Neruda, page 47
Allende’s initial success with government programs ironically helped bring about their demise. Early efforts at redistribution of income through wage and salary adjustments, as well as increased government spending, boosted the stagnant economy. The adjustments were meant to eliminate a wide income gap, while also giving a stimulus to the middle class. But Chilean businesses, manipulated by rampant anti-communist propaganda and fearing what Allende might bring, didn’t reinvest their gains; instead, they sold off their inventory at speculative prices. They invested in dollars and other hard currencies instead of the Chilean peso, which, combined with hoarding and black market trade, consequently created severe shortages of basics: flour, cooking oil, soap, common car and television parts, bedsheets, toilet paper, comfort foods, and, perhaps most aggravating for those dependent on them, cigarettes. Discontent rose along with prices. The U.S. campaign against Allende didn’t help the situation. Upon Allende’s election, Ambassador Korry proposed a series of actions to destabilize the economy, including having U.S. companies in Chile “foot-drag to maximum possible” and “hold off on orders, on deliveries of spare parts.” Starting rumors of imminent rationing created a “run on food stocks.” He also suggested asking U.S. banks to suddenly halt renewal of credit to Chile, saying, “Not a nut or bolt will be allowed to reach Chile under Allende. We shall do all within our power to condemn Chile and the Chilean to utmost deprivation and poverty.”
Inflation skyrocketed. By mid-1973, the annual inflation rate had risen to over 300 percent.
The UP’s land-reform program also lacked a clear vision and resulted in the disorganization of the agricultural economy. Production dropped so sharply that the government was forced to import food to meet the increased demand brought on by the higher incomes of workers. At the same time, sparked on by the MIR and radical Mapuche, campesinos temporarily or permanently occupied some seventeen hundred rural properties. The owners of these properties were terrified, and this helped fuel the opposition against Allende. Many think it was the Ultra-Left’s intimidation of centrists and landowners that sealed the fate of the UP.
* * *
Even before Allende’s victory, Neruda had had concerns about Chile. According to Jorge Edwards, Neruda feared the situation in Chile might be difficult: “He wasn’t optimistic at all; he held no illusions about it . . . If Allende won, as his party quite realistically supposed, he was afraid that things would end badly.”
Nevertheless, Neruda was tremendously proud of what his country had done. After all, he had played a role in its success, both on and off the page. His sentiments could be heard in his reading at the Royal Festival Hall in London in April 1972. With his earnest, at times dramatic voice carrying a twinge of sweetness, he began by telling the audience, in English:
Last time I read some of my poems before you [pauses, breathes out] but this time I am a different person, I am two persons, you see I was a [pauses] roving poet in that moment when I was here, but something happened to my country in Chile. After one hundred years of struggles of the humiliated and the trashed and the working class, we had [raises his voice just enough, with a dramatic pause] a great victory. [Applause.] We had at last a good and great victory and I am not only a roaming poet now, I am also the proud representative of the first popular government after centuries in my country, Chile. [Long, raucous applause.]
He was not without his detractors, though. Someone jeered at Neruda during his opening remarks but was quickly drowned out by loud noise in favor of the poet. The writer Jay Parini, then a graduate student, was at that London reading, sitting toward the back. He recalled how there had been a great deal of muttering in the audience, people talking over each other. At one point, “a bald-headed man in front of me was shouting something in Spanish—I couldn’t really understand it, but it seemed offensive.” Several people were telling him to shut up when “a well-dressed woman sitting next to me took off one shoe and brought a stiletto heel down hard on the man’s scalp, producing shrieks and a good deal of blood. A policeman dragged off the man, with the woman chasing after him, hitting him more times. The audience was in pandemonium, until Neruda—a large, impressive-looking man—raised a big hand and, like Moses parting the Red Sea, made a way for his poem, reading his masterpiece ‘The Heights of Macchu Picchu.’”
Neruda was accompanied on the stage by Alastair Reid, his Scottish-born English translator and dear friend. Reid read the English first, followed by Neruda reading the Spanish, in sections, so that the “sense comes first and the sound follows,” as Reid put it. If four decades earlier Neruda’s reading voice had been nasal and monotone, now it resounded, especially pronounced by the crisscross rhythm between the Spanish and the English, alternating long strands or stanzas or just couplets back and forth, the poems broken up as if into meter, creating varying speeds and tension and song. Reid had heard Neruda read many times, but on that night he sensed something truly special: the Chilean’s voice was “spreading itself like a balm over the English audience.” It was “a magical sound.”
