by Pablo Neruda
HAPLESS HUMAN FAMILY
In several essays on my poetry I have read that my stay in the Far East influenced it in some ways, especially Residencia en la tierra. As it happens, the poems of Residencia en la tierra are the only ones I wrote at that time, but without going so far as to defend my statement categorically, I say that this business of influence is mistaken.
All the esoteric philosophy of the Oriental countries, when confronted with real life, turned out to be a by-product of the anxiety, neurosis, confusion, and opportunism of the West; that is, of the crisis in the guiding principles of capitalism. In the India of those years there was little room for deep contemplation of one’s navel. An existence that made brutal physical demands, a colonial position based on the most cold-blooded degradation, thousands dying every day of cholera, smallpox, fever, and hunger, a feudal society thrown into chaos by India’s immense population and industrial poverty, stamped such great ferocity on life that all semblance of mysticism disappeared.
The theosophic centers were generally run by adventurers from the West, including North and South Americans. Of course, there were people among them who acted in good faith, but the majority exploited a cheap market where exotic amulets and fetishes wrapped in metaphysical sales talk were sold wholesale. These people were always spouting Dharma and Yoga. They reveled in religious acrobatics, all empty show and high-sounding words.
For these reasons, the Orient struck me as a large, hapless human family, leaving no room in my conscience for its rites and gods. I don’t believe, then, that my poetry during this period reflected anything but the loneliness of an outsider transplanted to a violent, alien world.
I recall one of those tourists of the occult, a vegetarian and a lecturer. He was a little middle-aged character named Powers, with a shiny bald dome and very light blue eyes, whose cynical look pierced right through you. He came from North America, from California, was a Buddhist, and he always closed his lectures with the follow- ing dietetic prescription: “As Rockefeller used to say, eat an orange every day.”
Powers’s cheerful openness appealed to me. He spoke Spanish. After his lectures we used to go off together and feast on huge bellyfuls of roast lamb with onions. He was a Buddhist theologian—whether or not he was the real thing, I don’t know—but his voracious appetite was more authentic than the contents of his lectures.
He soon fell in love, first with a half-caste who was crazy about his tuxedo and his theories; she was an anemic young lady with long-suffering eyes who believed he was a god, a living Buddha. That’s how religions are born.
After several months with this woman, he came to see me one day about attending a new marriage of his. On his motorcycle, provided by the commercial concern for which he was a refrigerator salesman, we quickly left groves, monasteries, and rice paddies behind us, finally coming to a small village with Chinese houses and Chinese inhabitants. Powers was received with fireworks and music, while the young bride, looking like an idol in her white make-up, remained seated on a chair that was higher than any of the others. Music was played while we sipped refreshments of all colors. Not once did Powers and his new wife say a word to each other.
We returned to the city. Powers explained that only the bride took part in this wedding ritual. The ceremonies would go on without his having to be there. Later he would go back to live with her.
“You realize you’re a polygamist, don’t you?”
“My other wife knows about it and will be very happy,” he said.
This statement had as much truth in it as his story about an orange a day. When we got to his house, his first wife’s home, we found her, the long-suffering half-caste, almost dead, with her cup of poison and a farewell note on the night table. Her dark body lay completely naked and motionless under the mosquito net. Her agony lasted several hours.
Although I was now beginning to find him repulsive, I stood by Powers because his suffering was obviously sincere. The cynic in him had gone to pieces. I went to the funeral with him. We placed the cheap coffin on a pile of firewood, on the bank of a river. Powers lit some kindling with a match, muttering ritual phrases in Sanskrit.
A few musicians dressed in orange-colored tunics chanted or blew on some very sad-sounding instruments. The pyre kept burning a little, then going out, and the fire had to be revived with matches. The river flowed on between its banks indifferently. The eternal blue sky of the Orient also displayed absolute unconcern, infinite disregard for the pitiful and lonely funeral of a poor forsaken creature.
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My official duties demanded my attention only once every three months, when a ship arrived from Calcutta bound for Chile with hard paraffin and large cases of tea. I had to stamp and sign documents with feverish speed. Then three months of doing nothing followed, of solitary contemplation in markets and temples. This was the most painful period for my poetry.
The street became my religion. The Burmese street, the Chinese quarter with its open-air theaters and its paper dragons and its brilliant lanterns. The Hindu street, the humblest of them, with its temples operated as a business by one caste, and the poor people prostrate in the mud outside. Markets where the betel leaves rose in green pyramids like mountains of malachite. The stalls and pens where they sold wild animals and birds. The winding streets where supple Burmese women walked with long cheroots in their mouths. All this engrossed me and drew me gradually under the spell of real life.
