by Pablo Neruda
The boys in school didn’t know I was a poet and wouldn’t have respected me for it. The frontier still had its marvelous quality of a Wild West without prejudices. My companions’ names were Schnake, Schler, Hauser, Smith, Taito, Seranis. All of us, including the Aracenas and the Ramírezes and the Reyeses, were equal. There were no Basque family names. There were Sephardim: Albalas, Francos. And Irish: McGintys. Poles: Yanichewskys. The Araucanian names gave off a mysterious light, an aroma of wood and water: Melivilus, Catrileos.
Sometimes we would fight with acorns in the huge closed-in shed. Anyone who has never been hit by an acorn doesn’t know how much it really hurts. Before reaching school, we would stuff our pockets with ammunition. I had little skill, no strength, and not much cunning. I always got the worst of it. While I was busy examining the marvelous acorn, green and polished, with its gray, wrinkled hood, or while I was still trying clumsily to make one of those pipes they eventually would grab away from me, a downpour of acorns would pelt my head. During my second year, I decided to wear a bright green rain hat. It belonged to my father, like the heavy woolen cape, the red and green signal lanterns, which I found so fascinating and took to school as soon as I got the chance, to strut around with them … This time it was pouring and there was nothing so fantastic as the green oilskin hat that looked like a parrot. The moment I reached the shed, where three hundred roughnecks were chasing around like madmen, my hat flew off like a parrot. I ran after it, and each time I was about to catch it, off it flew, followed by the most deafening howls I have ever heard. I never laid eyes on it again.
Among these memories I can’t see clearly the precise order of time. I confuse insignificant events that were very special to me, and this one coming back to my mind now seems to have been my first erotic adventure, strangely mixed in with natural history. Perhaps love and nature were, very early on, the source of my poems.
Across from my house lived two girls who were always giving me looks that made my face turn red. They were as precocious and diabolical as I was timid and quiet. This time I stood in my doorway trying not to look at them; they were holding something that fascinated me. I went closer, gingerly, and they showed me a wild bird’s nest, woven together with moss and tiny feathers; in it were several marvelous little turquoise-blue eggs. When I reached for it, one of the girls told me that they would have to feel through my clothes first. I was so scared I started to tremble and scurried away, pursued by the young nymphs holding the exciting treasure over their heads. During the chase, I went into an alley leading to a vacant bakery owned by my father. My assailants managed to catch me and had started to strip off my trousers, when we heard my father’s footsteps coming down the passage. That was the end of the nest. The marvelous little eggs were left shattered, while under a counter we, the attacked and the attackers, held our breath.
I also recall that one day, while hunting behind my house for the tiny objects and minuscule beings of my world, I discovered a hole in one of the fence boards. I looked through the opening and saw a patch of land just like ours, untended and wild. I drew back a few steps, because I had a vague feeling that something was about to happen. Suddenly a hand came through. It was the small hand of a boy my own age. When I moved closer, the hand was gone and in its place was a little white sheep.
It was a sheep made of wool that had faded. The wheels on which it had glided were gone. I had never seen such a lovely sheep. I went into my house and came back with a gift, which I left in the same place: a pine cone, partly open, fragrant and resinous, and very precious to me.
I never saw the boy’s hand again. I have never again seen a little sheep like that one. I lost it in a fire. And even today, when I go past a toy shop, I look in the windows furtively. But it’s no use. A sheep like that one was never made again.
