Neruda, page 45
As the tour wore on, Neruda visited San Francisco and read at the University of California, Berkeley, where he said that he “learned on the spot that the North American enemies of our peoples were also enemies of the North American people”—that those in the crowd were against the U.S. government policies too. He was deeply moved when a “spontaneous roar” came from the crowd after he announced he was going to read “The United Fruit Co.” The university’s paper wrote that he received two standing ovations from the crowd of one thousand. Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg were among the attendees. As in New York, the overflow crowd listened in another lecture room.
From San Francisco, Neruda and Matilde traveled to Mexico and then to Peru, where Neruda lunched with the centrist president Fernando Belaúnde Terry and was decorated with the Order of the Sun, the highest honor in Peru. But trouble was brewing in the midst of these accolades.
At the time, Belaúnde Terry was battling Cuban-inspired guerrilleros trying to spread the revolution to Peru. Fidel Castro and the Chilean Communist Party were having a falling-out, and Neruda became a figurehead in the rift. Castro, and in particular Che Guevara, felt that Latin America was ready for a continental revolution using armed guerrillero force. The Chilean Communist Party and Neruda disagreed. Cuba’s revolution took the course of an armed insurrection because of the repressive dictatorship controlling the country—there was no ballot box or patience for a prolonged pacifist approach. In 1965, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Panama, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Haiti were ruled by entrenched dictatorial regimes as Cuba had been. But Chile was not suffering under a repressive dictatorship. Chile’s democratic tradition provided a legitimate system through which to realize a revolution.
Cuban authorities put pressure on the writer Roberto Fernández Retamar and his colleagues to denounce Neruda’s visit to the United States and his meeting with Belaúnde Terry, whom the Peruvian Communist revolutionaries were fighting. Their attack on Neruda was seen as an indirect attack on the Chilean Communist Party. Just a month earlier, Fernández Retamar, a future member of Castro’s cabinet, had sent Neruda an affectionate letter:
Every once in a while, a few words written in green ink come to me from the deep south, which bring me happiness. But you need to come, you and Matilde need to come back, so that we can be together on the island like we were six years ago . . . No one awaits you with more friendship than your
Roberto
But suddenly, Fernández Retamar and more than 150 Cuban writers and intellectuals, including Alejo Carpentier, Nicolás Guillén, and José Lezama Lima, signed an open letter denouncing Neruda and his attendance at the PEN Club meeting. On July 31, 1966, the letter was published in the Cuban Communist Party’s newspaper, Granma. Addressed to “Compañero Pablo,” it began by saying, “We believe it is our duty to let you know the anxiety and uneasiness that our enemies’ use of your recent activities has caused in Cuba.” “It wouldn’t have occurred to us that we would have to automatically censure your participation in the PEN Club Congress, from which positive conclusions could have been made, or even your visit to the United States, because this visit could also derive positive results for our causes. But has that been the case?” they asked. They wondered why Neruda was permitted a U.S. visa while other Communists had been denied it for twenty years.
The letter hurt Neruda profoundly. The fact that it was published for all to read in Cuba’s main newspaper added to the pain. The letter was even covered in the Washington Post. Neruda replied in an open telegram the next day: “Dear compañeros: I am deeply surprised by the unfounded concern expressed for me by a group of Cuban writers.” He stated that “it appears” they are unaware that his entry into the United States, “as with that of Communist writers from other countries, was achieved by breaking the prohibitions of the State Department, thanks to the actions of left-wing intellectuals.” He continued:
In the United States and the other countries I visited, I maintained my communist ideals, my unbreakable principles, and my revolutionary poetry. I have the right to hope and demand that you, who know me, would not harbor or spread inadmissible doubts about this.
In the United States and everywhere else I went, I have been listened to and respected, based firmly on who I am and who I will always be: a poet who does not hide what he thinks, who has put his life and work at the service of the freedom of our peoples . . .
