Neruda, page 48
Neruda celebrated his sixty-eighth birthday in warm company at his Normandy country house, along with Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa, arguably four of the five most important Latin American prose writers at the time (Neruda’s quiet rival Jorge Luis Borges being the fifth).
Shortly thereafter, Neruda realized he was too tired to continue as ambassador. He was ready to retire to Isla Negra. He handed over the reins of the embassy to Edwards, but before he left, he met with French president Georges Pompidou in the Palais de l’Élysée. The poet gave him a signed copy of the just-published French translation of García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. They conversed about literature; Pompidou had been a teacher of literature and had edited an anthology of French poetry in his youth. Neruda then put in his word for the nationalization of French interests in Chilean copper, but Pompidou said that was a matter of the courts, not the executive.
When the Velascos met Neruda and Matilde at the airport on their return from France, Neruda told Francisco he wanted to go straight to Isla Negra; he refused to greet anyone in the official committee that awaited him. He got into his friend’s old Citroën with great difficulty. “I realized he was very bad,” wrote Velasco. Neruda was struggling with his breath—he had dyspnea, set off with the slightest effort. Gone was his heavy set; he was remarkably thinner, with “a jaundiced pallor” and, “above all, a sadness unlike I’ve ever seen.”
* * *
The Chile of October 1972 was a place of upheaval and civil unrest. A conflict that began in a remote region of Patagonia set off a spark, igniting a conflagration of tension that consumed the country that month. Local truckers had protested the Allende administration’s plan to create a state-owned trucking enterprise in Aysén, the country’s least populated area. The government felt the private trucking system was inadequate, while the truckers blamed the government’s inability to secure replacement parts and other supplies to keep them efficient. They announced a strike, and the National Truckers Confederation joined them, forty thousand members staying off the road. Telling of the tension that was gripping the country, the shopkeepers’ and merchants’ organizations joined the now-national strike, adding their own specific demands. They were followed by the Engineers Association, then bank clerks, gas workers, lawyers, architects, and taxi and bus drivers—a national strike that strove to paralyze the economy to leave the government no other choice than to make transformative changes. Patience had simply worn out. Moderate groups like the Christian Democratic Party supported the strike, which had wide consequences: influenced by Christian Democratic union leaders, for instance, one hundred thousand campesinos joined the strike as well.
Allende declared a partial state of emergency. The military, for the moment loyal to the government, was called in to maintain order and, in effect, help shore up the UP’s fragile position. Enough factories were still producing, and there were enough loyal supporters of the government that the economy held and the country wasn’t completely paralyzed, but the strike wore on.
On November 2, Allende shook up his cabinet in hopes of stemming the assaults on his administration and even ending the strike. He invited the army’s commander in chief, Carlos Prats, to serve as minister of the interior while still maintaining his military post. The moves worked. Twenty-five days after they started the strike, the National Truckers Confederation declared their full confidence in General Prats and negotiated an agreement. The government survived, but the strike had made the military the arbiter of the country’s political conflicts.
A year earlier, Neruda had written an article for Le Monde praising Prats, highlighting that, in Chile, the military was loyal to the country’s constitution. Prats, who would remain loyal to Allende, wrote a letter thanking the poet. On December 6, 1972, General Prats was the one to welcome the poet back from France at the National Stadium, in a great celebration for both his homecoming and winning the Nobel Prize. Neruda was very ill, but he mustered his strength for this great homage, complete with a balloon launch and a parade around the stadium’s track of young Communists, workers, horses, and a float dedicated to Luis Emilio Recabarren.
President Salvador Allende and First Lady Hortensia Bussi Soto took a helicopter to Isla Negra to visit the sick poet and officially receive his resignation as ambassador in person. Neruda read from his new book, Incitement to Nixoncide and Praise for the Chilean Revolution. When Neruda became bedridden and no longer made public appearances, his friends brought the outside world to his bedside. Julio Cortázar visited him that February. As he and his wife entered Neruda’s bedroom, the sea breaking directly outside the enormous window that took up a whole wall, it seemed to Cortázar that the poet was still “carrying on his perpetual dialogue with the sea, with those waves that he had always seen as great eyelids.” He went on:
In the evening, although we insisted on leaving so that he could rest, Pablo made us stay with him to watch a dreadful melodrama about vampires on television, which fascinated and amused him at the same time, as he gave himself up to a ghostly present that was more real to him than a future he knew to be closed to him. On my first visit, which had taken place in France two years before, he had embraced me with a “See you soon.” Now, he looked at us for a moment, his hands in mine, and said, “Better not to say good-bye, right?” his tired eyes already far away.
Though he appeared tired to his friends, Neruda still found energy to pursue Alicia, Matilde’s niece. Their separation had put the affair on hold, but their emotions had not faded, and they had maintained a correspondence. Believing her ailing husband was in good hands, Matilde had returned to Europe to settle various affairs, including selling their house in Normandy. On April 29, 1973, Neruda wrote to her, first describing the ten or so people who had come to lunch the day before. Then, showing the state of his health and the difficulties of obtaining even basic medicine in Chile at the time, partly due to economic blockades, Neruda asked Matilde to send or “bring back phenindione [an anticoagulant] for the veins. And Cortancyl (Prednisone) [cortisone, a steroid].”
