THE ROAD TO IGUAZÚ

Chapter X
Sube a nacer conmigo
Rise to be born with me
Chile

1. A Neruda Pilgrimage

If we know only one Latin American poet, it is Pablo Neruda (1904–1973). North American poets feel a special kinship with Neruda: his influence more than anyone’s opened our own poetry from its mid–century Anglophile lockstep, and we admire his militant social commitment. And yet his native Chile remains mysterious to us. The one thing we all know about the history of Chile is the military coup of September 11, 1973, which preceded the death of the Poet by just twelve days.

My first visit to Chile in July 1992 was a personal Neruda pilgrimage. I was impressed by the richness, splendor and variety of Chilean poetry, but what was hard for me to accept was the extent to which Pablo Neruda has been questioned and even rejected by contemporary Chilean poets.

Becky and I decided to go to Chile at the very last minute, and we arrived with no poetry–related phone numbers. We emerged from our North American summer via twenty–four airline hours into rainy Santiago winter, got soaked finding a breakfast empanada on the honking Alameda, and retreated into a creaking bed in the coldest room of the Residencial Londres (across the street from a former Military Intelligence torture center) in a high state of alienated jet lag. What were we doing in the Southern Hemisphere? Even the water swirled down the drain in the wrong direction.

By evening the rain slowed. We walked around the dark bulk of the Cerro Santa Lucía, a last outcrop of the Andes jutting out from downtown Santiago, and stumbled into a bookstore in the Plaza Mulato Gil. Did they have any current Chilean poetry? The clerk scoured the shelves, and as I rifled through small press editions trying to form opinions on a quick skim, he asked me pointedly what I thought of one little red volume, Asunto de Ojo (A Matter of Eye). “Seems like the poet goes into a lot of bars,” I fumbled. “I’d like you to meet the author,” he said. Carlos Decap (born 1958): a quiet person, haunted and true, like his poetry, not impressive, not trying to impress.

In the Acapulco Bar the waitress
tells me about the days of easy money
when the prostitutes
came down like lovely flowers from the hils.
After they killed Che the Mafia arrived
and the police dropped in every afternoon.
A Wurlitzer in the middle of the bar
seems like a monument to better days.
Now all you hear are out–of–tune
cumbias on the radio
in the light of the universe of red cellophane.

We followed Carlos to a book party in a hall full of tobacco smoke and mumbling chileno Spanish which took me weeks to click into. Afterwards, over beers, Carlos invited me to participate in a poetry marathon at the University. There were dozens of poets, angry, lyrical and intense. As we left after three hours of poetry the crowd was perceptibly thinning. “That’s the game,” said Carlos. “The last poet left is the autolector. He reads to himself.”

2. La Araucana

Chile was founded in an epic poem. Alonzo de Ercilla (1533–1594), a contemporary of Spenser and Tasso, immortalized the tough resistance the rapacious Conquistadors encountered at the hands of Chile’s indigenous Mapuche people in La Araucana, some 17,000 lines of ottava rima. This American Iliad, celebrating the nobility of native and invader, planted the seeds of specifically Chilean national awareness at the ends of the earth.

Lautaro was wise, industrious and quick,
of grand intelligence and sane counsel,
mild in his manner and noble in gesture,
neither large nor small in stature;
he put his spirit into large things,
strong to endure and remain composed,
hard, tough and nervous his limbs,
his back broad and his breast spacious.

Lautaro was a Mapuche orphan who turned up in the Spanish camp at the age of eleven, charming the conquistador Pedro de Valdivia and his compañera Inés Suárez (the only white woman on the expedition and herself the protagonist of a terrific novel, Ay Mamá Inés, by Jorge Guzmán). Lautaro was baptized Felipe and set to work as a stableboy. At sixteen, riding like a god, he ran off with a ramada of horses and put himself at the head of a Mapuche rebellion which succeeded in slaying his godfather Valdivia -- one version has it by forcing him to drink molten gold.

After a stray arrow killed Lautaro, his rebellion was repressed, but in 1599, the Mapuche rose up and expelled the Spanish from all southern Chile from Concepción to Puerto Montt. Riding Lautaro’s horses, they kept the Winka at bay until 1883, when they were finally “pacified” [sic] by the contemporaries of Custer. Today, half a million Mapuche eke out a living on marginal farmland or crowd into poblaciones around cities like Temuco.
Isolated from the Mesoamerican megaculture, which extends in a long gradation from Arizona to the Atacama, Mapuche artwork blazes up into radial and vertebral patterns: heavy necklaces and cascading earrings, and brilliant, thick woollen cloaks and blankets, red, white and black, and the sacred color blue: kallfu. Wool and silver, like the Navajo, reflecting long resistance to, and coexistence with, the invader, the Winka.
A Mapuche family performs traditional dances on the Paseo Ahumada in downtown Santiago,. While the grandmother eerily blasts the kultrún, a sheep–horn extended with reed tubing, and a nephew bangs the deep sheepskin drum, two teenage sisters gallop with long wooden staffs carved into a suggestion of a horse’s head, first round and round, then diagonally at each other, buffeting each other with blows.
Mapuche poet Elicura Chihuailaf (born 1953) writes:

Galloping, galloping, dreaming I go
along the paths of the sky
From all sides the stars come to greet me

Look at this in Mapundungu, the speech of the earth:

Wiraf, wirafgen, pewmantulen amun
Wenu Mapu rupu mew
Wallke pule chalipaenew ti pu wagulen

Wenu Mapu is the sky–earth. Mapu–che are the people of the earth. Pewma is dream. Wagulen are the stars. Roots pile up prefixes and suffixes in an agglutinative fashion, like German. The word kavallu, horse, was introduced to the language of the earth, one imagines, by Lautaro, at the moment when he ceased to be the stable boy Felipe. For verbs of movement, Mapundungu has no present tense. Either the arrow is coming towards you or it has already gone by. This culture is not vulnerable to the stroboscopic parable of Achilles and the tortoise.

