Neruda, p.39
Neruda, page 39
* * *
Neruda’s most important work to date in terms of heft, scope, and the time he spent composing it was out, and it was a powerful success. It had been written on the run, except for “The Heights of Macchu Picchu” and “Canto general de Chile,” composed between February 1948 and January 1949. These sections were born out of anger, as Neruda admitted, spurred by the political situation created by González Videla. Yet as he says in the poem “I End Here” and elsewhere, although the book was born from fury, he nevertheless remains positive through the end.
Though he would have liked to have been able to return to his cherished Chile, he was doing quite well in Europe and Mexico. Through his political appearances, and with Canto General’s celebrated release to the public, he seemed to eclipse González Videla, whom the world viewed as a petty tyrant. Neruda told an interviewer that in writing Canto General, “I had two immense sources of happiness: on one hand, the satisfaction of my book; on the other, its intangible elements of struggle.”
However, all this satisfaction was dampened when the book’s immediate reception fell far short of his expectations. After the book signing, there weren’t any of the expected homages. Not one article of any significant interest was published about the book’s importance in the international press. Those who did write about it at first seemed more interested in the author than the content, skirting around it, perhaps due to apprehension about being the first to critique such a monumental work. Or maybe the sheer magnitude of the book was too intimidating to take on right away, as several scholars have surmised. Even Alone never reviewed the complete Canto General; rather he just wrote about individual, separate parts of the epic, such as “The Heights of Macchu Picchu,” as they were released, before the complete book was published. He was impressed by the poems but in the end didn’t personally care for them.
Neruda was struck by this apparent indifference toward his epic work, produced with great effort, written by possibly the most famous living Latin American poet at the time. He knew it was good; his friends reassured him of it. While recognition would come later, at the time Neruda felt a disturbing emptiness that he hadn’t experienced for a long time. He wanted to leave Mexico. He had recovered from the thrombosis in his leg, but his passion for Matilde had swelled in his heart and mind.
As it became time for him and Delia to return to the normality of their life-in-exile in Europe, representing the Communist Party as needed, both Neruda and Matilde felt that what had occurred between them during the previous ten months, what they felt for each other now, was quite serious. Matilde had been committed to building something real with him from the start. Neruda came to realize that his feelings for her had gone beyond simple attraction to her beauty and charm, or the fact that Delia was now sixty-six.
Delia was still either ambivalent or in denial. The three had even made a quick trip to Guatemala together as he became more mobile, just before the signing party. It would be the first of many times the trio would travel together, and despite the other two’s clear romantic connection, it would be several years until Delia finally gave agency to her suspicions.
Upon their departure, Matilde installed herself in an apartment on the Paseo de la Reforma, down the street from where Neruda and Delia had lived. She made a life for herself, spending many weekends in Cuernavaca, a town she adored. Still, the man she loved and the life she wanted were in Europe.
Neruda and Delia started a surge of traveling as they returned to Europe in June 1950, a frantic international pace driven by requests for him to appear at political events from one country to the next. By planes, trains, and automobiles, the two spent time in Prague, Paris, Moscow, New Delhi, Bucharest, Warsaw, Geneva, Berlin, Beijing, and many parts of Italy.
Matilde lost the baby in Mexico, but she would not lose Neruda. It would take a year, a very long year, but Matilde eventually joined him in Paris. With the help of his friends, Neruda manipulated the levers of the Communist Parties in the various countries to act as a go-between, creating a diverse, almost nonstop itinerary of political/literary (the latter now just a stage for the former) activities of all stripes, most often with financing, which gave him more opportunities to pursue his clandestine relationship with Matilde. Their love flourished, though his poetry suffered from the constant travel and the uncertainty, not to mention his continued embrace of Stalinism and, with it, socialist realism. Regardless of the politics behind the style, it flattened his work. He did, however, manage to write one of his most beloved books of love poetry, Los versos del capitán (The Captain’s Verses), to Matilde, finished right before they finally returned to Chile.
Chapter Eighteen
Matilde and Stalin
Oh you, the one I love,
little one, red grain
of wheat,
the struggle will be hard,
life will be hard,
but you will come with me.
—“The Mountain and the River”
In November 1950, at the World Peace Council’s Second World Congress in Warsaw, Neruda was awarded the World Peace Prize for “Let the Rail-Splitter Awake.” Paul Robeson, Pablo Picasso, and others also received the award. The West always suspected the World Peace Council was a front organization formed and funded by Soviet intelligence, and Moscow did, in fact, aid it financially. The prize money, a million French francs, or around $100,000 at that time, was delivered to Neruda—in cash—in Paris.
Neruda gave the suitcase stuffed with cash to a friend, Inés Figueroa, the wife of the Chilean painter Nemesio Antúnez, and asked her to take care of it. She first hid it in her apartment and then deposited it in a bank account, despite her fears that “tax inspectors or people like that would come by someday to ask me about where it had come from.”
