“Amor mio, de pronto
tu cadera
es la curva colmada
de la copa,
tu pecho es el racimo
la luz del alcohol tu caballera,
las uvas tus pezones,
tu ombligo sello puro
estampado en tu vientre de vasija,
y tu amor la cascada
de vino inextinguible,
la claridad que cae en mis sentidos,
el splendor terreste de la vida.”

“My love, suddenly
your hip
is the curve of the wineglass
filled to the brim,
                your breast is the cluster,
your hair the light of alcohol,
your nipples, the grapes
your navel pure seal
stamped on your barrel of a belly,
and your love the cascade
of unquenchable wine,
the brightness that falls on my senses,
the earthen splendour of life.”

Certainly his study in Valparaiso, with its wine glasses, a view of his beloved sea and city spawned beauty on the page. Three of Neruda’s houses are now maintained in Chile -, La Sebastiana in Valparaiso, a permanent home on Isla Negra - off the coast, and La Chacona in Santiago. So I returned to the Latino emotion of a young woman in Santiago, where she offered me her city and her nation’s poet as much as she offered herself. In return, my offerings seemed to be unsuccessful: flowers - an inelegant handpicked collection from the local park in the absence of any florist that I could find in Santiago; concert tickets to the Santiago Philharmonic - which started too early for her to meet me; and a dinner invitation - only to find that the highly recommended Como Agua Para Chocolate restaurant was full, evidently ‘victim’ of a favourable entry in Lonely Planet, attested to by the hordes of tourist buses parked outside.

But as Neruda wrote in Plena mujer, manzana carnal (Full woman, carnal apple) from his 1960 collection Cien sonetos de amor (One hundred sonnets of love):

“Ah, love is a voyage with water and with stars, with suffocating air and brusque storms…”,

and so the night’s voyage moved inevitably forward: she’d never received flowers before, and we found ourselves at a candle lit table for many hours nestled privately in a cove of wine bottles, away from staid, impersonal concert halls and buses full of package tourists at commercialised restaurants. To say that the night was an “Ode to Common Things” would make it sound unremarkable, but perhaps the greatest romance and pleasure comes from simplicity and the unexpected - the music of a violin, born of a tree’s wood perhaps, as in another of his odes - Oda a una castana en el suelo (Ode to a chestnut on the ground):
           

Del follaje erizado
caiste
completa,
de madera pulida
de lucida caoba,
lista
como un violin que acaba
de nacer en la altura,
y cae
ofreciendo sus dones encerrados
su escondida dulzura
terminada en secreto
entre pajaros y hojas …

Out of the bristling foliage
you fell
complete:
polished wood,
glistening mahogany,
perfect
as a violin that has just
been born in the treetops
and falls
offering the gifts locked inside it,
its hidden sweetness,
finished in secret among
birds and leaves …

Between ages 23 and 31, Neruda traveled extensively, having received a number of honorary consulships, which saw him continually uprooted and relocated through Burma, Ceylon, Java, Singapore, Argentina and Spain. Those eight years of life remain for many the ‘ages of travel’ and despite the absence of honorary consulship, I remained driven to movement - perhaps at times losing love as a result. During this time of difficult constant movement in his twenties, Neruda compiled the collection of esoteric surrealistic poems, Residencia en la tierra (Residence in Earth) (1933), which not only marked his literary breakthrough, but also captured the lines in Arte Poetica (Ars Poetica) which described the ‘noises’ that also drew this traveler in his twenties (me) away from the romance of Santiago:

“… de pronto, el viento que azota mi pecho,
las noches de substancia infinita caidas en mi dormitorio,
el ruido de un dia que arde con sacrificio
me piden lo profetico que hay en mi, con melancolia
y un golpe de objetos que llaman sin ser respondidos
hay, y un movimiento sin tregua, y un nombre confuso.”

“… suddenly, the wind lashing at my chest,
the infinitely dense nights dropped into my bedroom,
the noise of a day burning with sacrifice
demand what there is in me of the prophetic, with melancholy
and there’s a banging of objects that call without being answered,
and a restless motion, and a muddled name.”