3. Neftalí Reyes

Pablo Neruda came from Mapuche country. Born July 12, 1904 in Parral under the name of Eliecer Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basualto, and brought up from age six in Temuco, he credited the mystical landscape of the South of Chile with developing his poetic consciousness. Young Neftalí took his pseudonym, borrowing his last name from a Czech symbolist poet, to avoid the wrath of his father, a railroad conductor, who had no use for poetry. In the late Libro de Preguntas (Book of Questions) he asks:

Is anything stupider in the world
than to name oneself Pablo Neruda?

Becky and I climbed the hills above the harbor to Pablo Neruda’s house La Sebastiana, which spirals up five levels like a boat anchored on the mountainside, every window overlooking the Pacific, and the hassock stained with the green ink Neruda always wrote with. We wandered through La Chascona, the house Neruda built above the Río Mapocho in Santiago as a refuge for his secret love, Matilde Urrutia, anonymously celebrated in Los Versos del Capitán. In September 1973 the soldiers diverted a creek to run through the living room, taking impotent revenge on the famous Communist poet. We toured his famous house at Isla Negra, which seems to rock with every crashing Pacific wave.

In all his houses, we marvelled at Neruda’s collectionism: ships in bottles, butterflies, seashells, still–lives, old maps, first editions, a bottle of scotch that turns out to be a music box, an astrolabe, ship’s figureheads, knick–knacks, doo–dads, and the life–size wooden horse from the firehouse of his Temuco childhood. Jorge Edwards (born 1930), Neruda’s First Counselor at the Chilean Embassy in Paris, has published a wonderful memoir, Adios, Poeta, in which he tells how the Poet saw a fiercely–smiling wooden figurehead of the pirate Henry Morgan in a Paris antique shop. Neruda didn’t have the price -- more than a thousand dollars -- but made a small down payment.

The dealer wasn’t eager to part with the piece, but accepted, figuring the impecunious poet would never come up with the money. A few days later, Neruda got a telegram: he had won a major cash prize in Italy. He rushed over and completed the sale. To salve his sadness at losing the figurehead, the dealer set up a champagne party to solemnize the transaction. Edwards invited a Chilean Communist who happened to be in town, an expert in agrarian reform, along to the fiesta. Neruda took Edwards aside. “You should never have invited so–and–so. When the boys from the Party see me buying expensive stuff like this and carry the word back to Chile, I’ll never live it down.”

Pablo Neruda, or Neftalí Reyes, or whoever he was, was no simple stereotype. We saw Pablo Neruda Viene Volando (Pablo Neruda Comes Flying), a lively stage dramatization which played for over a year in Santiago. Playwright Jorge Díaz explained that he wasn’t interested in beatifying the Poet, rather in “approaching intuitively the contradictions of Pablo Neruda” by having four different actors play the title role, while five actresses played the women in his life. Finally, we traipsed the recesses of Santiago’s General Cementery to the concrete niche where the bones of the greatest poet of this century lay with no more monument than the name he plucked out of the air, and the red carnations brought by the faithful.

4. Gabriela

But Pablo Neruda was not Chile’s first great poet, nor her first poet to win a Nobel Prize, nor even her first poet to become famous under a pseudonym. Lucila Godoy y Alcayaga was born April 7, 1889 in a dirt–floored house in the little town of Vicuña, in the clear mountain valley of the Elqui, three hundred miles north of Santiago. She prided herself on her mixed African, Spanish and Mapuche ancestry. Her father was an itinerant teacher, and the girl spent most of her childhood in the village of Montegrande, a wide spot in the dirt road, where her older stepsister was the schoolmarm.

All of us were going to be queens
in four realms above the sea:
Rosalía with Ifigenia
and Soledad with me.
And Lucila, who talked to the river,
the mountain and the tule field,
in the moons of madness
she got her kingdom for real.

Crucial childhood traumas included being molested and being stoned by schoolmates after Lucila denied an allegation of theft. At 16, she was publishing poems in La Serena, the provincial capital, under various pseudonyms: Alguien. Soledad. Alma. Someone. Loneliness. Soul.

Lucila became a schoolteacher in turn. In 1909, a handsome railroad man, Romelio Ureta Carvajal, whom she jealously fancied, committed suicide over a debt. In 1914, using another pseudonym, Lucila entered three sonnets written in memory of Romelio in the grand national contest of the Floral Games of Santiago. When the results came out, everyone was asking who was this unknown poetisa who won the gold medal and the laurel crown for her Sonetos de la Muerte, and who signed herself, “with the first name of an archangel and the last name of the wind,” Gabriela Mistral?

Out of the frozen niche where men have put you
I’ll bring you down to the humble, sunny earth.
Men will not know that I shall sleep there with you
and that we must dream upon a self–same pillow.
I’ll lay you down in the sunny earth with a
sweetness of mothering for a sleeping child,
and the earth must turn to softness like a cradle
to touch your body of a wounded child.
Then I’ll go scattering earth and dust of roses,
and in the light blue whirlwind of the moon
slight jealous glances will be held prisoner.
I’ll go away singing my lovely vengeance
for to that hidden depth no other woman
will go down to fight me over your fistful of bones.

Both in North America, where Langston Hughes’s lyrical translation took on her slightest poems only, and in Chile, where her simplest verses have been standard classroom recitative fare for a dozen generations of schoolchildren, Gabriela Mistral has acquired the false image of a delicate childhood poet. Her true work is muscular, dark, difficult, mystical, resisting translation in its strictness and rural archaisms. A good comparison among North American poets on all of the above counts would be Robert Frost.

A magnificent teacher and already a nationally–known poet, Lucila Godoy was named Inspector of Schools in a succession of remote posts, in 1918 in Punta Arenas by the Straits of Magellan, and in 1920 in Temuco, where a 16–year–old high–school boy brought her his first verses, signed Neftalí Reyes. “You are a true poet,” said the one future Nobel laureate to the other. “I have never said that to anyone. It would be a crime if you did not go on writing.”