ART AND THE RAIN
Just as the cold, the rain, the mud in the streets—that is, the nagging and crumbling winter of the southern part of America—came down on us, so, too, the yellow, scorching summer visited these regions. We were surrounded by unexplored mountains, but I wanted to know the sea. Providentially, my obliging father was loaned a house by one of his numerous railroad friends. In total darkness, at four o’clock in the night (I have never found out why they say four in the morning), my father woke up the whole house with his conductor’s whistle. From that moment on, there was no rest, or any light either, and surrounded by candles whose tiny flames were battered by the drafts filtering in everywhere, my mother; my brother and sister, Rodolfo and Laura; and the cook ran to and fro, doing up mattresses into enormous balls wrapped in burlap that were hastily rolled out of the way by the women. The beds had to be put aboard the train. The mattresses were still warm when they left for the nearby station. Sickly and weak by nature, and startled out of sleep, I felt nauseated and chilled to the bone. All the while, the fuss around the house went on, never ending. Everything was taken along on that month-long poor man’s vacation. Even the wicker dryers that were laid over the lit braziers to dry the sheets and clothes ever damp in that climate were tagged and bundled into the cart waiting outside for the luggage.
The train’s run was the stretch of that cold province between Temuco and Carahue. It crossed immense, unpopulated, uncultivated terrain, crossed virgin forests, rumbled through tunnels and over bridges, like an earthquake. The way stations were isolated in that wide countryside, among mimosas and flowering apple trees. In their ritual dress and ancestral majesty, Araucanian Indians waited at the stations to sell lambs, chickens, eggs, and textiles to the passengers. My father always bought something, after endless bargaining. His blond goatee was something to watch as he picked up a hen in front of some inscrutable Araucanian woman who would not lower the price of her merchandise by half a cent.
Each station had a lovelier name, almost all of them inherited from the ancient Araucanian. This was the region of the bloodiest battles between the invading Spaniards and the first Chileans, deep-rooted sons of the land.
Labranza was the first station. Boroa and Ranquilco followed. Names with the fragrance of wild plants, the sound of their syllables captivated me. These Araucanian names always signified something delicious: buried honey, lagoons or a river beside a forest, or a woodland with the name of a bird. We passed the hamlet of Imperial, where the poet Don Alonso de Ercilla was nearly executed by the Spanish governor. This was the capital of the conquistadors in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. During their war of independence the Araucanians invented the tactic of “scorched earth.” They did not leave one building standing in the city described by Ercilla as beautiful and proud.
And then we came to the city on the river. The train whistled cheerfully, darkening the countryside and the station with giant plumes of coal smoke, bells clanged, and you could now smell the wide, sky-blue, and tranquil Imperial River as it ran to the ocean. Taking down the countless pieces of luggage, getting the small family organized, and going in the oxcart to the boat that would ride down the Imperial River was quite a production, directed, of course, by my father’s blue eyes and his railwayman’s whistle. We squeezed both the luggage and ourselves into the small boat that would take us to the sea. There were no berths. I sat near the bow. The wheels churned the river currents with their paddles, the small vessel’s engines snorted and whined, and the taciturn southerners were spread about on the deck like motionless pieces of furniture.
An accordion broke into its romantic plea, its love call. Nothing can flood a fifteen-year-old’s heart with feeling like a voyage down a strange, wide river, between steep banks, on the way to the mysterious sea.
Bajo Imperial was only a string of houses with red roofs. It was situated on the river’s brow. From the house that had been awaiting us and, even before, from the rickety piers where the little steamer tied up, I heard the ocean thundering in the distance, a commotion far away. The sea swells were coming into my life.
The house belonged to Don Horacio Pacheco, a giant of a farmer who, all during the month
we took over his house, went up and down the hills and impassable roads driving his tractor and thresher. With his machine he harvested the wheat of the Indians and those peasants cut off from coastal towns. He was a huge man who would suddenly burst in upon our railwayman’s family with a booming voice, his body covered with cereal dust and straw. Then he would return just as noisily to his work in the mountains. For me he was one more example of the hard life in our southern region.
I found everything mysterious in that house, in the neglected streets, in the unknown lives around me, in the deep roar of the sea far off. The house had what seemed to me a huge, straggly garden and, in the center of this, a summerhouse battered by the rain, a summerhouse of white slats covered with vines. No one except me, a mere nobody, ever penetrated this gray solitude, where the ivy, the honeysuckle, and my poetry thrived. And there was another fascinating thing in that strange garden: a huge lifeboat, orphaned in some great shipwreck and now stranded in this garden without waves or storms, a castaway among the poppies.