Fueled by the energy of the crowd, Neruda’s voice reached a climax while reading “Macchu Picchu.” The pace of the poem was growing with force as he struck the lectern loudly with his fist while speaking the final line, “Hablar por mis palabras y mi sangre.” “Speak through my words and my blood.” The dramatic, emotional flair of his voice was both inspiring and chilling. With his country’s revolution as a backdrop, Neruda’s words resonated with authority and power. The audience erupted into a thunderous, jubilant applause.*
* * *
Neruda’s domestic life was once again in turmoil in 1970. Matilde’s niece Alicia had found out that her husband, the father of her child, was already married to another woman. As Alicia struggled to recover, Matilde invited her to live at Isla Negra in exchange for occasional domestic work, including as a dressmaker. Alicia was in her early thirties, exuberant and light skinned. Very quickly, she and Neruda became intimate. The affair was evident to visitors who had known Neruda through his relationships with Delia and Matilde. Aida Figueroa reported that Neruda summoned Alicia frequently and that his attachment struck her as profoundly sad, his “one last senile love.” Neruda never wanted to be disturbed during his daily siestas, so it was at this time that Matilde would take a long walk on the beach. And it was also then that Alicia and Neruda were alone together. Neruda wrote and published a book of poetry for and about her. There is a consensus among those who knew Neruda that the book, the phallically titled La espada encendida (The Flaming Sword), was intended as a mythological work in which a new Adam (Neruda) and Eve (Alicia) find each other in the destruction after nuclear war. Together, they set off to found a utopia.
Long before the book was published, Matilde became suspicious. One day when Alicia had gone to Santiago, Neruda made up a trip, saying he didn’t want Matilde to come along. He left alone with the chauffeur. Matilde followed him and caught them in a tryst. “I’ll tell you that your friend is not a healthy man,” Matilde told Neruda’s comrade Volodia Teitelboim. “He has gotten mixed up with dirty women, and now he’s sick in the part where he was doing that. And he’s not getting better. Where your sins are, you pay.”
Alicia was dismissed from Isla Negra, and Matilde told Neruda that they had to leave Chile. The party, helpfully, asked Allende to nominate Neruda as ambassador to France. On January 21, 1971, in a Senate session to confirm new nominations by Allende, the senators of the Right voted against Neruda, and the Christian Democrats abstained. He did get enough votes from UP senators, but the fact that the Christian Democrats abstained was an indication of their extreme dissatisfaction with the Communists and the Allende administration.
By serving in France, Neruda was fulfilling his youthful diplomatic dream. But all was not well. He was visibly agitated and anxious. Teitelboim remembers the day the poet left for Paris: “There is a part of the night that accompanies man even in daytime, especially when he has an ear finely tuned enough to hear the thunder before seeing the lightning. As if he had a covenant with something that was still hidden, Neruda did not seem happy when we bade him farewell at the airport, even though things were going well at that time.”
Despite his departure for Paris, the passion between Neruda and Alicia remained. They corresponded via Jorge Edwards, whom Neruda insisted on having as his chancellor at the embassy. Neruda would send gifts to Alicia and her daughter with friends returning to Chile. For his sixty-seventh birthday, she wrote him: “I kiss you and I caress your entire beloved body, my beloved love, love, my love, love . . .”
Chapter Twenty-one
The Flowers that Sleep
Wrapped in the sky, I return to the sea:
the silence between one wave and the next
creates a dangerous suspense:
life ebbs out, the blood slows down
until a new movement crashes
and the voice of infinity resounds.
—“Autumn”
Neruda arrived in Paris at the end of March 1971. When he was asked about his new position by a Swedish television station, Neruda had a righteous-sounding cover for the affair that had hastened his and Matilde’s departure:
My country is experiencing a peaceful revolution: We are changing our feudal system, we are fighting against the foreign domination of our economy, we are rescuing our natural riches, we are giving greater dignity to the life of the Chilean people. I could not have turned down this job. That’s it. I have come here because it is my duty.
As soon as they arrived in Paris, he and Matilde went immediately to a well-known urologist. A tube was placed into his bladder to ease his discomfort and ward off urinary tract infections. He couldn’t bear the hospital regimen and asked to be discharged as early as possible.
By July, Neruda’s prostate cancer symptoms were taking their toll on his tired body. His enthusiasm for all the cultural events he had imagined attending as ambassador would be put aside—soon, everything would be put aside. He wrote to Volodia Teitelboim on July 11:
Everything is the same here inside this catacomb. I have not seen friends or been to museums. Every once in a while, we go to the movies, with great effort, as if we were traveling from Isla Negra to Valparaíso. I am not going to talk to you about my poetry, because I have not taken it up again . . . If I keep dictating it to Matilde, she will catch my fever.
October brought a great affirmation of Neruda’s life in letters. His old friend Artur Lundkvist came from Stockholm to tell him he had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. His admirers had long campaigned for this. The Chilean Ministry of Foreign Affairs had even tried to set up a bibliographic exhibition of Neruda’s works in Stockholm in 1966 to influence the judges. Many believe he didn’t receive the prize earlier because of pressure not to award it to such a prominent Communist. Following the public announcement of the prize, Neruda gave a press conference, and Allende called in the middle of it. Gabriel García Márquez, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Julio Cortázar, and other artists traveled to attend the party that night at the embassy. Telegrams came from all over the world, and Allende said, “Neruda is Chile.”
Immediately after Neruda heard the news, he asked Edwards to help him find a house in Normandy. The Chilean ambassador’s residence was part of the embassy complex; the poet wanted privacy and refuge, and access to nature.
