Neruda, page 35
The headline splashed across the front pages of the daily papers: “Nationwide Search for Neruda.” The articles continued below the bold print: “Numerous personnel are trying to locate the fugitive Communist parliament member . . . the warrant for his arrest, search, and seizure having been issued by the summarizing minister, Mr. Gonzalez Castillo . . .” “In late breaking news we have also been informed that 300 agents were summoned to the theater of investigations to receive important instructions from high-ranking superiors.” Neruda’s photograph was plastered the length of the nation and rewards for his capture were offered. The radio buzzed with the latest on the Neruda case.
Neruda and Delia went into hiding immediately. For most of 1948 and through the beginning of 1949, the couple lived clandestinely in their own country, looking for a way to get across the border, while hiding out in at least eleven different houses. Agents questioned all of their friends. Police searched no fewer than sixty-three homes, sometimes so close on the trail that they arrived at a home where the couple had been just the day before. There was no warrant for Delia’s arrest; as an Argentine national, the Chilean government couldn’t touch her. But being close to Neruda, it was imperative she avoid being seen or questioned.
One of the homes where the couple stayed was the small apartment of the young Communists Aida Figueroa and Sergio Insunza. They had already housed a couple of labor leaders from the coal mines of Lota in the south who were fleeing persecution, but they were floored when they opened the door to find Neruda and Delia. Neruda had grown a beard and wore thick-rimmed glasses with no lenses, but the young couple recognized him immediately. Aida was so surprised to see him at her door that she lurched back and hit her head against the wall. Neruda stared at her through those fake glasses, a small Andalusian calañés hat perched on his large head, with its traditional conical crown and low upturned flaps, and smiled warmly. Delia was standing next to him, the legendary Hormiga, whom the couple also recognized right away, despite the hand-knitted wool balaclava covering much of her face. Behind them was the young historian and party member Álvaro Jara, directing the operation.
“Come in, come in,” Aida welcomed them. The three filed in. Aida and Sergio’s two-year-old daughter, Aidita, still awake despite the late hour, looked at the poet with great curiosity and asked, “Why are you wearing glasses with no lenses?” Neruda made an animated, comical face of surprise and laughed heartily.
Aida, then twenty-five years old, had never met either of them before but saw them as “monumental.” She was struck by their down-to-earth nature. She offered them her and Sergio’s room with a double bed, but they wouldn’t accept it. “They went to sleep in the baby’s bed, which was a twin-sized mattress, and they slept, according to Pablo, como cucharitas—like little spoons.”
It was in Aida and Sergio’s house that Neruda started working tenaciously on the expanded Canto General. He had already written “Macchu Picchu” and began working on what would be the opening section, “A Lamp on Earth,” using a typewriter. The young couple were in their final year of law school and left early in the morning for classes, giving Neruda the whole day to write. The apartment was right next to the Parque Forestal, running along the canaled Mapocho River, providing the poet a soothing glimpse of stately old trees, statues, green grass, and couples sitting on benches. Often, when he was writing, Aidita climbed up and down his body as if she were scaling a friendly statue, while Neruda showed no objections or particular distraction.
In the afternoons, he would gather everybody around and read what he had written. Delia, as always, would help correct errors and make suggestions. Aida would fetch him the historical and geographic information he needed from the National Library. The four got along famously and became lifelong friends.
Neruda and Delia hid in Valparaíso for several weeks, with the idea of escaping the country by boat, but the plan never materialized. He was then sequestered again in Santiago, in the house of photographer Lola Falcon, wife of the writer Luis Enrique Délano, a very good friend of Neruda’s, who was serving as Chilean consul to New York. Lola had returned to Chile at her husband’s urging, as he’d come to see their own situation as precarious in light of what was happening with Chile’s politics. The living situation at Lola’s house, especially without her husband there, proved difficult. It lacked the carefree atmosphere of the Insunza-Figueroa household. She was nervous; there was constant tension as La Nación and the radio gave daily updates on the efforts to detain the fugitive Communist and claimed that his capture was imminent. Party directors visited the house for long meetings behind closed doors with their poet compañero and Delia, after which they stayed for a meal. Often the couple’s friends would do the same.