The caste system had the Indian people arranged like an amphitheater of parallelepiped galleries superimposed one above the other, with the gods sitting at the top. The English, in turn, maintained their own caste system, starting with the small shop clerks, going on to professionals and intellectuals, then to exporters, and culminating on the system’s garden roof, where the aristocrats of the Civil Service and the bankers of the Empire lounged in comfort.
These two worlds never touched. The natives were not allowed in the places reserved for the English, and the English lived away from the throbbing pulse of the country. This situation created problems for me. My British friends saw me in a gharry, a little horse-drawn cab used mainly for ephemeral trysts in transit, and offered me the kindly advice that a consul should never use these vehicles for any purpose. They also suggested that I should not frequent a lively Persian restaurant, where I drank the best tea in the world in little translucent cups. These were final warnings. After that, they stopped greeting me.
This boycott couldn’t have pleased me more. Those intolerant Europeans were not really interesting, and after all, I had not come to the Orient to spend my life with transient colonizers but with the ancient spirit of that world, with that large hapless human family. I went so deep into the soul and the life of the people that I lost my heart to a native girl. In the street she dressed like an Englishwoman and used the name Josie Bliss, but in the privacy of her home, which I soon shared, she shed those clothes and that name to wear her dazzling sarong and her secret Burmese name.
WIDOWER’S TANGO
I had a troubled home life. Sweet Josie Bliss gradually became so brooding and possessive that her jealous tantrums turned into an illness. Except for this, perhaps I would have stayed at her side forever. I loved her naked feet, the white flowers brightening her dark hair. But her temper drove her to savage paroxysms. The letters I received from abroad made her jealous and furious; she hid my telegrams without opening them, she glowered at the air I breathed.
Sometimes a light would wake me up, a ghost moving on the other side of the mosquito net. It was she, dressed in white, brandishing her long, sharpened native knife. It was she, walking around and around my bed for hours at a time, without quite making up her mind to kill me. When you die, she used to say to me, my fears will end. The next day she would carry out mysterious rituals to make me remain faithful.
She would have ended up by killing me. Fortunately, I received official notice of my transfer to Ceylon. I made secret preparations for my departure and one day, abandoning my clot
hes and my books, I left the house as usual and boarded the ship that was to carry me far away.
I was leaving Josie Bliss, a kind of Burmese panther, with the deepest sorrow. The ship had barely started pitching and rolling in the Gulf of Bengal, when I started to write “Tango del viudo” (“Widower’s Tango”), a tragic poem dedicated to the woman I lost and who lost me, because a volcano of anger boiled constantly in her blood. The night looked so vast, the earth so lonely!
OPIUM
… Entire streets were set aside for opium … The smokers stretched out on low benches … They were in the true holy places of India … These contained no signs of luxury, no upholstery, no silk cushions … Nothing but unpainted planks, bamboo pipes, and pillows of Chinese porcelain … An air of decorum and austerity prevailed which was not to be found in the temples … The dreamers never stirred or made any sound … I smoked one pipe … There was nothing to it … Just a haze of smoke, warm and milky … I smoked four pipes and was sick for five days, with a nausea that rose from my spinal cord, that descended from my brain … And hatred for the sunlight, for life itself … Opium’s revenge … There had to be more to it than this … So much had been said, so much had been written, there had been so much poking into briefcases and bags, in attempts to intercept the poison in customs, the famed, sacred poison … I would have to overcome my queasiness … Become familiar with opium, experience it, before I could pass judgment … I smoked many pipefuls, until I knew … There are no dreams, no images, there is no paroxysm … There is a melodious draining of strength, as if an infinitely soft note lingered in the air … A blacking out, a hollow feeling inside oneself … The slightest movement, an elbow, the neck, any far-off sound of a carriage, a horn, or a street cry, became part of the oneness, a delicious, sleepy sensation … I understood why hired hands from plantations, day laborers, rickshawmen who pull and pull the rickshaw all day long, would lay there dazed, motionless … Opium was not, as painted to me, the paradise of the exotic, but an escape for the exploited … All those in the opium dens were poor devils … There was no embroidered cushion, not the slightest hint of luxury … Not a flicker of light in the place, not even in the half-closed eyes of the smokers … Were they resting, were they sleeping…? I was never able to find out … No one spoke … No one ever spoke … No furnishings, no rugs, nothing … On the worn benches, smoothed by so much contact, a few small wooden bolsters could be seen … Nothing else, except silence and the aroma of opium, strangely repellent yet powerful … No doubt, here was a path to destruction … The opium of the magnates, of the colonizers, was reserved for the colonized … At the entrance, the smokers found their authorized ration, their number, and their permit ready for them … Inside, a vast, smoky silence reigned, an immobility that eased away unhappiness and sweetened fatigue … A hazy silence, the dregs of many broken dreams, found a placid retreat here … The dreamers with their half-closed eyes were living an hour submerged in the sea, an entire night on a hilltop, delighting in a subtle and delicious repose …
After that, I did not go back to the smoking dens … I already knew … I had experienced … I had touched the untouchable … hidden far back behind the smoke …
CEYLON
In 1929, Ceylon, the most beautiful of the world’s large islands, had the same colonial structure as Burma and India. The English had entrenched themselves in their neighborhoods and their clubs, hemmed in by a vast multitude of musicians, potters, weavers, plantation slaves, monks in yellow, and immense gods carved into the stone mountains.