Inés became Neruda’s bookkeeper and book buyer. “He was tyrannical and adorable,” she reflected later. Neruda would write or call her to ask her to buy a first edition of Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell, Victor Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea, and Charles Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil. He had her buy a thirty-nine-volume set of the revolutionary French Enlightenment Encyclopédie (a book that would directly influence some of his future poetry), an edition of Shakespeare’s poetry from 1630, and much more.
Inés was a scrupulous administrator who suffered interminably watching the speed with which Neruda spent his money. Her account books were meticulously detailed. He would give them a distracted glance, then ask, “But how much is left?” Inés worked to make sure Neruda was receiving royalties from the many editions of his work that were beginning to appear in different languages across Europe and Asia. This effort yielded large sums, surprising Neruda, who had earned little even from Twenty Love Poems for a long time.
With the new royalties added to the prize money, Neruda started to spend without restraint: old, rare books and manuscripts, seashells, antiques, plane tickets, good hotels, and pocket money for hard-up Chileans and other kindred Latin Americans traveling through Europe—“poets, students, painters, filmmakers, musicians, or whoever else—in search of art, love, and revolution.” He also instructed Inés that “if this Chilean girl comes from Mexico . . . Matilde Urrutia—a very responsible person—give her 10,000 francs.”
Neruda and Delia had rented a little three-story chalet at 12 rue Pierre Mille in the Fifteenth Arrondissement, right behind the Porte de Versailles. It was a popular, bohemian neighborhood that Neruda enjoyed. He roamed among mustached French workers, open markets, and cozy bistros. Each floor of the chalet was a separate apartment. Delia and Neruda lived on the first floor, which included a bedroom, living room, dining room, and kitchen.
Delia, who cared nothing about the interior design, had signed the rental agreement in her name, telling the owner that her husband, “Monsieur del Carril,” was temporarily out of the country. As it already felt like an ideal art studio, Inés; her husband, Nemesio; and their young son, Pablo, took the second floor. Neruda and Delia rented the top floor for themselves as well, just so no stranger, or possible spy, could occupy it.
Neruda could not stay too long in Paris at one time, as the Chilean government was exerting a great deal of effort to convince France to expel or extradite him. France was an allied country that, as much as it respected the romantic image of Neruda, did not like his outspoken Stalinist side. As a guest of the Czech Writers’ Union, Neruda took up a residency at the Dobříš Castle outside of Prague. It became his second home base from which he would travel to other countries, usually France and Italy, meeting with writer and painter friends, participating in peace assemblies, reciting poems, and speaking about Chile. At this point, all governments kept him under strict surveillance and gave him only short-term visas.
One day while Delia and Neruda were at the castle, a former Spanish Republican general told them their mutual friend Artur London, the Czech vice minister of foreign affairs, had been imprisoned. Czechoslovakia’s president, Klement Gottwald, was cracking down on Communists who resisted Stalin. London and thirteen other high-ranking party members had been arrested and tortured, accused of being Titoists, Trotskyites, and Zionists; eleven of the fourteen were Jewish. After their show trials in 1952, London would be one of just three who were not hanged, but he would spend fourteen years in prison. Similar purges occurred in the new regimes in Hungary and Bulgaria. Even as his friends became victims of Stalin’s repression, Neruda remained uncritical of the Soviet leader. He had wrapped himself in Stalin’s flag, so committed now that it seems he lacked the courage to renounce it.
* * *
Nearly a year had passed since Neruda had returned to Europe from Mexico City following his phlebitis and the release of Canto General. Finally, the situation was right for Matilde and Neruda to reunite. On the stationery of Geneva’s Hotel Cornavin, he wrote to her that they would arrange for her to travel to Europe by ship in early January 1952. “Our angel or devil continues to watch over our love and H. [la Hormiga] has accepted it fully.” He ends the letter:
Perhaps you’ll have good news for me as well: that you’re the same as I left you: firm, loved, sweet, brave, happy, responsible, faithful, and hugged for a lifetime by your
Captain.
Delia may have seemed “generous and full of youthful happiness,” as if “she never aged,” as Aida Figueroa said. But Neruda now needed more than character, intellect, companionship, political alliance, editorial help, and deep friendship. She had been an important bedrock for him for some fifteen very intense years, and she had influenced him like few other people. And yet there was no denying the fact that she was closing in on seventy, while Matilde was not yet forty. And Matilde was as Neruda hoped she would be: a vital, happy, firm, strong, attentive woman, ready to devote herself to him.
Matilde was simple, natural, and earthen, just like the rural town where she grew up in a large family with little money. She had to struggle to get by, working at a variety of jobs. While Matilde had little cultural training, she was extraordinarily intelligent, as well as spontaneous, willful, capable, and strong. For her part, Delia was extremely intelligent and cultured, with an education rooted in Paris, funded by tremendously rich parents. But she was not well versed in the mundane essentials: Delia could barely make eggs. Matilde offered domesticity. Her adoration for Neruda was warm, effusive, dedicated, and romantic. It swelled his heart and pride. When he was around Matilde, especially at first, he would beam with an almost childlike joy, even seeming to act a bit giddy at times. Though Delia still admired him, it was in a less affectionate way. And Matilde also offered something Delia could not: youth.
