Neruda, page 30
Pablo Neruda, a fugitive of justice named Siqueiros writes you to tell you that he greatly regrets not being able to give you a welcome hug, and to plead that you will listen to something that Angélica will ask you . . .
It is unknown what Angélica Arenal, Siqueiros’s second wife, had to say to Neruda. Yet the artist was arrested just a few days later. Without hesitation, Neruda eagerly assisted in his release.
While there’s no factual basis to the claims that Neruda participated in Trotsky’s murder, there is no denying that he was on the path to becoming a die-hard Stalinist. An enduring friendship between Siqueiros and Neruda was born from this incident, one of so many fraternal bonds between Neruda and the great artists and intellectuals of his day that were forged through Stalinism, communism, and leftist causes.
* * *
Neruda and Delia moved the consulate from the previous consul’s house to the wide Avenida Brasil, where they set up a small Chilean library for Chilean and Mexican students. The poet-consul’s reputation quickly brought him new friendships with the artists, intellectuals, and left-wing activists of Mexico. Neruda and Delia were also reacquainted with many of their old friends from Spain who had fled the war and settled in Mexico. The art deco apartment they rented on Calle Revillagigedo became a social hub. The Mexican playwright Wilberto Cantón remembered Neruda there always laughing with his wide smile and the seashell collection that littered the apartment. The only other adornments were a reproduction of an oil painting by Henri Rousseau, a portrait of the great seventeenth-century poet and playwright of the Spanish Golden Age Lope de Vega, and a portrait of Federico García Lorca.
Later they would move into a large villa in Coyoacán. Neruda was happy. Wherever they lived, there were constant fiestas. Sometimes he would dress in costume, as an owl, a fireman, an army general, a train inspector (his friend the Oaxacan novelist Andrés Henestrosa said Neruda did this to “hide his ugliness”). On one occasion he dressed up as a train conductor, cap and all, and went around the party checking everyone’s ticket. The largest fiesta Delia and Neruda threw was actually to celebrate the baptism of Henestrosa’s daughter, Cibeles. Four hundred guests were invited. For two days, people danced, drank, sang, and climbed the trees in Neruda’s garden. It was so loud that their landlord evicted them. They then moved to an apartment next to the grand Paseo de la Reforma.
When Wilberto Cantón first heard Neruda read in public, he was struck by how “the lyrical and subterranean accent of his reading stuck in my mind: syllables that were sung in a somewhat simple and primitive melody, like a medieval priest.”
Neruda was in demand to deliver both discourse and poetry readings throughout Mexico as his Pan-American-themed message became more developed and consistent. In a speech at the National Preparatory School, he assured the audience that there had never been such a close pair of seemingly dissimilar sister nations as Mexico and Chile:
Between blue Acapulco and polar Punta Arenas there is all this land, with its different climates and races and regions . . . Mexicans and Chileans meet each other (so alone) in the roots and it is there we must look for ourselves: in the hunger and in the dissatisfaction of the roots, in the search for bread and truth, in the same needs, the same anguish, yes, in the land, in the origin, and in the terrestrial struggle we confuse ourselves with all of our brothers, with all of the slaves of bread, with all of the poor of the world.
The polarization between Right and Left, those for and against fascism, was becoming more and more volatile even in Mexico. On July 24, 1941, Neruda spoke in the National University’s gorgeous Simón Bolívar Amphitheater—where the back wall of the stage is covered by Diego Rivera’s first major mural—at a tribute to Bolívar (“the liberator of the Americas”) on the 158th anniversary of his birth. After the Spanish philosopher Joaquín Xirau spoke, Neruda walked to the podium, paper in hand, and read his new, rather long “Song for Bolívar,” delivered in his emerging emphatic voice (the poem notably starts out describing Bolívar as “our father who art in the earth”). The audience was silent and excited until Neruda reached the final lines:
I came upon Bolívar, one long morning,
in Madrid, at the entrance to the Fifth Regiment.
Father, I said to him, are you, or are you not, or who are you?
And, looking at the Mountain Barracks, he said:
“I awake every hundred years when the people awake.”
The audience erupted in a hail of applause until a commotion began. Suddenly, from the upper part of the amphitheater, young Fascists began shouting, provoked by the references to Spain in Neruda’s poem. “Death to the Spanish Republic!” “Long live the Generalissimo!” They hurled insults at the “savage” leftists who were damaging the university’s decency.
The dean, Neruda, and other guests hurried out, while those who stayed in the audience confronted the Fascists in a battle royal. The dean wanted to make amends to Neruda for the incident, and the university published Neruda’s poem in a special illustrated edition of five hundred copies.*
* * *
Neruda attended to his consular obligations as well as his poetic and social duties, which seemed like a good combination for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs—at first. Testifying to his diligence, the Chilean ambassador to Mexico, Manuel Hidalgo Plaza, a Communist, registered his high satisfaction with Neruda in his annual review: “Señor Reyes is developing an interesting program of propaganda on the intellectual values of our country, and a noble and prestigious study of the commercial possibilities of our products in México.”
