Among many cultures, the powers of seduction and destruction are sides of the same coin. In Sexual Water, from the second volume of Residencia en la Tierra (Residence on Earth), Pablo Neruda imbues the force of water with an erotic, corporeal energy, noting that with “drops like teeth . . . it falls biting . . . only a breath, moister than weeping” (ll. 2, 8, 11).

The land that awaits rainfall is parched with a drought, “a death rattle coming from a granary, / stores, locusts” (ll. 19–20). These natural plagues seem to be an objective signifier for social unrest, as next we are shown “girls / sleeping with their hands upon their hearts, / dreaming of bandits, of fires” (ll. 22–24).

People are mired in sex and commerce, a collage of “blood, daggers, women’s stockings . . . corridors where a virgin screams . . . blankets and organs and hotels” (ll. 28–31), as if it were Sodom, poised for the strike of God.

By the third stanza the speaker has asserted himself, adopting a tone of involuntary witness—the anaphora of “I see” begins line after line, and “like an eyelid atrociously and forcibly uplifted / I am looking” (ll. 35–36). Just as heavy rain after a long dry spell brings flash floods rather than relief, the speaker sees cultural upheaval bringing violence upon the very people who longed for it: “a red noise of bones, / a clashing of flesh, / and yellow legs like merging spikes of grain . . . I listen, shaken between gasps and sobs” (ll. 38–42).

The speaker qualifies his role as observer by recognizing his own deep division of self: “with half my soul upon the sea and half my soul upon the land, / and with the two halves of my soul I look at the world” (ll. 44–45). He knows both sides of the coin, seductive and destructive.

In the end the speaker realizes that the siren song of water cannot be resisted, even as the cost of change cannot be denied. He conflates transformative desire with the needs of the body: “though I close my eyes and cover my heart entirely, / I see a muffled waterfall . . . like a waterfall of sperm and jellyfish” (ll. 46–50).

The final haunting image fuses a moment of birth and of death: “I see a turbid rainbow form. / I see its waters pass across the bones” (ll. 51–52). For something to be created, something must be destroyed. Neruda is a master at finding the personal in the political, the human dynamic in the natural world. Here he deftly manipulates the matter of rainfall into the crisis of revolution.

Categories: Latin American Literature, Literature, World Literature

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