Neruda, p.2
Neruda, page 2
I turned to Mario Fernández Núñez and asked him what he thought of Neruda. The whole time we had been talking, he had been preparing bundles of cilantro for his market stand. His hands did not pause in their work when he answered, “Well, he’s our national poet. He won the Nobel Prize.”
“And what does that mean to you?” I asked.
“Well, first, it’s pride, an honor. And secondly, for us, Pablo Neruda, beyond all the poetry, was a very good person. Remember that he was practically the ambassador—he brought the Spanish over here when Spain was in a dictatorship.”
These experiences provided breathing insight that could not be found on the printed pages of the books I found at the Stanford Library, the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile, the Library of Congress, or Neruda’s own archives, or in so many key sources I’ve been grateful for in between.
* * *
In 2004, Isabel Allende, the globally renowned Chilean author, provided the narration for my documentary. Isabel lives in Marin County, and on a spectacular day, I drove her over the Golden Gate Bridge to the recording studio in my beat-up, graffiti-tagged old Subaru. My creative collaborator, Tanya Vlach, was in the back seat, and we listened, exhilarated, to Isabel’s enthusiastic account of her young granddaughter’s ability to invent tales of magical realism, and then she switched back to Neruda, to what he meant to her.
Isabel was thirty-one at the time of the coup. President Salvador Allende was her father’s cousin. She was an ambitious young journalist, writing humor articles for Chile’s first feminist magazine. She had met Neruda personally, at his home in Isla Negra, and his suggestion that she write novels rather than articles, as she had a penchant for exaggeration, would one day prove prophetic in her life. When the poet died, Isabel braved the streets for his funeral, though she stayed close to the tall Swedish ambassador, believing if the soldiers were to start firing, they wouldn’t shoot at leading diplomats. She stayed in Chile for another year, but freedom of the press ended the day of the coup. Despite all her efforts, in the new climate of censorship, her attempts to work as a journalist were futile. And eventually the dictatorship became too threatening: “The circle of repression was closing around my neck.”
An opportunity arose where she and her family could flee safely into exile if they acted quickly. They did. Isabel could not take much with her. As she recounted to us, she took with her a small bag with dirt from her garden and just two books. One was Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America, a history of the centuries of exploitation by foreign governments and multinational corporations that left countries like Chile so vulnerable to the horrors that had just occurred. The other was an old edition of Neruda’s poetry, a volume of his odes—not his typical love poems or political verses, but rather these utterly unique, beautiful, and brilliant poems that convey the social utility in everyday objects. “With Neruda’s words,” she has said, “I was taking a part of Chile with me, for Neruda was such a part of the country”—and such a part of the political dreams that had just been destroyed.
She took the soil of the country she loved, and she took Neruda.
Earth and poetry: two powerful, enduring sources of identity, inspiration, and hope, as seen in Isabel’s suitcase, as well as in the continued endurance of Neruda’s work. Earth and poetry: grounding, yet fertile.
Crystallized in Isabel’s story is a sentiment that runs through Neruda’s work and legacy: that poetry serves a purpose. Poetry is not only for the elite or for intellectuals, but for everyone—from the people in the market to Justice Minister Sergio Insunza and Isabel Allende, from Verónica studying feminist literature while working at Neruda’s house to that grief-stricken man with missing teeth, tearfully calling out “¡Presente!” Neruda’s life is nothing less than a testimony to poetry’s power to be so much more than pretty words on paper; it is an essential part of the fabric of human existence, one that mirrors culture and plays a role in shaping it. Yes, it evokes emotions, but it can also shift social consciousness, sparking both individual and collective change.
* * *
I am finishing the writing of this biography just at the end of the first hundred days of Trump’s presidency. Ever since his election, “resistance” has become the operative word in our new political reality, including for poets: on April 21, 2017, for example, the New York Times featured an article—on the front page, the first time the art form had been featured there in decades—titled “American Poets, Refusing to Go Gentle, Rage Against the Right.” What does one of the most iconic and important resistance poets of the past century give us now, both in the utility of his actual words and in his example? How can his words stir people to action, or provide space for reflection, even healing? What might this poet’s tumultuous and influential journey through political upheavals, uprisings, and exiles offer us as we continue to shape the next chapter in our own cultural story? In our current, unprecedented times, what is the relationship between literature and politics, between artists and social change? My hope is that this book will offer readers an opportunity to explore these questions alongside the vivid details of Neruda’s life and work, which find renewed purpose and relevance every day.
Chapter One
To Temuco
A man was born
among many
who were born.
He lived among many men
who also lived,
and that alone is not so much history
as earth itself,
the central part of Chile, where
vines unwind their green tresses,
grapes feed on the light,
wine is born from the feet of the people.
—“The Birth”
Pablo Neruda’s father, José del Carmen Reyes Morales, grew up in the late nineteenth century on a farm outside the town of Parral, two hundred miles south of the Chilean capital, Santiago. The landscape there was picturesque: well-irrigated orchards, flower farms, and vineyards stretching across fields at the foothills of the Andes. In this long, thin country, never more than 110 miles wide, Parral sat in the shadows of the mountains some sixty miles east of the Pacific Ocean. The area was short on rainfall but long on hot, dry sun, unusual for the fertile Central Valley. So all that beauty didn’t count for much when it came to feeding an extensive family from land that lacked good access to water, which was the case for José del Carmen’s parents on their hacienda-type farm. They had named it Belén, the Spanish spelling for Bethlehem.