Gabriela Mistral was invited to Mexico in 1922 by José Vasconcelos in order to reform the Mexican educational system. In the final 35 years of her life she practically never returned to Chile. Her books were published abroad: Desolación in New York in 1922, Ternura in Madrid in 1924, Tala in Buenos Aires in 1938. In 1932 she was named honorary Chilean consul for life wherever she might reside. She was in Spain during the Civil War, where she met up again with Neruda, and in Brazil during the Second World War, where her beloved adopted son Juan Miguel, “Yin Yin,” committed suicide at 17. She received honorary degrees from the University of Guatemala and from Mills College. In 1945 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. She represented Chile in the League of Nations and the United Nations. She died in Hampstead, Long Island, in 1957, and she is buried on a hillside above Montegrande, planted with flowers and eucalyptus, looking up to 16,000–foot peaks of the Andes. Her tombstone reads:

LO QUE EL ALMA HACE POR SU CUERPO
ES LO QUE EL ARTISTA HACE POR SU PUEBLO

When the hot new vanguard anthology, Antología de la Poesía Chilena Nueva, edited by eighteen–year–old Volodia Teitelboim and twenty–year–old Eduardo Anguita, came out in 1935, it did not include her, which can be attributed either to a myopic sexism or the stereotype that she was somehow stuck in the previous century; an embarrassment that Teitelboim has sought to rectify by publishing a full–length biography of Mistral. Despite access to her voluminous and often passionate correspondence, Teitelboim does not seem to me to quite get it about Gabriela, and fuller understanding may await a woman biographer.

Gabriela Mistral defined her poetics in a phrase etched in stone outside the museum dedicated to her in Vicuña: “I am learning the maternal meaning of things (el sentido maternal de las cosas). The mountain that watches me is also a mother, and in the afternoons the mist plays like a child around her shoulders and her knees.” The maternal meaning of things: Gabriela never gave birth to her own flesh and blood. Without her key word maternal, this formulation exactly characterizes Neruda, who is above all a poet of the material world. Mistral was also an elemental poet, and her Materias (Materials), poems to Bread, Salt and Water, anticipate by two decades Neruda’s Elemental Odes:

They left a loaf of bread on the table,
one side burned, one side white,
nibbled on top and open
with crumblets white as snow.
It seems new to me, unseen,
something different which never nourished me,
but fumbling at crumbs like a sleepwalker
I forgot all about touch and smell.
It smells of my mother when she gave milk,
it smells of three valleys where I have travelled,
of Aconcagua, of Pátzcuaro, of Elqui,
and of my entrails when I sing.

5. Residence In the Earth

But we left Pablo Neruda standing on Gabriela’s doorway with his first poems in hand. At seventeen he departed for Santiago to be a poet. He wore a long black cape, hung out with bohemians, fell in love with Albertina Azócar, or rather in love with love, and wrote the Veinte Poemas de Amor y una Canción Desesperada (Twenty Love Poems and a Desperate Song), which Neruda later considered juvenilia, but which remains his most popular poetry among the mass of the Chilean people. Poem Twenty, the biggest hit of all, was still capable, nearly half a century after it was written, of inspiring in Jorge Edwards’ words “a gigantic sigh throughout the auditorium, a vast collective swoon,” when the Poet read it in public. Every Chilean knows the opening verses:

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
Write, for example, ‘The night is shattered
and the blue stars shiver in the distance.’

His father was not happy with young Neftalí’s career, or lack of one, and editing a poetry magazine and translating Rilke did not put much congrío and porotos verdes on the table. Desperately seeking some kind of livelihood, the poet got himself named Chilean consul in Rangoon in 1926. Neruda ended up spending six years in Burma, Ceylon, Batavia and Singapore, absolutely isolated from his native language, immersed in exotic cultures, and embroiled in a phantasmagorical affair with the murderously jealous Burmese beauty Josie Bliss. Through these extremes of deprivation and overload, the young poet secreted the hermetic, surreal, wonderfully human poems of Residencia en la Tierra.

Residencia en la Tierra is unanimously considered by Chilean poets, even by those who reject Neruda’s influence, to be his greatest book; in the words of Gonzalo Rojas, “the Neruda that matters.” “Tango del Viudo” is the poem that I keep coming back to these days, ‘The Widow’s Tango,” Neruda’s farewell to Josie Bliss as he sails away to Ceylon, imagining her fury at finding his letter and his “old shoes empty forever.” The humble things take life here, the kitchen knife he buried “for fear you would kill me,” underground “under the moistness of the earth, among the deaf roots,” which “out of all human languages only knew your name.” And finally, what he most achingly misses in the bittersweet remorse of his escape is

to hear you piss, in the darkness, in the depth of the house
like pouring a slender, shimmering, silver, persistent honey.

Neruda, in his isolation, was arriving at a poetics of the material world that resonates with that of Gabriela. He wrote from Ceylon in 1929, “what seems better to me is a knowledge without antecedents, despite and against ourselves. The so–called ‘problems of knowledge’ seem dimensionless to me, how many of them would it take to fill up the void? Fewer and fewer ideas around me, more and more bodies, sun and sweat. I’m tired...”
Before leaving Asia, he married a Dutch colonial, Maruca Hagenaar. Another unanswerable question from the Preguntas: “Why did you get married in Batavia?” The marriage ended rapidly. Malva Marina, the only child Neruda ever fathered, was born in 1934, suffered from Down’s Syndrome, and died in the Netherlands at the age of eight.

Returning to Chile in 1932, Neruda reentered the local literary scene with a reading in the Miraflores Theatre. I thought I had been to some poetry readings from hell in San Francisco: the curtain opened upon a pair of gigantic painted oriental masks, and from behind the masks, according to Volodia Teitelboim, there issued “a dragging, nasal voice, like a lament, with no change of tone, without inflections, moaning, as if dispensing a soporific drug.” Neruda read for over an hour, entirely through the first section of the Residencia, and never showed his face.

