The Complete Memoirs

by Pablo Neruda

  At midday all of us had lunch together around a makeshift table of long planks. I looked out of the corners of my eyes as I ate, trying to find which of the women could have been my night visitor. But some were too old, others too skinny, and many were merely young girls as thin as sardines. And I was looking for a well-built woman with full breasts and long, braided hair. Suddenly a woman came in with a piece of roast for her husband, one of the Hernández men. This certainly could be the one. As I watched her from the other end of the table, I was sure I caught this attractive woman in long braids throwing me a quick glance and the slightest of smiles. And I felt as if the smile was growing broader and deeper, opening up inside my whole being.

  THE GIRL FROM THE JOURNEY BACK

  Days later, I had to go back, taking another road to keep from getting lost. I was joined by a family that was also returning from the mountains to the village on the coast. Two horses followed behind me, women, children, and baskets. There were too many travelers, and they asked me to let one of the girls from the family ride along on the back of my horse. Once I was settled into the saddle, they helped the girl in question straddle him behind me. She must have been around twenty, and all I saw of her were her bare, tanned legs and her cheeks red like wild apples framing her giggling lips. She must have been laughing at my inept handling of my mount. My vanity was stung: after my solitary expeditions, I’d come to think of myself as king of the roads.

  Rounding the lake, we rode toward the coast, where Lake Toltén meets the river. On the shore, we would change course and follow the beach until we were back to Bajo Imperial.

  We traveled at a slow trot through a uniform landscape of mountains, amid the ominous trees, black-necked swans, and red flamingos of the meandering lakeside terrain: three horses loaded down with people. We had left very early. Before midday, the distant thundering of the restive sea told us we would soon veer away.

  We stopped by the sea foam, stayed on our horses, ate bread and cheese, and drank a sip of wine.

  Once on our new route, we proceeded more quickly, and without noticing, my passenger and I pulled away from my escorts. Soon we had left them far behind. The sun’s naked rays beat down on our heads, and my poor horse was sweating under the weight of my adolescent self and my robust companion. We slowed to let the others catch up. It was beautiful to gaze at the unpeopled expanse, the whorls of sea foam, the wet beaches with their infinite, sun-caressed sand glimmering like salt or crystals. To the right, far off, were hints of the mountains. On our path were no shadows, not a single tree, nothing but the sand flats by the sea.

  Through the jolting gallop, my companion gripped the saddle, my waist, or my hips, but soon I noticed that her hands had grown more curious. I felt them, cool and determined, brushing me as if by chance, determined to scrutinize my anatomy. I turned my head and looked at her, and heard nothing but her laughter, a hearty, joyful cackle, like the whinny of a young mare.

  Holding the bridle in my left hand, I undertook an investigation of my own with the right, feeling for those parts of her body I could reach. She offered me a leg, a tense, febrile surface, squeezing me tighter and tighter. Slowly these caresses grew more intense. Rashly, I reached farther back. From me she encountered no resistance, and managed to grasp the most sensitive objective of my youth.

  The situation had to be dealt with. The sand of the shore was the perfect bed. But where would we hitch the horse? There were no branches, no tree trunks thrown up by the sea, not even a miserable bush. We had to find something. Otherwise there would be no celebration. The horse, half-wild, like all those in the region, would hurry off in search of water and grass in the distant mountains, and she and I would be left there, naked and abandoned, like Adam and Eve expelled from Paradise. But the wave of desire she had conveyed to me was welling now in my veins. In the meanwhile, nothing changed: the sun, the beach, and not a single godforsaken branch where we could tie the horse and consummate our pleasure.

  Night began falling. The stragglers caught up. By now we could see the hillsides holding vigil over the village. We returned to the path between the waves and rocks. The red roof and belfry of the church came into view. It was hopeless. All I could do was curse the sands of the sea and the disobliging barrenness of the coastal vegetation.

  More than fifty years later, I still remember this with a smile. I believe that day was one of the most frustrated and desperate of my entire life.