Perhaps due to Luis Enrique’s role in the New York consulate, their friends thought the Délanos were more well-to-do than they really were. Lola needed help but didn’t get any monetary support from Neruda, Delia, or the party. Though she cursed about the situation under her breath, Lola was timid and she didn’t complain, even when she constantly had to go out for more provisions for unexpected guests and gatherings. Delia was of little use in the kitchen, and Neruda did not volunteer, so Lola ended up cooking for everyone. She soon sent an SOS to Luis Enrique for him to send additional money.
Pablo maintained a strict work schedule while at the Délano house. He wrote in the morning, usually by hand with a fountain pen and sometimes on a typewriter. His routine was interrupted when Rubén Azócar came and informed him that the police were mounting a major search for Neruda in the neighborhood; at the very least they would certainly come close to the house. The party leadership moved him to another house within hours of what La Nación assured its readers was Neruda’s imminent capture.
Around this time, Delia and Neruda were given refuge by Víctor Pey, a Spanish engineer who had come to Chile on the Winnipeg. After reading the newspapers one afternoon, he and Neruda started an ongoing debate about the situation. Pey pointed out, as many others did, that if the police did actually arrest Neruda, it would create international headlines that would reflect terribly on the government. Neruda wasn’t so sure. But the blue-eyed engineer explained that politically, for Neruda and the Left, the best thing that could happen at the time was Neruda’s capture. The poet stayed silent and looked at the Spaniard with incredulity. “If they get me, those guys will humiliate me. Be sure of that,” Neruda insisted. “I know them. They’ll submit me to all types of indignities.”
Some felt that the government wasn’t really serious about persecuting Neruda, fearing an international public relations scandal. However, there is evidence that the police were indeed actively looking for him during this time, including internal reports made public later. The police noted they were keeping tabs on at least sixteen different cars, but, as the chief of investigations attested in an update to the court of appeals, Neruda had numerous friends in intellectual, political, and diplomatic circles beyond his fellow party members, all of whom could easily hide him. The chief attached a list of sixty-three houses they had under surveillance.
In the last months of 1948, yearning for the camaraderie of his old literary world and wanting feedback on his new poems, Neruda invited a group of close friends over for an intimate reading of his new Canto General material. He was staying in Valparaíso, and great lengths were made so that no notice would be made of the gathering. Among the group were his sister, Laura; a Communist congressman; the head of the University of Chile’s library; his old friends Rubén Azócar and Tomás Lago; and Lago’s wife, Delia Soliman. It was the first time Lago had seen Neruda since the arrest warrant had been issued.
Starting around five o’clock, they drank whiskey and a relaxed Neruda, sitting on a divan, read from more than seventy pages of the gestating Canto General. Friends then took turns reading more of Neruda’s new poems themselves. Neruda would watch whoever was reading with particular interest, all the while drinking his whiskey. He was so acutely focused on the reading that whenever an errant sound arose that interrupted the recital—someone clearing his throat loudly, or even just the creak of a chair—Neruda would raise his finger to whoever was reading: “Repeat. Repeat. So-and-so coughed and we couldn’t hear a thing.” Everyone would laugh.
The reading began to pick up a rhythm. By the end, Neruda was interjecting about historical figures or events mentioned in a poem, especially in the section “The Conquistadores.” He continued drinking his whiskey, despite the protests of Delia, who was keeping count. The room was cold; there were no heaters. Around ten o’clock they ate dinner together, and by midnight everyone left, content from the brief respite in the midst of such dark times.
A few days later, Tomás Lago brought Juvencio Valle over to the Valparaíso hideout. Valle, Neruda’s poet friend from growing up in Temuco, hadn’t seen him in several months. He came with his dog Kutaka, who thrilled Neruda by recognizing him immediately. Valle sat quietly as Neruda and the dog played, the fugitive’s heart filling up at this simple, life-affirming pleasure.
