by Pablo Neruda
The other day, my sister brought me a notebook containing my earliest poems, written in 1918 and 1919. Reading them over, I had to smile at their childish and adolescent melancholy, that literary sense of solitude given off by all my youthful work. The young writer cannot write without that shudder of loneliness, even when it is only imaginary, any more than the mature writer will be able to produce anything without a flavor of human companionship, of society.
I learned what true loneliness was, in those days and years in Wellawatte. During all that time I slept on a field cot like a soldier, an explorer. All I had for company were a table and two chairs, my work, my dog, my mongoose, and the “boy” who did the housework and returned to his village at night. This man was not, properly speaking, a companion; his status as an Oriental servant forced him to be quieter than a shadow. His name was, or still is, Bhrampy. There was no need to give him any orders, since he always had everything ready: my meal on the table, my freshly ironed clothes, the bottle of whiskey on the verandah. He seemed to have forgotten how to speak. The only thing he knew how to do was smile, with huge equine teeth.
Solitude, in this case, was not a formula for building up a writing mood but something as hard as a prison wall; you could smash your head against the wall and nobody came, no matter how you screamed or wept.
Across the blue air, across the yellow sand, past the primordial forest, past the vipers and the elephants, I realized, there were hundreds, thousands of human beings who worked and sang by the waterside, who lit fires and molded pitchers; and passionate women also, sleeping naked on thin mats, under the light of the immense stars. But how was I to get close to that throbbing world without being looked upon as an enemy?
Step by step, I became familiar with the island. One night I crossed all the dark neighborhoods of Colombo to attend a gala dinner. From a darkened house came the voice of a boy or a woman singing. I had the rickshaw stop. At the humble door, I was overwhelmed by a strong scent, Ceylon’s unmistakable odor: a mixture of jasmine, sweat, coconut oil, frangipani, and magnolia. Dark faces, which blended in with the color and the odor of the night, invited me in. I sat down quietly on a mat, while the mysterious human voice that had made me stop sang on in the dark; the voice of a boy or a woman, tremulous and sobbing, rose to an unbelievable pitch, was suddenly cut off, and sank so low it became as dark as the shadows, clinging to the fragrance of the frangipani, looping itself in arabesques and suddenly dropping with all its crystalline weight, as if its highest jet had touched the sky, only to spill back quickly in among the jasmines.
I stayed there a long while, caught in the magic spell of the drums and fascinated by the voice, and then I went on my way, drunk with the enigma of an emotion I can’t describe, of a rhythm whose mystery issued from the whole earth. An earth filled with music and wrapped in fragrance and shadows.
The English were already seated at the table, dressed in black and white.
“Forgive me. I stopped along the way to listen to some music,” I told them.
They, who had lived in Ceylon for twenty-five years, reacted with elegant disbelief. Music? The natives had musicians? No one had known about it. This was news to them.
This terrible gap between the British masters and the vast world of the Asians was never closed. And it ensured an inhuman isolation, a total ignorance of the values and the life of the Asians.
There were exceptions within this narrow colonialism, I found out later. Suddenly an Englishman from the Service Club would go off the deep end about some Indian beauty. He was immediately fired and cut off like a leper by his countrymen. Something else happened at about this time: the colonists ordered the burning of a Singhalese peasant’s hut, to rout him out in order to expropriate his land. The Englishman ordered to burn the hut to the ground was a modest official named Leonard Woolf. He refused and was dismissed from his post. Shipped back to England, he wrote one of the best books ever published about the Orient: The Village in the Jungle. A masterpiece true both to life and to literature, it was virtually eclipsed by the fame of his wife, none other than Virginia Woolf, the great subjective novelist of world renown.
Little by little the impenetrable crust began to crack open and I struck up a few good friendships. At the same time, I discovered the younger generation, steeped in colonialist culture, who talked only about books just out in England. I found out that the pianist, photographer, critic, and cinematographer Lionel Wendt was the central figure of a cultural life torn between the death rattles of the Empire and a human appraisal of the untapped values of Ceylon.
