thought I heard him promise in a very soft voice that I would hear from him. Then he picked up his newspaper again and I started back across the dangerous parquet, taking all the precautions I should have taken when first stepping onto it. Of course the senator, my friend’s father, never let me hear from him. On the other hand, sometime later a military revolt, which was actually stupid and reactionary, got him to jump out of his chair with his everlasting paper. I confess that this made me happy.
THE STUDENT FEDERATION
In Temuco I had been a correspondent for the review Claridad, the Student Federation’s organ, and I used to sell twenty or thirty copies to my schoolmates. One piece of news that reached Temuco in 1920 left bloody scars on my generation. The “golden youth,” offspring of the oligarchy, had attacked and destroyed the Student Federation’s headquarters. The authorities, who from colonial times to the present have been at the service of the rich, did not jail the assaulters but the assaulted. Domingo Gómez Rojas, the young hope of Chilean poetry, was tortured, and went mad and died in a dungeon. Within the national context of a small country, the repercussions of this crime were as profound and far-reaching as those of Federico García Lorca’s assassination in Granada later.
When I arrived in Santiago, in March 1921, to enter the university, the capital of Chile had only five hundred thousand inhabitants. It smelled of gas fumes and coffee. Thousands of buildings housed strangers and bedbugs. Public transportation was handled by small rickety streetcars that struggled along with a loud clanking of iron and bells. The ride from Independencia Avenue to the other end of town, near the Central Station, where my college was located, took forever.
The Student Federation’s headquarters was frequented by the most famous figures of the student rebellion, ideologically linked to the powerful anarchist movement of the day. Alfredo Demaría, Daniel Schweitzer, Santiago Labarca, Juan Gandulfo were the best-known leaders. The most formidable was undoubtedly Juan Gandulfo, who was feared for his bold political thinking and his unflagging courage. He treated me as if I was just a boy, which, of course, I was. On one occasion, when I arrived at his office late for a medical appointment, he frowned at me and said, “Why didn’t you get here on time? There are other patients waiting.” “I didn’t know what time it was,” I replied. “Take this, so you’ll know next time,” he said, pulling his watch from his vest pocket and giving it to me.
Juan Gandulfo was short, moonfaced, and prematurely bald, yet he always made his presence felt. Once, a troublemaking army man, who was well known as a bully and a good swordsman, challenged him to a duel. Gandulfo took him up on it, learned fencing in two weeks, and left his rival battered and scared witless. Around that same time, he engraved in wood the cover and all the illustrations for my first book, Crepusculario—impressive woodcuts done by a man no one ever associated with art.
The most important figure in the revolutionist literary world was Roberto Meza Fuentes, editor of the magazine Juventud, owned also by the Student Federation, but with more contributors, and more carefully prepared than Claridad. Outstanding in it was the work of González Vera and Manuel Rojas, who were, for me, from a much older generation. Manuel Rojas had recently come back from Argentina after many years there, and he astonished us with his impressive size and his words, dropped with a kind of condescension, pride, or dignity. He was a linotypist. I had known González Vera in Temuco, where he had fled after the police assault on the Student Federation. He came to see me straight from the railroad station, which was a short distance from my house. His sudden appearance had to impress a sixteen-year-old poet. I had never seen such a pale man. His fleshless face seemed to be carved in bone or ivory. He wore black, a black frayed at the extremities of trouser legs and sleeves, which, however, did not make him look less elegant. His words sounded ironical and sharp from the very first. On the rainy night that brought him to my house—I had not even known that he existed—I was moved by his presence, just as Sacha Yegulev is moved by the revolutionary nihilist’s coming to his home; Andreyev’s fictional character Yegulev was looked on by young Latin American rebels as their model.
ALBERTO ROJAS GIMÉNEZ
The review Claridad, which I joined as a political and literary militant, was run almost singlehandedly by Alberto Rojas Giménez, who was to become one of the closest friends I would have among my own generation. He wore a cordovan hat and the long muttonchop whiskers of a grandee. Well groomed and elegant despite his poverty, in the midst of which he seemed to preen like a golden bird, he embodied all the qualities of the new dandy, an attitude of contempt, a quick grasp of our numerous conflicts, as well as a cheerful sophistication and an appetite for everything in life. He knew all about everything—books and girls, bottles and ships, itineraries and archipelagos—and he flaunted this knowledge even in his slightest gestures. He moved about in the literary world with the condescending air of a perpetual idler, someone in the habit of wasting all his talent and charm. His neckties were always magnificent displays of prosperity in the midst of general poverty. He was constantly moving into a new home or to a new city, and thus for a few weeks his natural good humor, his persistent and spontaneous Bohemian ways, delighted incredulous people in Rancagua, Curicó, Valdivia, Concepción, Valparaíso. He always went away as he had come, leaving poems, drawings, neckties, loves, and friendships wherever he had been. Since he was as unpredictable as a storybook prince and unbelievably generous, he gave away everything—his hat, his shirt, his jacket, and even his shoes. When he had no material belongings left, he would jot down a phrase on a scrap of paper, a line from a poem or something amusing that came into his head, and he would offer it to you as he went, with a magnanimous look on his face, as if he were putting a priceless jewel in your hand.
His poems were written in the latest fashion, according to the doctrines of Apollinaire and Spain’s ultraist group. He had founded a new school of poetry and called it “Agu,” which, he said, was man’s first cry, the newborn infant’s first poem.
Rojas Giménez set off new fads in the way we dressed, in the way we smoked, in our handwriting. Mimicking me, in gentle fun, he helped me get rid of my melancholy tone. Neither his skeptical attitude nor his wild drinking sprees ever infected me, but I am still deeply moved when I remember his face that made everything light up, that made beauty fly out from every corner, as if he had set a hidden butterfly in motion.
From Don Miguel de Unamuno he had learned how to make little paper birds. He would make one with a long neck and outspread wings, which he would then blow out into the air. He called that giving them their “vital push.” He discovered French poets, dark bottles buried away in wine cellars, and wrote love letters to Francis Jammes
heroines.
His lovely poems went around all wrinkled in his pockets, without ever, to this day, getting published.
Being generous to a fault, he attracted so much attention that one day, in a café, a stranger came up to him and said, “Sir, I have been listening to you talk and I have taken a great liking to you. May I ask you for something?” “What is it?” Rojas Giménez asked, looking put out. “Let me leap over you,” the stranger said. “What?” the poet asked. “Are you so powerful that you can leap over me here, sitting at this table?” “No, sir,” the stranger said meekly. “I want to leap over you later, when you are resting in your coffin. It’s my way of paying tribute to the interesting people I’ve met in my life: leaping over them, if they let me, after they’re dead. I’m a lonely man and this is my only hobby.” And taking out his notebook, he said, “Here’s the list of people I’ve leaped over.” Wild with joy, Rojas Giménez accepted the strange proposition. Several years later, during the rainiest winter anyone in Chile can remember, Rojas Giménez died. As usual, he had left his jacket in some bar in downtown Santiago. In the middle of the Antarctic winter, he had walked across the city, in his shirtsleeves, to his sister Rosita’s house over in the Quinta Normal neighborhood. Two days later, bronchial pneumonia carried off from this world one of the most fascinating human beings I have ever known. The poet flew away with his little paper birds into the sky, in the rain.