by Pablo Neruda
Then, in a hard, dry voice, he uttered words that, for us at least, became immortal: “My dear sirs, I’m not getting hitched to these skins.” And he walked out forever, with his hat still on, smoking Alvaro’s superb cigar, without saying goodbye, implacable slayer of our millionaire’s dreams.
MY FIRST BOOKS
I sought refuge in poetry with the intensity of someone timid. The new literary movements hovered over Santiago. I finished writing my first book at 513 Maruri Street. I used to write two, three, four, five poems each day. In the late afternoon, outside my balcony, there unfolded a spectacle I never missed for anything in the world. It was the sunset with its glorious sheaves of colors, scattered arrays of light, enormous orange and scarlet fans. The middle section of my book is called “Maruri Twilights.” No one ever asked me what Maruri is supposed to mean. Maybe a very small number of people know it’s only a modest street frequented by the most extraordinary twilights.
In 1923 my first book, Crepusculario, appeared. I had setbacks and successes every day, trying to pay for the first printing. I sold the few pieces of furniture I owned. The watch my father had solemnly given me, on which he had had two little crossed flags enameled, soon went off to the pawnbroker’s. My black poet’s suit followed the watch. The printer was adamant, and in the end, when the edition was all ready and the covers had been pasted on, he said to me, with an evil look, “No. You are not taking a single copy until you pay me for the entire thing.” The critic Alone generously contributed the last pesos, which were gobbled up by my printer, and off I went into the street carrying my books on my shoulder, with holes in my shoes, but beside myself with joy.
My first book! I have always maintained that the writer’s task has nothing to do with mystery or magic, and that the poet’s, at least, must be a personal effort for the benefit of all. The closest thing to poetry is a loaf of bread or a ceramic dish or a piece of wood lovingly carved, even if by clumsy hands. And yet I don’t believe any craftsman except the poet, still shaken by the confusion of his dreams, ever experiences the ecstasy produced only once in his life, by the first object his hands have created. It’s a moment that will never come back. There will be many editions, more elaborate, more beautiful. His words will be poured into the glasses of other languages like a wine, to sing and spread its aroma to other places on this earth. But that moment when the first book appears with its ink fresh and its paper still crisp, that enchanted and ecstatic moment, with the sound of wings beating or the first flower opening on the conquered height, that moment comes only once in the poet’s lifetime.
One of my poems seemed to break away from that immature book and go off on its own: “Farewell,” which many people, wherever I go, still know by heart. They would recite it to me in the most unlikely places, or ask me to do it. I might find it annoying, but the minute I was introduced at a gathering, some girl would raise her voice with those obsessive lines, and sometimes ministers of state would receive me with a military salute while reciting the first stanza.
Years later in Spain, Federico García Lorca told me how the same thing kept happening to him with his poem “La casada infiel” (“The Faithless Wife”). The greatest proof of friendship Federico could offer anyone was to repeat for him his enormously popular and lovely poem. We become allergic to the unshakable success of just one of our poems. This is a healthy and natural feeling. Such an imposition by readers tends to transfix the poet in a single moment of time, whereas creation is really a steady wheel spinning along with more and more facility and self-confidence, though perhaps with less freshness and spontaneity.
* * *
I was now leaving Crepusculario behind me. Deep anxieties stirred my poetry. Short trips to the south renewed my powers. In 1923 I had a strange experience. I had returned home to Temuco. It was past midnight. Before going to bed, I opened the windows in my room. The sky dazzled me. The entire sky was alive, swarming with a lively multitude of stars. The night looked freshly washed and the Antarctic stars were spreading out in formation over my head.
I became star-drunk, celestially, cosmically drunk. I rushed to my table and wrote, with heart beating high, as if I were taking dictation, the first poem of a book that would have many titles and would end up as El hondero entusiasta. It was smooth going, as if I were swimming in my very own waters.