Once again, I express to you, as I have done through my poetry, my passionate fidelity to the Cuban revolution.
He would never forgive his former friends who had signed the letter; they remained his enemies until death, with no movement made toward reconciliation.
Chapter Twenty
Triumph, Destruction, Death
Right, comrade, it’s the hour of the garden
and the hour up in arms, each day
follows from flower or blood:
our time surrenders us to an obligation
to water the jasmines
or bleed to death in a dark street:
virtue or pain blows off
into frozen realms, into hissing embers,
and there never was a choice . . .
Ours is a lank country
and on the naked edge of her knife
our frail flag burns.
—Untitled (1973)
On August 8, 1966, Neruda and Matilde wrote to their friend and secretary Margarita Aguirre and her husband, Rodolfo Aráoz Alfaro: “Confidential: We are getting married, Chilean style (Shhh! Quiet! Discretion! Silence!).” On a beautiful spring day at Isla Negra, October 28, they were married in a small private ceremony, Matilde in a white dress and Neruda in a dark suit, a flower in his lapel, a folded white handkerchief in his breast pocket. Neruda was now sixty-two, Matilde, fifty-four.
It was an extraordinarily fruitful time for his writing. That same year, Neruda published two more books. The first, Arte de pájaros (Art of Birds), was a private, numbered, illustrated edition. It contains poems to real and imaginary birds, including “El pájaro yo: (Pablo Insulidae Nigra)” (“The ‘I’ Bird: [Pablo of Isla Negra]”), where the poet is a “bird of one single feather / flyer of clear shadow,” “the furious bird / of the tranquil storm.”
Un casa en la arena (A House in the Sand) is a thin, poignant book of love to Isla Negra, thirty-eight prose poems, accompanied by photographs, all revolving around Neruda’s home, the coast, and the sea: “The Pacific Ocean overflowed the map. There wasn’t any place to put it. It was so large, unruly, and blue that it didn’t fit anywhere. That’s why they left it in front of my window.” Neruda seemed to see the world as though it were made just for him.
On October 14, 1967, Neruda’s play Fulgor y muerte de Joaquín Murieta (The Splendor and Death of Joaquín Murieta) premiered to an enthusiastic sold-out crowd in Santiago. The real-life bandit Murieta is usually thought to be Mexican, but due to a translation of the California gold rush story by a Chilean, many people in Chile claim him as their hero, the one who stood up and defended all Latinos.
The work unfolds like an opera, populated by “the voice of the poet”; a chorus of campesinos, miners, fishermen, and their wives; and other singers with songs often in rhyme, all the while following real figures and events from the last century. The plot begins with the righteous bandit Murieta and his friend Juan Three-Fingers following the lure of the California gold rush, sailing up from Valparaíso in 1850—as many Chileans did at that time. On the ship, Murieta marries Teresa. In California, the Chileans are shown only with Latinos, while the white rangers and hooded men are always looking over them. The hooded men quote John L. O’Sullivan of the New York Morning News, words that Neruda directed to be projected on a screen at the back of the set-less stage for most of the production: “It is our manifest destiny to extend ourselves until we are owners of the entire continent that providence has given us for the grand experiment in liberty.”
“Only the white race!” the hooded men yell. “America for the Americans!” “We won the war” (referring to the Mexican-American War [1846–1848]). The hooded men kill Latinos and blacks, then rape and murder Teresa. Murieta then avenges the murder of his wife and all the other Latinos by killing the white oppressors. Murieta, Three-Fingers, and a gang of fellow bandits set off, taking the gold from the whites they kill and giving it to the poor. But as Murieta lays flowers at Teresa’s grave, the yanquis find and kill him. His head is displayed at the San Francisco Fair, as it was in real life. In the play, a man charges twenty cents to see the head, while cheering, “Freedom! Freedom!” (Neruda had done research for the play across the bay from San Francisco, at the University of California, Berkeley, when he was there giving his reading the year before.)