6. Cultural Soup

Chile in the thirties was bursting open with literary activity. “It was a delightful sort of cultural soup,” remembers Gonzalo Rojas, “a bacterial pullulation.” A rich fermentation of poets was bubbling to the surface in and around the 1935 Antología, including Teófilo Cid (1914–1964), who descended from Chief of Protocol in the Foreign Ministry to become practically a street person, and who was involved with Rojas and the brilliant teenager Jorge Cáceres (1923–1949) in the surrealist group La Mandrágora (The Mandrake). But Neruda’s most vociferous rivals for poetic primacy were Vicente Huidobro (1893–1948) and Pablo de Rokha (1894–1968).

In 1919, Huidobro returned from Paris, where along with Pierre Reverdy, Jean Cocteau and Blaise Cendrars he founded Creationism. He described this poetic movement as “a war cry against anecdote and description, two elements alien to all pure poetry and which for centuries have kept the poem tied to the earth.” He spent most of his adult life in Europe, “marginalized or self–marginalized,“ in the words of Enrique Lihn, “from Chilean literary life.” Huidobro thought of the poet as a “little god,” and reserved the right to reinvent the language.

But do not fear me because my language is strange
... I want to bring you a music of the spirit
... Music that makes you think about the growth of trees
and explodes in festival lights inside your dream
I speak in the name of a star no one knows
I speak with a tongue moistened by unborn seas
...A voice that brings sight to the attentive blind
The blind hidden in the basements of their houses
As if at the bottom of their selves

The falling out between Huidobro and Neruda was inevitable. Huidobro was the first to point out, in his little magazine Vital, that Neruda’s Love Poem Sixteen is essentially plagiarized from The Gardener by Rabindranath Tagore, first published in Spanish in 1917:

Tagore:

You are the twilight cloud of the sky of my fantasies. Your color and shape are those of my love’s desiring. You are mine, you are mine, and you live in my infinite dreams.

Neruda:

In my sky at twilight you are like a cloud and your color and shape are as I wish them. You are mine, you are mine, woman of sweet lips, and my infinite dreams live in your life.

By the time young Octavio Paz arrived in Republican Spain in 1937, Neruda whispered to him: “don’t talk to Vicente Huidobro.” When Rafael Alberti arrived Chile ten years later, he felt he had to keep his visit to Huidobro secret from Neruda. Fundamentally, we are dealing with a classic failure of understanding between Earth Poet and Air Poet. Huidobro wanted to cut the bonds of anecdote and description that tie the poem to the earth, from which Neruda, like Antaeus, derived his strength. Neruda maintained a lifelong suspicion of intellectual theorizers, lumping Huidobro with Borges, Paz and the Brazilian concrete poets as somehow unfaithful to the tierra of Latin America.

Neruda’s obsessive collecting, however it may contradict his economic Marxism, makes sense in this context. It was his particular poetic genius to speak through the meaning of things (el sentido de las cosas, subtracting Gabriela’s maternal), through the physical materials of this world. There are many stories of him falling in love with things in an almost child–like way; a huge metal key attached to a wall in Paris, and to buy it they had to cut out part of the wall; a grand old steel lock closing a restaurant at midnight in Prague not far from Neruda Street, named not for him but for the eponymous Czech writer, which Pablo “looked at for a long time, stroked, shook, and let go with a long sigh.” In this way each of the Poet’s houses stuffed with knick–knacks is a mute anthology.

A remark repeated by Jorge Edwards illustrates Neruda’s distrust of the intellect per se: arriving for dinner at the home of the French Communist intellectual Louis Aragon, the Poet groaned, “we’re going to have to be intelligent all evening!” Anthologist Eduardo Anguita illustrates the rifts between these poetics: “If Huidobro is the poet of metaphysical clarity, Neruda is the opposite, the lyrical, twilight poet, if you will. Neruda is the poet of the buried world of America. He made matter, which is deaf and blind, speak. The light of reason is not there in his poetry, but with that unformed matter, in gestation, came out a voice which he did not disguise, nor falsify, nor use to create false disorders. Huidobro could not enter that world, it was closed to him. These were two very distinct poetic options, and that was what produced the conflict between them.”

Gonzalo Rojas remembers, as a young university Surrealist, dropping by Huidobro’s place and complaining that he was tired of his Latin assignment. “Reading Ovid?” the older man sniffed. “Don’t you know that today’s poetic imagination is allied to scientific imagination? You have to go to the new physics, to biochemistry, to astronomy, and let go of all that rotten rhetoric!”

Rojas got mad. “Well, you’re certainly very Vicente Huidobro, but you’ve never read these Roman elegies or any of the classics so what do you know about it?”

“Huidobro just looked at me in silence with those magnetic eyes,” Rojas remembers, “began to pace around the room and started to recite Ovid by heart: Cum subit illius tristissima noctis imago... I was ashamed of myself, and changed the subject.”

Carlos Decap shows me a photo of himself and his daughter at the tomb of Vicente Huidobro in Cartagena. Engraved on the stone is this message: ABRID ESTA TUMBA. AL FONDO SE VE EL MAR. OPEN THIS TOMB. AT THE BOTTOM YOU CAN SEE THE OCEAN. “They used to catch young poets,” Carlos tells me, “going down there at night with a shovel and a crowbar, hoping to dig him up and see if it was true.”
Pablo de Rokha was an antagonist of a different polemic order. The young Jorge Edwards caught a cab in downtown Santiago with De Rokha, who snarled, “here I am on this side of the trenches, full of lice! and on the other side are those two queers (maricones), Vicente Huidobro and Pablo Neruda.” In 1935, De Rokha called Huidobro “a little grand bourgeois, who has made contact and alliance with Imperialist Europe and its baggage of moribund art full of cunning, weakness and deviltry... who comes back telling us things we already knew.”

