Neruda, page 32
The reception for Neruda—his persona, his politics, and his poetry—was not always so rosy. Among his critics was the poet Pedro Rueda Martinez, who insisted in the conservative Bogotá newspaper El Siglo that Neruda’s politics were a weakness: “He has wanted to mix his verse with the sentiment of class warfare. It’s almost a fanatical proletariat who puts aside his purely emotional artistic impulse in order to foment party hatred.”
The paper’s founder, Laureano Gómez, also criticized Neruda, as Neruda was celebrated by the liberal government, which Gómez opposed in favor of fascism. Gómez published defamatory poems he wrote against Neruda under a pseudonym. Of course Neruda couldn’t just let this go, and he responded with a tight, witty rhyme satirizing Gómez: “Laureano never laureado.”
Delia and Neruda found themselves next in Lima, Peru, where they were given an honorary lunch by President Manuel Prado of the recently restored Peruvian democracy. In the following days, Neruda gave a lecture, “A Journey Through My Poetry,” in the gorgeous Teatro Municipal. Shortly afterward he delivered a talk to Peruvian writers that he had just composed. Entitled “America, Your Lamps Must Keep Burning,” it highlighted the bonds between Chile and Peru just as he had done with Mexico. Another manifestation of his evolving Pan-Americanism, the name of the talk echoes the name he’d give to the first canto of Canto General, which portrays the genesis of the Americas: “A Lamp on Earth.”
President Prado then facilitated an expedition to Machu Picchu for Neruda and Delia. The Incan ruin was not yet the tourist spot it is today; they traveled through the Andes for three days by burro and foot. The mystical site inspired his magnificent poem “The Heights of Macchu Picchu,” which became the second canto of Canto General. “I thought it held the umbilicus of American history there; it was the center, the apotheosis, and the origin of the entire American continent. I think that a European can admire the grandness of Machu Picchu but cannot comprehend the historical sentiment that the sight of her inspires in us.”
In fact, Neruda said that the idea to expand the scope of Canto general de Chile into a Canto general for all of the Americas was born while visiting that ancient site: “The nucleus of the work emerged in my country, but after visiting Mexico, Peru, and especially Machu Picchu, I felt personally tied to American soil, to the entire continent.” He needed to return and change course with the canto, to write this new projection.
One of the reasons “The Heights of Macchu Picchu” is such an extraordinary poem is that Neruda had discovered how to be politically direct without applying strict dogmatic or social realist formulas to his verse. It illuminates Pan-American history through the lens of Neruda’s own process of discovery. He is able to forge a vision of the inequality in the past that still exists in the present: “I thought about a lot of things after my trip to Cuzco [the settlement near Machu Picchu]. I thought about the American man of old. I saw his old struggles as intertwined with his current ones.” “The Heights of Macchu Picchu” provides a voice for generations past and present. He wrote the poem while watching the ocean at Isla Negra.
The poem’s division into twelve parts resembles the Stations of the Cross, each a meditation at a stop along his pilgrimage to find his lost roots. The chronicles of the peregrination are presented almost as religious scripts, which express the continental vision he had been striving for.
The first canto begins, as Neruda put it, “with a series of autobiographic memories”:
From air to air, like an empty net,
I went wandering between the streets and the atmosphere,
arriving and saying good-bye
Up until then, throughout his life, he had gone from one day to the other, “from air to air,” from nothing to nothing. He felt like an empty net. From Poem VII in Twenty Love Poems:
Leaning into the evenings I toss my sad nets
to that sea which stirs your ocean eyes.
And from Poem XIII:
Between the lips and the voice, something goes dying.
Something with bird wings, something of anguish and oblivion
The way nets don’t hold water.
The fourth section of “The Heights of Macchu Picchu” begins with his admission that “Powerful death invited me many times.” But by the sixth section, he finds the resting place that allows him to see the site as sacred, to meditate on his Pan-American vision and see history and future in one continuum:
And then on the ladder of the earth I climbed
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
up to you, Macchu Picchu.
High city of scaled stones,
at last a dwelling where the terrestrial
did not hide in its sleeping clothes.
In you, like two parallel lines,
the cradle of the lightning-bolt and man
rocked together in a thorny wind.
Mother of stone, spume of the condors.
High reef of the human dawn.
Shovel lost in the first sand.
He begins to find a sense of solidarity, of community, as the transforming moment occurs, in which Neruda witnesses the past in the present: “I felt the sense of community in the construction . . . as if in that construction man had left behind the truest continuation of his life.”
This was the dwelling, this is the place:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Here the gold thread was fleeced off the vicuña
to clothe the love affairs, the tombs, the mothers,
the king, the prayers, the warriors.
The poem reaches its climax in the twelfth section, where he talks to the slaves who built Machu Picchu:
Rise up and be born with me, brother.
From the deepest reaches of your
disseminated sorrow, give me your hand.
You will not return from the depths of rock.
You will not return from subterranean time.
It will not return, your hardened voice.
They will not return, your drilled-out eyes.
