Tango del Violador

Out of respect for languages I never learned, or didn't learn thoroughly enough, I usually avoid reading poetry in translation. Of course, I've read the classics in translation, and some of my favorite authors, like Chekhov, Camus, and Kawabata, I know only from translations. But it's prose. As Virginia Woolf explained, "to know a language one must have forgotten it, and that is a stage that one cannot reach without having absorbed words unconsciously as a child. In reading a language that is not one's own, consciousness is awake, and keeps us aware of the surface glitter of the words; but it never suffers them to sink into that region of the mind where old habits and instincts roll them round and shape them a body rather different from their faces."

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.

Sleeping Beauties

“Good day, mother,” said the Princess, “what are you doing?” “I am spinning,” answered the old woman, nodding her head. “What thing is that that twists round so briskly?” asked the maiden, and
taking the spindle into her hand she began to spin; but no sooner had she touched it than the evil prophecy was fulfilled, and she pricked her finger with it. In that very moment she fell back upon the bed that stood there, and lay in a deep sleep, and this sleep fell upon the whole castle.

(Grimm's Fairy Tales, "The Sleeping Beauty," 1812)



Yesterday - Friday here in the Far East - I spent most of the day in a state of amazement. Though I am dubious of Kim Jong Un's ultimate ambitions on the Korean Peninsula,(1) his very presence in the Korean Demilitarized Zone across a table from South Korean president Moon Jae-In, and walking side by side with him, planting a tree and even having what looked like a friendly conversation away from microphones, was an amazing spectacle. 

However unconvinced I am that Kim has turned over a new leaf, this has to be an immeasurably heartening moment for Koreans - in the south, that is. Who knows what the North Koreans have even heard about the meeting? I have written about the year I spent (1997-98) in what the U. S. Army calls Area One in South Korea, the area between Seoul and the DMZ, so my interest in what happens next is personal. Since everyone is speculating about possible conditions prior to actual negotiations for peace, I suggest only one: how about a Kim-free Korean peninsula?

But earlier on Friday, in the wee hours, I was equally amazed when I learned that Bill Cosby was found guilty on three counts of sexual assault in a court in Pennsylvania. I have not mentioned Cosby in the years since women started to come forward with accusations, most of them remarkably similar, that he drugged them and had sex with them when they were unconscious. Like most people, I believed the women's stories, and not simply because, eventually, there were so many of them. 

I am rapidly approaching the age of 60 (less than three weeks!), so I remember watching I Spy when I was a boy and listening to some of Cosby's many comedy albums. I didn't hear his Fat Albert stories until later. Then there was The Cosby Show from 1984  until 1992. It was easy to like Cosby by then - an innocuous wise old man. His chastisement of young black comics (like Eddie Murphy) who used foul language in their comedy was a little silly - especially now that we know about Cosby's dirty little secret. 

Phylicia Rashad, who played Cosby's wife in his hit TV series, made some callous statements after the first victims came forward with their stories. After trying to walk her remarks back, Rashad then insisted that "What I said is this is not about the women. This is about something else. This is about the obliteration of legacy." However much she may have tried to defend Cosby's "legacy," it's all over by now. 

Whatever it's called by psychoanalysts, it's clear that Cosby had a definite taste for performing sex acts with helpless, defenseless women who were unaware of what he was doing. There is an interesting precedent for Cosby's strange behavior from an unlikely source: a 1961 novella by Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata called The House of the Sleeping Beauties. It tells the story of an old gentleman named Eguchi who frequents an exclusive brothel that caters to old men who want to pay an unnamed sum of money to spend the night sleeping next to a naked young woman. The women with whom they spend the night are sufficiently drugged to make confidentiality certain. They're involvement in the transaction is voluntary, or, to use the legal term, "consensual." 

Eguchi is informed that sex with the young woman is forbidden. The first sentences of the novella make this prohibition explicit: "He was not to do anything in bad taste, the woman of the inn warned old Eguchi. He was not to put his finger into the mouth of the sleeping girl, or try anything else of that sort." But the simple fact that the girl is naked (beneath a quilt) arouses the expectation in the reader that some form of sexual contact is taking place. 

Given the key to the room, Eguchi smokes a cigarette outside the door. "He was a light sleeper, given to bad dreams. A poetess who had died young of cancer had said in one of her poems that for her, on sleepless nights, 'the night offers toads and black dogs and corpses of the drowned'. It was a line that Eguchi could not forget. Remembering it now, he wondered whether the girl asleep.. no, put to sleep.. in the next room might be like a corpse from a drowning. And he felt some hesitation about going to her. He had not heard how the girl had been put to sleep. She would in any case be in an unnatural stupor, not conscious of events around her, and so she might have the muddy, leaden skin of one racked by drugs. There might be dark circles under her eyes, her ribs might show through a dry, shriveled skin. Or she might be cold, bloated, puffy. She might be snoring slightly, her lips parted to show purplish gums. In his sixty-seven years old Eguchi had passed ugly nights with women. Indeed, the ugly nights were the hardest ones to forget. The ugliness had had to do not with the appearance of the women, but with their tragedies, their warped lives. He did not want to add another such episode, at his age, to the record. So ran his thoughts, on the edge of the adventure. But could there be anything uglier than an old man lying the night through beside a girl put to sleep, unwaking? Had he not come to this house seeking the ultimate in the ugliness of old age?"

Eguchi enters the room: "He locked the door, drew the curtain and looked down at the girl. She was not pretending. Her breathing was of the deepest sleep. He caught his breath. She was more beautiful than he had expected. And her beauty was not the only surprise. She was young too. She lay on her left side, her face toward him. He could not see her body, but she would not yet be twenty. It was as if another heart beat its wings in old Eguchi's chest." After he undresses, Eguchi slips under the quilt next to the girl. "She was not a living doll, for there could be no living dolls. But, so as not to shame an old man no longer a man, she had been made into a living toy. No, not a toy. For the old man, she could be life itself. Such life was, perhaps, life to be touched with confidence."   

Doing what he was told to do, Eguchi slips into reveries, and finally sleeps beside the unconscious girl. He dreams. Eventually he dreams of his mother, until the sight of blood oozing from a fish she had cooked in his dream wakes him: "Old Eguchi awoke with a groan. He shook his head, but he was still in a daze. He was facing the dark girl. Her body was cold. He started up. She was not breathing. He felt her breasts. There was no pulse. He leaped up. He staggered and fell. Trembling violently, he went into the next room. The call button was in the alcove. He heard footsteps below."

How long must it have taken Bill Cosby to work out the correct dosage of whatever he was using to drug his victims? And how far was he prepared to go to exercise his power, his control over his sexual encounters with all those women? Rape - non-consensual sexual contact with another person - is a kind of murder - the taking of something that was not his to be taken, that would otherwise not be given: another person's physical integrity. Perhaps Cosby is lucky that his peculiar sexual practices hadn't, after all the years he practiced them, resulted in charges of murder?


(1) Kim's statement that "New history begins now" sounds suspiciously like Pol Pot's declaration to the Cambodian people that it was "Year Zero." What he meant - in true Marxist fashion - was that the political struggle of history was over.