The Complete Memoirs

by Pablo Neruda

  But friends present at his wake that night had an unusual visitor. A torrential rain was falling on the rooftops, with lightning and the wind together illuminating and shaking the huge plantain trees on Quinta Normal, when the door opened and a man all in black, drenched by the rain, walked in. No one knew who he was. Before the curious eyes of the friends keeping vigil, the stranger braced himself and leaped over the coffin. And he left immediately, as suddenly as he had arrived, without uttering a word, vanishing into the night and the rain. And so Alberto Rojas Giménez’s amazing life was sealed with a mysterious rite nobody has yet been able to puzzle out.

  I had just arrived in Spain when I received the news of his death. Seldom have I felt such intense grief. This was in Barcelona. I immediately began writing my elegy “Alberto Rojas Giménez viene volando” (“Alberto Rojas Giménez Comes Flying”), which Revista de Occidente later published.

  But I also had to say farewell to him with some kind of ceremony. He had died so far away, in Chile, when days of heavy rain were flooding the cemetery. I could not be near his mortal remains, or be with him on his final voyage, so I had an idea for a ceremony. I went to my friend Isaías Cabezón, the painter, and together we headed for the marvelous basilica of Santa María del Mar. We bought two huge candles, each almost as tall as a man, and with them we entered the shadows of that strange temple. Santa María del Mar was the cathedral of seafarers. Fishermen and sailors built it stone by stone many centuries ago. Then it was embellished with thousands of votive offerings: miniature boats of all sizes and shapes, sailing through eternity, formed a tapestry over the walls and ceilings of the beautiful basilica. It occurred to me that this was the perfect setting for the late poet, this would have been his favorite spot if he had come to know it. My friend the painter and I lit the huge candles in the center of the basilica, near the clouds of the coffered ceiling, and sat in the empty church, each of us with a bottle of white wine, feeling that, despite our agnosticism, the silent ceremony brought us closer to our dead friend in some mysterious way. Burning in the highest part of the empty basilica, the candles were alive and radiant and might have been the two eyes of the mad poet, whose heart had been extinguished forever, looking at us from the shadows, among the votive offerings.

  MADMAN IN WINTER

  Apropos of Rojas Giménez, I’ll say that madness, a certain kind of madness, often goes hand in hand with poetry. It would be very difficult for predominantly rational people to be poets, and perhaps it is just as difficult for poets to be rational. Yet reason gets the upper hand, and it is reason, the mainstay of justice, that must govern the world. Miguel de Unamuno, who loved Chile very much, once said: “The thing I don’t like is that motto. What is it all about, through reason or force? Through reason and always through reason.”

  I’ll talk about Alberto Valdivia, one of the mad poets I knew in the old days. Alberto Valdivia was one of the skinniest men in the world and so sallow-complexioned that he seemed to be made entirely of bone, with a wild shock of gray hair and a pair of glasses covering his myopic eyes, which always had a faraway look. We called him Valdivia the Corpse.

  He went in and out of bars and eating places, cafés and concerts, without ever making a sound and with a mysterious little bundle of newspapers under his arm. “Dear Corpse,” his friends used to say, embracing his incorporeal body, with the sensation that we were embracing a gust of air.

  He wrote some lovely lines packed with subtle feeling, with intense sweetness. Here are a few:

  Everything will go—the afternoon, the sun, life:

  evil, which cannot be undone, will prevail.

  Only you will stay, inseparable

  sister of the twilight of my life.

  This poet whom we fondly knew as Valdivia the Corpse was a true poet. We often said to him: “Stay and have dinner with us, Corpse.” Our nickname never upset him. Sometimes a smile played on his very thin lips. His phrases were few and far between, but they were always to the point. We made a rite of taking him to the cemetery every year. On the eve of November 1 we used to give a dinner for him, as sumptuous as the miserable pockets of young students and writers would permit. Our “Corpse” occupied the seat of honor. At twelve on the dot, we cleared the table and headed for the cemetery in a lighthearted procession. Someone would make a speech honoring the “late” poet, in the stillness of the night. Then each of us said goodbye solemnly and we marched off, leaving him all alone at the graveyard gate. The “Corpse” had long accepted this traditional rite, and there was no cruelty in it, since he took an active role in the farce all the way to the end. Before leaving, we would hand him some pesos, so he could eat a sandwich in his grave.