Look at me from the depths of the earth,
plowman, weaver, silent shepherd:
tender of the guardian guanacos:
mason of the impossible scaffold:
water-bearer of Andean tears:
goldsmith of crushed fingers:
farmer trembling on the seed:
potter poured out into your clay:
bring all your old buried sorrows
to the cup of this new life.
Show me your blood and your furrow,
say to me: here I was punished
because the gem didn’t shine or the earth
didn’t deliver the stone or the grain on time:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I come to speak through your dead mouth.
How did Neruda have the privilege to speak through them, to speak from them? Neruda strove to tell the history from the point of view of the people themselves, not the history told by the conquerors.
The canto ends:
Through the earth unite all
the silent and split lips
and from the depths speak to me all night long
as if we were anchored together,
tell me everything, chain by chain,
link by link and step by step,
sharpen the knives you kept,
place them in my chest and in my hand,
like a river of yellow lightning,
like a river of buried jaguars,
and let me weep, hours, days, years,
blind ages, stellar centuries.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Come to my veins and my mouth.
Speak through my words and my blood.*
He sees with their eyes; they see with his. The “poet’s calling” conveys a sense of vocation and, at the same time, a sense of activity: the poet is simultaneously called and is calling to others, and through his voice, he gives voice to others’ calls.
The Chilean Raúl Zurita, a modern master in poetry of resistance, feels this is the single greatest poem in the history of the Spanish language. For the 2014 anthology Pinholes in the Night: Essential Poems from Latin America, which Zurita edited (with Forrest Gander), the only selected poems by Neruda were cantos from “The Heights of Macchu Picchu.” Magdalena Edwards, interviewing Zurita and Gander for the Los Angeles Review of Books, noted there was nothing from the Residences: “How to choose in this case?”
Zurita explained that he made his selections based on “which poem makes a poet exactly who that poet is.” To choose a poem from Residence is to choose a great work, “no doubt, one of the two or three most powerful works of 20th century poetry.” But such a poem is one by an individual first named Ricardo Neftalí Reyes Basoalto, then Pablo Neruda. To choose “The Heights of Macchu Picchu,” however, “is not simply to choose the most extraordinary poem in the language, it is to choose the language; that is to say, it is to choose the speech of a continent.” It is attempting to wash away the crimes that came with the imposition of Spanish language on the continent through the poetic use of that very same language. For Zurita, then, choosing “Macchu Picchu” over any other poem by Neruda was to “wager on a new destiny: not for a single individual”—like the narrator of Residence—“but for everyone.”
Neruda’s poems for the Spanish Republic and the survival of Stalingrad were reactions to real-time events. “Macchu Picchu” reached far back in history. Yet unlike many of Neruda’s poems to come, it is not merely Communist propaganda. Neruda’s commitment to the workers who built Machu Picchu drew from a well that he had now dug and explored deeply, one of empathy and commitment that he attached to the working class on a much broader scale through a more enabled technique than he first had as a teenager with “Railroad Roundhouses at Night.”
This empathy is what allowed him to audaciously appoint himself as the workers’ spokesman, to say, “I’ve come to speak through your dead mouths,” to implore, “Come to my veins and my mouth.” But despite his political commitment and work, had he really earned this privilege? It was certainly a lofty assertion that few others would be bold enough to make. But Neruda’s persona at this point was so great that he pulled it off, even more so because he used it so skillfully as a poetic device. It situates the poem, and the poem’s speaker, so as to bring together the realities of the past and present. Regardless of his arrogance, “Macchu Picchu” succeeds and is one of the century’s richest, most dynamic poems. For while Neruda proclaims that he is the one through whom the dead slaves will speak, it is in the end not about him, as Zurita emphasizes, but rather an exploration of the past as a way to create a better destiny for everyone.
And the acceptance by the general readership of Neruda as the voice of the fallen and the downtrodden further established the persona he was creating for himself, the sense of responsibility—one that he had felt ever since he began writing as a teenager. In a 1965 interview with the English critic J. M. Cohen, Neruda said, “The problem of the future in our world and in yours is man himself. In my poem ‘The Heights of Macchu Picchu,’ I use a vision of ancient men to understand the men of today. From the Inca to the Indian, from the Aztec to the contemporary Mexican peasant, our homeland, America, has magnificent mountains, rivers, deserts, and mines rich in minerals. Yet the inhabitants of this generous land live in great poverty. What then should be the poet’s duty?”
Chapter Fifteen
Senator Neruda
You, what did you do? Did your word ever come
for your brother of the deep mines,
for the pain of the betrayed,
did your syllable in flames ever come
to cry out for justice, to defend your people?
—“The Traitor”
Each time Neruda came back from abroad, whether from the Far East, Spain, or Mexico, he arrived transformed. In Lima, he told the journalist Jorge Falcón, “I am going to Chile because I have been missing it for quite some time now. I have been traveling around different countries for sixteen years, with just short trips to my country. Now, I want, I desire, to remain there, and participate more directly in its politics.” He expressed his belief that a unified Left presented the strongest hope for the future of Chile, and a strong Chile would help make all of South America stronger. He would retire from the diplomatic corps.