The strange thing about this unkempt garden was that, by design or through neglect, only poppies grew there. The other plants had disappeared from this gloomy corner. Some were huge and white like doves, some scarlet like drops of blood, some purple or black, like widows forgotten there. I had never seen such a wilderness of poppies, and I have never seen another like it. And though I had a deep respect for them, and a superstitious dread only they, of all flowers, inspire in me, that did not stop me from snapping one off, now and again, the broken stem leaving sticky milk on my hands and a whiff of unearthly perfume. Then I would stroke its sumptuous petals lovingly and put them into a book to keep. To me they were the wings of huge butterflies that couldn’t fly.
The first time I stood before the sea, I was overwhelmed. The great ocean unleashed its fury there between two big hills, Huilque and Maule. It wasn’t just the immense snow-crested swells, rising many meters above our heads, but the loud pounding of a gigantic heart, the heartbeat of the universe.
The family laid out its table linen and tea things in that spot. The food reached my mouth sprinkled with sand, but I didn’t care. What terrified me was the apocalyptic moment when my father ordered us to take our daily swim. Far back from the giant rollers, my sister, Laura, and I were splashed by the water’s icy lash. And we trembled, believing that some wave’s finger would hook us into the mountains of the sea. When, our teeth chattering and our ribs blue, my sister and I prepared to die, hand in hand, the railwayman’s whistle blew and my father’s voice freed us from martyrdom.
I’ll tell you about other mysteries in that place. One of these was the Percherons, and another the house of the three enchanted sisters.
Several big buildings stood at the end of the small village. They may have been tanneries, owned by French Basques, who almost always ran the leather industry in southern Chile. I don’t really know what they were used for. All I was interested in was watching the huge horses that came out of the front gates toward sundown and crossed the town.
They were Percherons, gigantic colts and mares. Their long manes fell down their very tall backs like human hair. They had enormous legs, also covered with tufts of hair that waved like huge plumes when they galloped off. They were deep red, white, roan, powerful. That’s how volcanoes would have moved, if they had been able to trot and gallop like those colossal horses. They would go down the dusty, rocky streets like the violent shock of an earthquake. They whinnied huskily, producing subterranean sounds that sent a shudder through the quiet air. I have never again in my life seen such arrogant, massive, and statuesque horses, except perhaps for those I saw in China carved in stone for the tombs of the Ming dynasty. But even the most venerable stone cannot provide a sight like those huge animals that seemed, in my childish eyes, to emerge from the darkness of dreams, headed for some other-world of giants.
In fact, that untamed world was filled with horses. Chilean, German, and Araucanian riders, all wearing ponchos of black Castilian wool, mounted and dismounted in the streets. Scrawny or well fed, shabby or sleek, the horses stayed where the riders left them, munching on the grass, with steam coming out of their nostrils. They were accustomed to their masters and to the lonely life of the settlement. Later they would return, loaded down with sacks of food or farm implements, to the labyrinthine highlands, climbing up dreadful roads or endlessly galloping over the sand by the sea. From time to time an Araucanian rider would come out of a pawnshop or a dim tavern, mount his unperturbed horse with difficulty, and take the road back to his home in the hills, swaying from side to side, drunk to the point of unconsciousness. As I watched him start off on his journey, it seemed to me that the tipsy centaur was about to fall every time he lurched dangerously, but I was wrong: he always righted himself, only to double over again, swaying toward the other side and always recovering, glued to the saddle. He covered mile after mile, sitting on his horse like that, until he merged into the wild world of nature like an animal unsure of its way but mysteriously protected.
We returned many other summers, with the same household ceremonies, to that fascinating region. With the passing of time, between the bitter winters in Temuco and the wonder-filled summers on the coast, I was growing up, reading, falling in love, and writing.