He ends the letter: “I’m angry because you don’t write, dammit! I forgive you for today. I love you, I kiss you, but enjoy your trip.” He closes it, addressing her as “Perro-tita [little dog], hasta luego, your”—and then draws in a small picture of a dog for himself.
In her absence, when he went to Valparaíso for cancer treatments, he and Alicia reunited at the city’s iconic Hotel Miramar, overlooking the sea. These rendezvous occurred with some frequency, always in the same hotel. She would also accompany him at the hospital. It seems Matilde never knew anything of the post-France affair between her husband and niece. It’s possible that the two also saw each other behind Matilde’s back when she was in Chile, when Neruda dissuaded her from making the trips to Valparaíso for treatment.
Alicia was struck by how thin he was becoming. Sometimes he was so sick a doctor had to come to the hotel. She found him in great pain, walking with difficulty, but trying to hide the extent of his suffering. Alicia begged him to take better care of himself.
But little, if anything, could be done at this point. Dr. Velasco remembers how the cancerous metastasis in his hips provoked so much pain that he could barely walk. On his last visit to La Sebastiana in Valparaíso, Velasco had to put one of his old friend’s arms over his shoulders and help him with his cane as they walked down the long alley to the iconic house they had shared. On one of Velasco and María’s last trips to Isla Negra, he saw Neruda trying to write his memoirs in bed, with great difficulty. At one point the pen fell out of his hand as he fell into a state of semiconsciousness from which he recovered rather quickly. His body was failing him, but he persevered.
* * *
On February 27, Dr. John R. G. Turner of the State University of New York at Stony Brook wrote Neruda a letter that lifted his spirits and expanded his legacy in a romantic, nostalgic way. Turner explained (in Spanish) that a new subgenus of South American butterflies of the genus Heliconius needed a name. With Mount Helicon being a setting in Greek mythology where inspirational muses dwelled, the custom of the past century was to name a new subgenus after a muse, such Melpomene, the muse of tragedy, whom one evokes to stimulate poetry, or Erato, the muse of erotic poetry. “The era of those classical names has come and gone, but we still think it appropriate to name the new subgenus after a poet of our time, and since said butterflies are from South America, we were thinking about a Hispano-American poet”: Pablo Neruda. (No other Heliconius subgenus has been named after a modern writer.)
The butterfly Neruda is found in Peru, Ecuador, and French Guiana. It is beautiful, dark with orange stripes and white splotches. Neruda, a collector of butterflies since his youth, was thrilled. Neruda wrote a brief and charming note back to Turner: “I’ve never been given such a great honor as the one you propose. I am deeply moved to accept the tribute and will be delighted to think of those butterflies flying in some corner of our continent with my name on their wings.” The name Neruda has remained in use, and it was even elevated to the level of genus by one of Turner’s colleagues, meaning that butterflies have been flying around with names like Neruda aoede and Neruda metharme on their wings.
Another respectful acknowledgment of Neruda’s significance came when the Cuban publisher Casa de las Américas published an anthology of Neruda’s poetry with a prologue by Roberto Fernández Retamar. But the Chilean still held great animosity for the man who had signed the 1964 letter of attack against him. Neruda wrote to the publisher:
Unfortunately, I must seriously protest against a part of the new edition that you have done. It has to do with the name, and prologue, of Señor Fernández Retamal [Neruda played on Retamar’s name, changing the final r to l, making it “Reta-bad”].
A while back, a defamatory and calumnious letter was widely distributed around the world. Señor Fernández was the main author of that erroneous, monstrous, and unjustifiable letter . . .
His body may have been failing him, but his defiance could still flare, and his ego could still inflate.
* * *
Throughout this time, the democratic Chilean revolution was in tatters. Allende hoped that General Prats would anchor his administration amid rampant inflation, constant political and economic crises, and the rising pitch of rhetoric between the government and its opposition. However, Prats was losing his popularity with the public. His support among fellow officers was eroding because he remained an Allende loyalist, with his own personal political ambitions becoming more evident. Additionally, he made the mistake of threatening a woman driver with death after she reportedly stuck out her tongue at him, an embarrassing, if not fateful, public relations disaster.
The streets of Santiago became violent with terrorist acts from both the Far Right and the Far Left. Chile was in chaos. Many felt the situation was moving toward civil war.
On May 26, from Isla Negra, Neruda gave an interview that was broadcast on national television, in which he spoke of the danger of fascist takeover and, alluding to his experiences in Spain, urged the people to realize what a civil war would really mean in terms of human suffering.
In the words of Joan Jara, wife of the activist folk singer Victor Jara:
The whole cultural movement responded to Neruda’s call. Exhibitions and television programmes were organised; a cultural open-air marathon [of activity] took place in the Plaza de la Constitución. It lasted several days and hundreds of artists, poets, theatre and dance groups, musicians and song groups took part. It was a great anti-fascist event to which thousands came, and there were similar events all over the country. Victor’s contribution, apart from performing as a singer, was to direct a series of programmes for the National Television Channel with a common theme: a warning, relating documentary material about Nazi Germany and the Spanish Civil War to the situation in Chile, to make people aware of the real dangers of the same things happening here and now. Victor had put to music one of Neruda’s latest poems which had the refrain “I don’t want my country divided . . . ,” and he sang it as the opening theme for each programme.
Yet while Neruda appealed to everyone to join in to stop this confrontation among brothers, many already thought the collapse of the Allende experiment was inevitable and readied themselves for the transition.
In Congress, the opposition (the center-left to the right wing) called for the military to intervene to guarantee institutional stability, civil peace, and development. At the same time, hundreds of military officers’ wives protested in front of General Prats’s home, demanding that he resign. He subsequently did so, and two other generals followed suit. Allende was now at the mercy of General Augusto Pinochet.
On August 31, 1973, Neruda wrote a letter to Prats, telling him that the great majority of Chileans would continue to consider him their “chief general and an exemplary citizen . . . It would be impossible to look without anguish upon the blind insistence of those who want to drive us into the misfortune of a war pitting brother against brother.”
The general wrote back, thanking Neruda and stating that it had been edifying to be the one to welcome him upon his return from France at the National Stadium, adding:
I send my best wishes for the quick restoration of your health, because Chile—on the brink as it is of political entrenchment—needs the important intellectual values that you symbolize so that reason and common sense can once again prevail in this beautiful country, so that its people can achieve the social justice that they so deserve . . .
The Pinochet regime would later assassinate Prats in Argentina, where he lived in exile after the coup.
At 7:55 A.M. on the morning of September 11, 1973, on a phone connected to Radio Corporación, Salvador Allende addressed his country:
This is the president of the republic speaking from El Palacio de la Moneda. Reports confirm that a sector of the navy has set siege to Valparaíso and that the city is occupied, signifying an uprising against the government, the legitimate, constituted government, the government that is supported by the law and the will of the citizens.
In these circumstances, I call on all workers: Stay in your workplaces, go to the factories, stay calm, keep calm . . .
After two other broadcasts, at 9:03 the president again spoke on the radio:
Planes are flying over us right now. They may riddle us with fire. But let them know that here we stand, at least with our example that in this country there are men who know they must fulfill the obligation they have. I will follow the orders of the people and the orders of the conscience of a president who has the dignity of his post given to him by his people in free and democratic elections . . .
I will pay with my life to defend the principles this country holds dear. Shame will fall upon those who have betrayed their commitments, broken their words . . . broken the doctrine of the armed forces . . .
Gunshots were heard in the background. An air force plane bombed La Moneda. Six minutes later, Allende sat in his armchair and spoke into his telephone, which was connected now to only Radio Magallanes:
This will surely be the last opportunity for me to address you. The air force has bombed the towers of Radio Postales and Radio Corporación . . .
Workers of my homeland! I have faith in Chile and its destiny. Other men will overcome this dark and bitter moment when treason seeks to prevail. Keep in mind that, much sooner than later, the great avenues will again be opened, through which the free man will pass to construct a better society . . .
Long live Chile! Long live el pueblo! Long live the workers! These are my last words. I am sure that my sacrifice will not be in vain . . .
Then the tanks started making their approach on La Moneda. The air force’s jets screamed in and dropped their bombs. Eventually, Allende shot himself in order to evade certain imprisonment and likely torture and murder by the coup regime.
Pinochet seized control of the country.
The general always seemed much more interested in power than ideology. He was not known for his intelligence, but his methodical maneuvers always seemed to work out, just as he managed to take sole control of the junta, which was supposed to have been a rotating presidency. With the army behind him, he secured the title of “President of the Republic” for nearly two decades. U.S. intelligence was caught off guard by his brutality and ruthlessness. After the coup, a Defense Intelligence Agency report described him as “quiet; mild-mannered; very businesslike. Very honest . . . A devoted, tolerant husband and father; lives very modestly.” Yet by late October, a fact sheet prepared for Kissinger on “post-coup repression” showed that in Pinochet’s first six weeks in power, the military had massacred approximately 1,500 civilians, with more than 300 being summarily executed, and more than 13,500 already arrested. The enigmatic folk hero Victor Jara, for example, had been kept in depraved conditions in the National Stadium. His body was later found in a canal, with his guitar-playing hands mutilated and forty-four bullet holes in his body.
* * *
Neruda had listened to the day’s news at Isla Negra, feverishly changing the radio dial from one report to another. Matilde felt that Neruda was reacting in a manner uncharacteristic of the fighter she had always seen in him. Instead, he seemed broken inside; there was “an empty gleam of unconscious desperation in his eyes and his attitude.” Neruda could barely walk. He had developed a high fever as they watched the television broadcasts of La Moneda on fire, tanks passing through Santiago, and people being arrested all around the city. Once again—now in his own country—fascism, the enemy he had spent so much of his life battling, was killing his friends.
Three days later, the military came to search the house at Isla Negra. Neruda was still in bed when they entered his room, looking for arms or guerrilleros, but really just trying to intimidate Neruda and his family. “Look all you want,” Neruda is said to have told the captain. “There’s only one thing here that’s dangerous to you.”