José del Carmen had inherited his mother’s striking blue eyes, but she, Natalia Morales, barely had time to look into them; she died shortly after giving birth, in 1872. He was left to his imposing father, José Angel Reyes Hermosilla. The authoritarian patriarch wanted to instill the fear of God in José del Carmen and the thirteen more children he’d have with a new wife. His booming voice was frightening. He rarely cracked a smile.
Their property had a little more than 250 cultivable acres, which was rather modest compared with other haciendas of that type in Chile at the time. They struggled to eke out a subsistence living farming its soil. The family had little money to invest in crops and animals, or in rich rootstock for vines. With fourteen children, there were simply too many mouths to feed on a farm that didn’t have enough hands of age to successfully work the stubborn soil.
As José del Carmen grew, so did his frustration with farm life. Despite all their acreage, he felt claustrophobic with so many siblings and an overbearing father. In 1891, at the age of twenty, he took his dreams for a different life to the burgeoning salty port town of Talcahuano, 150 miles by steam train to the southwest, where a great public works project had just begun. It was a whole new world, and a stark contrast to the confines of repressive religion back at Belén. Here the future was open and his responsibilities were few, and shortly after he arrived he joined a team building dry docks down by the wharf.
José del Carmen’s home in Talcahuano was a cold pension run by a Catalan widow with three young daughters. The pension was only a few blocks from the port, and it housed a few other dockworkers who had come from the provinces for work. José del Carmen’s sense of possibilities was sparked further by the social interaction within this urban society in an international port—so different from the enclosed, rigid world of Belén and the small, provincial Parral. Meanwhile, he was witnessing a historic period of transformation in southern Chile, with the import of machinery to exploit the land and turn it into an agricultural region, and the export of some of the first products.
His time at the port moved him further away from the influence of his father, allowing him to find his own identity and instilling in him a nonreligious, rational outlook on life. At the pension down by the docks, he came to know the owner’s teenage daughter Aurelia Tolrá, who would become a close confidante. As José wandered between Parral and Talcahuano in search of work, the pension would be an important location to which he’d return often.
* * *
Charles Sumner Mason was born in Portland, Maine, in 1829. He would come to play a fundamental role in Neruda’s life. While many Europeans immigrated to Chile, especially the south, very few North Americans did. Though his exact motivation for traveling to South America isn’t certain, after a supposed stop in Peru, he came to Parral in 1866 at the age of thirty-seven. He arrived with another American (Henry “Enrique” St. Clair), who was enticed by Chile’s rich mineral deposits. At one point the two would formally set up a business venture to explore silver deposits in the hills.
Mason would soon involve himself in many matters in Parral. By 1891, when José del Carmen was starting his adventures and coming and going from the farm outside Parral, Mason marked his twenty-fifth anniversary of living in Chile. He was a well-settled family man, husband to Micaela Candia, the daughter of an important Parral businessman. He was the father of eight. He was so widely respected during his life that people would often ask him to arbitrate disputes. He even represented José del Carmen’s father in a lawsuit in 1889.
Eventually Mason headed to the newly founded pioneer town of Temuco, some two hundred miles to the south. There, he and his family could expand on what they had established in Parral, taking advantage of all the opportunities that the exciting frontier could offer. Temuco and its surroundings were Chile’s “Far West,” as Neruda would describe it in his memoirs. Just two decades earlier, the indigenous Mapuche people of the region—an area of ancient forests, snowcapped volcanoes, and breathtaking volcanic lakes—had finally submitted to the Chilean military. The Mapuche’s three-century-long resistance, dating back to 1535, had constituted the longest continual war of indigenous people defending their native lands and rights against colonial encroachment in the history of the Americas. With the Mapuche defeated, the town of Temuco was formed in 1881 next to a Chilean fort, where the peace accords were finally signed that same year.
The virgin territory now being relatively safe for settlement and exploitation, Mason, among others, wanted to be sure to get in on the opportunity. In 1888, shortly after his father-in-law died (there’s no record of the date of his mother-in-law’s death), Mason began to act in earnest toward his new ambition. That year he placed a small ad in a regional newspaper offering his services as a bookkeeper. Through this work, he was able to provide critical help to all the entrepreneurs setting up new businesses in the south who had little formal business experience. With his skill and integrity, he earned trust and respect among the key players in Temuco. Combining this with his ease at establishing personal relationships, he quickly ascended to the top of the city’s social and political scene.
Mason was still going back and forth between Temuco and Parral when his seventh child, Laura, was born in 1889. By 1891, the whole family had moved to Temuco for good. Nearly all of his wife Micaela’s seven siblings moved there with him.