Once in Chile, while they waited for the completion of some restorations of the new house they bought on Avenida Lynch, the Nerudas stayed at the apartment of Sylvia Thayer. Sylvia was an acclaimed actress and the sister of Neruda’s pal Hinojosa, who had accompanied him to the Far East in his youth. Antonia Ramos, a young Argentine studying at the University of Chile, was also staying at the apartment. She wrote:
Pablo was already fat then, and bald. [Delia] was thin, very refined, with magnificent manners . . . Pablo was excessively bohemian. They arrived at two A.M., woke everyone up, and stayed up talking until four or five o’clock in the morning. The house became a beehive of Spanish refugees, people from Mexico; it was impossible to imagine how she lived her life around him and his bohemian lifestyle. They had that easygoing mentality of the free; nothing at all mattered to them. But she was serious. She took care of vulgar, everyday things patiently and stylishly. She was elegance itself; he was like an enfant terrible.
Soon the repairs on their new home were finished, and after a tour of Chile giving lectures, they moved in. In memory of their time in Mexico, they named the house La Michoacán. Delia’s family had sold a building in Argentina, and with that money the Nerudas were more stable financially; they also received help from the public employees’ pension fund, now that Neruda had officially retired from the diplomatic corps. It was a medium-sized house with a small office for Pablo and a large backyard, where they built a rough amphitheater-style stage dedicated to Lorca and a studio for Delia to practice her art, in particular her printmaking. They modeled the home on the typical style of the indigenous or mestizo houses of Michoacán: thick rafters and old wood. Neruda’s butterfly collection was displayed in a large frame next to the rustic dining table and chairs in front of the fireplace. He would sit outside on a stump below a huge oak tree and write his poetry.
Neruda was closely involved with the design of his houses. They were so particular, not just because he needed an environment that inspired writing, or because he derived great satisfaction from entertaining friends, but also due to his innate creativity, which resulted in environments that reflected his imagination and, in turn, sparked his imagination anew.
Out of all the objects and collections at La Michoacán, what most stood out to the Chilean writer José Donoso was a bar decorated with turn-of-the-century postcards, a great novelty then. He was always impressed by Neruda’s gift “to see beyond the usual” and pick out things, either real or abstract, that only he noticed. His ability to establish a deep relationship between himself and his surroundings was, Donoso believed, essential: “He was a creator in both the poetic and the lived sense.”
Neruda enjoyed sharing his homes with others. Diego Muñoz had recently begun a relationship with Inés Valenzuela, who was only eighteen at the time. Neruda and Delia invited them to share the house with them. Delia was ten years older than Inés’s mother, but Inés thought of her differently. “I never thought about la Hormiga as an older person,” she recalled in an interview sixty years later. Delia was “very, very young from within,” and joyful. Inés felt instantly at home with her new sixty-year-old friend. Delia was “able to make everyone who came to her home—everyone she knew—feel good.”
Rafael Alberti also had a lasting impression of life at La Michoacán when he visited Chile, invited by Neruda to give readings and talks. During his stay, Neruda gave a number of parties there in Alberti’s honor, attended by an eclectic mix of poets, writers, politicians, painters, and complete strangers. One night, Alberti saw Neruda open the kitchen door to find a group of strange-looking gate-crashers holding glasses of wine as they fried an enormous number of eggs in a huge pan. Amused and puzzled, Neruda simply signaled to Alberti, and the two withdrew silently. “They must know what they’re doing,” Neruda said to Alberti. “I’ve no idea who they are. They’ve never been here before.”
Neruda led Alberti away from the kitchen and other guests to a separate room, closing the door carefully behind him. He served his friend a large glass of wine and poured a generous whiskey for himself, then said, “I’m going to read you something that I think is quite important, that nobody knows about yet.” As Alberti described it, “in his slow, sleepy voice,” Neruda read him all of “The Heights of Macchu Picchu,” which he was just finishing. When the long and secret reading was over, they returned to the party, which was in full swing.
During these parties, Neruda would sometimes go to La Vega Central himself and buy enormous pieces of cheese for the party, usually mantecoso, which is relatively soft, like butter on the tongue. He’d also put out several demijohns of local wine, nothing fancy. Everybody helped him- or herself to wine, bread, and those huge cheeses, as the conversation wove around the table, creating a sense of the communal.
* * *
While living the bohemian life at La Michoacán, Neruda ratcheted up his activism and public readings. On November 7, 1943, Neruda read “New Love Song for Stalingrad” to a gigantic crowd at the National Stadium in celebration of the twenty-sixth anniversary of the October Revolution. It was broadcast by radio throughout the country. Chile, along with many other Latin American countries, had not recognized the Soviet Union since the 1917 revolution; Neruda demanded recognition now.
And then, in December 1944, the Chilean Communist Party named its candidates for the parliamentary elections coming in March 1945. Though he was still not an official member, the party asked Neruda to be a senatorial candidate for the northern desert mining provinces of Tarapacá and Antofagasta. There were five Senate seats up for election, and this arid region was where the Communist Party had the most strength from the large working-class population. Neruda would likely be a very popular candidate there. The poet accepted the nomination.