Caught between the Englishmen dressed every evening in dinner jackets and the Hindus I couldn’t hope to reach in their fabulous immensity, I had only solitude open to me, and so that time was the loneliest in my life. Yet I also recall it as the most luminous, as if a lightning flash of extraordinary brightness had stopped at my window to throw light on my destiny inside and out.
I went to live in a small bungalow recently built in the suburb of Wellawatte, near the sea. It was a sparsely populated area, with the surf breaking on the reefs nearby. The music of the sea swelled into the evening.
In the morning, the miracle of this newly washed nature was overwhelming. I joined the fishermen very early. Equipped with long floats, the boats looked like sea spiders. The men pulled out fish of vivid colors, fish like birds from the teeming forest, some with the deep blue phosphorescence of intense living velvet, others shaped like prickly balloons that shriveled up into sorry little sacs of thorns.
With horror I watched the massacre of those jewels of the sea. The fish were sold in segments to the poor. The machetes hacked to pieces the God-sent sustenance from the deep, turning it into blood-drenched merchandise.
Strolling up the shore, I would come to the elephants’ bathing hole. With my dog alongside, I couldn’t get lost. Out of the smooth water surged a perfectly still, gray mushroom: soon it turned into a serpent, then into an enormous head, and finally into a mountain with tusks. No other country in the world had, or has even now, so many elephants doing work on its roads. They were an amazing sight, far from any circus or the bars of any zoo, trudging up and down with their loads of timber, like hard-working giant journeymen.
My dog and my mongoose were my sole companions. Fresh from the jungle, the latter grew up at my side, slept in my bed, and ate at my table. No one can imagine the affectionate nature of a mongoose. My little pet was familiar with every minute of my day-to-day life, she tramped all over my papers, and raced after me all day long. She curled up between my shoulder and my head at siesta time and slept there the fitful, electric sleep of wild animals.
My tame mongoose became famous in the neighborhood. The constant battles mongooses wage so courageously against the deadly cobras have earned them a kind of mythological prestige. I believe in this, having often seen them fight these snakes, whom they defeat through sheer agility and because of their thick salt-and-pepper coat of hair, which deceives and confuses the reptiles. The country people believe that, after battling its poisonous enemy, the mongoose goes in search of antidotal herbs.
Anyway, the fame of my mongoose, who accompanied me every day on my long walks by the seashore, brought all the neighborhood kids to my house one afternoon in an impressive procession. An enormous snake had appeared in the streets, and they had come to ask for Kiria, my celebrated mongoose, whose sure victory they were ready to cheer on. Followed by my admirers—entire bands of Tamils and Singhalese youngsters wearing nothing but loincloths—I led the fight-bound parade, with my mongoose in my arms.
The ophidian was the dreaded black polonga, or Russell’s viper, which has a deadly bite. It was sunning itself in the weeds on top of a white water main, silhouetted like a whip on snow.
My followers dropped behind silently. I followed the pipe and released my mongoose about two meters from the viper. Kiria sniffed danger and crawled slowly toward the serpent. My small friends and I held our breaths. The great battle was about to begin. The snake coiled, raised its head, opened its gullet, and fixed its hypnotic eyes on the small animal. The mongoose kept edging forward. Only a few centimeters from the monster’s mouth, however, she realized exactly what was about to happen. Then, with a great leap, she streaked wildly in the opposite direction, leaving serpent and spectators behind, and did not stop running until she reached my bedroom.
That’s how I lost caste, more than thirty years ago, in the suburb of Wellawatte.
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