I got used to riding on horseback. My world expanded upward and outward along the towering mud trails, over roads with sudden curves. I encountered the tangled vegetation, the silence or the sounds of wild birds, the sudden outburst of a flowering tree dressed in scarlet robes like a gigantic archbishop of the mountains, or snowed under by a riot of blossoms I had never seen before. Or from time to time, when least expected, the copihue bellflower, wild, untamable, indestructible, dangling from the thickets like a drop of fresh blood. Slowly I got used to the horse, the saddle, the stiff, complicated riding gear, the cruel spurs jangling at my heels. Along endless beaches or thicketed hills, a communion was started between my spirit—that is, my poetry—and the loneliest land in the world. This was many years ago, but that communion, that revelation, that pact with the wilderness, is still a part of my life.
MY FIRST POEM
Now I am going to tell you a story about birds. In Lake Budi, swans were brutally hunted. They were stalked quietly in boats and then, rowing faster, faster … Swans, like the albatross, take to the air clumsily, they have to make a run, skimming the water. They lift their huge wings heavily, and so were easily caught, and finished off with sticks.
Someone brought me a swan that was half dead. It was one of those magnificent birds I have not seen again anywhere in the world, a black-necked swan. A snowy vessel with its slender neck looking as if squeezed into a black silk stocking, its beak an orange color and its eyes red.
This happened at the seaside, in Puerto Saavedra, Imperial del Sur.
It was almost dead when they gave it to me. I bathed its wounds and stuffed bits of bread and fish down its throat. It threw up everything. But it recovered from its injuries gradually and began to realize that I was its friend. And I began to realize that homesickness was killing it. So I went down the streets to the river, with the heavy bird in my arms. It swam a little way, close by. I wanted it to fish and showed it the pebbles on the bottom, the sand the silver fish of the south went gliding over. But its sad eyes wandered off into the distance.
I carried it to the river and back to my house every day for more than twenty days. The swan was almost as tall as I. One afternoon it seemed dreamier; it swam near me but wasn’t entertained by my ruses for trying to teach it how to fish again. It was very still and I picked it up in my arms to take it home. But when I held it up to my breast, I felt a ribbon unrolling, and something like a black arm brushed my face. It was the long, sinuous neck falling. That’s how I found out that swans don’t sing when they die.
* * *
Summer is like fire in Cautín. It scorches the sky and the wheat. The land would like to shake off its lethargy. The houses are not prepared for summer, just as they were not prep
ared for winter. I wander off into the countryside and I walk, walk, walk. I become lost on Nielol Hill. I am alone, my pocket filled with beetles. In a box I carry a hairy spider I just caught. Overhead, the sky can’t be seen. The forest is always damp, my feet slip. Suddenly a bird cries out, it’s the ghostly cry of the chucao bird. A chill of warning creeps upward from my feet. The copihues, drops of blood, can barely be made out. I am only a tiny creature under the giant ferns. A ringdove flies right past my mouth, with a snapping sound of wings. Higher up, other birds laugh harshly, mocking me. I have trouble finding my way back. It’s late now.
My father is not here yet. He will be back at three or four in the morning. I go upstairs to my room. I read Salgari. The rain pours down like a waterfall. In less than no time, night and the rain cover the whole world. I am alone, writing poems in my math notebook. I am up very early the next morning. The plums are green. I charge up the slopes. I carry a little packet of salt with me. I climb a tree, make myself comfortable, bite a little chunk out of a plum carefully, and dip the plum into the salt. I eat it. And I repeat this, up to one hundred plums. I know I’m overdoing it.
Our other house burned down, and this new one is filled with mystery. I climb up on the fence and I watch for the neighbors. There is no one around. I lift up some logs. Nothing but a few measly spiders. The toilet is at the back of the place. The trees next to it have caterpillars. The almond trees display their fruit covered with white down. I know how to catch bumblebees without harming them, with a handkerchief. I keep them captive for a little while and hold them up to my ears. What a beautiful buzz!