What De Rokha could not forgive was Huidobro’s upper–class origin. “Huidobro is that millionaire little man (señorito),” he wrote, “inheritor of the Santa Rita Winery, who plays at writing literature as an idle luxury of the rich, pulling it out of his library -- Verlaine, Baudelaire, Corbière, Jules Romains, Appollinaire or Rimbaud -- with exactly the same attitude which which he pulls out those peso bills, new and pink just like him and like his fat little, clean little, pretty little poems, out of the safety–deposit box which Daddy and Mommy keep filling.”
There is a movie to be made of the one–sided relationship between Pablo De Rokha and Pablo Neruda, ten years younger. When Neruda first came to Santiago he was eager to meet De Rokha, who scornfully remembers the encounter: “I invited him to the Unión Comercial to drink peach wine, but he only drank milk, milk with milk, slowly, like a Quaker, like the official evangelist of an evangelist… or like those poor sexless titless ladies of the Salvation Army.” Neruda, who was nothing if not a ladies’ man, indulged an infatuation with De Rokha’s younger sister Helena; De Rokha ghost–wrote her love–letters.

De Rokha completely loses his tenous coherence when he writes about Neruda, enmeshing himself in an unexamined bog as he attempts to explain his rage. “Don’t you see the psychopathic relationship between plagiarism [of Tagore] and that masked man who speaks as if he were eating hot potatoes, salivating the words, soaking them in mucus, and extends to you a frog’s hand, soft, sticky, tepid, as if it came out of the bed, a sexual, lugubrious hand, a genital hand, a fluvial salamander’s hand, a hand of mud and the social swamp, of the whorehouse swamp, of the swamp in which is generated the most corrupt and anti–virile poetry of America?”
Neruda stole it all from me, cries De Rokha, the success, the glory. Rokha was himself a pseudonymic, born Carlos Ignacio Díaz Loyola; he even stole my name: Pablo. De Rokha portrayed himself as a more genuine Marxist poet of the masses, but even paranoids have enemies, and by 1940 he was expelled from the Chilean Communist Party. He ended up writing a book entitled Neruda y Yo, in a futile attempt to destroy the greater poet’s reputation. You will search in vain in the autobiography of Pablo Neruda for the name of Pablo de Rokha. Neruda devotes a couple of chilling paragraphs to his defeated rival under the lisping sobriquet of Perico de Palothes. “His solitary battle was that of a man with his own shadow… with his Nietzschean philosophy and his irrepressible scribbling, he was an intellectual and physical goon.”

Pablo De Rokha’s poetry is a titanic overflow of apocalyptic self–aggrandizement. Juan Ramón Jiménez called Neruda a great bad poet; De Rokha is a semi–great terrible poet. He never uses one adjective when three will do. He composed a staggering ‘Epopeia of the Dishes and Drinks of Chile’ which no one else could have written, which begins “Lovely as a young calf is the song of frogs stewed among quail,” but to give you a sense of his heroic excess I will have to quote at least one whole sentence. This is from a late, despairing Canto del Macho Anciano (Song of the Old Male), written not long before De Rokha’s suicide in 1968.

And as I go on seeking the lost steps of what never existed,
or the origin of man in the vocabulary, the animal root of Beauty
carved in errors and stupor, and the tonic of the high
and wide masses in the high and wide multitudes of the secular
country of Chile,
the heroic being is roaring in our new epic, conditioned by the
national terror of content;
as surely I weep sleeping in pyramidal tears exploding, the writings
that are dream subject to an inexorable chain and image that no
one may ever undo or comprehend, dragged by the scruff of blood
that runs below Humanity and cuts its own throat in language,
organizing it, my language
overwhelms me, my head is a pile of trash catching fire, a dead
guitar, a great abandoned house of pain;
this frozen June or July shelters me in sobs
and though these old bones of vegetal steel oppose the invasion of
the Nada advancing with its terrible rattle,
I understand that I transform forces through annihilation and I
become one more event in nature.

7. I’m Going To Explain a Few Things

Pablo Neruda did not remain long in Chile at this point; fatefully, he was named consul in Spain, where he arrived in May 1934. Two fundamental things happened to Neruda in Spain. First, he became friends with some very great poets, including Rafael Alberti (born 1902), Miguel Hernández (1910–1942), César Vallejo and especially Federico García Lorca (1899–1936). Second, he became a political poet. It may have been the most explicit poetic conversion in history. It came out of the shock of Lorca’s assassination; it was guided by the woman he fell in love with, Delia del Carril, an Argentine artist and Communist twenty years his senior, called La Hormiga, the Ant, for her indefatigable activity; and it was a result of the inevitable pressure of historical events as Spain exploded into civil war. I’m going to explain a few things, says Neruda. You all want to know what happened to the lilacs in my poems? to the volcanoes of my country? to my metaphysics covered in poppies?

Federico, do you remember
under the ground,
remember my house with balconies
where June light drowned flowers in your mouth?
Brother, my brother!

After Spain fell, Neruda worked feverishly with La Hormiga in Paris, organizing a ship, the Winnipeg, which convoyed more than 2,000 Spanish Loyalist exiles, including the parents of my publisher Luis Cortés Bargalló, to refuge in Latin America. As the Second World War began, Neruda was posted in Mexico, where he became friends with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. On his way south to Chile, in October 1943, Neruda ascended to the mist–shrouded shrine of Machu Picchu.

Las Alturas de Machu Picchu (The Heights of Machu Picchu), perhaps the highest single summit of his poetry, was completed two or three years later. Here, as John Felstiner shows brilliantly in his wonderful book Translating Neruda, the Poet goes down, down, always sinking, with the verb hundir, past his personal death, into the bowels of the buried world of the continent, only to climb to the dizzying focal point of the sacred city, and of creation:

Sube a nacer conmigo, hermano.
Rise up to be born with me, brother.

Returning to Chile, Neruda formally joined the Communist Party and was elected senator representing the Atacama desert in the north. After President González Videla outlawed the Communists in 1948 to please Harry Truman, Neruda went underground, and in a romantic adventure escaped on horseback into Argentina over a wild Patagonian pass.

