The Complete Memoirs

by Pablo Neruda

  This lasted until I ran into my friend Bianchi. The Bianchi family of Chile is a noble clan. Painters and popular musicians, jurists and writers, explorers and climbers of the Andes give all those with the Bianchi name an aura of restlessness and sharp intelligence. My friend, who had been an ambassador and knew the ins and outs of the ministries, asked me: “Hasn’t your appointment come through yet?”

  “I’ll get it any moment now, I’ve been assured of it by a high patron of the arts in the Ministry.”

  He grinned and said: “Let’s go see the Minister.”

  He took me by the arm and we went up the marble steps. Orderlies and employees scurried out of our way. I was dumbstruck. I was about to see my first Foreign Minister. He was quite short, and to disguise this, he swung himself up and sat on his desk. My friend mentioned how much I wanted to leave Chile. The Minister pressed one of his many buzzers, and to top off my confusion, my spiritual protector suddenly appeared.

  “What posts are available in the service?” the Minister asked him.

  The elegant functionary, who could not bring up Tchaikovsky now, listed various countries scattered over the world, but I managed to catch only one name, which I had never heard or read before: Rangoon.

  “Where do you want to go, Pablo?” the Minister said to me.

  “To Rangoon,” I answered without hesitating.

  “Give him the appointment,” the Minister ordered my protector, who hustled out and came back in nothing flat with the official order.

  There was a globe in the Minister’s office. My friend Bianchi and I looked for the unknown city of Rangoon. The old map had a deep dent in a region of Asia and it was in this depression that we discovered it. “Rangoon. Here’s Rangoon.”

  But when I met my poet friends some hours later and they decided to celebrate my appointment, I had completely forgotten the city’s name. Bubbling over with joy, I could only explain that I had been named consul to the fabulous Orient and that the place I was being sent to was in a little hole in the map.

  MONTPARNASSE

  One day in June 1927 we set out for faraway regions. In Buenos Aires we turned in my first-class for two third-class fares and sailed on the Baden. This German ship supposedly had just one class, but that must have been fifth class. There were two sittings for meals: one to serve the Portuguese and Spanish immigrants as fast as possible, and another for the remaining sundry passengers, particularly the Germans, who were returning from the mines and factories of Latin America. Alvaro, my companion, immediately classified the female passengers. He was a very active lady-killer. He divided women into two groups: those who prey on man and those who obey the whip. These distinctions did not always apply. He had a whole bag of tricks for winning the affection of the ladies. Whenever a pair of these interesting passengers appeared on deck, he would quickly grab one of my hands and pretend to read my palm, with mysterious looks and gestures. The second time around, the strollers would stop and beg him to read their future. He would take their hands at once, stroking them far too much, and the future he read always indicated a visit to our cabin.

  But the voyage soon took a different turn for me and I stopped seeing the passengers, who grumbled noisily about the eternal fare of Kartoffeln; I stopped seeing the world and the monotonous Atlantic to feast my eyes only on the enormous dark eyes of a Brazilian, an ever so Brazilian girl, who boarded the ship in Rio de Janeiro with her parents and two brothers.

  * * *

  The carefree Lisbon of those years, with fishermen in the streets and without Salazar on the throne, filled me with wonder. The food at our small hotel was delicious. Huge trays of fruit crowned the table. Houses of various colors; old palaces with arched doorways; cathedrals like monstrous vaults, which God would have abandoned centuries ago to go live elsewhere; gambling casinos in former palaces; the crowds on the avenues with their child-like curiosity; the Duchess of Braganza, out of her mind, walking solemnly down a cobbled street, trailed by a hundred awestruck street urchins—this was my entry into Europe.

  And then Madrid with its crowded cafés; hail-fellow Primo de Rivera teaching the first lesson in tyranny to a country that would later learn all the rest. The first poems of my Residencia en la tierra, which the Spaniards were slow to understand and would only understand later, when the generation of Alberti, Lorca, Aleixandre, and Diego appeared. And for me Spain was also the interminable train and the sorriest third-class coach in the world, taking us to Paris.

  * * *

  We disappeared into Montparnasse’s swarming crowds, among Argentinians, Brazilians, Chileans. Venezuelans, still buried away under Gómez’s reign, did not yet dream of coming. And, over there, the first Hindus in their full-length robes. And my neighbor at the next table, with her tiny snake coiled around her neck, drinking a café crème with melancholy languor. Our South American colony drank cognac and danced the tango, waiting for the slightest chance to start a battle royal and take on half the world.

  Paris, France, Europe, for us small-town Bohemians from South America, consisted of a stretch of two hundred meters and a couple of street corners: Montparnasse, La Rotonde, Le Dôme, La Coupole, and three or four other cafés. Boîtes with black singers and musicians were just beginning to become popular. The Argentinians were the most numerous of the South Americans, the first to pick a fight, and the richest. Hell could break loose at any time and an Argentine would be lifted up by four waiters, and would pass, in the air, over the tables, to be summarily deposited right out in the street. Our cousins from Buenos Aires did not care at all for this rough handling that wrinkled their trousers and, worse still, mussed up their hair. In those days, pomade was an essential part of Argentine culture.

  Actually, in those first days in Paris, whose hours flitted past, I did not meet a single Frenchman, a single European, a single Asian, much less anyone from Africa or Oceania. Spanish-speaking Americans, from the Mexicans down to the Patagonians, went about in cliques, picking on one another, disparaging one another, but unable to live without one another. A Guatemalan prefers the company of a Paraguayan bum, with whom he can idle the time away exquisitely, to that of a Pasteur.

