When Cernuda's mother died in the summer of 1928, the poet felt free to leave Seville. On his way to Madrid, he spent a few days in Malaga with Manuel Altolaguirre and Emilio Prados, directors of the printing house, Sur, that a year earlier had published his Perfil del aire. Cernuda saw the sea for the first time and was so impressed that he wrote a description of the Malaga coast in the story “El indolente” (1929).

Once in Madrid, he reencountered some of the writers he had met during his first visit to the capital, in January 1926. He also saw Vicente Aleixandre. In November 1928, through Pedro Salinas’s recommendation, Cernuda joined l'Ecole Normale in Toulouse as lecteur in Spanish. He spent seven months in that city, dedicated to cultivating new literary and artistic values, and old hobbies, such as silent movies. The cinema was indeed one of his greatest passions, including the epic adventures of Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Rudolph Valentino, the tragicomic adventures of Chaplin and Buster Keaton, and the psychological dramas featuring George O ' Brien, John Gilbert and Gilbert Roland. Cernuda found in the movies not only entertainment but also visual stimuli for his own work. His “Oda” was originally entitled “Oda a George O'Brien.”

Moreover, during his stay in Toulouse, Cernuda reconciled with his (homo)sexuality (out of the closet). Freed from the taboos that family and friends often impose, the poet cultivated a new look. Overcoming his natural shyness, he learned to speak in public and bought "a gray american hat, just like the one worn by Gilbert Roland in Marguerite Gautier.” He grew “a John Gilbert style mustache”  4 , and, wearing this Hollywood outfit, he began listening to fox trot records, Charleston, waltz and tango. These changes, however, did not bring the desired emancipation.

In March 1929, he traveled to Paris. The city dazzled him with its museums, bars and bookstands on Saint-Michel Boulevard: “I spent a period in Paris without conceding, because of shyness and fear, to the desires stirring up inside me, just seeing, walking, and reading. What a strong desire I felt to stay there forever!”  5  . Some of this same vital and erotic frustrations echoed in the poems “Remordimiento en traje de noche,” “Quisiera estar solo en el sur,” and  “Sombras blancas” that he wrote on his return to Toulouse, and later became part of the book Un río, un amor. As an experiment with automatism -that the surrealists proposed-, these poems were a decisive step forward in the poet’s career. Throughout that year, Cernuda was gaining pace with the new momentum, and he published the first results of this activity in the Malagaperiodical, Litoral.

In June 1929, Cernuda returned to Madrid, where he finished writing Un río, un amor. Unemployed for some months, he eventually found a job at León Sánchez Cuesta’s bookstore in early 1930. This job contrasted with the image of the rebel poet he had made his own; but with no better prospects, Cernuda complied with the new unglamorous routine. In April 1931, he started writing Los placeres prohibidos, his second book of surreal poems. The external stimulus that sparked his creativity was his love affair with Serafín Fernández Ferro, a young Galician that had a significant influence on Cernuda’s life and work of during the following years.

While his life was shrouded with intense moments, the Spanish political arena was going through something similar, with the proclamation of the Second Republic on April 14, 1931.