Gypsies don’t have televisions in their bedrooms. But they have books. This morning I reached for Stephen Tapscott’s translation of Pablo Neruda’s Cien Sonetos de Amor. 100 Love Sonnets. The collection arrived to the world, in Spanish, in 1960. It was the same year I was born. No one in my country of birth knew of Pablo Neruda then, but it would happen soon—that he would become known as a man to revile, during the tumultuous and despairing times of the Cold War, for his political passions and involvements—which spanned the globe.

The book came to me through my son, who read it in high school for an English class. There is some marginalia on page 15 that I recognize as his handwriting: “Sunday: NOTICE NATURE. Bring it in.” What an absurd school assignment for a gypsy child. But it was 2008 or 2009, and, by then, many children in my country had stopped wandering off into nature. (Neruda wrote that he made his sonnets out of wood.) The page also has my son’s drawing of a bird, or maybe it is a bug—with wings—holding a bow and arrow. There are two hearts drawn, shot through with an arrow. They are marked with my son’s initials and those of someone he was thinking about during class. The drawings are underneath Neruda’s unabashed sensuality, represented by words, on the page. Here are the last lines:

     “But my heart went on, remembering your mouth—and I

          went on.

     and on through the streets like a man wounded,

     until I understood, Love: I had found

     my place, a land of kisses and volcanoes.

On page 7, there is a graphic doodle on the left side of the page my son did during class. And many years later, I added my doodles to it.

And, at last, on dog-eared page 171, is the sonnet I found again this morning.

“De viajes y dolores yo regrese, amor mío…”

“My love, I returned from travel and sorrow

      to your voice, to your hand flying on the guitar,

      to the fire interrupting the autumn with kisses,

      to the night that circles through the sky.

 

      I ask for bread and dominion for all;

      for the worker with no future I ask for land.

      May no one expect my blood or my song to rest!

      But I cannot give up your love, not without dying.

     

      So: play the waltz of the tranquil moon,

      the barcarole, on the fluid guitar,

      till my head lolls, dreaming:

     

      for all my life’s sleeplessness has woven

      this shelter in the grove where your hand lives and flies,

      watching over the night of the sleeping traveler.”                                                                                                                    

 

Neruda’s dedication in the book, to Matilde Urrutia:

“Señora mia muy amada…”

“My beloved wife, I suffered while I was writing these misnamed “sonnets”; they hurt me and caused me grief, but the happiness I feel in offering them to you is vast as a savanna. When I set this task for myself, I knew very well that down the right sides of sonnets, with elegant discriminating taste, poets of all times have arranged rhymes that sound like silver, or crystal, or cannon fire. But–with great humility–I made these sonnets out of wood; I gave them the sound of that opaque pure substance, and that is how they should reach your ears. Walking in forests or on beaches, along hidden lakes, in latitudes sprinkled with ashes, you and I have picked up pieces of pure bark, pieces of wood subject to the comings and goings of water and the weather. Out of such softened relics, then, with hatchet and machete and pocketknife, I built up these lumber piles of love, and with fourteen boards each I built little houses, so that your eyes, which I adore and sing to, might live in them. Now that I have declared the foundations of my love, I surrender this century to you: wooden sonnets that rise only because you gave them life.”

In my gypsy life, I fell in love with a guitar player. We got married. We found an old barn and took great care in choosing all the wood we used to build the barn up after it had been abandoned and left to die. Inside this little shelter of ours, I read poems out loud. I do it in the same way that my true love plays his guitar—for the simple joy of doing something that brings me pleasure.