"I went so deep into the soul and life of those people, that I fell in love with a native. She dressed like an Englishwoman and her street name was Josie Bliss. But in the privacy of her house, which I soon shared, she shed such garments and of such a name to wear his dazzling sarong and his hidden Burmese name. "

This is how Pablo Neruda recalls in his memoirs, 'I confess that I have lived', to the girl from whom he fled months later, she crazy with love, he with so much fear of his passion that he left without saying goodbye at dawn. He barely left a note. Months later he wrote that mismatch in the poem 'Tango del widodo ', which starts with the shame of the fugitive: 'Oh Maligna, you have already found the letter, you have already cried in fury, / and you have insulted my mother's memory / calling her a bitch rotten and mother of dogs, / you have already drunk alone, alone, the afternoon tea / looking at my old empty shoes forever, / and you can no longer remember my illnesses, my night dreams, my meals / without cursing me out loud as if I was still there ... '

Pablo Neruda, born as Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto on July 12, 1904, raised by his grandparents for the sudden death of his mother two months later, the teenager who with 13 published his first text in the newspaper ' The Morning' of Temuco ( Chile), with knowledge of English and French, departed by boat to Yangon, then part of the British Empire, to take possession as consul of choice and third class in 1927 . Who would later be Nobel Prize (1971) and Lenin Peace Prize (1953) wanted to leave Santiago de Chile as outside. "In Santiago it seemed that something was going to happen, but nothing ever happened," writes Jorge Edwards in ' Oh, maligna' (Cliff), the recent book where he novels all this nonsense.

Through a friend, he achieved an audience before a foreign minister, who knew and valued his poems (he had already published Twenty love poems and a desperate song ). He offered several cities in the world "of which I only managed to catch a name that I had never heard or read before: Rangoon," according to Neruda himself in his memoirs, I confess that I have lived . In June 1927, together with his friend Álvaro Hinojosa, he departed aboard the ship Baden . They touched port in Lisbon, crossed Madrid and Paris, where he met César Vallejo, until he reached that corner of the universe.

The look of fire

"I had not come to the East to live with colonizers, but with the ancient spirit of that world," wrote the poet. And so much. In the bar frequented by the English, Neruda noticed a girl "with a look of fire," says Edwards. "The Burmese [was] thin, with perfect arms, tanned, dressed in a dark blue sarong , with a beetle-shaped brooch of various colors in her hair." She was an English woman by day, because she worked for the colonial administration, and Burmese at night.

Neruda has just turned 24, smokes a foam pipe and Neftalí Ricardo is starting to change for Pablo, but there, in far away Burma, he remembers when he talked to the director of the Girls' Liceu de Tamuco as a child. His name is Gabriela Mistral. The future Nobel Prize for Literature of 1945 also lent him books and he taught him his poems. Now he only speaks English, he hardly remembers Spanish when he receives a letter. He can't even talk to his friend Álvaro Hinojosa because, determined to become an actor, he has moved to the Calcutta film studios (although he would fail and finished teaching in the United States).

Jossie Bliss. Bliss, he explains, means erotic ecstasy, perhaps also religious ecstasy. He will not yet call her the Wicked or the Furious. Josie Bliss lives in a native neighborhood, with multi-colored fruit stands, but works for the English. For necessity. At the same time, she is a conspirator and is part of clandestine resistance movements. But this still the poet does not know. The poet is a smug. He wears shoes of two colors and also alternates in English parties when they invite him. There he meets a girl named Rosie. Rosie, so much like Josie. They dance, they intimidate. Back home, Josie knows something has happened. It is the first downpour of the storm that will fall later. In the background beats the bitterness of the fall in disgrace of their parents, the dethronement of the kings of Burma by the London army.

The poet goes to his office. Type reports in an Underwood with tracing papers. Start weighing that perhaps the best is a change of destiny. It is not entirely clear what happened. Jorge Edwards says that he is officially notified of a possible transfer to Colombo, the capital of Ceylon. Is it a response to your request, a coincidence? Edwards' words: "I was already starting to separate from Josie with my imagination, and I did it with an intimate feeling of betrayal, stabbing in the back."

Forgive me Josie

Occurred. It happened that he left, that he wrote a note, the letter referred to in the poem. "Josie, my Josie. As I think you already guess, I have to separate from you, I can't help it, although my body, my heart, my insides ask me, they shout at me, that I don't separate from you. If I didn't walk away, you would end up for killing me with that kitchen knife or I would kill you with that same knife. "

According to the poet she has wielded that knife while she sleeps. He has felt fear. What this woman feels is excessive, it borders on madness. "We are entirely incompatible ... Forgive me Josie. I run away to live ... I want and need to live," he adds in the letter, which he placed under the largest coconut tree in the garden of Josie's house. On the kitchen table, a note indicating where the letter is, under a stone next to the coconut tree. Leave the keys and leave. He leaves as if he were going to the office, but he goes to the ship, which finally sails to Calcutta where he would see his friend and from there, he had planned, he would take another to Colombo (Ceylon).

Neruda has taken, always according to Jorge Edwards' novel, all Shakespeare's work in English on bible paper, poems by Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling and prose and stories by Oscar Wilde, novels by Salgari, verses by Leopoldo Lugones, by Amado Nervo, by Humberto Díaz Casanova in Spanish, of course. He has put land and sea in between. There he even has a native boy who acts as a boy for everything that convinces him that there is a mongoose in the house to deal with cobras. He frequents an English club. One of them lends him books by TS Eliot, which fascinates him and that somehow, some verses, reminds him of his admired Baudelaire. In Ceylon, he discovers that Leonard Woolf has even passed through there, who would end up marrying Virginia Stephen, better known as Virginia Woolf.

The poet does not know that Josie, the Burmese, "the feminist, the nationalist, the furiously anti-British" has followed. Soon he will know that he now lives in front of his house, from where he spies on him, from where he silently watches and stalks his encounters with his new English friends. He even throws stones and shouts at him when he senses the most delicate moments. And so more than once, until one of them manages, through her work as a civil servant, to be expelled from the country. Before, Josie has begged her on her knees. The end.

Jorge Edwards, who is also the author of the highly recommended essay Goodbye, poet (Comillas Prize) includes in ' Oh, malignant' an episode, a conversation, perhaps without coming to mind, Neruda with a French journalist where he addresses his political commitment. He is reminded of the reporter who wrote ' Oda a Stalin ', who was a convinced Stalinist and an open letter from Cuban intellectuals and artists published in 1966 in which he was attacked. The poet said: 'Je suis trompé " . I was wrong. Jorge Edwards, he says, was ahead. Was he wrong with Josie Bliss too?

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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