Durga

While stationed as a diplomat in Rangoon, Pablo Neruda fell in love with a local woman: during the day she was Josie Bliss and dressed in "western clothes", but during the night she'd return home to Neruda as her Asian self, used her Burmese name etc. From what is known it was a very passionate - all out- love. However she was incredibly jealous, so much that it ruined the relationship. He arranged to get transferred elsewhere, and without breathing a word to her, one day he left for work in the usual way and boarded the ship that took him away. He took none of his possessions with him. She only knew of his departure and the end of their relationship when she read his good-bye letter to her:

The Widower's Tango:


Oh Maligna, by now you will have found the letter, by now you will have cried with rage
and you will have insulted the memory of my mother
calling her a rotten bitch and a mother of dogs,
by now you will have drunk alone, all by yourself, your afternoon tea
with your eyes on my old shoes which are empty forever,
and by now you will not be able to recall my illness, my dreams at night, my meals
without cursing me out loud as though I were still there
complaining of the tropics, of the coolies corringhis,
of the poisonous fevers which did me such harm,
and of the horrendous English whom I still hate.

Maligna, the truth of it, how huge the night is, how lonely the earth!
I have gone back again to single bedrooms,
to cold lunches in restaurants, and I
drop my pants and my shirts on the floor as I used to,
there are no hangers in my room, and nobody's pictures are on the walls.
How much of the shadow that is in my soul I would give to have you back,
the names of the months sound to me like threats
and the word winter is like the sound of lugubrious drum.

Later on you will find buried near the coconut tree
the knife which I hid there for fear you would kill me,
and now suddenly I would be glad to smell its kitchen steel
used to the weight of your hand, the shine of your foot:
under the dampness of the ground, among the deaf roots,
in all the languages of men only the poor will know your name,
and the dense earth does not understand your name
made of impenetrable divine substances.

Thus it hurts me to think of the clear day of your legs
in repose like waters of the sun made to stay in place,
and the swallow that lives in your eyes sleeping and flying,
and the mad dog that you harbour in your heart,
and thus also I see the dead who are between us and will be from now on,
and I breathe ash and utter ruin in the air itself,
I would give this giant sea-wind for your sudden breath
and the vast solitary space that will be around me forever.

I would give this wind off the giant sea for your hoarse breathing
heard in the long nights unmixed with oblivion,
becoming part of the atmosphere as the whip becomes part of the horse's skin.
And to hear you make water, in the darkness, at the bottom of the house,
as though you were pouring a slow, tremulous, silvery, obstinate honey,
how many times over would I yield up this choir of shadows which I possess,
and the clash of useless swords which is audible in my soul,
and the dove of blood, alone on my forehead,
calling to things which have vanished, to beings who have vanished,
to substances incomprehensibly inseparable and lost.