Neruda, page 43
Some twenty years later, following his death, Delia said, “Since 1952 our activities sent us on divergent paths. Pablo became involved with other people. I became increasingly interested in my art. There was no animosity. There isn’t much more I can say. I loved Pablo and he will always be in my heart.”
At the time of the separation, Neruda was forty-eight, Matilde was forty-three, and Delia was sixty-eight.
Tomás Lago had been one of Neruda’s closest friends for decades, but after the breakup with Delia, a rift occurred between the two. Lago’s sympathy lay with Delia. Despite this, some months after Delia and Neruda’s separation, he asked them both to be witnesses at his daughter’s wedding. Neruda didn’t go, apparently unable to participate alongside Delia. He just sent a gift of antique wine cruets. Lago never saw Neruda again.
Inés Valenzuela and Diego Muñoz, despite their special love for Delia, didn’t take sides in front of Neruda. Shortly after the split, he invited them to a party for Chile’s Independence Day, on September 18, 1955, at La Chascona, where he was now living with Matilde. Inés was reluctant to go, recovering from surgery and still upset with how Neruda had treated Delia. But Diego, Neruda’s friend since grammar school, insisted. As soon as Neruda saw Inés arrive he came down. “Look, this is Matilde. I hope you can be very good friends.” With so many people there celebrating, it was hard to hold a conversation. So Neruda invited them the next day for lunch, just the four of them. There, Matilde said something quite vulgar about Delia, something so inappropriate Inés refused to repeat it when recounting the story (it was a reference to her teeth). “Aside from that being a lie, it’s simply slander,” she told Matilde strongly. “I won’t accept it, and, Matilde, I’m going to ask you that if we’re going to be friends, don’t even talk about la Hormiga in front of me. I don’t like la Hormiga because she was Pablo’s wife; I like her because she is an exceptional human being.” Pablo, with a large smile, raised his glass of wine and said, “Let’s drink to la Hormiga, because I love how you love her so much.”
“And that was the end of that,” Inés concluded.
As Neruda would write almost ten years after the breakup:
Delia is the light of the window open
to truth, to the honey-tree . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Delia, among so many leaves
in the tree of life,
your presence
in the fire,
your virtue
of dew:
in the raging wind,
a dove.
—“Loves: Delia (I)”
Delia eventually returned from Paris and lived out her life in La Michoacán, devoting all her energy to activism and her art, including a well-regarded print series of abstract horses in black, white, and silver gray. She passed away peacefully in her sleep on July 26, 1989, at the age of 104.
Chapter Nineteen
Fully Empowered
I write in the clear sun, in the teeming street,
At full tide, in a place I can sing;
Only the wayward night inhibits me,
But in its interruption I recover space,
I gather shadows to last a long time.
—“Fully Empowered”
By midcentury, Neruda had lived many lives as a poet, each one with its accompanying style, constantly evolving, like a lizard shedding its skin. But there were also many Nerudas, the person with whom the poet coexisted; his personal affectations and conditions always manifested in the new styles, forms, and themes of his writing. In the late 1950s, the Neruda who settled into his poetry, into Isla Negra, into La Chascona and his now-public relationship with Matilde, was at the height of these evolutions. Neruda himself referred to this period as the “autumn” of his life, a mellow one, but like grapes in Chilean vineyards ready to transform into wine, it was a fruitful time in which he produced a cluster of outstanding, engaging books. In them, he allowed himself to be more relaxed and whimsical and personally reflective than ever before. Many of the poems are warm and affective. His social concern was still very much there, but it didn’t dominate him or his poetry.
“Sometimes I’m a poet of nature, sometimes a poet of things, sometimes I’m a public poet, an angry poet, a poet of joy—but now I’m learning,” Neruda noted to Alastair Reid in 1964.
In one line, Neruda rehumanizes himself as “a man rainy and happy, lively and autumn-minded.” Grounded, at peace with his poetry and international success, he was perhaps at his personal apex, at the height of both his poetic and personal powers, able to use them like at no other time before or after. In the middle of this period, in September 1962, he published Plenos poderes (Fully Empowered), a small but uniquely satisfying book. A deeply personal tone sustains throughout, and it contains two of his most important political poems. In Spanish, the term plenos poderes most often refers to the powers given to an ambassador to take independent action on behalf of his country, but it can more generally mean powers at their peak. English has no equivalent phrase.
“Fully empowered” is translator Alastair Reid’s perfect linguistic solution. It captures Neruda’s personal peace, the respect he had in his country and around the world at the time, and his poetic mastery: proud to fly his own flag from the garden at Isla Negra; able to bask in the company of the love of his life; free to simply be himself, unencumbered by technicalities and bureaucrats and constant conferences as he had endured in Europe; having already put out into the world “a shelf of remarkable books, as vast and varied as the sea itself,” as Reid put it. Neruda’s autumn yielded fine works scribed mostly from that low bluff overlooking the Pacific, books in which he poetized his own persona, allowing himself to be more adventurous and have some fun at his own expense. Furthermore, it was during this period that he finally saw the errors of Stalinism and was emboldened enough to reject them and admit his mistakes publicly, in some cases even to take a stand. This might have been the truest sign that he was, in fact, fully empowered.
