Nor would he stop traveling and getting himself romantically involved. Then there were the newspaper deadlines to meet, for journalistic squibs were, in the end, his only regular means of support. Actually, these two elements, women and journalism, played a crucial role as Darío’s career entered its last creative stage. Women sometimes seemed almost the entire focus of his attention. He was known as a regular visitor of prostitutes. He also wrote profusely on women. In the short story “The Ruby,” one of the characters says: “. . . I have been but a slave to one, an almost mystical adorer of the other.” Sometimes Darío discussed their role as labor at the dawn of the twentieth century in societies such as Germany, England, and the United States, in order to persuade people that in Latin America “the working mother will make hardworking children, and good citizens”; he also talks of the Nicaraguan woman as possessing “a kind of Arabian languor, a native-born insouciance, joined to a natural elegance and looseness in her movements and her walk.” But when Darío talks about Spanish women, his lyricism is unequaled. He chants:

 

Nature proceeds and teaches logically; Nature has ordered the creatures and things of the earth according to their place on it, and Nature knows why the Scandinavians are blond and Abyssinians black, why the English have swan’s necks and Flemish women opulent handholds. Spanish females were given several models, depending upon their region in the Peninsula, but the true type, the type best known through poetry and art, is the olive-skinned beauty, somewhat potelée, neither tall nor short, with wondrous large dark eyes and wavy black hair that falls in cascades, all this animated by a marine, Venusian quality that has no name in any other language: sal.

 

As his first and second marriages attest, Darío also sought to commit himself to women, even though his itinerant life often unraveled those commitments. But the picture that emerges in short stories like “The Palace of the Sun” is never that simple. In it the Nicaraguan talks of anemic maidens overwhelmed by melancholy, a favorite fin-de-siècle malady. Darío talks of “something better than arsenic and iron for rekindling the crimson of lovely virginal cheeks.” What does he recommend? The message is allegorical. He tells the mothers of those maidens, “your enchanting little birds’ cages must be opened, especially when the spring-time comes and there is ardor in the veins and sap, and a thousand atoms of sunlight are buzzing in the garden like a swarm of gold among the half-open roses.” When describing the female body, the Nicaraguan’s language is invariably lush. He talks of the “pink flesh” of precious princesses, describing them as “gay, delicious songbird[s] of black eyes and red mouth.” They are voluptuous in their innocence, nymphs that become not only love objects but idols to be adored. In “The Ruby,” Darío states: “My human woman loved a man, and from her prison she was sending him her sighs. The sighs passed through the pores of the earth’s skin and found him, and he, still loving her, would kiss the roses in a certain garden, and she, his beloved, would have sudden convulsions . . . in which she would pucker her pink, cool lips like the petals of a damask rose.” In the spirit of the Romantics, Darío seems infatuated by a woman’s nakedness, which he describes by invoking flowers—roses, lilies, ivory hillocks crowned with cherries. His infatuation reaches such a degree that it often makes him lose all inhibitions. Voyeurism leads to lust, and lust might result in violent possession. This approach might appear scandalous to our eyes, but think of popular examples in Darío’s age, like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, first published in 1897, as well as Alexandre Dumas’s play La dame aux camélias, on which Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata is based. Women in them are discontented beings or sheer objects of uncontrollable male desire, or both. Surely Darío was not unique in his fixations.

In 1899, Darío, again traveling to Spain—first to Barcelona, then to Madrid—met Francisca Sánchez, an illiterate peasant from Navalsáuz, whom Darío taught to read. The couple relocated in Paris, where he worked as a correspondent for La Nación, focusing on the Exposition Universelle de Paris. His pieces for La Nación were at times reportage and others columns and op-eds. And this was only the principal newspaper he worked for.