  Two or three days later, no one was surprised to see the poet-corpse quietly slip back into our small knot of friends and into the cafés. He could count on being left in peace until the following November 1.

  * * *

  In Buenos Aires I met a very eccentric Argentine writer whose name was, or is, Omar Vignole; I don’t know if he is still living. He was a giant of a man and carried a heavy walking stick. Once, in a midtown restaurant where he had invited me to dinner, he turned to me at the table, motioning me to a seat, and said in a booming voice that could be heard throughout the room, which was filled with regular customers: “Sit down, Omar Vignole!” I sat down a bit uneasily and promptly asked: “Why do you call me Omar Vignole? You know that you are Omar Vignole and I am Pablo Neruda.” “Yes,” he replied, “but there are lots of people in this restaurant who only know me by name. And several of them want to thrash the daylights out of me; I’d rather have them do it to you.” Vignole had been an agronomist in an Argentine province and had brought back a cow that became his inseparable friend. He used to walk all over Buenos Aires with his cow, leading her by a rope. Around that time, he published some books, all with intriguing titles: What the Cow Thinks, My Cow and I, etc. When the P.E.N. club had its first world congress in Buenos Aires, the writers, who were headed by Victoria Ocampo, trembled at the thought that Vignole would turn up with his cow. They explained this imminent threat to the authorities, and the police cordoned off the streets around the Plaza Hotel to prevent my eccentric friend from showing up with his ruminant at the luxurious place where the congress was being held. It was all in vain. The festivities were in full swing and the writers were discussing the classical world of the Greeks and its relation to the modern meaning of history, when the great Vignole burst in upon the conference hall with his inseparable cow, which, to top things off, started to moo as if she wanted to join the debate. He had brought her into the heart of the city in an enormous closed van that had somehow eluded the vigilance of the police.

  Something else I want to tell about this same Vignole is that he once challenged a wrestler. The pro called his bluff, and on the night of the match my friend showed up at a packed Luna Park right on time with his cow, hitched her to a corner of the ring, shed his super-elegant robe, and faced the Calcutta Strangler.

  Well, neither the cow nor the wrestling poet’s gorgeous apparel could help him here. The Calcutta Strangler pounced on Vignole and tied him into a helpless knot in double-quick time. What’s more, adding insult to injury, he placed one foot on the literary bull’s throat, amid tremendous whistles and catcalls from an audience that demanded that the fight continue.

  A few months later Vignole brought out a new book: Conversations with the Cow. I’ll never forget the unique dedication that appeared on the first page. If memory serves me, it read: “I dedicate this philosophical work to the forty thousand sons of bitches who hissed and called for my blood in Luna Park on the night of February 24.”

  * * *

  In Paris, before the last war, I met Alvaro Guevara, the painter who was known in Europe as Chile Guevara. One day he called me on the telephone, with an urgent tone in his voice. “It’s something very important,” he said.

  I had come up from Spain, and our struggle then was against Hitler, the Nixon of that era. My house in Ma
drid had been bombed and I had seen men, women, and children wiped out by the bombings. The world war was in the offing. Other writers and I had started to fight Fascism in our own way: with books urging people to open their eyes to this grave threat.

  My countryman had stayed out of the struggle. He was an uncommunicative man, a hard-working painter, and always kept busy. We were sitting on a keg of gunpowder. When the great powers blocked the delivery of arms for the defense of the Spanish Republic, and later, in Munich, when they threw the doors wide open for Hitler’s army, the war had arrived.

  I complied with Chile Guevara’s plea that I go see him. What he wanted to tell me was very important.

  “What’s it all about?” I asked him.

  “There’s no time to lose,” he answered. “There’s no reason for you to be anti-Fascist. No one has to be anti-anything. We must get down to brass tacks, and I have found those brass tacks. I want to tell you about it right away so that you’ll drop your anti-Nazi congresses and settle down to serious work. There’s no time to lose.”