Meanwhile, headlines kept saying that Neruda would be caught any day. The persecution of Communists continued throughout 1948. The magazine Vea reported:
As of the evening of Monday, October 27, eight hundred members of the Communist Party, whether union leaders or politicians, were in jail throughout the country. This number is not official, though, because the police are keeping quiet about the extent of the offensive. But despite all the secrecy, we know that there were more than four hundred people arrested in the city of Antofagasta alone—a record.
Neruda, fearful of joining the others in jail, continued to move from one house to another, growing out his beard even fuller, now traveling under the alias Antonio Ruiz Legarreta, ornithologist. For over a year, one plan after another to flee by boat or by car failed to materialize, until Víctor Pey realized that a friend of his could help.
Jorge Bellet was a member of the party and the foreman on a ranch at the foot of the Andes, just above Patagonia. From there, Neruda could cross into Argentina on horseback through an unpatrolled pass, known to few people other than the Mapuche and smugglers. After he and Bellet formulated the plan, Pey sent a message describing it to Galo González, the main leader of the party at the time. A few days later he got the green light.
The departure was delayed for nearly a dozen weeks due to torrential rains in the austral region those winter months. When the road was finally passable, the first step was to drive some five hundred miles south to Valdivia. Pey believed it should be done in just one car, one in optimal mechanical condition. The driver needed to be a mechanic himself and to know the route perfectly. They would also get the name and addresses of reliable, long-term party members who lived in towns along the route where they could stay if anything happened.
In the end, Bellet drove the car himself, a fine-tuned cherry-red Chevrolet on loan from a party member. Getting out of Santiago was the first and most dangerous step. To this end they enlisted Dr. Raúl Bulnes, who had moved to Isla Negra just a month before Delia and Neruda first visited the coastal village and had become warm friends with them. He served as a doctor for the police force, held the rank of captain, and was able to put the green flag of the police on his car. He and Bellet would drive Neruda out of Santiago under the protection of the green and white.
When they went to the house to pick up Neruda, they found the poet, Delia, Galo González, and the Communist senators Carlos Contreras Labarca and Elías Lafertte Gaviño, who had represented the northern provinces with Neruda. Delia had been told that she wouldn’t be going with Neruda, and she was irate. The party leadership said the decision was motivated by concern for her safety, though she was an equestrian and Neruda was the one who would have to learn how to ride again, not having been on a horse since childhood. But the operation was too complicated and dangerous, she was told. It would be even more complicated if a couple was involved. She shouted with frustration, but her arguments fell on deaf ears.
Dr. Bulnes’s wife, Lala, urged the others to let not just Delia go, but herself as well. She was a well-trained equestrian who could help. But they refused her. “Galo was a male chauvinist,” she said. “My husband [who would be part of the operation] wasn’t political. I was communist to the soul.”
It had been a tough year and a half of living on the run. Delia said years later, “Once Pablo and I were in a car and a policeman hitched a ride. He sat in the front and we sat in the back. We didn’t say a word . . . In a sense, that period was very romantic, if you know what I mean.” Others, though, have said that despite some very good times and warm bonding, the constant hardship and anxiety did put a strain on the relationship, and guarded resentments erupted with Delia’s exclusion from the Andean escape. Some believed Neruda himself was opposed to her going; perhaps he didn’t want to be bound to her or responsible for her safety, but he never said as much himself. Later, Delia sensed the separation would mark the beginning of a definitive distancing between them, but in that moment, no one could imagine them no longer being a couple. There were farewell hugs all around, a kiss and long embrace between Pablo and Delia.
They left in the evening, Bellet in the passenger seat, the fugitive senator in the back. Thanks to the police flag, Dr. Bulnes’s car passed through a checkpoint on the edge of the city without problems. Around nine at night, at a designated site near the town of Angostura, thirty miles south of Santiago, Neruda and his car met up with Víctor Pey and the red Chevrolet. An exiled Communist congressman, Andrés Escobar, was there as well. A railroad workers’ leader, he was experienced in engine mechanics and would be able to help if there were any problems with the car. Five little glasses appeared, which Neruda filled with whiskey. They toasted the mission and the end of González Videla.