The New York Times reviewed opening night, calling it “two hours of drama filled with furious hatred for the United States.” The fact that the Times would review a play that opened in Santiago shows Neruda’s high standing in the cultural world and his continuing political influence. The anti-American feeling in the play is partly anti-imperialist, partly a statement of identity politics. Murieta, whether a Chilean or Mexican, is an American, and the gold is a piece of America to which any American, whether from Valparaíso or Virginia, is entitled. The United States had stolen California from Mexico through an unjust war. The play focused more on racism, rather than just imperialism. As Neruda wrote to the editor of the New York Times:
One generalization that I feel I must correct has to do with the supposed anti-Americanism of my work. This is mostly manifest in the spirit of violence, domination and racism in one historical period. By the way, I don’t think that your great country has put these characteristics behind it. But by stigmatizing segregationists and violent people during the California gold rush, my work does not cover the immense majority of the American people . . .
Elsewhere, Neruda wrote that the idea of the Ku Klux Klan was undoubtedly born with the white vigilante groups that formed in California against the Latinos and blacks, “because the same wild racism that you see even today existed in those first Yankee crusaders who wanted to clean California of Latin Americans and also, logically, have a hand in their discoveries. Joaquín Murieta’s wife was killed in one of these incursions.”
The play was a success in Santiago, but it has seldom been performed since the opening. It was the only play Neruda wrote.
He did, however, translate Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet into Spanish, on the occasion of the four hundredth anniversary of the English bard’s birth. (Alastair Reid, Neruda’s friend and translator, liked to say that Neruda is the most widely read poet since Shakespeare.) In a letter to his publisher Gonzalo Losada on May 12, 1964, Neruda wrote, “I’ve achieved a lucid translation, freeing the verse of mannerisms and pretense. It came out like crystal-clear water.”
While that may be true of the literal translation of the lines, Neruda also edited his version, creating an adaptation of the original to make the play more populist, to appeal to a wider audience in Latin America. In a less direct-action, grassroots manner, Neruda’s intent seems to have been to perpetuate Lorca’s aim to bring Spanish theater “within reach of the people,” an action that excited Neruda’s idealism back in the days of the Second Republic in Madrid. Instead of playing up elements of a pertinent yet rhetorical theme like class struggle, Neruda accentuated the dramatic tension of the impossibility of Romeo and Julieta’s love (and echoed the tragedies of his youth, the impossibility of love with Teresa, Maria Parodi, Albertina, and Laura due to their parents’ tragic objections).
Toward this end, as Chilean poet, translator, and scholar Rodrigo Rojas points out, Neruda tried to make Romeo simpler and more romantic, so he dropped some of his dialogue, some of his words where Neruda felt he was being hesitant, doubtful, and rather lyrical, in order to make him appear more direct, less impatient, more decisive, more sure of his love for Julieta (in contrast, one could argue, to Neruda’s own love life). Most of the changes were at the beginning, and they were actually rather subtle compared with many of the adaptations of the classic that are constantly staged around the world. And Neruda’s changes should not be pinned to Neruda’s process of translation; he could have created them had he simply been commissioned to stage a new production in English.
From 1960 to his death in 1973, Neruda never let his pen of green ink rest. He was enormously productive, despite his deteriorating health, churning out a total of twenty-six books of poetry (seven of them would be published posthumously). They were of varied quality, but many were true gems. One of the most evocative was La barcarola, released shortly after the premiere of Joaquín Murieta. It is a lengthy love song to Matilde, written in the traditional 6/8 time to reflect the rhythm of the gondolier’s stroke. It is somewhat of a surrealistic departure from the straightforward personal poetry he had been writing. Aboard his imaginary boat, he tells Matilde the story of their love, their history, his love of Chile. Toward the end, the war in Vietnam fills an episode, as it often did in the books he wrote during that war. When he won the Nobel Prize in 1971, the Swedish Academy presenter called La barcarola his recent “masterpiece.”