The following day, filled with happiness, I read my poem. Later, when I got to Santiago, the wizard Aliro Oyarzún listened with admiration to those lines of mine. Then he asked in his deep voice: “Are you sure those lines haven’t been influenced by Sabat Ercasty?”
“I’m pretty sure. I wrote them in a fit of inspiration.”
Then I decided to send my poem to Sabat Ercasty himself, a great Uruguayan poet unjustly neglected today. In him I had seen realized my ambition to write poetry that would embrace not only man but nature, its hidden forces: an epic poetry that would deal with the great mystery of the universe and with man’s potential as well. I started an exchange of letters with him. While I continued my work and mellowed it, I read with great care the letters Sabat Ercasty addressed to me, an unknown young poet.
I sent Sabat Ercasty, in Montevideo, the poem I had written that night and I asked him if it showed any influence from his poetry. A kind letter from him promptly answered my question: “I have seldom seen such a successful, such a magnificent poem, but I have to tell you: Yes, there are echoes of Sabat Ercasty in your lines.”
It was a flash of light in the darkness, of clarity, and I am still grateful for it. The letter spent a good many days in my pocket, wrinkling until it fell apart. Many things were at stake. I was particularly obsessed with the fruitless rush of feelings that night. I had fallen into that well of stars in vain, that storm of stars had struck my senses in vain. I had made an error. I must be wary of inspiration. Reason must guide me step by step down the narrow paths. I had to learn humility. I ripped up many manuscripts, I misplaced others. It would be ten years before these last poems would reappear and be published.
Sabat Ercasty’s letter ended my recurrent ambition for an expansive poetry. I locked the door on a rhetoric that I could never go on with, and deliberately toned down my style and my expression. Looking for more unpretentious qualities, for the harmony of my own world, I began to write another book. Veinte poemas was the result.
Those Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada make a painful book of pastoral poems filled with my most tormented adolescent passions, mingled with the devastating nature of the southern part of my country. It is a book I love because, in spite of its acute melancholy, the joyfulness of being alive is present in it. A river and its mouth helped me to write it: the Imperial River. Veinte poemas is my love affair with Santiago, with its student-crowded streets, the university, and the honeysuckle fragrance of requited love.
The Santiago sections were written between Echaurren Street and España Avenue, and inside the old building of the Teachers Institute, but the landscape is always the waters and the trees of the south. The docks in the “Canción desesperada” (“Song of Despair”) are the old docks of Carahue and Bajo Imperial: the broken planks and the beams like stumps battered by the wide river: the wingbeat of the gulls was heard and can still be heard at that river’s mouth.
In the long, slender-bodied, abandoned lifeboat left over from some shipwreck, I read the whole of Jean-Christophe, and I wrote the “Canción desesperada.” The sky overhead was the most violent blue I have ever seen. I used to write inside the boat, hidden in the earth. I don’t think I have ever again been so exalted or so profound as during those days. Overhead, the impenetrable blue sky. In my hands, Jean-Christophe or the nascent lines of my poem. Beside me, everything that existed and continued always to exist in my poetry: the distant sound of the sea, the cries of the wild birds, and love burning, without consuming itself, like an immortal bush.
I am always being asked who the woman in Veinte poemas is, a difficult question to answer. The two women who weave in and out of the
se melancholy and passionate poems correspond, let’s say, to Marisol and Marisombra: Sea and Sun, Sea and Shadow. Marisol is love in the enchanted countryside, with stars in bold relief at night, and dark eyes like the wet sky of Temuco. She appears with all her joyfulness and her lively beauty on almost every page, surrounded by the waters of the port and by a half-moon over the mountains. Marisombra is the student in the city. Gray beret, very gentle eyes, the ever-present honeysuckle fragrance of my footloose and fancy-free student days, the physical peace of the passionate meetings in the city’s hideaways.
* * *
Meanwhile, life was changing in Chile.
