Neruda, page 28
Neruda and Delia joined the efforts to prepare a Second International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture, which was to be held in Spain. Neruda worked to get Latin American writers to attend. While he received a small salary for this, he was not fully supporting Maruca, who was still in Monte Carlo, unable to make a living. Forlorn, Maruca took her daughter to Holland. Being from Batavia, a Dutch colony, facilitated her and Malva Marina’s immigration, and she had some relatives in The Hague. It was obvious at this point that the marriage would not last much longer. Neruda, it seems, may have made one trip to visit them. No matter what, his position was that the uncertainty of what awaited him in Chile and of where his new consular post could be just presented too much instability, especially given Malva Marina’s condition; she and Maruca should stay in Holland. At this point it also was clear that Malva’s illness was incurable.
Meanwhile, by April 1937, Franco and his generals had become frustrated with their efforts to seize control of the northern Basque country. While so much had been focused on Madrid, here there was talk of spreading terror and turning towns and cities into dust and ash, an emphatic physical statement intended to quickly destroy the people’s morale and will to resist all at once. The small town of Guernica, which for centuries had held a hallowed place in Basque identity, became a target because of its significance as a symbol of regional liberties. Mondays are market days in Guernica, a time when the streets fill with people and abundant stalls, and so, on Monday, April 26, 1937, beginning at 4:40 in the afternoon, with Franco’s proud approval, twenty-three warplanes in a joint operation between the Nazi Condor Legion and the Fascist Italian Royal Air Force rained bombs down onto Guernica for three straight hours. The town became engulfed in flames. The death toll was around two hundred, but the toll on the collective psyche was immeasurable. The bombing of Guernica represented the Fascists’ indiscriminate incineration of innocence. Citizens trying to escape into the hills were strafed down by machine guns. Nothing like this had ever happened in Europe before. It was the first time a civilian population had been attacked by air with the apparent goal of total destruction. It was totalitarian warfare.
News of the massacre quickly sent shock waves throughout the world. Franco and his allies’ goal was to wipe out morale with all those bombs. In that regard, they failed. While Guernica was a terrible blow to Neruda and his friends, it didn’t devastate them. The bombing inspired some of the most impactful art of the period, especially Picasso’s painting Guernica. They knew that the best course of action was the power of the pen or the paintbrush, and they poured themselves into creative acts to stay resilient and to shape works of resistance.
* * *
As the Fascists’ bombs fell on Madrid, the Second International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture convened first in Barcelona and then in Valencia over the first weeks of July, finally ending up back in Paris. The meetings were held in different cities to show solidarity with the whole Republic. Around two hundred writers from twenty-eight countries took part in the gathering, including Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Mann, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Octavio Paz, Langston Hughes, and the Russian poet Ilya Ehrenburg. For Neruda and Delia, who were pivotal in its organization, the congress was a landmark achievement. For the struggling and bloodstained Republic, it raised some spirits.
Neruda’s compatriot rival Vicente Huidobro, a militant Communist, was also in Paris at the time. The two led different delegations working toward the same cause. Huidobro’s Chilean Intellectual Workers Union was a Communist organization, while Neruda’s Alliance of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals’ raison d’être was fighting fascism. The fact that Huidobro cofounded his union with Neruda’s nemesis Pablo de Rokha only heightened concerns that tensions, however petty, could threaten solidarity among those working for the Republic.
In an effort to prevent any conflict, César Vallejo, Tristan Tzara, and nine others signed and sent a short, eloquent letter deploring the fact that “motives of discord” continued to exist between the two comrades, “both of whom struggle for the same cause.” “Taking into account what each of you represent,” they urged the two Chileans to “set aside any resentment and division” so that, “with increasing enthusiasm and with one united will,” they could all better serve “under the flag of the victimized people for the material and moral triumph over fascism.” There were no further public arguments between them.
When the congress was in Madrid, Neruda went to La Casa de las Flores, which was right on the front line of the battle for the city. The block it was on, in fact, had already changed sides several times. Miguel Hernández, in his militia uniform and carrying his rifle, had secured a van to get the books, masks, and other belongings Neruda had left behind. The apartment was in shambles from the bombings and gunfire, books strewn among the rubble on the floor. Delia recalled decades later that amid the ruins of “our” house, “our dog Flak appeared. He had knocked down a window as he sensed our presence there. Pablo rejoiced in seeing him.” Neruda’s consul’s tailcoat and collection of Asian masks were gone, but as Neruda later wrote, the looters had left pots and pans and the sewing machine, which were more valuable than masks in wartime. “War is as whimsical as dreams, Miguel,” Neruda remarked to his companion. It would be the last time the two would see each other: Hernández would die in prison five years later.
Neruda spoke publicly at the congress only once, on its penultimate day in Paris. He talked about the new unity of Latin American writers and people coming together to fight fascism. He ended his short discourse:
Fraternity this great has never, ever situated itself so close to justice and life; in fact, fraternity, justice, and life stand together on the same battle line. All that’s left for us to do now is spread out and fight criminal fascism in all corners of the world. Wherever we fight for the freedom and greatness of mankind, we will be fighting and struggling for Spain, even if we do not say her name. This will continue as long as Spain can continue to defend herself with a savage calm.