Escobar, Bellet, and Neruda got in the Chevy; Pey left with Bulnes. “From this moment on,” the poet said to the other two, “Pablo Neruda disappears. You must call me Antonio. I am Antonio Ruiz Legarreta, ornithologist. I’m going to the interior of Valdivia to work on the ranch you’re the foreman on, Jorge. This will be our only story until I’m in the hands of our comrades in Argentina.” Bellet nodded and drove in silence, all his attention on the road, the fluvial coastal town of Valdivia some five hundred miles away. From there they would turn eastward to the Andes.
They passed horse-drawn carts and carriages, then trucks. The evening air was warm and carried the scents of jasmine and manure. Neruda, who had seemed dejected and uneasy while in hiding, began to fill with hopeful, renewed spirits on the open road toward the expected escape. He broke Bellet’s silence and became something of a chatterbox for most of the drive, more animated with every passing town.
In the morning hours he began to name—or try to name—the insects that splattered across the windshield, or the scientific names of trees they saw outside the windows. He talked about the agriculture of the different regions they passed through, about the pink grapes and different wines, as they made their way down and out of the Central Valley, toward where he was born and raised.
They entered what is considered Chile’s south. As they were leaving the large town of Chillán, a policeman standing on the side of the road signaled with his baton for them to pull over. Bellet stopped the car. The officer approached the window and asked humbly, “If it’s not a bother, can you give me a ride? I’m going about six miles up the road, to my mother’s house.” Bellet didn’t risk making an excuse, despite the fact that Neruda’s image had been shared widely in the press and in police bureaus. They dropped the officer at his mother’s house without incident.
Eventually, they reached Temuco. Neruda hadn’t been there in years, but he couldn’t stop to see anyone. It was near noon, and nobody recognized him. He noticed how many of the main roads were now paved, but he also saw the same carts pulled by oxen, manned by the same suffering Mapuche. He felt a longing for his childhood innocence, despite the pain it brought with it. They passed a train that brought back strong memories of his father, and it inspired the poet to tell tales of his childhood to his travel companions.
Finally, they reached Valdivia and the majestic confluence of three rivers that flow along the historic town, surrounded by forests and deep green fields. They stopped only for gas, where Neruda felt the station’s attendant staring at him as if he recognized the poet, though if he did, he seemed to collude with the escape, as he said nothing.
They took a boat across the massive Lake Maihue to a small landmass that separated it from another lake, on whose opposite shore sat the ranch. As Neruda would describe to Delia, the boat took them through the black night, the lake moving along a heavy swell. They drank shots of Scotch as they passed dark islands surrounded by wilderness. When they got to the next piece of land, “they lit a bonfire with burlap and wood to guide our landing, and from far away we could see the enormously tall mountain rising from the water . . . Soon we left them behind, [Bellet driving us] in a colossal tractor fast in the darkness, through huge trees, tangles of leaves, roots the size of buildings. In sum, all of my poetry.”
After crossing the next lake, which felt to Neruda like approaching the end of the world, they finally reached the shore below the ranch. A rustic log house on a hill with a roof of oak shingles and chairs fashioned out of branches would provide them shelter.
Leoné Mosalvez was fifteen years old when Neruda, a.k.a. Antonio Ruiz, stayed for a month and a half with her, her parents, and her brother on the ranch. She described him as being a bit fat, with a prominent nose. He went around dressed simply, usually in a sweater and a cap with a small visor that he never took off. He wore thick shoes made for the country. “Sometimes he wrote in some notebooks with thick covers. He went around writing, sometimes in bed, sometimes at the table. The door to his room wasn’t closed. When he went out into the fields and forests, he always had a pen and a little notebook.” When not with Bellet, riding horses, or writing, she said, he would often go bird-watching, most content when he saw a local woodpecker.