Isla Negra, the small house that Neruda and Delia had bought in 1931 in a fishing village along the rugged coast, became Neruda’s sanctuary. The rocks on the beach became the cornerstones to which he would always return. It was his center, and he would transform it continuously, according to his aesthetic vision and touch. He used to say that he had a second profession, that of a rather surreal architect, a transformer of homes, and it proved true. It was from this house that he composed himself and his poetry, while sitting on a stone bench outside or in his little writing room with the infinite sea out his window. The house became his vessel with the water below him. Isla Negra was an externalization of himself.
Built on top of a small, sharp hill above a rocky beach, the house at Isla Negra spreads in various extensions to form the shape of a boat. He wanted it to have as many curves as possible, frustrated by how so many houses are just pure rectangles. He wanted his home to be impure, like the poetry he had preached. The house was furnished with his eclectic collections: ship figureheads, ships in bottles, seashells from the beaches of the world, sextants, astrolabes, ethereal rare butterflies and insects linking back to his childhood train excursions, miniature Mexican guitars, glass jugs in a spectrum of hues, beautifully carved wooden stirrups covering a wall just like in his childhood home, seventeenth-century maps of the Americas and the oceans, pictures of some of his favorite writers (Poe, Baudelaire, and Whitman) who had their place of honor wherever he lived, and first editions of their books, a giant shoe that once hung outside a cobbler’s shop in Temuco. He even made a special room for the wooden horse he had fallen in love with in the saddlery shop in Temuco.
There was a chimney that looked like a cascade of lapis lazuli flowing down the tall curved wall. Among the many unique rooms was a bar with glasses of every shape and color, and inscribed on the ceiling beams were the names of his friends who had passed away. Winding paths outside, rustic gardens, and a little writer’s hut on the hill completed the Isla Negra refuge. An old locomotive engine stood parked outside.
Neruda never loved being at sea. He loved the ocean, but he took ocean liners by necessity for travel and never went out in a boat. He liked to say that he was a “sailor of the land.” From the shore, though, the sea was essential to him. As he once said, “To me, the sea is an element, like the air.” The impact of discovering the sea in his youth, in Puerto Saavedra, never left him. The sensation that the sea was the heartbeat of the universe, as he had described it, brought him to Isla Negra and to the creation of his singular refuge there.
One single being, but there’s no blood.
One single caress, death or rose.
The sea comes and reunites our lives
and attacks and divides and sings alone
in night and day and man and creature.
The essence: fire and cold: movement.
—“The Sea”
* * *
Matilde and Neruda made frequent trips up the coast to Valparaíso, his old bohemian escape from Santiago during his student days. Soon, Neruda decided he needed his own home above the port. The Communist wanted his third house to be simpler, more modest. A Valparaíso friend, the poet Sara Vial, recalled that Neruda asked her to find him a house “neither too high nor too low, where you can’t see people but where there are people, where you can’t hear the buses but there are buses.” It happened that a friend of Vial’s had just inherited an old, eccentrically shaped house—somewhat like a tower—up on one of the city’s many hills, with a very narrow staircase winding up three floors and spectacular views of the city and the sea. Neruda couldn’t afford the house, so he convinced his friends Dr. Francisco Velasco and the artist María Martner (who crafted the mosaic on Isla Negra’s chimney) to buy the first two floors and leave him the third.
Neruda named his new Valparaíso home La Sebastiana, in honor of the old Spaniard who had built the house, Sebastián Collado. La Sebastiana may have been Neruda’s smallest home, but it had its own unique charm with its view of the city and cylindrical shape, and during the work on initial repairs, he subtly modified it to fit the Nerudian fashion. Each house was like a private stage: he would design the sets, and he always played the lead.
The house grows and speaks,
stands on its own feet,
has clothes wrapped round its skeleton,
and as from seaward the spring,
swimming like a water nymph,
kisses the sand of Valparaíso.
Now we can stop thinking. This is the house.
Now all that’s missing will be blue.
All it needs now is to bloom.
And that is work for the spring.
—“To La Sebastiana”
As a mover hung up a large portrait of Whitman, he asked Neruda, “Is this your father?”
“The father of my poetry,” Neruda answered.
* * *
Neruda’s unusual book of conversational poetry, Estravagario, was published in August 1958. The title is a word created by Neruda. As Karl Ragnar Gierow put it in his Nobel Prize presentation to Neruda in 1971, Estravagario “comprises both extravagance and vagabondage, whim and errantry.”
Once again, the book marked a radical change in Neruda’s style. In this new, very personal prose, Neruda isn’t creating poems as practical or utilitarian as the odes had been. Gone too is the overtly political poetry. Neruda had reached the point where he felt he could relax and be whimsical, with himself as the main subject. Influenced by his compatriot Nicanor Parra’s antipoesía, Neruda had come to recognize that poetry did not have to be solemn, and, like other literary genres, it could entertain. The outlandish type and comical illustrations in Estravagario add to the effect. Neruda is not preaching. He is a liberated man: liberated to love Matilde, liberated from his literary past, liberating himself from Stalinism, now more interested in individual liberation rather than collectivism. His new voice is heard in “Keeping Quiet,” where the narrator seems to want to take a breather from the tensions of the Cold War:
Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.