  “Well, tell me what it’s all about. Alvaro, I really have very little time.”

  “Pablo, my idea is really expressed in a three-act play. I’ve brought it along to read to you.” And he stared at me hard—his face, with its bushy eyebrows, like an ex-boxer’s—as he pulled out a voluminous manuscript.

  Panicky, and stressing my lack of time as an excuse, I convinced him to give me a quick rundown of the ideas that he planned to use to save the human race.

  “It’s like Columbus’s egg, easier to crack than it looks,” he said. “I’ll explain. If you plant one potato, how many potatoes will it yield?”

  “Well, maybe four or five,” I answered, just to say something.

  “Lots more,” he answered. “Sometimes as many as forty, sometimes more than one hundred potatoes. Imagine everybody planting one potato in the garden, on the balcony, anywhere. How many people are there in Chile? Eight million. Eight million planted potatoes. Pablo, multiply this by four, by one hundred. That’s the end of hunger, the end of war. How many people are there in China? Five hundred million, right? Each Chinese plants one potato. Forty potatoes come from each potato that’s been planted. Five hundred million by forty potatoes. Humanity is saved.”

  When the Nazis marched into Paris, they did not take into account that world-saving idea: Columbus’s egg, or rather, Columbus’s potato. Alvaro Guevara was arrested at his home in Paris on a cold, foggy night. They dragged him off to a concentration camp and held him prisoner there, marked with a tattoo on his arm, until the end of the war. He came out of that hell a human skeleton, and he never recovered. He came to Chile for the last time, as if to bid his country goodbye, giving it a final kiss, a sleepwalker’s kiss, and returned to France, where death completed its work.

  Great painter, dear friend, Chile Guevara, I want to tell you one thing: I know you are dead, that your non-aligned potato politics did not help you at all. I know that the Nazis killed you. And yet—last June I went into the National Gallery. I was only going to look at the Turners, but I hadn’t reached the main room, when I discovered an impressive painting: a painting as lovely to me as the Turners, a resplendently beautiful work. It was the portrait of a lady, a famous lady: her name, Edith Sitwell. And this painting was your work, the only work by a Latin American painter ever privileged to hang among the masterpieces of the great London museum.

  I don’t care about the place, or the honor, and, at heart, I also care very little about that lovely canvas. What matters to me is that we did not get to know each other better, to understand each other more, and that we let our lives cross without understanding, all because of a potato.

  * * *

  I have been too simple a man: this has been my honor and my shame. I went along with my friends’ shenanigans and envied their brilliant plumage, their Satanic poses, their little paper birds, and even their cows, which, in some unexplained way, may have something to do with literature. Anyway, I believe I was born not to pass judgment but to love. Even the divisionists who attack me, ganging up to gouge out my eyes, after having first nourished themselves on my poetry, deserve my silence if nothing else. I was never afraid I’d contaminate myself circulating among my enemies, because the only enemies I have are the enemies of the people.

  Apollinaire said: “Mercy on us who explore the frontiers of the unreal.” I quote from memory, thinking of the stories I have just told, stories about people who are no less dear to me because they were eccentric, and no less valorous because I did not know what to make of them.

  BIG BUSINESS

  We poets have always believed we could come up with brilliant ideas that would make us rich, that we are geniuses at planning business deals, but geniuses no one understands. I recall that in 1924 I was prompted by one of those money-making brainstorms to sell my Chilean publisher the rights to my book Crepusculario, not for one edition, but for eternity. I thought this sale would make me rich, and signed the contract before a notary. The fellow paid me five hundred pesos, a little under five dollars in those days. Rojas Giménez, Alvaro Hinojosa, Homero Arce were waiting for me outside the notary public’s door, to celebrate this commercial success with a big banquet. And in fact we ate in what was then the best restaurant, La Bahía, with exquisite wines, cigars, and liqueurs. But first we had our shoes shined until they glittered like mirrors. The restaurant, four shoeshine boys, and a publisher profited from this business deal. Prosperity stopped short of the poet.