  THE HORSE FROM THE SADDLER’S

  Temuco, that city in the south of my country that I now see before me again, meant the whole of the world’s reality and its mystery throughout my long childhood. Long, because the ages are static in the cold and rainy regions.

  The trees in the south of Chile need centuries to grow. That is why, on my return, I see nearly the entire landscape ravaged. The landowners are ruthlessly incinerating the marvelous and ancient forests. This immense destruction is the fruit of greed. They need trees that grow quickly. That is what the wood trade demands.

  Little is left of the city of the dreams of my youth. Of course, hardly a single human face. Different children, different old people, different people with unfamiliar eyes.

  I found only one face I recognized immediately, and that seemed to recognize me. It was the head of a large wooden horse at the old saddler’s shop in the village. There it was, among the same wares as always, saddles, leather lassos for roping the cattle, giant spurs to harry the horses, broad belts for the boorish riders.

  But from all that array of fascinating backwoods curios, only the glass eyes of the large wooden horse recaptured my imagination. They looked at me with infinite sadness, recognizing the boy who’d taken more than one journey round the world and now had returned to greet him. We were older now, he and I. Surely we had much to tell each other.

  In the Temuco of fifty years before, the vendors would advertise their wares with some large symbol dangling over the door. From afar, the Araucanian Indians who came from their mysterious, secluded redoubts could know right away where to buy their oil, their nails, their shoes. A huge hammer on a corner told them this was a place that sold tools. Otherwise they could buy them in the hardware store, El Candado, which announced its presence with a big blue lock. The cobblers drew people in with giant boots posted over their shoe shops. Wooden keys and spoons, three meters high, left no doubt as to where rice, coffee, and sugar could be purchased.

  I walked in short pants beneath those colossal insignia, filled with extraordinary respect. They seemed to me part of an outsize world, strange and hostile, like the enormous ferns of the nearby forest or the vines hanging high in the trees. They were akin to the tempestuous wind that shook the humble wooden houses and the volcanoes that sang songs of fire no sooner than they came into view.

  But the horse from the saddler’s shop was something else. Every day on my walk to school, I would stop a moment at the display window to see if he was still there. He never made it up over the door. Lined in real leather, with real hoofs, mane, and tail, he was too precious to be abandoned to the wind and freezing rain of the southern hemisphere. No, he stayed inside, very still and proud, with lustrous skin and costly tack. Once I was sure he was still there, that he hadn’t galloped off or even flown away toward the mountains, I would go inside, stretch out my small hand, and pass it over his soft muzzle. Rain or shine, the big wooden horse knew the young schoolboy would come by to pet him. I sensed that many times from the look in his glassy eyes.

  The city is so changed, it seems as if all it was before has vanished. The wood houses with their wintertide colors have been replaced by large domiciles of disconsolate cement. More people are walking the streets. Fewer horses, fewer carriages stop at the doors of the hardware stores. This is the only city in Chile with Araucanians on the streets. I’m glad that hasn’t changed. The Indian women with their colorful blankets, the Indian men in black ponchos with white fretwork patterns repeating like lightning strikes. There was a time when they only came down to buy and sel
l their scant merchandise: fabrics, eggs, and chickens. Now there’s something else. I will tell you of my surprise.

  The whole town came to the venue to hear my poetry. It was a Sunday morning, and the room was ringing with the shouts and laughter of children. Children are master interrupters, and no poetry can stand its ground against the shout of a child who’s suddenly remembered it’s breakfast time. I walked onstage to the public’s applause and felt that vague Herodian inclination that can strike even the most paternally inclined. Then I heard the silence settle. And amid that silence rose up the strangest, most primordial, ancient, grating music on the planet, coming from a group in the back.

  It was Araucanians playing their instruments and chanting their plaintive melodies for me. Never in history had such a thing been seen: my reclusive compatriots were offering their ritual art to accompany a political and poetic ceremony. I never thought I would see it, and it moved me even more that I was the object of this missive. My eyes misted over as their old leather drums and gigantic flutes played a scale that antedated all music. Muffled and sharp all at once, monotonous and rending like windblown rain or the roar of a primeval animal in torment beneath the earth’s crust.