For once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.
It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness . . .*
* * *
Despite his more internal focus, Neruda was inspired to action by political events that disrupted his serenity. The triumph of Fidel Castro’s Cuban Revolution on January 1, 1959, shook Latin America. Neruda sang exaltation to it and its leader, at first. He met Castro in Caracas soon after the victory. The Cuban was there to thank the Venezuelan people for supporting his revolution. Neruda was touring Venezuela and joined the enthusiastic multitude gathered to celebrate Castro and hear his four-hour speech.
The day after the rally, Neruda and Matilde were picnicking in a Caracas park when some motorcyclists approached with an invitation to go to the Cuban embassy for a reception that afternoon. The embassy was overflowing. Celia Sánchez, Castro’s supposed lover and “the heart of the revolution,” sent Neruda to a room alone, while she stayed with Matilde. Suddenly the room’s door opened and Castro filled the space with his height. As Neruda wrote in his memoirs:
He was a head taller than I. He walked toward me quickly.
“Hello, Pablo!” he said, submerging me in a tight hug.
Unbeknownst to me, a news photographer had entered the room and was taking pictures of us from the corner. Fidel was by his side in a second. I saw him grab the photographer by the neck; he was shaking him.
Neruda saved the photographer, who abandoned his camera and fled.
Neruda changed the focus of the book he was currently writing from the colonial situation of Puerto Rico to, now, after the Cuban Revolution, assessing the situation throughout the Caribbean. The new book was called Canción de gesta, as in the French chanson de geste, songs of heroic deeds. He dedicated it to “the liberators of Cuba: Fidel Castro, his compañeros, and the Cuban people,” and continued:
There is much for us to wash and burn in all of America.
Many of us must build.
Everyone contributes what they can, with sacrifice and happiness.
Our peoples have suffered so much; us giving our all is very little for them.
From Venezuela, Neruda and Matilde went for a nine-month stay in Europe. On the way back, they arrived in Havana in December 1960. Lawrence Ferlinghetti was there. His book A Coney Island of the Mind had just been published and was on its way to being one of the bestselling books of poetry in the United States (by the twenty-first century it would have sold over a million copies). The great Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante, thirty-one at the time (Ferlinghetti was ten years older), arranged for him to meet Neruda, who was staying at the Hotel Habana Libre—the former Habana Hilton, now controlled by the government. “Neruda sitting in plush suite with open spiral notebooks, gets up smiling, shakes hands heartily—bald with eagle eyes in round face, grave ship’s-prow eyes,” Ferlinghetti wrote in his journal.
Ferlinghetti was the first to publish Allen Ginsberg, and his City Lights Bookstore had become the headquarters for the West Coast Beats. Neruda had read some of their work, most recently in the literary supplement to Cuba’s daily newspaper. “I love your wide-open poetry,” Neruda told him.
Ferlinghetti replied, “You opened the door.”
There was a large event at the capitol that night, commemorating a hero of Cuba’s independence from Spain. Neruda was to give a speech and asked Ferlinghetti, “Why don’t you come along?” Again from Ferlinghetti’s journal:
Down we go with his beautiful wife and get in limousine from Casa de la Amistad, new international “friendship house” set up by Fidel. En route I tell him I’m staying in hotel near Capitol where there are the biggest bedbugs I ever saw. He laughs and says when he first came to Santiago de Chile from the country as a boy there were bedbugs but he didn’t know what they were until they bit. Then he had Battle of Bedbugs all night, burning them up with a candle . . . says he still has candle back at hotel . . .
They arrived at the back entrance. Neruda and Matilde disappeared behind the stage; Ferlinghetti went to the main floor of the big senate chamber. It was already packed with around two thousand Fidelistas “still in their combat boots and clothes, feet up, smoking wild cigars” where “all the henchmen of the dictator had sat.” The galleries were “now full to roof with campesinos and students.” A “revolutionary euphoria filled the air”; “the whole place was just throbbing with this fantastic energy and vitality and enthusiasm.” When it was his turn to come on, Neruda received an enormous ovation.
Neruda continued to give recitals in universities, libraries, and high schools, traveling all across the island and, of course, taking time to find sensational seashells to add to his collection. Casa de las Américas, a cultural institution with a Pan-American focus founded right after the revolution, published twenty-five thousand copies of Canción de gesta, but the book would never be published again on the island as relations between Neruda and the Cuban government deteriorated. Neruda became a cautious and critical observer of the revolution. He would never again vociferously support it as he had done with the book, which he dedicated to the revolution’s triumph and the idealistic hope that came with it.
Part of Neruda’s change of heart came when he met Che Guevara. Guevara was the head of the National Bank at the time, and he had set the meeting at his office there at midnight. As Neruda opened the door, Guevara didn’t move his feet, which were resting in his thick boots up on his desk. Neruda was accustomed to being treated with deference. “Those aren’t hours, nor manners either!” he told a friend.