The final resolution of the congress urged fellow writers of the world, for the sake of culture and humanity, to not remain neutral.
Lacking a new consular appointment, Neruda arranged to return home to Chile with Delia. Before he did, he wrote a long letter to the Chilean minister of foreign affairs, defending himself against the growing criticism of his public activism. It included the line, set apart from the rest of the text: “I’m not a communist; I’m an anti-fascist.”
Around the same time, he went further, answering a question by the Chilean paper Ercilla: “I am not a communist. Nor a socialist. Nor anything. I am, simply, a writer. A free writer who simply loves freedom. I love the people. I belong to them because I come from them. That is why I am anti-fascist. My adhesion to the people is not tainted with orthodoxy or submission.”
* * *
Maruca wrote a letter to Trinidad, her mother-in-law or, as she put it, “my dear mother,” from The Hague on September 2, 1937, announcing that “Neftalí” was traveling back to Chile. “He’ll tell all.” Maruca told Trinidad that she always thought of her with great affection but hadn’t written in several months because “we’ve lived through a horrible time of wars and travels and great misery with a sick little child.” She ends it by sending affection to all and a strong hug to Trinidad, from “your daughter Maruca.”
Neruda and Delia had boarded the French steamship Arica a week earlier and arrived in Valparaíso a little over a month later. Neruda’s friends and many fans were there to meet them at Santiago’s Mapocho Station. Delia stepped off the train in a blue two-piece suit and a small pink hat. To the crowd, it seemed as if a famous actress had just appeared, such was her glamorous appearance. “This is la Hormiga,” Neruda announced. “Say hi to her.” Diego Muñoz and others immediately became friends with Delia. They had already heard many good things about her. “She was a charming, cultured woman,” Muñoz wrote in his memoirs. However, Neruda looked heavier, a bit older than his thirty-three years. His experience in Spain had aged him, physically and mentally. There was a huge fiesta in their honor that night at the City Hotel. Neruda was now an important figure in his country, a poet acclaimed on the international stage.
Though he had announced that he was not a communist, his ideology and alliances were leading him in that direction. His friends, including Diego Muñoz, Tomás Lago, and Rubén Azócar, were now very active in the Communist Party, adding an intellectual and artistic component to the proletariat base. Neruda joined them in organizing Spanish solidarity events, but he would have risked expulsion from the diplomatic service if he had joined the Communist Party himself.
Neruda and his friends organized a Chilean chapter of the Alliance of Intellectuals for the Defense of Culture. In its first meeting that November, Neruda was elected president and gave a discourse entitled “Writers of Every Country, United with the People of Every Country.” It was a rallying cry:
From this moment the Alliance of Intellectuals, a group of men from different creeds and disciplines, will stand at the front of the battle for freedom and democracy, for the dignity of culture, with deeds and words, now that words are our arms, arms that can be and must be feared by the dark forces of reactionaries.
In the subsequent weeks, Neruda gave several readings of his poetry from Spain in the Heart in Santiago and Valparaíso. Over the months that followed, he was involved in various conferences and acts on the part of the Alliance of Intellectuals and other groups, speaking out about Spain and the threat of fascism to Chile.
At its convention in April, the Chilean Popular Front (with the Chilean Confederation of Workers added to its ranks) nominated Pedro Aguirre Cerda as its presidential candidate for the elections that October, running against the archconservative Gustavo Ross. Neruda and the Alliance of Intellectuals went to work campaigning for Aguirre Cerda.
* * *
Meanwhile, Neruda and Delia settled into their relationship. They rented a comfortable house in the tranquil neighborhood of Providencia, outside the city’s noisy center, such a contrast to the stifling small gray apartment he had lived in with Maruca before Buenos Aires and Spain. They opened their home to friends, as Neruda would for the rest of his years.
Fernando Sáez, executive director of the Pablo Neruda Foundation at the time of this writing, wrote in his biography on Delia that for her,
the open house is yet another subtle way of keeping an eye on Pablo . . . La Hormiga is inflexible, and she can be tough. “No, Pablo, you are mentally retarded” is her battle cry. And he would conspire to give her a hard time, obliging some friend to tell a dirty joke or use a word with a vulgar meaning that would rattle her. But that is just one part. What you see is an affectionate, inseparable, united couple. He is much more spontaneous, loving, affectionate, and concerned. Taught in such a way as to not show her feelings, Delia seems cold, but her love is unconditional, expressed in her unrestricted support and total admiration.
Book royalties still largely nonexistent, they bought the house primarily with funds from his Ministry of Foreign Affairs pension, which he had started to accumulate when he left for Burma in 1927. It was a modest sum he had never really dipped into. Most of his housing in recent years had been paid for by the ministry, and while he’d drink and eat well, his tastes were not excessively expensive.
Shortly after their return to Chile, Delia made a trip back to Buenos Aires, primarily to attend to her financial affairs. She had been away for seven years. Her family froze her out because of her politics, effectively cutting her off from any family assets to which she may have thought she was entitled.