  All this to recount how the Araucanians’ culture, what remains of it, anyway, seems to emerge from a dream immemorial to move you, and longs to take part in a world that up till now has been denied it.

  The fields’ physiognomy has changed. Brutally burned, what the mountains were has largely disappeared. On the peaks, you can see their charred scalp, the bony structure of the earth. Erosion proceeds without pity. And then, many houses and buildings in the towns and villages of the south were shaken and destroyed by the earthquake. Time passes, and they only rebuild in the city centers, in the luxury neighborhoods or the administrative zones. In some of the new townships, recently rebuilt and painted in attractive colors, black letters on white backgrounds proclaim the following: “This area was reconstructed thanks to money from the North American people.”

  Many countries, untold assistance, came to Chile’s rescue after its most recent and terrifying calamity. But only the North Americans flaunt their little clusters of neatly painted houses. Naturally, they don’t say that the money they make from copper mining alone could rebuild every city, every road and rail line, every bridge and factory, everything man has built in my entire country through the course of its history.

  As the old, immobile horse that has witnessed so many changes looks at me, I ought to tell him that I, too, have changed, more than a little.

  Old friend: when I left this city, I was writing verses about love and the night, pensive songs that welled in me like the slow seeds of grains or the secret waters flowing beneath these mountains. Let me tell you, old horse, my poetry changed many times. It was stained by the smoke of the cities, it has spoken up in meetings, it has been a weapon and a flag.

  I’m happy, old friend.

  But I don’t want to be cataloged, not definitively, shoved into a drawer with the dogmas of our era. I want to perpetually change, be perpetually born, perpetually grow. I want to sing with my erstwhile intimacy with the rain and with the earth. I’ve come back to you, old friend, to tell you I’ve changed as no one can change and that still, I am the same.

  I said these words with my eyes, as my lips were unable utter them, and I went to say goodbye, stroking his wooden muzzle once more, and there, where I placed my hand, the leather of his face, of his handsome muzzle, was worn, and I could feel the wood beneath it. It was like touching the old horse’s soul.

  Before now, I’d always thought I was the only child who’d had that habit of caressing the horse in the saddler’s shop, but that hollow showed that many, many others had done as I had. Many, many children, I saw, continued to take that road on their walks from home to school and back.

  And I grasped that even an old wooden horse lost in the immensity of the world could hope for tenderness. The tenderness of children passing often over that long road that leads us to become men.

  2

  Lost in the City

  ROOMING HOUSES

  After many years of school, and the struggle through the math exam each December, I was outwardly prepared to face the university in Santiago. I say outwardly because my head was filled with books, dreams, and poems buzzing around like bees.

  Carrying a metal trunk, wearing the requisite black suit of the poet, all skin and bones, thin-featured as a knife, I boarded the third-class section of a night train that took an interminable day and night to reach Santiago.

  This long train crossed different zones and climates; I took it so many times and it still holds a strange fascination for me. Peasants with wet ponchos and baskets filled with chickens, uncommunicative Indians—an entire life unfolded in the third-class coach. Quite a number of people traveled without paying, under the seats. Whenever the ticket collector came around, a metamorphosis took place. Many disappeared, and others might hide under a poncho on which two passengers immediately pretended to play a game of cards, to keep the conductor from noticing the improvised table.

  Meanwhile, the train passed from the countryside covered with oaks and araucaria trees and frame houses with sodden walls to the poplars and the dusty adobe buildings of central Chile. I made the round trip between the capital and the provinces many times, but I always felt myself stifling as soon as I left the great forests, the timberland that drew me back like a mother. To me, the adobe houses, the cities with a past, seemed to be filled with cobwebs and silence. Even now I am still a poet of the great outdoors, of the cold forest that was lost to me after that.