Lionel Wendt, who owned an extensive library and received all the latest books from England, got into the extravagant and generous habit of every week sending to my house, which was a good distance from the city, a cyclist loaded down with a sack of books. Thus, for some time, I read kilometers of English novels, among them the first edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, published privately in Florence. Lawrence’s works impressed me because of their poetic quality and a certain vital magnetism focused on the hidden relationships between human beings. However, it soon became clear to me that, for all his genius, he was frustrated by his passion for instructing the reader, like so many other great English writers. D. H. Lawrence sets up a course in sexual education that has almost nothing to do with what we learn spontaneously from love and life. He ended up boring me stiff, but this did not lessen my admiration for his tortured mystico-sexual search, all the more painful because it was so useless.
* * *
One of the things I remember from my Ceylon days is a great elephant hunt.
The elephants had grown much too numerous in one district, where they made constant raids, damaging houses and farmlands. For over a month, all along the banks of a wide river, the peasants had gradually rounded up the wild herds—with grass fires, bonfires, and tom-toms—and driven them back toward one spot in the jungle. Night and day, the fires and the noise excited the huge beasts, drifting now like a slow river toward the northwestern part of the island.
On this particular day, the kraal was all set. A stockade penned off a part of the forest. I saw how the first elephant went in through a narrow passage and sensed itself trapped. It was too late. Hundreds more followed into this dead-end passage. Almost five hundred strong, the immense herd of elephants could neither advance nor retrace their steps.
The most powerful males charged the palisades, trying to knock them down, but innumerable spears surged up on the other side and halted them. Then they regrouped in the center of the enclosure, determined to protect the females and the young. Their organization and their protectiveness made them a touching sight. They let out an anguished call, a kind of neigh or trumpet blast, and in their despair uprooted the weakest trees.
Suddenly the tamers went in, mounted on two huge trained elephants. The domesticated pair acted like common policemen. They took their places on either side of the captive animal, pummeled him with their trunks, and helped reduce him to immobility. Next, with thick ropes, the hunters secured one of his hind legs to a strong tree. One by one, the creatures were rendered helpless in this same way.
The captive elephant turns down his food for a good many days. But the hunters know his weaknesses. They let the animals fast awhile and then bring them the sprouts and tender stalks of their favorite plants, those they would forage for on their long forest treks when they were still free to roam at will. At last, the elephant breaks down and eats. He has been tamed and begins to learn his heavy chores.
LIFE IN COLOMBO
In Colombo there seemed to be no visible symptoms of revolution. Its political climate was different from India’s. Everything was engulfed by an oppressive calm. The country supplied England with the finest tea in the world.
The country was split into sectors, or compartments. The English, who occupied the tip of the pyramid and lived in large residences with gardens, were followed by a middle class much like that in South American countries. They were and may still be called burg
hers and were descendants of the former Boers, the Dutch settlers of South Africa exiled to Ceylon during the colonial war of the last century.
Below them was the Buddhist and Moslem population of Ceylon, which numbered many millions. And still further down, making up the worst-paid working ranks, and also running into the millions, were the Indian immigrants, all from the southern part of that country; they spoke Tamil and professed the Hindu religion.
In the so-called “polite society,” which paraded its finest clothes and jewels in Colombo’s exclusive clubs, two famous snobs competed for leadership. One was a phony French nobleman, Count de Mauny, who had a group of devotees. The other was an elegant and devil-may-care Pole, my friend Winzer, who dominated the few fashionable salons there were. This man was extremely witty, quite cynical, and a source of knowledge about everything in the world. He had a strange profession—“preserver of the cultural and archaeological treasure”—and going along with him on one of his official expeditions was an eye-opening experience to me.
Excavations had brought to light two magnificent cities the jungle had swallowed up: Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa. Pillars and corridors gleamed once again in the brilliant Singhalese sun. Naturally, everything that could be shipped was carefully packed and went on its way to the British Museum in London.