When Neruda’s father fell ill that April, most likely from a stroke, the poet went to Temuco to be with the family. He wrote to “my dear Hormiga of my soul” that while his father had the endurance of an ox, he was still in agony. And his half sister, Laura, was “useless in this situation,” so everything was falling to him. Ever since he arrived, Neruda said, his father spent hours unconscious and then, in moments of dazed wakefulness, would criticize him: “Why are you so twisted? Straighten up.”
Still with his family in Temuco on May Day 1938, Neruda, representing the Alliance of Intellectuals, gave a discourse imploring workers to defend their rights. He also warned about the growth of Nazism in the south, with its large German immigrant population. May 1 was also Nazi Germany’s National Day and was celebrated by many Chileans of the region. Neruda roared, “Enemies of the motherland, get out of Chile! Spies and agents of the savage carnivorous megalomaniac Hitler, get out of here! Close the Nazi schools of the frontier and south!”
* * *
Neruda’s father died on May 7. Later in life, Neruda would speak admiringly of his father, whose rigorous objections to his son’s poetry had served to strengthen his resolve. His father’s personality could resemble a rock. But behind that hardness he had truly cared for his son, and Neruda knew it.
In his reflective book Isla Negra, Neruda remembered José del Carmen:
My poor, hard father,
there he was at the axis of existence,
virile in friendship, his glass full.
His life was a running campaign,
and between his early risings and his traveling,
between arriving and rushing off,
one day, rainier than other days,
the railwayman, José del Carmen Reyes,
climbed aboard the train of death, and so far has not come back.
—“The Father”
* * *
For some breathing space during his time in Temuco, Neruda stayed in the house of Dr. Manuel Marín, the Reyeses’ family friend and doctor. Marín noted that the night Neruda’s father died, the poet shut himself in the den. The next morning the doctor found what the poet had written the night before: the first lines of the Canto general de Chile, which would eventually evolve into the larger Canto general. In these lines, Neruda took the seeds of conviction he had discovered in Spain and replanted them in his native Chile. As Spain was “in his heart,” Chile, and Latin America, now took root there as never before. The poem he wrote that night was “Discoverers of Chile,” depicting the violence and oppression unleashed by the conquistadores in their plunder of the New World.
While he had not yet expanded his scope to all of the Americas as he did in the larger work, in this smaller Canto, Neruda applied his political convictions to Chile. Here he found a new audience for his verse, not just in fellow intellectuals, but in el pueblo, the people. Campaigning at Santiago’s great market, La Vega Central, for presidential candidate Pedro Aguirre Cerda, Neruda read almost all of Spain in the Heart to the workers of the porters’ union. It was the first time he had taken his poetry to the streets in such a manner, and they were completely silent while he read. When he ended, many applauded, while others lowered their heads. Then a man who Neruda thought might be the leader of the union said, “Compañero Pablo, we are a much-forgotten people. I can tell you that we have never felt such great emotion. We want to tell you—” According to the poet, the worker then started to cry, as did others.
Neruda said that the workers’ reaction made his throat feel “tied in knots by an irrepressible feeling,” and that this was the most important act in his literary career until that point. While this description may seem exaggerated, it also conveys Neruda’s deepening identification with the working class and the poor. He adopted a new, humble tone, saying his trade as a poet was no greater than that of the baker, the carpenter, the miner; that he was no greater than the righteous of any class.
By the time he was working on Canto General in 1949 and 1950, Neruda had started to write in a voice that aimed to speak for the masses. While he somewhat appointed himself to the role of advocate for the people, the “people’s poet,” the majority seemed to value his representation. His acclaim had earned him tremendous visibility to further his activism for workers and all those suffering from economic injustice. To some degree, his posture was manufactured, and he played up his new image as the poet of the proletariat. But there was also sincerity involved; it was a role that came naturally as part of his personal, political, and poetic trajectory since childhood. It had evolved from his lifelong belief in the role of the poet, answering the poet’s calling, fulfilling his obligation to share with the world and humanity the creative gifts bestowed upon him at birth, which he had worked hard to develop.
* * *
Neruda’s stepmother died three months after the death of his father, on August 18, 1938. Her tenderness and serene strength had been essential to Neruda as a boy. Doña Trinidad Malverde’s peace and equanimity had been constant through the years, a rarity in his family, in the world around him, and in himself.
Neruda had acknowledged her importance in subtle ways. The postcard considered to be his first poem was addressed only to her. While lost in Asia he wrote letters addressed just to her as well. When he wrote his father from Spain to tell him about the birth of his daughter, he explained her full name, Malva Marina Trinidad, was an homage to his stepmother, la mamadre.
Dear more-mother—
I was never able
to say stepmother!—
at this moment
my mouth trembles to define you,
for hardly
had I begun to understand
than I saw goodness in your poor dark clothes,
a practical sanctity—
goodness of water and flower,
that’s what you were . . .
—“The More-Mother”
At the time of Trinidad’s death, Neruda’s half sister, Laura, now thirty-one, was still living in Temuco. With her father and stepmother gone and never having reestablished a relationship with her own mother, she moved to Santiago in 1938 and found work in the public school administration. The bond she shared with Neruda was still firmly intact.