  I brought my references to a rooming house at 513 Maruri Street. Nothing can make me forget this number. I forget all kinds of dates, even years, but the number 513 is still in my mind, where I engraved it so many years ago, fearing I would never find that rooming house and would lose my way in the strange, awe-inspiring city. On the street just mentioned I used to sit out on the balcony and watch the dying afternoon, the sky with its green and crimson banners, the desolation of the rooftops on the edge of town threatened by the burning sky.

  At that time, living in a rooming house for students meant starvation. I wrote a lot more than I had up until then, but I ate a lot less. Some of the poets I knew in those days broke down under the strict diet of poverty. Among them, I remember Romeo Murga, a poet my own age but much taller and gawkier than I, whose subtle lyric poetry was filled with emanations that lingered wherever it was heard.

  Romeo Murga and I went to read our poetry together in the city of San Bernardo, near the capital. Before we took the stage, everyone had been in a festive mood, watching the queen of the Floral Games—fair and blond—with her court, and enjoying the speeches of the town dignitaries, and the so-called local bands; but when I went on and began reciting my poems in the most wretched voice in the world, everything changed. The audience coughed, joked about me, and had a good time laughing at my melancholy poems. Seeing this reaction from the barbarians, I rushed through my reading and left the stage to my companion, Romeo Murga. It was something to remember. When this Quixote, over six feet tall, with dark, frayed clothes, came on and began reading in a voice that was even more wretched than mine, no one in the audience could hold back his indignation and they all began to shout: You starving poets! Get out! Don’t spoil the celebration.

  * * *

  I moved out of the Maruri Street rooming house like a mollusk leaving its shell. I said goodbye to that shell and went out to explore the sea—that is, the world. The unknown sea was the streets of Santiago, which I had seen almost nothing of, as I walked back and forth between the university and the room I was now leaving for good.

  I knew that during this adventure there would be more of the old hunger to face. At least my former landladies, remotely linked to my part of the country, mercifully doled out a potato or an onion from time to time. But I could not help it: life, love, glory, freedom called to me. Or so it seemed.

  I rented
the first room where I was completely on my own, over on Argüelles Street, near the Teachers Institute. A sign peered through a window on that gray street: “Rooms for rent.” The landlord lived in the front rooms. He was a man with graying hair, a noble bearing, and eyes that seemed odd to me. He was talkative and quite eloquent, and he earned a living as a ladies’ hairdresser, an occupation he shrugged off. He explained that he was more interested in the invisible world, the world of the beyond.

  I unpacked my books and the few clothes I possessed, from the trunk that had traveled with me from Temuco, and I stretched out in bed to read and sleep, filled with pride at my independence and my idleness.

  The house had no patio, only a gallery lined with innumerable closed rooms. The next morning, as I explored the nooks and crannies of the lonely mansion, I noticed that all the walls, including the toilet’s, displayed signs saying more or less the same thing: “Resign yourself. You cannot get in touch with us. You are dead.” Alarming notices that cropped up in every room, in the dining room, in the corridors, in the tiny parlors.

  It was during one of Santiago’s harsh winters. From colonial Spain my country had inherited a vulnerability to the rigors of nature as well as a disregard for them. (Fifty years after the events I am recounting now, Ilya Ehrenburg, who had just come from the snowy streets of Moscow, told me he had never felt so cold as he had in Chile.) Winter had turned the glass windows blue. The trees on my street shivered with cold. The horses pulling the old carriages blew clouds of steam through their nostrils. It was the worst possible time to be in that house, among sinister intimations of the beyond.

  Coiffeur pour dames and occultist, the landlord stared straight through me with the eyes of a madman, and calmly explained: “My wife, Charito, died four months ago. This is a trying moment for the dead. They go on visiting the old places where they lived. We can’t see them, but they don’t know that we can’t see them. We have to let them know this so they won’t suffer, thinking we’re indifferent. That’s why I’ve put up those signs for Charito, they will make it easier for her to understand that she is dead now.”