It so happens I am sick of being a man.
And it happens that I walk into tailorshops and movie houses
dried up, waterproof, like a swan made of felt
steering my way in a water of wombs and ashes.
The smell of barbershops makes me break into hoarse sobs.
The only thing I want is to lie still like stones or wool.
The only thing I want is to see no more stores, no gardens,
no more goods, no spectacles, no elevators.
It so happens I am sick of my feet and my nails
and my hair and my shadow.
It so happens I am sick of being a man.
Still it would be marvelous
to terrify a law clerk with a cut lily,
or kill a nun with a blow on the ear.
It would be great
to go through the streets with a green knife
letting out yells until I died of the cold.
I don’t want to go on being a root in the dark,
insecure, stretched out, shivering with sleep,
going on down, into the moist guts of the earth,
taking in and thinking, eating every day.
I don’t want so much misery.
I don’t want to go on as a root and a tomb,
alone under the ground, a warehouse with corpses,
half frozen, dying of grief.
That’s why Monday, when it sees me coming
with my convict face, blazes up like gasoline,
and it howls on its way like a wounded wheel,
and leaves tracks full of warm blood leading toward the night.
And it pushes me into certain corners, into some moist houses,
into hospitals where the bones fly out the window,
into shoeshops that smell like vinegar,
and certain streets hideous as cracks in the skin.
There are sulphur-colored birds, and hideous intestines
hanging over the doors of houses that I hate,
and there are false teeth forgotten in a coffeepot,
there are mirrors
that ought to have wept from shame and terror,
there are umbrellas everywhere, and venoms, and umbilical cords.
I stroll along serenely, with my eyes, my shoes,
my rage, forgetting everything,
I walk by, going through office buildings and orthopedic shops,
and courtyards with washing hanging from the line:
underwear, towels and shirts from which slow
dirty tears are falling.
In “Walking Around,” Neruda crafts an internal monologue correlating with a speaker’s travels around town.
Although in many of Neruda’s poems the “speaker” and “the poet” are congruent, here the reader may wrestle to reconcile the speaker’s disdain for everything the poet celebrated: busy markets, common people, sovereign bodies. The speaker is tortured by the stench of business everywhere he goes, as “A whiff from the barber shops sends me wailing . . . all I want is to see neither buildings nor gardens, / no shopping centers” (ll. 5–8). His unspecified job is steeped in isolation and inability to help those “dying in distress,” comparable to serving “as root and tomb, / a solitary subterranean” (ll. 25, 23–24). Each work week begins with an assault: “Monday day burns like petroleum / when it sees me coming with my prison face” (ll. 26–27).
Life is dire, and the speaker ponders various escapes, dreaming of incarceration with his surly claim that “it would be delightful [to] slay a nun with a blow to the ear” (ll. 12–14). He finds no refuge in his body, which also falls into the traps of commerce. Eyes demand bifocals, feet lure him into “certain shoe stores reeking of vinegar,” and hospitals bill a man just to watch “bones sail out the window” (ll. 31–32). The specter of bellybuttons ranks with umbrellas and poison on the speaker’s list of threats to his sanity—a sanity that, by this penultimate stanza, the reader already may have begun to doubt.
Neruda leaves this poem suspended in a lyric moment rather than with a rhetorical or narrative conclusion. The speaker has walked around and continues to walk around, filled “with calm” and yet “with fury” (ll. 40–41). He is resigned to using his eyes to see, his shoes to walk, his bones to carry him, despite their purported betrayals. He exits from the poem passing by clothes “hanging from a wire: / underwear, towels, and shirts that weep / slow, dirty tears” (ll. 43–45).
Perhaps the speaker’s malaise infects even mute objects around him, or perhaps he perceives a genuine sadness in his world that no one else can see; either way, his sense of isolation is absolute.
Any first line that asserts “I happen to be tired of being a man” requires extraordinary pessimism to sustain what follows. Neruda seems to relish the task, though this same poet would later write “Ode to Joy.”
One understanding of this poem might focus on Neruda’s job concurrent to its drafting: his draining consulship in Argentina required daily wrangling with politics and forms. Neruda hints at another possibility in his memoirs, where he denotes 1933 as a period of “discovering Dublin by way of the streets in Joyce.” He was enthralled by the personae of James Joyce’s Ulysses and undertook a translation of Chamber Music.
Some critics see “Walking Around,” which has always been titled in English, as Neruda’s homage—replete with “sulfur-colored birds and horrific intestines” (l. 34)—to Ireland’s dirty, dyspeptic streets.
Categories: Chilean Literature, Literature, World Literature
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