The Chilean people’s movement was starting up, clamoring, looking for stronger support among students and writers. On the one hand, the great leader of the petite bourgeoisie, Arturo Alessandri Palma, a dynamic and demagogic man, became President of the Republic, but not before he had rocked the country with his fiery and threatening speeches. In spite of his extraordinary personality, once in power he quickly turned into the classic ruler of our Americas; the dominant sector of the oligarchy, whom he had fought, opened its maw and swallowed him and his revolutionary speeches. The country continued to be torn apart by bitter strife.
At the same time, a working-class leader, Luis Emilio Recabarren, was extraordinarily active organizing the proletariat, setting up union centers, establishing nine or ten workers’ newspapers throughout the country. An avalanche of unemployment sent the country’s institutions staggering. I contributed weekly articles to Claridad. We students supported the rights of the people and were beaten up by the police in the streets of Santiago. Thousands of jobless nitrate and copper workers flocked to the capital. The demonstrations and the subsequent repression left a tragic stain on the life of the country.
From that time on, with interruptions now and then, politics became part of my poetry and my life. In my poems I could not shut the door to the street, just as I could not shut the door to love, life, joy, or sadness in my young poet’s heart.
THE WORD
… You can say anything you want, yessir, but it’s the words that sing, they soar and descend … I bow to them … I love them, I cling to them, I run them down, I bite into them, I melt them down … I love words so much … The unexpected ones … The ones I wait for greedily or stalk until, suddenly, they drop … Vowels I love … They glitter like colored stones, they leap like silver fish, they are foam, thread, metal, dew … I run after certain words … They are so beautiful that I want to fit them all into my poem … I catch them in mid-flight, as they buzz past, I trap them, clean them, peel them, I set myself in front of the dish, they have a crystalline texture to me, vibrant, ivory, vegetable, oily, like fruit, like algae, like agates, like olives … And then I stir them, I shake them, I drink them, I gulp them down, I mash them, I garnish them, I let them go … I leave them in my poem like stalactites, like slivers of polished wood, like coals, pickings from a shipwreck, gifts from the waves … Everything exists in the word … An idea goes through a complete change because one word shifted its place, or because another settled down like a spoiled little thing inside a phrase that was not expecting her but obeys her … They have shadow, transparence, weight, feathers, hair, and everything they gathered from so much rolling down the river, from so much wandering from country to country, from being roots so long … They are very ancient and very new … They live in the bier, hidden away, and in the budding flower … What a great language I have, it’s a fine language we inherited from the fierce conquistadors … They strode over the giant cordilleras, over the rugged Americas, hunting for potatoes, sausages, beans, black tobacco, gold, corn, fried eggs, with a voracious appetite not found in the world since then … They swallowed up everything, religions, pyramids, tribes, idolatries just like the ones they brought along in their huge sacks … Wherever they went, they razed the land … But words fell like pebbles out of the boots of the barbarians, out of their beards, their helmets, their horseshoes, luminous words that were left glittering here … our language. We came up losers … We came up winners … They carried off the gold and left us the gold … They carried everything off and left us everything … They left us the words.
3
The Roads of the World
ROAMING IN VALPARAÍSO
Valparaíso is very close to Santiago. They are separated only by the shaggy mountains on whose peaks tall cacti, hostile but flowering, rise like obelisks. And yet something impossible to define keeps Valparaíso apart from Santiago. Santiago is a captive city behind walls of snow. Valparaíso, on the other hand, throws its doors wide to the infinite sea, to its street cries, to the eyes of children: everything there is different.
At the wildest stage of our young manhood, we would suddenly—always at daybreak, always without having slept, always without a penny in our pockets—board a third-class coach, guided by the star of Valparaíso. We were poets and painters, all of us about twenty years old, brimming over with a precious store of impulsive madness that was dying to be used, to expand, to burst out. Valparaíso beckoned to us with its magnetic pulsebeat.
