The Neruda Case
Page 29
I am convinced that the women in Neruda’s life are the ones who hold his secret. The ultimate keys to his personality, and to his work, cannot be found in the academic treatises on him, but in the voices of the women who mattered in his personal life—what they said, and what they kept silent. I believe that only these relationships convey the flesh-and-blood poet, that profoundly contradictory being, so full of light and shadow, that I sought and found in order to write this novel that blends fiction with actual history. The rest is a matter of interpreting the words—both poetic and everyday—that Neruda used throughout his life to protect himself, to hide, and to project the image of himself that has become so legendary. The first woman to play a decisive role in his life was his beloved stepmother, who took him in, loved him, and raised him after his mother’s early death. When he was a university student, his first loves were either platonic or simple passions lacking in fantasies or stunning feats; they were sad loves in cold rooms and dark Santiago winters; it was in remote regions of Asia, where he arrived as a very young Chilean consul, that he discovered the pleasures of passion and learned the skills of an experienced lover. The person who taught him these techniques was Josie Bliss, that mysterious woman lost in Asian landscapes, whose voice we never hear directly. We only glimpse, in Neruda’s poetry, his amazement at her slim, agile body and her mastery of the erotic arts. The Dutchwoman María Antonieta Hagenaar Vogelzang gives him everything, trusts him, marries him, and bears him a hydrocephalic child; he leaves them both when he falls in love with Delia del Carril, an aristocratic Argentine twenty years his senior who converts him to communism and persuades him to abandon the hermetic poetry he was composing, and to write in a manner everyone could understand. And then comes Matilde Urrutia, a young dancer who dazzled the poet when he was in his fifties, and who would be at his bedside when he died in 1973. But there are many more women in Neruda’s life. So many that, among his friends, he was known as a “serial monogamist.” There were romances, both loves and flings, that remain shrouded in secrecy, buried in the untold annals of the past. His love affair with Beatriz could be one of those lost romances. As I said, I didn’t find the most thorough explorations of Neruda’s relationships with women in academic books, but in the memoirs and recollections of the women who knew him, and who describe him and reflect on who he was. From them, from their portrayals and evocations, but also from their omissions, emerge the fictional characters of Beatriz and her daughter, Tina, as well as the monologues of Neruda’s memories and troubled conscience as he waits in the solitude of his Valparaíso home, in the twilight of his own life and of his friend Allende’s government.
Neruda died on September 27, 1973, when Pinochet’s dictatorship was sixteen days into its seventeen-year duration. He died of cancer, but also from the pain of watching the tragic end of his political dream. He couldn’t bear the bombing of La Moneda, or the death of Allende, or the murder and imprisonment of thousands of people, or the echoing shots of nocturnal firing squads or the chilling sound of armored helicopters as they patrolled the city. In 1990, Chile returned to democracy and freedom. Pablo Neruda’s poems, many of them born in his Valparaíso home, were a source of inspiration for many people as they fought the dictatorship and strove to create a more just society. As his Valparaíso neighbor, I owed Don Pablo a novel that portrayed his full being.
Iowa City
August 2011
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Roberto Ampuero is an internationally bestselling, award-winning author. He has published twelve novels in Spanish, and his works have been translated around the world. The Neruda Case is his first novel published in English. Born in Chile, Ampuero is a professor of creative writing at the University of Iowa and currently serves as Chile’s ambassador to Mexico. He lives in Mexico City and lowa City.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Carolina De Robertis is the translator of Bonsai, by Alejandro Zambra, and other works published in Granta, Zoetrope : All-Story, and Two Lines. She is the author of the novels Perla and the international bestseller The Invisible Mountain, which was translated into fifteen languages and received Italy’s Rhegium Julii Prize. It was also awarded an O, as The Oprah Magazine Terrific Read of 2009, and named the San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year. Robertis grew up in a Uruguayan family that emigrated to England, Switzerland, and California. She is the recipient of a 2012 Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.