In the next few years, Neruda travelled in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, France, Italy, India, Poland, East Germany, Mongolia, China, Guatemala and Denmark, giving readings and receiving prizes everywhere, appearing with figures like Picasso, Nehru and Madame Sun Yat–Sen. His poetry was translated and published in at least twenty–four languages. In the apogee of McCarthyism, however, the time wasn’t yet ripe for Neruda’s work to make an impression in the United States. After New Directions published a first volume of Neruda translations, Kenneth Rexroth wrote to James Laughlin, “the only good Stalinist is a dead Stalinist.”
Pablo Neruda returned to Chile in 1952, covered with international glory. Friends, admirers, disciples, militants and sycophants filled up Los Guindos, his house on Avenida Lynch in Santiago, as well as the stone cottage he began constructing an hour’s drive south of Valparaíso on a peninsula he called Isla Negra. Wherever the Poet went the conviviality was legendary. His double amorous life was discovered behind the transparent anonymity of Los Versos del Capitán, and he regretfully abandoned Delia del Carril, now pushing seventy (and who lived to be a hundred, fragile as a grasshopper) and joyously moved into La Chascona with red-headed Matilde Urrutia. Life was good. The triumph of socialism was inevitable.

Stalin is the noonday
the maturity of men and nations.

In the optimism of his mid–century, Neruda had second thoughts about the bleak, romantic, alienated outpourings of his own youth. He suggested to the Hungarian comrades that perhaps it would be just as well if Residencia en la Tierra were not translated and reprinted in Magyar. What was it, after all, but the immature, negative, individualistic contradictions of an adolescence that had not fully understood the historical progress of dialectical materialism? If read too seriously, the poems might lead some young people in the direction of suicide! Better to write in sunny tones about the simple things! And Neruda began a series of poems in short lines entitled Odas Elementales, Elemental Odes.

8. Anti-Poetry

This was the situation confronting the next generation of Chilean poets. As Carlos Alberto Trujillo told me, “We felt like Neruda was a great poncho covering up the whole sky!” In 1952, Enrique Lihn was twenty–three years old; Jorge Teillier was seventeen; Gonzalo Rojas was thirty–five, but had published little; and Nicanor Parra, at thirty–eight, had published nothing so far, but was back from three years studying quantum physics in England and was ready to challenge authority.

If you say El Poeta with a capital P in Chile, there is never any doubt to whom you are referring. If Neruda had done everything along the line of Poetry, and seemed to stand blocking that path like a giant monument reaching to the sky, why not try Anti-Poetry?

In Poemas y Antipoemas, Nicanor Parra (born 1914) proposed an antithesis to the inflated, grandiloquent language of Neruda and his followers. “The traditional language was very limited,” explains Parra. “One spoke in a ‘poetic’ language, not only as to vocabulary, but also syntax and semantics. So in Antipoetry we gave up that formulation, and all the words apparently have the right to enter into discourse... if a line could be used in a conversation, it fits in a poem, that is, daily life enters in.”

If Antipoesía represents a revulsion against conventional poetic rhetoric and a return to common speech, it also implies a rethinking of the poet’s persona. Parra again: “In so–called traditional poetry, at least in lyric poetry, he who talks is always the poet, who is supposed to be a hero, a positive subject, of good feelings, intelligent, who knows everything. Now here come the antipoems in which you work with an antihero. But this antihero is still the victim of circumstances. Let’s think, for example, of Charlie Chaplin...”

The Antipoems are understated, stereotyped, anonymous tragedies of urban existence. At their strongest and most austere, they are small masterpieces of black comedy, Kafka as played by Woody Allen.

The man goes out to piss in the yard
He sees a young girl
It’s night time
She’s washing the dishes
The man goes up to the girl
Embraces her
They dance a waltz
They go out to the street together
They laugh
There’s an accident
The girl has lost consciousness
The man goes to call for help
He weeps
There’s a house with lights in the windows
He asks for a telephone
Someone recognizes him
Stay and eat, man
No
Where’s the telephone
Eat, man, eat
Later you can go
He sits to eat
He drinks like a condemned man
He laughs
They make him read his poetry
He recites
He falls asleep under a writing desk

Neruda’s first reaction to the Antipoems? He scratched his head, paced the room “like a caged bear,” and finally muttered, “If you do a whole book of these, something is going to happen.” In one stanza, Parra takes on all the poetic fathers:

No more little god (Huidobro)
No more sacred cow (Neruda)
No more raging bull (De Rokha)

In the late fifties, Parra, Enrique Lihn and Alejandro Jodorowsky (who later directed the movie El Topo) placed a new cut-up collage poem in the front window of a vegetarian restaurant in Santiago every week for more than a year, calling them Quebrantahuesos, Bonebreakers. Today, Parra considers himself an ecological poet.
Carlos Decap asked me if I wanted to interview Nicanor Parra. I said sure, but I didn’t follow up on it, because although I like Parra’s irony and sense of proportion, it seemed ludicrous that he was being promoted as a greater poet than Neruda, and I didn’t feel equipped, or eager, to attack him. When I look clearly at the poetry of Nicanor Parra, I find there is less there than meets the eye. Perhaps Parra, always a reductionist, would agree with me.

On one occasion, Nicanor Parra spoke of Neruda with an engaging and revealing honesty. “There are two ways to refute Neruda: one is not reading him, the other is reading him in bad faith. I have tried both, but neither one worked for me… I still react like a novice, pardon my sincerity -- my state of mind is like that of a freshman who is interviewed by the Rector of the University and who in his juvenile nervousness forgets even the multiplication tables. I stammer and become aphasic. I feel completely blank.”

“By the beginning of the sixties,” Carlos Alberto Trujillo told me, “there were these two big figures face to face, Neruda and Parra. Gabriela Mistral wasn’t read that much, Huidobro had died practically unknown. A young poet had to be in one corral or the other. Well, what’s born is always born in opposition to something.” The opening provided by the Antipoems made room for some interesting voices in the middle generation, those who published significantly before September 11, 1973.