Many in Matilde’s family were militant Communists, but she wasn’t political. If anything, she seemed at this time to be conservative in comparison to Neruda and his friends; the Marxist Delia she was not. While Neruda was caught up in his promotion of Stalinism, this may have been a welcome relief, a sanctuary to escape the constant political rhetoric and show driving his life at the moment.
When Matilde first arrived in Paris, Neruda was unable to meet her; he had been in Eastern Europe, and the French had denied him reentry. He sent Matilde a welcoming telegram and told her to meet him at the Third World Festival of Youth and Students in East Berlin. At the festival, Neruda spoke out against Truman, imperialism, and the Korean War.
When Matilde arrived in Berlin, her friends told her that Pablo was at the theater at the moment and that he wanted her to meet him there immediately. As Matilde wrote in her memoir, “I was radiant. I got to the theater and there he was. His face lit up when he saw me. We embraced and he said to me, ‘This is over. I never want to be separated from you again.’”
The next day, Matilde played her guitar and sang at the festival, and later that evening Neruda surprised her in her hotel room when she returned. Neruda had the boisterous Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet convince a dubious Delia that he and Neruda had to attend an urgent, nonexistent party meeting that would last until dawn and that her presence was not required. This was the first of many lies to Delia that involved fictitious party meetings as a way to be with Matilde. With Delia duped, the lovers had the whole night to themselves. As Matilde placed her head on Neruda’s chest, she said, “You have the smell of tenderness.”
“Be careful!” Neruda answered. “That’s poetry—don’t go literary on me.”
When the East Berlin festival ended, Matilde received an invitation to sing on the radio in Czechoslovakia, where Neruda and Delia were traveling as well. The three of them went together by car. Two weeks later, at the end of August, they went to Bucharest, Romania. They all stayed together in one large house. Neruda and Matilde pretended that they were jovial, good friends, and Delia seemed to accept this.
One night while they were entertaining Romanian friends, Neruda slipped away. When he came back he secretly passed Matilde a piece of paper. It was a poem, “Always,” the first of many he would write to her in Europe, which would form the book The Captain’s Verses:
In front of you,
I’m not jealous.
Come with a man
at your back,
come with a hundred men in your hair,
come with a thousand men between your breasts and your feet,
come like a river,
full of drowned men
that finds the furious sea,
the eternal foam, the weather.
Bring them all
where I wait for you:
we will always be alone,
we will always be you and I,
alone upon the earth
to begin life.
The poem is curious, as Matilde was already in love with him and would never be with another man. Neruda, on the other hand, had both Delia and Maruca to contend with.
In her memoir, Matilde wrote that she wasn’t jealous of Delia; instead, she “saw her like a solicitous and affectionate mother or older sister who took care of him.” But living in the same house with her was difficult. The intensity of Matilde and Pablo’s love, the restrictions the situation placed on it, and the confusion and discomfort caused by the secrecy became too much. Matilde broke out with a terrible case of hives. Neruda prioritized finding time to be with her then, and the two Chileans took a trip alone to Constant¸a on the Black Sea. Yet the vacation didn’t alleviate her symptoms, despite the poetry Neruda was writing for her daily and despite Delia’s relative acceptance of her presence. The inability to be fully out in the open during a period of constant travel and the uncertainty of when Neruda actually might leave his wife were just all too much for her. As grounded as she could appear, her emotions were getting the best of her, living their love this way. She told Neruda, at least for leverage, that she wanted to end the affair, go back to Paris and then Mexico.
They returned to Bucharest, where Matilde would board a train to Paris and Neruda would fly to Prague and Delia. Matilde wrote that their good-bye was so emotional that afterward she turned and ran away from her lover. But before she ran, Neruda gave her a letter to read later. She opened it on the train. It was a poem, “The Potter”:
Your whole body holds
a goblet or gentle sweetness destined for me.
When I let my hand climb,
in each place I find a dove
that was looking for me, as if
my love, they had made you out of clay
for my very own potter’s hands.
Your knees, your breasts,
your waist
are missing in me, like in the hollow
of a thirsting earth
where they relinquished
a form,
and together
we are complete like one single river,
like one single grain of sand.
But the next poem in the letter furiously blamed Matilde for having lost their baby in Mexico. Neruda had already accused her of not taking enough care of the baby and herself. He entitled the poem “La pródiga”—the prodigal, the squanderer, the wasteful woman.
I ask you, where is my son?
Didn’t he await me inside you, recognizing me,
and telling me, “Call on me to come onto the land
to continue your struggles and your songs”?
Give me back my son!
“As I read those words, I felt as if they had been addressed to a different woman,” Matilde wrote after Neruda died. “Nothing had ever mattered more to me than to have his child.” Still, there is no sign that she defended herself directly from his reproach in the days after reading those scathing, authoritative lines. He would actually include the poem in The Captain’s Verses. This was cruel and narcissistic in any case, but Neruda’s recent history makes it all the more galling. After having blithely abandoned his first child with hardly a glance back, now he was righteously indignant for having lost his second, callously hurling blame at the mistress he claimed to love.