But Neruda angered the ministry shortly thereafter, as he worked on yet another literary journal, this one entitled Araucanía, named after the region in southern Chile. It had a picture of a Mapuche woman smiling broadly with large teeth on the cover, and the minister of foreign affairs reprimanded him for his “bad taste” in representing Chile with such a woman, “even though,” Neruda noted in his memoirs, “Don Pedro Aguirre Cerda, whose pleasant and noble face had all the features of our mixed race, was president of the republic.” The journal lasted only one issue.
More serious trouble followed. In or around April 1941, Neruda learned that the Mexican government didn’t want Siqueiros in a public jail. Mexico’s president, Manuel Ávila Camacho, was progressive, and Siqueiros was one of the country’s greatest artists. Mexican government officials hoped Neruda, as an influential consul general and friend of Siqueiros, could arrange a visa for him to go to Chile. Neruda’s relationship with Siqueiros had recently become closer with both of them in Mexico City. With the aid of an officer, Neruda would take him out of jail at night for dinner. Neruda and the Mexicans came up with the idea that the visa would be issued under the pretext that Siqueiros paint a mural in a school in the town of Chillán, which had recently been devastated by an earthquake.
But on April 23, the Chilean Ministry of Foreign Affairs urged Neruda to annul the visa. The poet cabled back his refusal, defending his reasoning. The following day, Neruda received a second cable urging him to annul the visa. This time, Neruda wrote a long letter in Siqueiros’s defense, maintaining that the muralist had received an invitation from the director of the Chilean National Museum of Fine Arts. On April 30, Neruda received a cable saying that the ministry considered his actions “a grave mistake.” Neruda responded by offering to renounce his position. Siqueiros and his wife, Angélica Arenal, were on their way to Chile. They were allowed a two-month stay. The ministry suspended Neruda for a month without pay.
Though the poet had already offered his resignation, he was furious that the government had reprimanded him and docked his pay. Neruda still hadn’t joined the Chilean Communist Party, but these provocations drove him to become even more vocal politically. On June 8, 1941, he sent a letter to the party’s secretary, Senator Carlos Contreras Labarca:
I want to know, dear Carlos, what you think about all this, about whether I should just swallow this new provocation—which would be very difficult, considering the fact that the terms of my suspension are frankly aggressive and disrespectful to me—or whether I should put an end to this matter and return to Chile to accompany you in the struggle.
Neruda was haunted by thoughts of his comrades who had died in Spain and increasingly yearned to take a stand. He could not shake the awareness that his present position was a convenient way for the Chilean government to keep him away from the home front.
* * *
The insult of the suspension notwithstanding, it freed Neruda to travel. The more he saw, the more his experience of Central and South America affected his thinking, his vision, his conscience. The travels also eased his relationship with Delia, which had grown somewhat tense in Mexico City. Delia was growing tired of Neruda’s constant partying and her role as disciplinarian. Neruda’s infantile acts annoyed her, as did his dependence on her as both personal secretary and poetry editor. But life on the road worked well for them both.
They headed to Guatemala by car. They lived with the writer Miguel Ángel Asturias for a week, beginning a deep fraternal friendship. The dictator Jorge Ubico was ruling Guatemala at the time. Among many abuses, freedom of speech was repressed, leading Asturias to withhold the publication of his novel El Señor Presidente (The President), a book about the evils of a despot. Eventually, it would be one of the key works that earned him the 1967 Nobel Prize in Literature. During Neruda’s trip to Guatemala, a group of eager, young poets asked him to give a poetry reading (after requesting Ubico’s permission by telegram). While Neruda read his poems with enthusiasm, hoping to open a window of expression for the students despite the oppression, the chief of police sat conspicuously in the front row. Neruda wrote that he later learned that four machine guns had been aimed at the audience and himself, which would have been fired if the chief had stood up and asked for the reading to stop.
It was on this trip to Central America that Neruda witnessed firsthand the damage that dictatorial rule can do to a country and its people. Ubico’s crimes and Guatemala’s plundering by foreign companies led directly to Neruda’s lyrically searing “The United Fruit Co.” Part of its potency comes from the short lines Neruda uses, which seem intended, as Robert Hass notes, “to carry a sense of contained force.”
When the trumpet sounded, everything
on earth was prepared
and Jehovah distributed the world
to Coca Cola Inc., Anaconda,
Ford Motors, and other entities:
The Fruit Company Inc.
reserved the juiciest for itself,
the central coast of my land,
the sweet waist of America.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The Company disembarks
among the bloodthirsty flies,
brim-filling their boats that slide
with the coffee and fruit treasure
of our submerged lands like trays.
Meanwhile, along the sugared-up
abysms of the ports,
indians fall over, buried
in the morning mist:
a body rolls, a thing
without a name, a fallen number,
a bunch of dead fruit
spills into the pile of rot.
In the poem (which would be included in the Canto General) Neruda claims the United Fruit Co. and other imperialist interests bought their power through “unsheathing jealousy,” “alienating free will,” “founding a comic opera,” and bestowing gifts like “crowns of Caesar.” He lays out a litany of dictators, whom he refers to as “flies.” First is General Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina—“the Dictatingest Dictator who ever Dictated,” in the words of Junot Díaz’s narrator in the novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao—who ruthlessly ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961.