Enrique Lihn (1929–1988) follows Parra with an anti– rhetorical urban poetry, though in a gentler, self–questioning voice. Lihn had a frustrating political odyssey: he joined the Communist Party, went to Cuba, criticized the Castro government over the arrest of the poet Heberto Padilla, came back to Chile in the days of Allende, and was rapidly expelled from a Left editorial collective for being adventurist, opportunist and/or anti-Marxist.

When asked about his relations with Neruda, Lihn replied candidly, “Negative. We were matriculating with Parra, who seemed like an alternative, the counter–figure to Neruda. Nicanor enjoyed that status, he cultivated it. At that time, he had a conflictive relationship with Neruda, he annoyed Neruda, Neruda grumbled at him, but they were still definitely friends. [The younger poets] were strictly in opposition. We were closed to the dominant Neruda of that time, which was that of the Odas Elementales... and all that nonsense (majamama) which we considered practically garbage.”

“I had a certain duplicity here,” Lihn confessed, “because at the same time I was reading the Neruda of Residencia en la Tierra, which fascinated me. Curiously, when Las Alturas de Machu Picchu appeared, the people loved it and I couldn’t resist that fascination, despite the fact that at the same time we were severely criticizing the poem.” Jorge Edwards invited Neruda and Lihn to dinner together in Paris in the late sixties, hoping to effect a reconciliation, without success, as the two poets quarrelled spectacularly.

Juan Andrés Piña writes that Lihn “was the least provided for of the Chilean writers, with the most precarious day to day existence, and the furthest from political, social or cultural power. Rebellious or independent, he maintained his literary discourse up to the end, with no thought of hustling or networking, which meant, for him, a permanently irregular situation.” In fact, it meant that he never really had a steady job. Dying of lung cancer in the spring of 1988, Lihn kept a voluminous journal, published posthumously under the title of Diario de Muerte. He was faithful to the last to the poet’s vocation.

This exaggeration almost in bad faith
thorough which enter words and deeds
and the void opens its schismatic landscapes where even the flesh
seems to evaporate
under a glacial piano solo and instead of dogmas, well
poetry, this big idiot ghost, comes out
ah, and the style which is certainly not the man
but rather the sum of his uncertainties

Jorge Teillier (1935–1996), born and raised in a town with the fateful name of Lautaro, in the magical rainy South, breaks with the urban setting of Parra and Lihn. Teillier’s father was a Communist organizer who drove his 1930 Dodge on Sunday afternoons from village to village, shouting ¡Viva la Reforma Agraria! and singing the Internationale out–of–tune in clandestine meetings with farmers and workers and teachers.

Young Teillier was proud to consider himself an atheist like Dad; but at nightfall he went to novena with his mother and inhaled deeply when they passed the lilies gathered for the Virgin. When he was fourteen, Jorge claimed he was a poet in order to impress a neighbor girl. She kept pressing him to show her a poem; he kept putting her off. He couldn’t sleep thinking of her eyes “shooting .44 caliber bullets of love.” The next time he saw her in the plaza she wouldn’t talk to him. With no other alternative, he went home and wrote his first poem.
Jorge Teillier creates a deep imaginary Chile that is more authentic than any possible real Chile, evoking muddy roads, lost towns, vanished childhood, and trains wailing in the night. Teillier called what he was writing poesía lárica, a word–play on lares, the spirit of place, combined with lírica, lyric. Carlos Alberto Trujillo recalls Enrique Lihn, in the sixties, sniffing that Teillier was just writing about geese! The gap between the Chile of his poems and the Chile he saw around him, Teillier filled with alcohol.

I see myself that Sunday in your parlor
looking at old magazines and daguerrotypes
while you play waltzes on the piano.
Someone told me in secret that spring returns.
Spring returns but you don’t return.
Your sister no longer believes in fairies.
You wouldn’t know how to write my name
on the frost–covered windows
and I can only count my memories
the way a beggar counts his coins in cold autumn.

Oscar Hahn (born 1939) is one of the few poets identified with the arid north coast of Chile. He was born in Iquique and was teaching Classics in Arica, on the Peruvian border, at the time of thecoup. Hahn was detained for ten days in the public jail of Arica in September 1973. His interrogators asked him if he assigned Marxist authors. He replied that since he was teaching Plato and Aristotle, there was no way he could do so even if he had wanted to. Hahn counts as his main influence medieval Spanish poetry, especially the Dance of Death.

ADOLPH HITLER MEDITATES ON THE JEWISH PROBLEM

Take this flyswatter and exterminate the angels,
then pluck their wings off with long fingernails.
I see their stumps, see them dragging along
desperately trying to get themselves aloft.
Take this insecticide. I hear their white coughs
flicker on, then off. A sunset or a fall
of angels is doubtless the same thing
because now the night lifts up its hunchback
and they go slowly sinking into the ground.
Lift your foot slowly. Like that. Smash them.
Let their wings be stripped with boiling water
and put their naked bodies in delicatessens.
Now they go by carrying toy shrouds
and roped–up coffins. Now they go by
with teeny–tiny crosses in order to entertain
dead babies. Pass me the spray can,
the black pins. Take this flyswatter
and exterminate the angels.

9. Adios, Poeta

Becky and I made our way up the valley of the Elqui to visit the tomb of Gabriela. Walking down from Montegrande, we caught a ride from an older couple and saved ourselves a drenching. The señor was happy to have an audience for his political views. Pinochet had been good for the economy, he said, and as for the dead and disappeared, there weren’t nearly so many as the foreign press made out. His wife quietly disagreed and let us know she had voted for democracy. Meanwhile, I was simultaneously reading Adios, Poeta by Jorge Edwards and Volodia Teitelboim’s biography of Neruda, hoping to resolve some fundamental discrepancies.
Edwards, a liberal intellectual from one of the richest families in Chile, advances the revisionist thesis that after Khrushchev revealed the crimes of Stalin in 1956, Pablo Neruda “began a long and complex evolution, a process of learning and disillusionment,” which brought him, in effect, to a position of premature perestroika. This process is hard to document because it was accompanied “by an effort of will and discipline” by which the Poet “always submitted himself to the discipline of the Party, and never entered into a process of open intellectual dissidence.” It goes without saying that Teitelboim, frankly an old–line Party hack, does not whisper of any such process. Edwards points to a sense of doubt and uncertainty that invades Neruda’s poetry beginning with Extravagario (1958), replacing the noonday certitudes of the Captain’s Verses and the Elemental Odes.

No one can claim the name of Pedro,
nobody is Rosa or María,
all of us are dust or sand,
all of us are rain under rain.
The have spoken to me of Venezuelas,
of Chiles and of Paraguays.
I have no idea what they are saying.
I know only the skin of the earth
and I know that it is without a name.

When Stalin died in 1953, Neruda wrote an elegy in which he stands with an old fisherman by a Russian lake, each of them absorbed in their, and the world’s, great loss. Finally the wise old proletarian fisherman comforts the distraught poet, saying, “But Malenkov will carry on his work.” But by 1964, in Memorial de Isla Negra, and only when it was considered acceptable within the Party to do so, Neruda takes aim at “those plaster statues/ of the moustached god with boots on.” Safely among friends in Paris, the poet would twirl his fingers in Uncle Joe’s imaginary moustache, saying “Nous avions les moustaches très, très longues...”

In 1965, invited by Arthur Miller, who convinced the State Department to grant the famous Communist poet a visa, Neruda read under the auspices of PEN in New York City, reading some of his fiercest political poems against the war in Vietnam. A delegation of Cuban writers signed a virulent open letter attacking the poet for setting foot on enemy ground. Neruda never again spoke to any of the signers, who included Nicolás Guillén, Roberto Fernández Retamar, and José Lezama Lima. When Neruda was Ambassador to France, Alejo Carpentier, another signer, was First Secretary of the Cuban Embassy there. At diplomatic events they would step around curtains in order not to greet one another.

Teitelboim prefers not to analyze the event too deeply, and simply quotes Neruda himself, being diplomatic, in his memoirs: “a blind point, a small blind point within the process, has little importance in the context of a great cause. I have gone on respecting, loving and singing the Cuban revolution, that nation and its noble protagonists.” The Poet was considerably more explicit in a letter to Edwards, writing, “The Cuban writers behaved like a bunch of bastards (unos cabrones). To their master’s voice they heaped on slime and envy.” Edwards ends up comparing Neruda to “an atheist Cardinal,” who loses his faith but retains the trappings of the Church, and even drives a wedge of inference, of raised eyebrows, off–hand remarks and ironic inflections, implying the Poet’s less than enthusiastic approval of the Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende.

What’s the truth here? Had he lived into the late eighties, would Neruda have welcomed Gorbachev’s reforms? Undoubtedly. Did he in fact break ranks with his Party while he lived? Never. Volodia Teitelboim’s biography is thick with comprehensive detail, but its ultimate mission is to seal an official image. “When all is said and done,” he concludes, “Pablo Neruda was more than Pablo Neruda.” When Teitelboim is done, Neruda has become a plaster statue. Jorge Edwards has a deeper insight into the man, and the portrait that emerges from his book is more complex and affectionate. I am equally queasy about his political agenda, which is to posthumously separate Neruda from the Chilean Left. Teitelboim and Edwards each have a political axe to grind. I think there may be some room between them for contradictions and multiplicity in the heart and soul and lifestyle and ideology of Pablo Neruda.

We do know that Neruda kept writing. “Write a poem a day,” he urged Oscar Hahn. “I do it.” “Yeah,” said Hahn, “but you’re Pablo Neruda. I’m only Oscar Hahn.” Neruda kept publishing, churning out a new book every year, each one somehow making less of an impact, in the vast wash of his poetic celebrity, than the one before. “Nobody reads me!” he complained to Jorge Edwards, and yet, besieged by autograph–seekers in a restaurant, he remarked bitterly, “Just think that this is the only thing Nicanor Parra wants!”

Neruda ran for president, representing the Communist Party, in a primary–season manuever which folded into the Party’s support of Allende’s Unidad Popular, which narrowly won a three–way election in 1970, taking power with 37% of the vote. He was appointed Allende’s Ambassador to France, and insisted on taking Jorge Edwards -- who had already gotten himself thrown out of Castro’s Cuba for involvement in the Heberto Padilla affair -- with him as his First Counsellor.

There was a final infatuation in the twilight years, with Matilde’s niece Alicia. Matilde told them she’d be in Santiago till late, came quietly back after an hour, discovered Poet and niece in flagranti, and sent her packing. The Ambassadorship in distant Paris was part of the deal which preserved the marriage. After years of hopes and disappointments and backstage maneuvering -- the Cuban letter hurt his chances in the late sixties and Miguel Angel Asturias got the award instead -- Pablo Neruda was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. Gravely ill with prostate cancer, he returned to Chile the following year.

Neruda was sick in bed at Isla Negra, glued to the radio, on the morning of September 11, 1973, when the tanks rolled through the streets of Santiago, and the Hawker Hunter jets dive–bombed La Moneda, the presidential palace, and after fighting to the last, his old friend Salvador Allende took a bullet to the head, most likely self–inflicted, though the Left didn’t want to believe that, and the Generals took over, and thousands upon thousands of Chileans were rounded up and interrogated and tortured and sent to concentration camps and executed or simply disappeared.

The death of his friend Salvador Allende was the last straw for the Poet, who declined rapidly. Still, when they came to search the house at Isla Negra, Neruda sat up and said, “Go ahead and search, Captain. There is only one thing here that is a danger to you.” The soldier clapped his hand to the butt of his revolver. “What’s that?” “Poetry!”

His condition worsened; they moved him in an ambulance to Santiago. It was searched at two roadblocks along the way. On September 23, 1973, Pablo Neruda died. When his death–scene was played in the theatre, the actors carried his death–bed out through the audience, as the Poet repeated “regreso volando por debajo del mar... I return flying from under the sea.” His funeral procession was a rare open expression of defiance to the dictatorship, as the Communist Youth sang the Internationale under the muzzles of the machine–guns.