  Alvaro Hinojosa claimed he had an eagle’s eye for all kinds of business. We were impressed by those grandiose schemes of his that, put into practice, would make money rain down on our heads. For us down-at-the-heels Bohemians, his command of English, his Virginia-blend cigarettes, his years of study at a university in New York spoke volumes for the pragmatism of his great business brain.

  One day he called me aside, very confidentially, to let me in on a fantastic plan aimed at making us rich quick. I could go in fifty-fifty with him, and simply by contributing a few pesos I would get somewhere. He would put up the rest. That day we felt like capitalists beyond God and the law, capable of anything.

  “What kind of merchandise is it?” I asked the unappreciated king of finance timidly.

  Alvaro closed his eyes, expelled a mouthful of smoke that broke up into small rings, and finally answered in a hushed voice: “Pelts!”

  “Pelts?” I echoed in amazement.

  “From seals. To be precise, from hair seals all the same color.”

  I couldn’t bring myself to ask for more details. I didn’t know that seals, or sea lions, had hair of any color. When I had watched them on a rock, on southern beaches, I had seen a shiny skin that glistened in the sun, had never noticed the slightest hint of hair on their lazy bellies.

  I converted everything I owned into ready cash with lightning speed, without paying my rent, or my tailor’s installment, or the shoemaker’s bill, and I placed my share of the money in my business associate’s hands.

  We went to look at the pelts. Alvaro had bought them from an aunt of his, a southerner who owned several uninhabited islands. On those desolate rookeries, the sea lions carried out their erotic ceremonies. And they were here now, before my eyes, as huge bundles of yellow pelts riddled by the carbines of the wicked aunt’s hirelings. The packs of skins were stacked all the way up to the ceiling in the storehouse rented by Alvaro to impress prospective buyers.

  “And what are we going to do with this enormous mass, this mountain of pelts?” I asked sheepishly.

  “Everybody needs this kind of pelt. You’ll see.” And we left the storehouse, Alvaro shooting off sparks of energy, I with lowered head, wordlessly.

  Alvaro made the rounds with a portfolio made of our genuine pelts from “hair seals all the same color,” a portfolio filled with blank forms to make it look business-like. Our last money went for newspaper ads. Just let one interested and appreciative magnate read them, and that was it. We’d be rich. Alvaro,
a very elegant dresser, wanted to have a half dozen suits made out of English cloth. Much more modest, I harbored among my unfulfilled dreams the dream of buying a good shaving brush, now that the one I had was well on its way to turning unacceptably bald.

  A buyer showed up at last. He worked in leather goods, a short, robust man with fearless eyes, sparing with words, and with an air of candor which, I thought, verged on rudeness. Alvaro received him with guarded indifference and set a suitable time, three days later, for showing him our fabulous merchandise.

  During those three days Alvaro bought some superb English cigarettes and some “Romeo y Julieta” Havana cigars, which he stuck in his breast pocket, in plain sight, just before the client was expected to arrive. We had laid out the better-looking skins on the floor.

  The man showed up for our appointment right on time. He did not take off his hat and barely greeted us with a grunt. He glanced scornfully and quickly at the skins spread out on the floor. Then he ran his sharp, stern eyes over the crammed shelves. He raised a pudgy hand, and a suspicious fingernail pointed out a bundle of skins, one of those highest and farthest away. Exactly where I had jammed the worst ones into a corner.

  Alvaro made the most of this crucial moment to offer him one of his genuine Havanas. The small-time merchant grabbed it, bit off the end, rammed the cigar into his mouth, and went on calmly pointing to the bundle he wanted to inspect.

  There was nothing to do but show it to him. My partner climbed up the ladder and came back down with the thick bundle, smiling like a man sentenced to death. Pausing now and then to draw more and more smoke from Alvaro’s cigar, the buyer examined all the skins in the package, one by one.

  The man picked up a pelt, rubbed it together, bent it double, tossed it aside scornfully, and immediately went on to the next, which in turn was scratched, rubbed, sniffed, and dropped. When he was finally through with his inspection, he once more ran his vulture’s eyes over the shelves brimming with our pelts from hair seals all the same color, and at last halted his gaze on the forehead of my partner, the business expert.