Then Neruda writes of Nicaragua. “Tacho” was the nickname of the murderous Anastasio Somoza García, who brutally ruled from 1936 until he was assassinated in 1956. Franklin D. Roosevelt famously said of him, “Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but at least he’s our son of a bitch.” After his assassination, his two sons carried on the family’s reign until the Sandinistas’ 1979 revolutionary victory.
Honduras’s Tiburcio Carías Andino, who ruled from 1932 to 1949, is next. Carías Andino gained the support of the banana companies by crushing strikes and the labor movement, outlawing the Communist Party of Honduras, and cracking down on the press.
Neruda continues to El Salvador: the Fascist general Maximiliano Hernández Martínez seized control of El Salvador in a 1931 coup. A year later, in response to a popular uprising, he presided over a horrific massacre that some estimate killed up to forty thousand peasants.
Last came Guatemala. Under Jorge Ubico’s dictatorship from 1931 to 1944, United Fruit became the most important company there. It received enormous tracts of real estate and tax exemptions, making it the largest landowner in the country, and it also controlled the country’s sole railroad, electricity production, and main Caribbean port, while, as Neruda writes, “the indigenous were collapsing in their poverty.”
* * *
In July, his one-month suspension was over and Neruda took up his position as cónsul general again. He needed the money. The drama over Neruda defying orders in the Siqueiros affair had no enduring repercussions; knowing how desperate he was for it, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs even ended up reimbursing Neruda his docked salary. However, since Germany’s June 22, 1941, invasion of Russia, war had broken out in earnest across Europe. For Neruda, this meant that he could no longer allow diplomacy to constrain his literary political activism.
And then the reality of the fight against fascism hit Neruda quite literally. Just after Christmas 1941, Neruda, Delia, and his consular secretary were in a park in Cuernavaca. As they toasted Roosevelt, who had just declared war on the Axis powers following the December 7 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor; Mexico’s new president, Ávila Camacho; Winston Churchill; and Stalin, a group of ten to thirteen Nazi sympathizers who had been sitting nearby suddenly attacked the festive group with fists, chairs, and bottles—“in military formation,” according to Neruda—and yelled “Heil Hitler!” with their arms raised in Nazi salute. The poet suffered a four-inch wound to his head after being struck, he said, by a blackjack. The assailants fled when the police arrived.
The Associated and United Presses circulated a photograph of Neruda and his wound around the world, along with an account of the incident. (The short reports from the wire services, which appeared in the New York Times, the Baltimore Sun, and others, identified Neruda as a Chilean consul but interestingly made no mention that he was a well-recognized poet.) Neruda received hundreds of telegrams wishing him well from around the world.
His head wound didn’t impede his New Year’s celebrations with his friends, which had grown to include a new group of European exiles. That night they sang the Socialist and Communist anthem, “The Internationale,” in Spanish, French, German, Polish, Romanian, and Czech. Many of the guests would later recall how it was at this party that they last saw the legendary Italian Communist photographer, actress, and activist Tina Modotti alive. She died five days after the fiesta, supposedly of a heart attack, though many believe she was murdered. Modotti was an inspiration to Neruda; she bore witness to fascism and other injustices through her photographs, just as Neruda was now doing through his poetry, and she often put her camera aside to do grittier work for the Communist Party, as Neruda would also do. “I cannot solve the problem of life by losing myself in the problem of art,” she wrote. At her funeral, Neruda read his elegy “Tina Modotti Is Dead”:
In the old kitchens of your country, on the dusty
roads, something is said and passes on,
something returns to the flame of your golden people, something awakes and sings.
* * *
It was not all peace and harmony in this social sphere, and personal discord began to arise between Neruda and others within his orbit of poets, intellectuals, and the like. One such clash erupted with Octavio Paz. At the time, Paz was the director of the literary journal Taller (Workshop). Neruda gave Paz a short essay to publish, in which he took some jabs at Juan Ramón Jiménez, his rival back in Spain. Through an “unforgivable error,” Neruda wasn’t mentioned as a contributor on the cover. In that same issue of Taller, Paz published poems by Rafael Alberti, which Alberti had dedicated to José Bergamín, a poet with whom Neruda had had a separate feud. Neruda became furious with Paz for publishing the dedication to his enemy: “You have been an accomplice in a plot against me.” (For all the commotion this perceived slight would set off, Taller was a little-known publication, and Paz—though he would go on to win the 1990 Nobel Prize—was not yet an important literary figure.) Neruda was prone to paranoia regarding other artists, a problem that would continue throughout his life.
At the same time, Paz and Bergamín were editing a new anthology of modern Hispanic poetry, Laurel. Bergamín was in charge of selecting two Mexican and two Spanish poets to include. Neruda was further incensed when Bergamín didn’t choose his friend Miguel Hernández, then jailed in one of Franco’s prisons, as one of the Spaniards; in Neruda’s Canto General poem “To Miguel Hernández, Murdered in the Prisons of Spain,” he takes a swipe at Bergamín and Laurel, as he pays homage to his lost friend:
