Despite my ignorance of Spanish, however, the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda is one of my heroes. But you, dear reader, must know this if you've looked up this blog on a web search. "Widower's Tango" (Tango del Viudo) is the title of a Neruda poem that he included in his collection, Residence on Earth. I chose to name my blog after the poem for reasons that I described in a post on February 1, 2011. In 2001, I copied a page from the life of Neruda when I waited until my wife left our apartment at around 11 AM and watched her drive out of sight. Then I moved a van I had rented the day before to the bottom of the stairs, filled several empty boxes with all of my clothes, books, videos, cds - everything that I still considered to be mine - and carried them down to the van. When I was done, I taped a note to the screen of our big screen TV (far too heavy to carry down three flights of stairs), locked the front door, slid the key under it, and drove from Denver to Des Moines, Iowa without stopping. I hadn't told her I was leaving. The note said I had gone to San Diego. I left her in such a manner because I couldn't think of any other way to get away clean.
Neruda found himself in a similarly impossible predicament with a Burmese woman he called Josie Bliss. I won't recount the whole story. It can be found in his Memoirs, first published (in Spanish) in 1974, and in English translation (by Hardie St. Martin) in 1977. Neruda was involved in the editing of the book when he died of cancer in 1972. The editing was completed and the book was published with the revelatory title, Confieso que he vivido: Memorias - "I confess that I lived".
And then everything I knew - or thought I knew - about Neruda was called into question when, the day after Thanksgiving, I read this headline from The Guardian: "Poet, hero, rapist – outrage over Chilean plan to rename airport after Neruda". It was the first time I'd heard anything about Neruda being a rapist. Doing a little digging, I learned that the accusation has been a hot potato since 2010, when Slavoj Žižek, the Slovenian socialist provocateur, quoted a passage from Neruda's Memoirs as an example of liberal hypocrisy. In the book, the particular passage quoted by Žižek comes right after Neruda had been revisited by Josie Bliss in Ceylon and he had to pack her off back to Burma to keep her from being arrested and forcibly deported. Here is the entire passage that has caused all the latest controversy:
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.
The pail was clean every morning, but I had no idea how its contents disappeared. One morning I rose earlier than usual, and I was amazed when I saw what had been happening.
Into the back of the house, walking like a dusky statue, came the most beautiful woman I had yet seen in Ceylon, a Tamil of the pariah caste. She was wearing a red-and-gold sari of the cheapest kind of cloth. She had heavy bangles on her bare ankles. Two tiny red dots glittered on either side of her nose. They must have been ordinary glass, but on her they were rubies.
She walked solemnly toward the latrine, without so much as a side glance at me, not bothering to acknowledge my existence, and vanished with the disgusting receptacle on her head, moving away with the steps of a goddess.
She was so lovely that, regardless of her humble job, I couldn't get her off my mind. Like a shy jungle animal she belonged to another kind of existence, a different world. I called to her, but it was no use. After that, I sometimes put a gift in her path, a piece of silk or some fruit. She would go past without hearing or looking. That ignoble routine had been transformed by her dark beauty into the dutiful ceremony of an indifferent queen.
One morning, I decided to go all the way. I got a strong grip on her wrist and stared into her eyes. There was no language I could talk with her. Unsmiling, she let herself be led away and was soon naked in my bed. Her waist, so very slim, her full hips, the brimming cups of her breasts made her like one of the thousand-year-old sculptures from the south of India. It was the coming together of a man and a statue. She kept her eyes wide open all the while, completely unresponsive. She was right to despise me. The experience was never repeated.
For me, the strangest thing about this story, which took place in 1929, is not Neruda's forthright confession of what he had done to the Tamil woman, or his evident contrition, but how it could've been in print for 36 years, in its original Spanish and in translations into several other languages, read by thousands of people, including critics and biographers, before anyone had a problem with it.
In my online search for articles using the keywords "Pablo Neruda rapist", I found one (one was enough) written by a journalist (1) who clearly made up a story about how she had just bought a bagful of Neruda books, along with the new biography of Neruda by Mark Eisner, Neruda: The Poet’s Calling, had read the incriminating passage from Neruda's Memoirs while riding the subway, and, after interviewing Eisner, who was fair enough to tell her "he was incredibly influential as a human being, and played such a historic role that included so many political events, and he’s so important for understanding social and artistic movements”, took all of her Neruda books off her shelf and threw them into a recycle bin.
But there is a passage in Neruda's Memoirs that comes just before the rape that provides some welcome context for his mistreatment of the Tamil woman:
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.
Neruda was a lifelong communist, but his observations in Burma and Ceylon, both British colonies, were somewhat disingenuous, and his intimacy with the "downtrodden" native people was more than a little patronizing, especially from a young man in a position of authority. To Neruda, and to the reader decades later, it was a different world in a different time. In Burma, Neruda had a native lover. His relations with her were initially purely physical. But the woman's possessiveness and jealousy soon became intolerable. He was trapped with her until he received orders that he was transferred to Ceylon. He saw his opportunity to leave the woman, abandoning almost everything to keep her from suspecting, and went off to board the ship just like he was going to work. Were there sexual and racial aspects to his relations with the women he encountered in the East? Of course there were - since he was from the other side of the world and didn't speak their languages. Yes, it is significant that the beautiful Tamil woman was a pariah caste and that she was already familiar with Neruda's shit. She may have been "untouchable" but she was still eminently desirable. It was perhaps her very low social status that made her even more fascinating to Neruda. If she had somehow testified her own case to us, if we had known anything more of her than Neruda gave us in his confieso, perhaps it would be different. But Mark Eisner suggests that even Josie Bliss may have been a fictitious person. As far as we can tell, was there ever a beautuful Tamil woman whom Neruda ravaged?
I am tentatively (perhaps selectively) in favor of the #MeToo movement, giving credence to voices that were formerly and historically silenced. I hoped that enough people would take it seriously to block the recent Supreme Court justice nomination. But we aren't there yet. If any formerly avid reader of Neruda can use the sketchy anecdote from his youth as enough of a reason to reject his life's work, they probably weren't serious about him in the first place. I think there is a dividing line between a person's life and their work. I won't excuse or forgive what Neruda did - and confessed to having done. I don't consider it my place to do either. Does it change the way I think of Neruda, or lessen my consideration of his work? As I said before, I don't - can't - properly judge the quality of his poetry. But the chilling first words of "Tango del viudo" still thrill through me --
Ah maligna ...
And, for the record, I won't be changing the name of this blog any time soon, and they probably won't be changing the name of Santiago's airport.
(1) Joshunda Sanders.
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