The national railroad arrived in Temuco in 1893, a seminal event in a burgeoning frontier town. In 1897, Mason built the Hotel de la Estación right in front of the station—fifty meters from the ticket window, to be exact—on land he had managed to obtain at a significant discount or perhaps even through a free land grant. It advertised itself with the English title THE PASSENGER’S HOME, and noted SE HABLA INGLÉS, ALEMÁN Y FRANCÉS. The hotel allowed Mason to further strengthen his social and political influence in up-and-coming Temuco, as government functionaries, businessmen, important members of the state railroad company, political candidates on their campaigns, and tourists all would either stay or at least eat at the hotel. It also became a meeting place for local politicians.
Not long after he turned twenty-one, José del Carmen traveled by train to Temuco. Its population had just passed ten thousand, with some twenty-five thousand people pioneering the countryside around it. The town was dominated by a recent wave of mostly Swiss German immigrants. The Chilean government wanted to set up an agricultural economy, particularly to help meet the growing food demands of miners in the arid north, where the mining industry was booming. In order to attract people who had enough capital and capability to exploit the virgin frontier, the Chilean government enacted the Law of Selective Immigration—“selective” as in only upstanding European citizens looking for new opportunities and of a sufficient socioeconomic level who would be able to colonize and enrich the area. Toward this end, these immigrants were granted swaths of land, tax exemptions, and other incentives. They would form a broad society, founding new towns and cities and dominating local politics, while establishing ties between the region and the national political scene as never before. They would dominate the social and class structure of the region for decades.
José del Carmen would also witness the domestic migration of adventurous Chileans of all economic stripes to the incipient town, people looking for the excitement of uncharted territory and the opportunities that come from expansion, as Mason and his relatives had done. The remainder of the population was mostly former soldiers who settled down after the war against the Mapuche and the War of the Pacific, hoping to find jobs, and people teetering on the edge of tenement life in Santiago who had enough to head south to try their luck. These latter groups offered a striking contrast to the European colonials and other more “dignified” citizenry. The recently incarcerated, the desperate and jobless, and the former soldiers often drank excessively, which frequently led to fist and knife fights. Newcomers dealt with a variety of new challenges, including the need to fortify themselves against the cold of seemingly endless winters drenched in rain, now being so close to the southern tip of South America.
Temuco was colorful and studded with diverse characters both within its borders and outside of town, such as the huasos, the gentlemen of the countryside who would ride their white horses into town for supplies and drink. These men were extremely skilled horsemen, often landowners, and they distinguished themselves with their short, colorful ponchos decorated in broad primary-color stripes and their flat-brimmed black straw hats rimmed with ribbon, called chupallas. Even the stirrups of their saddles were carved by hand. They had maintained this artisan craft as they migrated from the north over the previous decades.
When José del Carmen first stepped off the train onto the muddy platform, he saw a station crowded with women wearing floor-length dresses and ornate bonnets escorted by men in suits, the local gentry. There were also people in simpler clothes, those in laborers’ threads, and a few vendors in well-worn sombreros selling bread and cheese for those about to take the train north.
José would have been amazed to see another kind of people: the Mapuche. These indigenous people were so low on the social scale that they weren’t considered part of the town’s population and were forbidden to live within its confines. The women wore beautiful, distinctive silver jewelry over their wide black ponchos; the men wore ponchos of many colors. The majority of Chilean citizens, including those in power, treated the Mapuche as outcasts.
Because they were not allowed to live within the boundaries of Temuco itself, the Mapuche came into town from the fields and forests to trade and left at night, the men on horseback, the women on foot. Most of the Mapuche couldn’t read Spanish, and their native language, Mapudungun, had no written form. Thus, as José walked the streets that first day, he kept looking up at the enormous representations of objects hanging outside stores to convey what goods they sold: “an enormous cooking pot, a gigantic padlock, an Antarctic spoon,” as Neruda would later recount in his memoirs. “Farther along the street, shoe stores, a colossal boot.”
Mason knew of José del Carmen from José’s father, but José del Carmen was just one of his friend’s fourteen children. José may have spent a few nights in Temuco, but he wouldn’t have been able to just stay for free at the hotel, nor would Mason have had a job waiting for him. So José continued his travels back and forth between Talcahuano and Parral, scraping together work as he found it. It was an austere but free life. But then, on a visit to Temuco in 1895, José had an intimate encounter with Trinidad, Mason’s sister-in-law. He had a wanderer’s charm, and the twenty-six-year-old Trinidad, whose long, angular face was more interesting than beautiful, had little to entertain her in Mason’s frontier compound.
It was a short-lived passion, but it had lifelong ramifications for both. This affair would be one of several clandestine relationships conducted by people with some relation to Charles Mason. Neruda’s childhood was undeniably influenced by these unspoken histories and their repercussions.
Trinidad knew the consequences of taking a lover. Four years earlier, the first of several secret scandals had occurred. Trinidad had a son, Orlando, from an earlier affair with Rudecindo Ortega, a twenty-two-year-old seasonal farm laborer whom Mason had invited down from Parral to help him get things started in Temuco. Micaela and Mason, the boy’s aunt and uncle, were irate at Trinidad’s indiscretion and quickly adopted Orlando. The circumstances of Orlando’s birth were never mentioned outside Mason’s household.