My friend Winzer was pretty good at his work. He went to remote monasteries and, to the enormous satisfaction of the Buddhist monks, he loaded the official van with marvelous stone sculptures, thousands of years old, that would end up in England’s museums. The look of contentment on the faces of the saffron-garbed monks was something to see, when Winzer would leave them some painted-up celluloid Buddhist images, made in Japan, as replacements for their own antiques. They would look them over with reverent eyes and set them up on the same altars from which the jasper and granite statues had smiled for centuries.
My friend Winzer was an excellent product of the Empire; that is, an elegant short-change artist.
Something came to throw a cloud over those days literally burned away by the sun. Without warning, my Burmese love, the tempestuous Josie Bliss, pitched camp in front of my house. She had come all the way from her far-off country. Believing that rice was not grown anywhere except in Rangoon, she arrived with a sack of it on her back, with our favorite Paul Robeson records, and a long, rolled-up mat. She spent all her time posted at the front door, looking out for anyone who came to visit me, and she would pounce on them and insult them. I can see her now, consumed by her overwhelming jealousy, threatening to burn down my house, and attacking a sweet Eurasian girl who had come to pay a call.
The colonial police considered her uncontrollable behavior a focus of disruption in the quiet street, and I was warned that she would be thrown out of the country if I didn’t take her in. I felt wretched for days, racked between the tenderness her unhappy love stirred in me and the terror I had of her. I didn’t dare let her set foot in my house. She was a love-smitten terrorist, capable of anything.
One day, at last, she made up her mind to go away. She begged me to go with her to the ship. When it was time to weigh anchor and I had to go ashore, she wrenched away from the passengers around her, and seized by a gust of grief and love, she covered my face with kisses and bathed me with her tears. She kissed my arms, my suit, in a kind of ritual, and suddenly slipped down to my shoes, before I could stop her. When she stood up again, the chalk polish of my white shoes was smeared like flour all over her face. I couldn’t ask her to give up her trip, to leave the ship with me instead of going away forever. My better judgment prevented me from doing that, but my heart received a great scar which is still part of me. That unrestrained grief, those terrible tears rolling down her chalky face, are still fresh in my memory.
* * *
I had almost finished writing the first part of Residencia en la tierra. But my work was progressing very slowly. Distance and a deep silence separated me from my world, and I could not bring myself to enter wholeheartedly the alien world around me.
Things that happened in my life, which was suspended in a vacuum, were brought together in my book as if they were natural events: “Closer to life’s blood than to the ink.” I tried to purify my style, but relied more and more on a wild melancholy. I insisted on truth and effective rhetoric (because they are the ingredients for the bread of poetry) in a bitter style that worked systematically toward my own destruction. The style is not only the man. It is also everything around him, and if the very air he breathes does not enter into the poem, the poem is dead: dead because it has not had a chance to breathe.
I have never read with so much pleasure or so voluminously as I did in that suburb of Colombo where I lived all alone for so long. From time to time I would return to Rimbaud, Quevedo, or Proust. Swann’s Way made me experience all over again the torments, the loves and jealousies of my adolescence. And I realized that in the phrase from the Vinteuil Sonata, a musical phrase Proust referred to as “aerial and fragrant,” one savors not only the most exquisite description of sensuous sound but also a desperate measure of passion itself.
My problem, in those solitary surroundings, was to find this music so that I might listen to it. With the help of my friend the musician and musicologist, we pursued the matter until we learned that Proust’s Vinteuil was probably a combination of Schubert and Wagner and Saint-Saëns and Fauré and d’Indy and César Franck. My shamefully skimpy musical curriculum had omitted almost all those composers. Their works were boxes that were missing, or sealed to me. My ear could never recognize any but the most obvious melodies and, even then, with difficulty.