Neruda’s absence from his beloved Chile lasted into the Spanish Civil War, during which García Lorca (whom Neruda knew) was murdered  and prompted him to join the Republican movement in Spain. Appointed consul for Spanish emigration, but residing in Paris, and shortly afterwards, Consul General in Mexico, Neruda remained away from a land for which he longed. Tragically his return was filled with  disappointment. Although he joined the Communist Party and was elected senator of the Republic in 1945, his protests against President González Videla's policy against striking miners in 1947 led to him living underground before fleeing in desperation in 1949.

In love, perhaps in the same way as politics, a return is not always triumphal and often leads to greater loss and sadness. As with our poet’s absence in the 1930’s and 40’s, having been released from Chile by the urge to travel, I similarly returned - unconvincing optimistic - to a woman in Santiago for Easter.  Drawn uncomfortably by a slender, beautiful, ever-changing country (sometimes described as sliding off the end of the South American continent), the contradictions and uncertainties of both Chile, and my clandestine affair manifested themselves in a slender, beautiful, ever-changing woman. In hindsight, to travel into the rugged dirt roads and shear rock faces of the Andes with a Chilean woman, armed together with little more than a few clothes and my (now well worn) copy of Neruda’s poetry thrown into her 4WD, the experience was always going to be a “bumpy” ride. The return to romance was no poetic fairytale, but maintained an honest optimism, whatever the inevitable unraveling of emotion. Easter 2005 was a harsh, gratifying reality that two people were pleased to have met, to have spent the time and to look wistfully to the future, but perhaps we always expected little more than the comfort of showing the courage to spend time fruitlessly together.

Whatever the sense of separate destiny at the time, and given the fact that this dalliance is more easily described objectively twelve months later, a poem resounded for some days after leaving Santiago for the last time (or at least this part of Santiago). The poem was Puedo escribir los versos mas tristes (I can write the saddest verses) and in part reads:

“Puedo escribir los versos mas triestee esta noche.
Escribir por ejemplo: “La noche esta estrellada, y tiritan, azules, los astros, a lo lejos.”
El viento de la noche gira en el cielo y canta.
Puedo escribir los versos mas triestee esta noche.
Yo la quise, y a veces ella tambien me quiso.
…
Ya no la quiero, es cierto, pero cuanto la quise.
Mi voz buscaba el viento para tocar oido.
De otro. Sera de otro. Como antes de mis besos.
Su voz, su cuerpo claro. Sus ojos infinitos.
Ya no la quiero, es cierto, pero tal vez la quiero.
Es tan corto el amor, y es tan largo el olvido.
Porque en noches como esta la tuve entre mis brazos, mi alma no se contenta con haberla perdido.
Aunque este sea el ultimo dolor que ella me causa,
Y estos sean los ultimos versos que yo le escribo.”

“I can write the saddest verses tonight.
Write, for example “The night is shattered with stars, twinkling blue, in the distance”
The night wind spins in the sky and sings.
I can write the saddest verses tonight.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
…
I no longer love her, it’s true, but how much I loved her.
My voice searched for the wind that would touch her ear.
Another’s. She will be another’s. As before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her, it’s true, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, and forgetting is so long.
Because on nights like this I held her in my arms,
My soul is not at peace with having lost her.
Though this may be the final sorrow she causes me,
and these the last verses I write for her.”

My few days of hardship produced a few more pages of impassioned travel journal entries and some meager attempts to memorise a number of poems in both English and their original Spanish. Chile’s poet laureate however, evidenced his own hardships in Chile and abroad in the form of Canto General, through which ran the theme of South American nature, its people and its historical destiny. Initially it was only published as an underground work in Chile, but received official recognition in Mexico in 1950, and the approximately 250 poems were promptly translated into a dozen other languages.

But back to love.

Traveling north I met a Peruvian woman in southern Peru who spoke little English but, after I encouraged her to read the English translation of Neruda’s Cuerpo de mujer (Body of woman) … well … I fell briefly in love again. Sitting in a rooftop bar in Arequipa in the foothills of the Andes she read: