Neruda, page 49
“What’s that?” the officer asked, his hand on his holster.
“Poetry!”
The young folk singers Hugo Arévalo and Charo Cofré, friends of Neruda’s, were in Santiago. By September 18, Chile’s Independence Day, rumors were rampant that Neruda was dead, perhaps even assassinated. Arévalo and Cofré drove to Isla Negra, despite the risk of being stopped by the police. As Arévalo recalled the visit, they went up to Neruda’s room and he was delighted to see them, and then “he started asking us how we had survived the coup in Santiago; who, of the people we saw, was still alive; whether or not we knew of anyone who had died or had been arrested.”
Around two that afternoon, it being Chile’s Independence Day, Neruda declared that they must celebrate it as always, even though they didn’t consider Chile an independent country since the coup. “So we toasted to the eighteenth of September, in parentheses.”
Every Independence Day, the Catholic Church holds a special Mass, the ceremonies of Te Deum. They watched the event on TV. Ex-presidents attended, and this year they saw Jorge Alessandri, Gabriel González Videla, and Eduardo Frei. The turning point in the day came when Neruda saw González Videla, who had called him a traitor and sought his arrest. Neruda became very distressed, like a wild animal. “I think that this was the culmination of his nightmare,” Arévalo said, “and that it led to his end.”
Neruda’s condition started to visibly worsen. Around eleven o’clock that night, as they were watching the news on TV, his hands started to shake. He asked Matilde to take Arévalo and Cofré to their bedroom, where they would hardly sleep. Matilde knocked on their door at five in the morning, saying that Neruda was very ill and that an ambulance was on its way.
On the way to Santiago, the ambulance was stopped at several checkpoints. The military searched it, including underneath the stretcher where Neruda lay. He was taken to the Clínica Santa María. Doctors came in and out of his hospital room, prescribing medicines, some of them distraught themselves. The poet was suffering intense pain. On September 20, the Mexican embassy told Neruda that President Luis Echeverría Álvarez had offered him asylum and a flight to Mexico in a private plane. Neruda thanked the ambassador but said he would stay in Chile because he could never live anywhere else.
On September 21, Matilde found out that the military had ransacked their Santiago home, La Chascona, and flooded it by diverting the canal that ran at the top of the hill. Matilde pleaded that they go to Mexico, at least for a couple of months until order was restored in Chile. Neruda was silent for hours and then said, “Yes, we’ll go.” Matilde went back to Isla Negra to get some more clothes. She had kept Neruda’s friends at arm’s length, not wanting him to hear about what Pinochet was doing, but when she left, they came to the hospital and told him who had been arrested, who was being tortured, who had been killed.
According to Matilde, when she returned that night she found Neruda in a state of madness, very sick and disturbed. He reproached his wife for not having told him the reality of what was happening to his friends, the atrocities that were occurring daily; that the junta was murdering people. She told him that it wasn’t true, that his friends were exaggerating, that “one should only believe a part of what one hears.”
As Matilde wrote in her memoir, that evening, Neruda began talking to her about their honeymoon, sweetly, more sweetly than he ever had. Then a tremendous despair passed over him again as he slipped into delirium. “They’re shooting them!” he yelled over and over. A nurse gave him an injection to relax. He fell asleep and then into a coma. Pablo Neruda died on September 23, 1973.
Matilde had to face his death along with the reality of the coup. In La Chascona, furniture was overturned, the telephone line cut, books tossed up and down the hill, and flood damage setting in. Everything was in chaos.
They eventually got the coffin to the living room, which was filled with shattered glass. Homero Arce asked Inés Valenzuela, “Inésita, don’t you think it would be best to sweep up some of this?”
“No, under no circumstances” was her proud reply. “Let the ambassadors come and see how all of this is.”
Within a few hours, the Swedish ambassador arrived, carrying with him an immense crown that he placed at Neruda’s feet. Other diplomats came, as well as a camera crew from an East German news television program, who hid from the military under the cover of being from West Germany.
Matilde, Inés, and their friends decided to make the funeral a public event, to march out of the house and take the body to the Santiago cemetery in a procession. “We knew what we could do,” Inés recounts.
Matilde had the procession start at La Chascona on the twenty-sixth so the press would show the world what the military had done to the house. The military junta, realizing Neruda’s international popularity, retroactively declared three official days of mourning for Chile’s great poet, starting on the twenty-third, the day he died, and ending the day of the funeral. Neruda’s friends, as well as some students and workers—people from all walks of life—came to the house where Neruda lay in rest.
And then, in the first open act of resistance by the Left since the coup, Neruda’s pueblo came from all over Santiago. As his coffin was taken from La Chascona, they marched to the Cementerio General de Santiago, with people joining in from all corners of the city, as defiance overcame their fear. They marched in front of soldiers who held their guns at the ready but did nothing, because this was Pablo Neruda; the world was watching.
“We were afraid but we were also defiant, because we were going to have that funeral,” recalled the painter Roser Bru, who as a five-year-old Spanish Civil War refugee escaped Europe on the Winnipeg, thanks to Neruda’s efforts. “This was a way of making our presence felt.”
The marchers were mourning the death of their poet, the deaths of so many compañeros taken by the regime, the death of their democracy. It was terribly cathartic. They tossed red carnations on Neruda’s coffin as it passed through the streets. They solemnly sang the Socialist anthem, “The Internationale.” Then over the tears came the chants. Someone called out, “¡Compañero Pablo Neruda!” and the whole procession answered, “¡Presente!” “Here, now!”
“Compañero Pablo Neruda!”
“¡Presente!”
“Compañero Salvador Allende!”
“¡Presente!”
“Compañero Victor Jara!”
“¡Presente!”
“Compañero Pablo Neruda!”
“¡Presente!”
Other shouts rang out from the crowd, drowning out the other chants: “He hasn’t died! He hasn’t died! He has only fallen asleep. Like the flowers that sleep when the sun has set.”
Epilogue
Eight small books of poetry sat on Neruda’s desk when he died, eight books he was waiting to publish the following year on his seventieth birthday. They are a collection of books written by a man who knew his life was at its end and had accepted it. The poetry is simple, as had been his style. Love and politics are present, as always—his observations of the impending downfall of the Allende government are notable—but these are not the dominant subjects or themes. Instead, in these books the reader most often finds Neruda by himself, contemplating. The poetry is deeply personal, penetrating, and meditative, set in and borne by nature.
The books are also at times playful, especially in Libro de las preguntas (The Book of Questions), a collection of whimsical rhetorical questions, which, in the words of William O’Daly, who translated these final books into English, “coalesce in the realm of paradox.” In the work, Neruda did not let his rational mind restrain his whim.
If all rivers are sweet
where does the sea get its salt?
Which yellow bird
fills its nest with lemons?
The book also contains many questions addressing political and social concerns. He could not avoid them. Neruda questions Hitler’s and Nixon’s fates and shows his increasing fear for his own country’s destiny, as the drama among factions between 1971 and 1973 became starker:
Is it true that a black condor
flies by night over my country?
These books contain the poetry of a man who knows he is dying. They are his homecoming, as seen in a poem from El mar y las campanas (The Sea and the Bells):
One returns to the self as if to an old house
with nails and slots, so that
a person tired of himself
as of a suit full of holes,
tries to walk naked in the rain,
wants to drench himself in pure water,
in elemental wind, and he cannot
but return to the well of himself,
to the least worry
over whether he existed, where he knew how to speak his mind
or to pay or to owe or to discover,
as if I were so important
that it must accept or not accept me,
the earth with its leafy name,
in its theater of black walls.
—“Returning”
Before the final silence of death, there is spiritual renewal, in which nature becomes the vehicle for reflection and connection to the larger world. This occurs in “Winter Garden”:
Winter arrives. Shining dictation
the wet leaves give me,
dressed in silence and yellow.
I am a book of snow,
a spacious hand, an open meadow,
a circle that waits,
I belong to the earth and its winter.
Earth’s rumor grew in the leaves,
soon the wheat flared up
punctuated by red flowers like burns,
then autumn arrived to set down
the wine’s scripture:
everything passed, the goblet of summer
was a fleeting sky,
the navigating cloud burned out.
I stood on the balcony dark with mourning,
like yesterday with the ivies of my childhood,
hoping the earth would spread its wings
in my uninhabited love.
I knew the rose would fall
and the pit of the passing peach
would sleep and germinate once more,
and I got drunk on the air
until the whole sea became the night
and the red sky turned to ash.
Now the earth lives
numbing its oldest questions,
the skin of its silence stretched out.
Once more I am the silent one
who came out of the distance
wrapped in cold rain and bells:
I owe to earth’s pure death
the will to sprout.
* * *
Alastair Reid translated Isla Negra, Extravagaria, and Fully Empowered, along with many other individual poems. They first met at Isla Negra in 1964 as Neruda was turning sixty; Alastair was thirty-eight. Over the next decade, the two listened to each other and heard each other, sharing a friendship that was profound for them both. Shortly following Neruda’s death, Alastair wrote this:
Translator to Poet
There are only the words left now. They lie like tombstones
or the stone Andes where the green scrub ends.
I do not have the heart to chip away
at your long lists of joy, which alternate
their iron and velvet, all the vegetation
and whalebone of your chosen stormy coast.
So much was written hope, with every line
extending life by saying, every meeting
ending in expectation of the next.
It was your slow intoning voice which counted,
bringing a living Chile into being
where poetry was bread, where books were banquets.
Now they are silent, stony on the shelf.
I cannot read them for the thunderous silence,
the grief of Chile’s dying and your own,
death being the one definitive translation.
* * *
The dictatorship tried to proscribe Neruda from the country in which he was so ingrained. It vaulted the virtuous Gabriela Mistral into his place as the country’s main cultural figure, enshrining her as “the mother of the nation.” Still, like those cries of “¡Neruda!” “¡Presente!” at his funeral, Neruda remained present throughout those fifteen dark years, as the dark condor he had written about gripped his country. In 2004, Ariel Dorfman, Duke University’s distinguished professor of literature and Latin American studies, reminisced:
When I went back to Chile after ten years of exile, I went to see Neruda’s house in Isla Negra. I knew it was boarded up, and what I found there on that extraordinary fence—I found it full of graffiti. And I had not till then understood to what point Neruda was a saint for the people of Chile. Of course there were a lot of anti-dictatorial messages, but most of the messages were “Pablo, I brought my son here, you’re alive.” “Pablo, thanks for having helped me in such a way.” . . . It was full of little messages to him, directly . . . And what’s wonderful about that is that the fence had become symbolic of the way we had gotten rid of the dictatorship . . . in the sense of taking over the public space. Okay, they’ve shut down Neruda’s house, we can’t go to this house—you know what, they can’t stop us writing on the walls. And when they whitewash it, tomorrow we’ll write on it again.
* * *
Chile’s nightmare finally ended in 1988. At the beginning of that decade, Pinochet and the regime felt invincible, strong enough to legitimize their rule and regularize their reforms in a new “constitution of liberty.” They put it to a national plebiscite, which may have seemed bold, but with no safeguards for the opposition and balloting, and with human rights violations still occurring, no one pretended it would be a clean election. The government claimed it received 67 percent of the vote, and, with it, Pinochet was granted an eight-year term as president. Another plebiscite would be held at the end of that term. If the people voted in his favor, then he’d have an additional eight years in office. If not, democracy would return. Pinochet always believed he would rule for life.
But the tide began to turn against the dictatorship. The strong economy, a source of great pride and a bulwark of Pinochet’s power, collapsed in 1982. The recession allowed widespread protests to break out, protests that opened up space for a broader section of the population to voice their opposition. Meanwhile, by 1987, Pinochet was the only dictator left standing in the region: Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, Argentina, and Uruguay had returned to democracy after suffering through their own military dictatorships. Mikhail Gorbachev was introducing democratic reforms in the Soviet Union. Western Europe and even the United States pressured Pinochet to restrain himself.*
Pope John Paul II’s 1987 visit to Chile was a tipping point. He said the Catholic Church must work to bring democracy back to the Chilean people and accused the “dictatorial” government of trampling on human rights and using torture against its opponents. This pronouncement electrified the opposition, as it stripped away the false Chile that the regime tried to present. On one day of his visit, students chanted, “John Paul, brother, take the tyrant with you!” outside a cathedral where he was delivering a homily, until the police’s tear gas, batons, and dogs forced them to run.
The pope reportedly advised Pinochet to resign when they met privately.
The 1988 plebiscite was a yes-or-no vote for one single candidate, General Augusto Pinochet. Under his dictatorship, the Chilean military had been responsible for the murder, disappearance, and death by torture of some 3,197 citizens, with thousands upon thousands more brutally tortured, arbitrarily imprisoned, forced into exile, or subjugated to other forms of state-sponsored terror. Beginning in 1980, seventeen different political parties had revived and formed a rather unified opposition. Ruptures that had once helped open the doors for Pinochet, namely between the Socialists and Christian Democrats, now healed. Their vast grassroots voter registration drive, starting several years before, was vital. Despite worries of violence or fraud, more than 7.5 million Chileans registered to vote. The “NO” campaign was based around their “Happiness Is Coming” slogan—broadcast during slotted TV times in the two weeks leading up to the vote, in ads, in posters and flyers hung up and down the country—accompanied by a graphic of a rainbow.
On October 5, 1988, 97 percent of registered voters participated in the election, a rate that ensured the historic validity of this democratic choice by the Chilean people. It was a relatively orderly process, with few disturbances or complaints. In the end, 54.7 percent voted “no” to Pinochet staying in power, 43 percent “yes.” Spontaneous rallies and celebrations broke out the length of that long, thin petal of a country.
When they realized what had just happened, “there was a sense that a great weight had been taken off our shoulders. I guess it was fear,” explains the poet Rodrigo Rojas, who was seventeen at the time. “We had grown so accustomed to fear without even knowing that it was there. Since the campaign for the ‘no’ was based on the phrase ‘Happiness Is Coming,’ in a way we truly believed in the phrase. Suddenly with this vote we all felt a little bit lighter, much lighter.”*
With the return of democracy came the return of Neruda. The doors of Isla Negra opened again, now to the public, to the world. The Pablo Neruda Foundation took charge of his estate. It was the legal entity Matilde had put in place to protect and organize everything, from their property to his copyrights, as there were no specific heirs to their estate, and she was growing sick. In the years after Neruda’s death, Matilde had championed the preservation of her husband’s legacy as the regime tried to diminish it. Matilde was boldly outspoken against the regime. She died of cancer in 1985 at the age of seventy. Bedridden in La Chascona during her final days, Matilde told her friends that she was happy, eager to return to her Pablo. She was buried next to him in the Santiago cemetery.
Isla Negra had suffered some damage from a small earthquake, flooding, and years of neglect during the dictatorship. By April 1990, all the repairs and transformations had been made for it to be opened to the public as a museum, a casa-museo, as all three of his houses would be. Gabriel García Márquez was one of the many major cultural and political figures who came to the event. Swiss and German diplomats were praised for their countries’ financial contributions to the restoration. The opening of Isla Negra was seen by many as one of the most important, iconic milestones in the transition back to a free Chile.