That very morning, they found what they were looking for in Condé-sur-Iton. Near an old sawmill, on expansive land, was a chateau from the Renaissance era. Because of its low elevation, it couldn’t be seen from town. As per his custom, Neruda made the decision to buy it immediately. Matilde’s input, if any, had little effect on the decision. He instantly started to plan his life around the new property, as if, Edwards felt, “the house grew within him from that very instant.” He named his new house El Manquel, which is the Mapuche’s Mapudungun word for “eagle.”
The Chilean Right attacked him in the press for what it characterized as hypocrisy, a Communist making such an extravagant purchase. Neruda paid $85,000 for the home, taken from the $450,000 of his Nobel Prize.
The prize ceremony was held on December 11, 1971. In his presentation speech, Karl Ragnar Gierow of the Swedish Academy proclaimed, “His work benefits mankind precisely because of its direction . . . What Neruda has achieved in his writing is community with existence . . . In his work a continent awakens to consciousness.”
The sick poet’s voice was not weak when he accepted the prize and gave his lecture. He sounded clear but tired. As he spoke, Neruda hit his rhythm, and his words resonated.
The poet is not a “little god.” No, he is not a “little god.” He is not assigned a superior mystical destiny over those who pursue other crafts and careers. I have often said that the best poet is the one who gives us our daily bread: the local baker who does not feign godliness . . .
Exactly one hundred years ago today, a poor and magnificent poet, the most tremendous of all woeful souls, wrote this prophecy: “À l’aurore, armés d’une ardente patience, nous entrerons aux splendides villes.” “At dawn, armed with a burning patience, we will enter the splendid cities.”
I believe in the prophecy of Rimbaud, the Visionary. I come from a dark province, a country separated from all others by a sharp geography. I was once the most dejected of poets and my poetry was provincial, painful, and rainy. But I always had faith in humanity. I never lost hope. That is why perhaps I have made it this far, arriving here with my poetry and also my flag.
In closing, I must say to the goodhearted people, to the workers, to the poets, that the future’s entirety is expressed in Rimbaud’s lines: only with a burning patience will we triumph in the splendid city, the city that will give light, justice, and dignity to us all.
* * *
Meanwhile, Neruda had serious diplomatic duties to attend to. In November 1971, due to the depleted treasury, Allende was forced to announce a moratorium on paying back foreign debt. He hoped the creditor nations would reschedule and restructure Chile’s nearly $2 billion owed to eleven countries. This was done through the Paris Club, an informal assembly of representatives of the world’s major creditor nations. With the meetings being held in Paris, Neruda as ambassador led the negotiations for his country. Nearly two-thirds of the debt, though, was owed to the United States, who wanted any refinancing to be tied to compensation for the expropriation of copper companies. Neruda helped to secure what was perceived as a favorable deal. He also worked to persuade the French to dismiss the pressure of expropriated American companies to put an embargo on Chilean copper exports.
* * *
Neruda’s health continued to deteriorate, but this did not prevent him from traveling to New York City, in early April 1972, to deliver the opening speech at the PEN American Center’s fiftieth anniversary celebration. There were no visa issues now, even though Neruda had been writing fervently about Vietnam, and even though he was an ambassador of a government Washington was trying to destroy. Nixon had denied entry to other artists, but Neruda’s star, especially after the Nobel Prize, shone too bright now. Even Nixon understood what Johnson surmised: that to censure his voice, prevent his presence, would do much more damage than good.
The evening began with the president of PEN America reading a greeting from Nixon, to which the seven hundred or so guests who filled the grand ballroom “hissed, laughed and booed,” according to the New York Times. Arthur Miller then introduced Neruda as the “father of contemporary Latin-American literature.” Onstage, Neruda “humbly” asked for forgiveness as he broke away from the literary discourse for a moment to “return to the concerns of my country,” in particular debt relief. “The entire world knows that Chile is undergoing a revolutionary transformation, within the dignity and severity of its laws. That is why there are a lot of people who feel offended.”
While just a few years ago he would have been animated by such attention, now, besieged by an admiring crowd after the conference, Neruda’s dear friend Fernando Alegría saw him turn gray. The press and the fans cornered him, and “there [were] already ashes clinging to his dark suit.” Next, gathered with an intimate group at an elegant salon, his friends offered him breathing room and flutes of champagne. He was fatigued and headed back toward the bathroom with “slow, tired steps,” in Alegría’s words. “He says in passing that he isn’t well, that he will return to Chile in November and that no one must know. But everyone did.”
The endless questions he faced in public seized upon him in his final act in New York, a symposium at Columbia University, where the Q&A became contentious with sharp inquiries into his opinion on international politics, with little attention to poetics. He was done with all this.
He and Matilde quickly took off for Moscow, on April 24, where he got another prognosis. On their flight to Russia, he wrote to Francisco Velasco and María Martner, their La Sebastiana housemates: “We are sick ones but still fighting.” The doctors confirmed what Neruda had been told before: there was nothing to be done. It was his final visit to the Soviet capital, and he wrote a book to it, Elegía (Elegy), poems celebrating his friends and the city, while also denouncing social realism and the former hero he now called “Stalin the terrible.” The book would be published posthumously.