Making further headway in the investigation, more literary than musical, I finally got hold of a three-record album of César Franck’s Sonata for Piano and Violin. No doubt about it, Vinteuil’s phrase was there. There was absolutely no room for doubt.
For me its attraction had been purely literary. In his sharp-sighted narrative about a dying society he loved and hated, Proust, the greatest exponent of poetic realism, lingered with passionate indulgence over many works of art, paintings and cathedrals, actresses and books. But although his insight illuminated whatever it touched, he often went back to the enchantment of this sonata and its renascent phrase with an intensity that he probably did not give to any other descriptive passages. His words led me to relive my own life, to recover the hidden sentiments I had almost lost within myself in my long absence. I wanted to see in that musical phrase Proust’s magical narrative and I was swept away on music’s wings.
The phrase loses itself in the depths of the shadows, falling in pitch, prolonging, enhancing its agony. It appears to build up in anguish like a Gothic structure, volutes repeated on and on, swayed by the rhythm that lifts a slender spire endlessly upward.
The element born of pain looks for a triumphal way out that, in its rise, will not deny its origin transmuted by sadness. It curls seemingly into a melancholy spiral, while the dark notes of the piano accompany time and again the death and renascence of the sound. The heart-rending intimacy of the piano repeats, time and again, the serpentine birth, until love and pain come together in death and victory.
There could be no doubt for me that this was the phrase and this the sonata.
Savage darkness came down like a fist on my house lost among the coconut trees of Wellawatte, but each night the sonata lived with me, leading me on, welling around me, filling me with its everlasting sadness, its victorious melancholy.
Until now, the critics who have scrutinized my work have not detected this secret influence I am confessing here. For I wrote a large part of Residencia en la tierra there, in Wellawatte. Although my poetry is not “fragrant or aerial” but sadly earth-bound, I think those qualities, so often clad in mourning, have something to do with my deep feelings for this music that lived within me.
Years later, back in Chile once more, I met the big three of Chilean music—young, gathered together at a party. It was 1932, I believe, in Marta Brunet’s home. Claudio Arrau was
chatting in a corner with Domingo Santa Cruz and Armando Carvajal. I sauntered over, but they hardly spared me a glance. They went on talking imperturbably about music and composers. So I tried to show off a little, bringing up that sonata, the only one I knew. They looked at me with a distracted air and spoke down to me: “César Franck? Why César Franck? Verdi is what you should get to know.” And they went on with their conversation, burying me under my own ignorance, from which I still haven’t been able to escape.
SINGAPORE
Solitude in Colombo was not only dull but indolent. I had a few friends on the street where I lived. Girls of various colorings visited my campaign cot, leaving no record but the lightning spasm of the flesh. My body was a lonely bonfire burning night and day on that tropical coast. One friend, Patsy, showed up frequently with some of her friends, dusky and golden, girls of Boer, English, Dravidian blood. They went to bed with me sportingly, asking for nothing in return.
One of them told me all about her visits to the “chummeries.” That’s what they called the bungalows where young Englishmen, clerks in shops or firms, lived together in groups to save on money and food. Without a trace of cynicism in her voice, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, the girl told me that she had once had sex with fourteen of them.
“And why did you do it?” I asked her.
“They were having a party one night and I was alone with them. They turned on a gramophone, I danced a few steps with each of them, and as we danced, we’d lose our way into one bedroom or another. That way, everyone was happy.”
She was not a prostitute. No, she was just another product of colonialism, a candid and generous fruit off its tree. Her story impressed me, and from then on, I had a soft spot for her in my heart.
My solitary bungalow was far from any urban development. When I rented it, I tried to find out where the toilet was; I couldn’t see it anywhere. Actually, it was nowhere near the shower, it was at the back of the house. I inspected it with curiosity. It was a wooden box with a hole in the middle, very much like the artifact I had known as a child in the Chilean countryside. But our toilets were set over a deep well or over running water. Here the receptacle was a simple metal pail under the round hole.