It wasn’t until many years later that I felt this same inexplicable call again. It was during my years in Madrid. In a tavern, coming out of the theater in the small hours, or simply walking the streets, I would suddenly hear the voice of Toledo calling me, the soundless voice of its ghosts and its silence. And at that late hour, with friends as crazy as those of my younger days, I took off for the ancient, ashen, twisted citadel. To sleep in our clothes on the sands of the Tagus, under stone bridges.
I don’t know why, but of all the trips to Valparaíso I can picture to myself, one remains fixed in my mind, permeated by an aroma of herbs uprooted from the intimacy of the fields. I will tell the story.
We were going to see a poet and a painter off, they would be traveling to France in a third-class cabin on the P.S.N.C. (Pacific Steam Navigation Company) anchored out in the bay. The ship floated there, resplendent, blowing smoke from its thick chimney: there was no doubt it was set to depart. We did not have enough money between all of us to pay for even the dingiest hotel, so we looked up Novoa, one of our favorite lunatics in wonderful Valparaíso. We knew he was trustworthy, and the door to his house in the hills was always wide open for mayhem. It was late in the evening when we set out. It wasn’t easy to get to his house. Scrambling and slipping up and down endless hills, we followed Novoa’s undaunted silhouette as he guided us along.
He was an impressive man, with a bushy beard and a thick moustache. His dark coattails flapped like wings on the mysterious slopes of the ridge we were climbing, blindly, worn out.
He wouldn’t stop talking. He was a mad saint, canonized by us poets alone. He wasn’t interested in that canonization, but only in the secret relations, known only to him, between bodily health and the natural bounties of the earth. He was, naturally, a naturist. He was a vegetal vegetarian. He preached to us as he walked along; he threw his thundering voice back at us, as if we were his disciples. His huge figure advanced like a St. Christopher native to these dark, forsaken suburbs.
At last we reached his house, which turned out to be a cabin with two rooms. Our St. Christopher’s bed occupied one of them. The other was mostly taken up by an enormous wicker armchair, lavishly crisscrossed by superfluous rosettes and with quaint little drawers built into its arms. A Victorian masterpiece.
The huge armchair was assigned to me for sleeping that night.
My friends spread the evening papers over the floor and stretched out carefully on news items and editorial columns.
Their breathing and their snores soon told me that they were all sound asleep. Sitting in that monumental piece of furniture, my weary bones found it difficult to coax sleep. My weariness kept me awake.
I could hear a silence coming from the heights, the lonely peaks. Only the occasional barking of the Dog Stars in the darkness, only the faraway whistle of an arriving or departing ship made this night in Valparaíso real for me.
Suddenly I felt a strange, irresistible force flooding through me. It was a mountain fragrance, a smell of the prairie, of vegetation that had grown up with me during my childhood and which I had forgotten in the noisy hubbub of city life. I started to feel drowsy, cradled in the lullaby of the mother soil. Where could this wild breath of the earth, this purest of aromas, be coming from? It suffused me, overwhelmed my senses with an invasive scent composed of the pure virginity of aromas. In the darkness, I felt around for the wicker frame of my colossal chair.
Probing with my fingers into its nooks and crannies, I discovered the innumerable little drawers. And in them, blinded by the darkness, I felt with my hands dry, smooth plants, coarse, rounded sheaves, spear-like, soft or metallic leaves. The entire health-giving arsenal of our vegetarian preacher, the complete record of a life spent by our exuberant wandering St. Christopher gathering wild plants with his huge hands. Once this enigma had been cleared up, I fell asleep peacefully, protected by the fragrance of those guardian herbs.
When I recall it today, on Isla Negra, on this morning in August of 1973, I realize that all my friends from that strange, aromatic night have met their deaths, each fulfilling his own tranquil or tragic fate.
It’s been years now since Novoa and his moustache disappeared. The ones who left for Paris the next day are gone as well. A hurricane coming in from the ocean swept away forever the cabin and the armchair that sheltered me and blessed me with sleep on that occasion.