A year after La barcarola came Las manos del día (The Hands of the Day). In the opening poem, the speaker admits he is the “guilty one” for never having done anything physical with his hands, that he never once made a broom so he could never “gather and unite / the elements.” He verges on overly apologetic, expressing an exaggerated guilt when, twenty-one poems into the book, he claims that his hands are “negative” and “useless.”
Thus forgive me for the sadness,
of my happy mistakes,
of my shadowed dreams,
forgive me, everyone, for the unnecessary:
I didn’t manage to use my hands
in a carpenter’s shop or in the forest.
Once again, in The Hands of the Day Neruda couldn’t turn his gaze away from Vietnam, where, in his universalist view that all men are brothers, he urged readers to look for their own bones and blood in the mud among those of so many others:
now, all burned, they aren’t anyone’s,
they are everyone’s,
they are our bones, seek
your death in that death,
because those same people are stalking you
and they intend for you to enter that same mud.
—“In Vietnam”
Neruda’s next book, Aún (published in English as Still Another Day), is from the earth and of the earth, which nurtures but also takes away:
Forgive me, if when I want
to recount my life
it is the earth of that I talk.
This is the earth.
It grows in your blood
and you grow.
If it’s extinguished in your blood,
you are extinguished.
As seen in his verse, Neruda was now moving from the autumn of his life into a more focused meditation on mortality. The lines above presage his coming illness. Neruda was now sixty-five and clearly reflecting on the course of his life, though he still maintained his humanitarian duties to which he was called, as a poet and as a person.
* * *
Political tumult around the world contributed to Neruda’s reflections on his life choices—his acts of omission and commission, his choices of heroes and villains. In 1968, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic bowed to the winds of change in what became known as the Prague Spring, a period in which newly elected leaders there enacted brave new reforms to liberalize their economy and give citizens more rights, including a ten-year plan to establish democratic socialism. The Soviet ruler, Leonid Brezhnev, threatened to use military force if needed to stop any of Russia’s satellite states from compromising the rest of the Eastern Bloc’s national interests and cohesion. He was particularly fearful Czechoslovakia would leave the bloc, weakening it and opening up the possibility of more defections.
On August 20, 1968, Russia and the Warsaw Pact countries of East Germany, Poland, Bulgaria, and Hungary (all of which had been similarly invaded in 1956) attacked Czechoslovakia with a half million troops. The hope and progress that had developed that spring were quickly destroyed. Reformists and liberals were arrested; a student set himself on fire in a Prague square protesting the repression. A Moscow-friendly government was installed.
Jorge Edwards, among other friends, was at Isla Negra with Neruda the day after the invasion of Czechoslovakia. As Edwards wrote in his memoir, Adíos, poeta . . . :
Books and authors were discussed; we commented on people we considered friends and those we didn’t; we told repetitive, hackneyed jokes in an atmosphere of naturalness or relaxation that was rather fake. And not a word was spoken, not one, about the events in Czechoslovakia. Upon leaving, as we were sharing—under the fresh night air—one of those prolonged good-byes so typical of Chileans, I asked Pablo when he was leaving for Europe. “I don’t think I’ll travel after all,” he responded pensively, worried, upset: “It seems to me the situation is too Czechoslovakian.”
When asked what he thought about the Prague Spring a month later while in Brazil, Neruda first tried to evade the question and then couldn’t commit to a side publicly:
I am a friend of Czechoslovakia, the country that gave me asylum when I needed it, and I am also a friend of the Soviet Union. For that reason, when you ask me what side I am on, I feel like a child who is being asked if he is with his father or with his mother. I am with both.
He then admitted, “I suffered a lot from the events. But now things are normalizing and I hope that the process of democracy continues in that country.”
A year later, Neruda published Fin del mundo (World’s End). The following poem, “1968,” is emblematic of the book:
The hour of Prague fell
on my head like a stone,
my destiny was unsteady,