  Around this time I met César Vallejo, the great cholo; a poet whose poetry had a rough surface, as rugged to the touch as a wild animal’s skin, but it was magnificent poetry with extraordinary power.

  Incidentally, we had a little run-in right after we met. It was in La Rotonde. We were introduced, and in his precise Peruvian accent, he greeted me with: “You are the greatest of all our poets. Only Rubén Darío can compare with you.”

  “Vallejo,” I said, “if you want us to be friends, don’t ever say anything like that to me again. I don’t know where we’d end up if we started treating each other like writers.”

  My words appeared to unsettle him. My anti-literary education prompted me to be bad-mannered. On the other hand, he belonged to a race that was older than mine, with viceroyalty and courtesy behind it. When I saw that he was offended, I felt like an unwelcome boor.

  But this blew over like a small cloud. We became true friends from that moment on. Years later, when I spent more time in Paris, we saw each other daily. Then I got to know him really well.

  Vallejo was shorter than I, thinner, more heavy-boned. He was also more Indian than I, with very dark eyes and a very tall, domed forehead. He had a handsome Inca face, saddened by an air of unmistakable majesty. Vain like all poets, he loved it when people talked to him this way about his Indian features. He would hold his head high to let me admire it and say, “I’ve got something, haven’t I?” And then laugh at himself quietly.

  His self-regard was nothing like that sometimes expressed by Vicente Huidobro, a poet who was Vallejo’s opposite in so many ways. Huidobro would let a lock of hair hang over his forehead, insert his fingers in his vest, push out his chest, and ask: “Have you noticed how much I look like Napoleon Bonaparte?”

  Vallejo was moody but only on the outside, like a man who had been huddling in t
he shadows a long time. He had a solemn nature and his face resembled a rigid, quasi-hieratic mask. But his inner self was something else again. I often saw him (especially when we managed to pry him away from his domineering wife, a tyrannical, proud Frenchwoman who was a concierge’s daughter), yes, I saw him jumping up and down happily, like a schoolboy. Later he would slip back into his moroseness and his submission.

  * * *

  The Maecenas we had been waiting for but who never showed up rose suddenly out of the Paris shadows. He was a Chilean writer, a friend of Rafael Alberti’s, of the French, in fact almost everybody’s friend. Also, and far more important, he was the son of Chile’s biggest shipping magnate. And well-known as a big spender.

  This messiah who had just fallen out of the sky wanted to fete me, so he took all of us to a White Russian boîte called the Caucasian Wine Cellar. Its walls were decorated with Caucasian costumes and landscapes. We were soon surrounded by Russian or phony Russian girls dressed as peasants from the mountains.

  Condon, for that was our host’s name, looked like the last of the Russian decadents. A frail-looking blond, he ordered bottle after bottle of champagne and did mad leaps in the air, imitating Cossack dances he had never seen.

  “Champagne, more champagne!” And, all of a sudden, our pale millionaire host collapsed on the ground. He lay there under the table fast asleep, like the bloodless corpse of a Caucasian done in by a bear.

  A shiver ran through us. The man would not come to even with ice compresses or bottles of ammonia uncorked under his nose. Seeing our helplessness and confusion, all the dancing girls deserted us, except one. In our host’s pockets we found an impressive checkbook that, in his corpse-like condition, he could not use.

  The head Cossack demanded immediate payment and closed the exit door to stop us from getting out. We escaped from his custody only by leaving my brand-new diplomatic passport as security.

  We departed with our lifeless millionaire on our shoulders. It took a herculean effort to carry him to a taxi, settle him in it, and then unload him at his deluxe hotel. We left him in the arms of two huge doormen in red livery, who carried him off like an admiral fallen on the bridge of his ship.

  The one girl from the boîte who had not deserted us in our misfortune was waiting for us in the cab. Alvaro and I invited her to Les Halles to enjoy the early-morning onion soup. We bought her flowers in the market, thanked her with a kiss for being a good Samaritan, and noticed that she was rather attractive. She was neither pretty nor homely, but her turned-up nose, so typical of Paris girls, made up for that. Then we invited her to our seedy hotel. She had no objection to coming with us.

  She went with Alvaro to his room. I dropped into bed exhausted, but all at once I felt someone shaking me roughly. It was Alvaro. His harmless maniac’s face seemed a little odd. “Listen,” he said. “This woman is something special, fantastic, I can’t explain to you. You’ve got to try her right away.”

  A few minutes later the stranger got into my bed, sleepily but obligingly. Making love to her, I received proof of her mysterious gift. It was something I can’t pin down with words, something that rushed up from deep within her, something that went back to the very origins of pleasure, to the first upsurge of a wave, to the erotic secrets of Venus. Alvaro was right.

  At breakfast the next morning, Alvaro warned me, on the side, in Spanish: “If we don’t leave this woman right away, our trip will be doomed. We will be sunk, not at sea but in the unfathomable sacrament of sex.”

  We decided to shower her with little gifts: flowers, chocolates, and half the francs we had left. She confessed that she didn’t work in the Caucasian nightclub; she had gone there the night before for the first and only time. Then we got into a taxi with her. The driver was passing through an unfamiliar neighborhood when we told him to stop. We said goodbye to her with big kisses and left her there, confused but smiling.

  We never saw her again.

  VOYAGE TO THE EAST

  Nor will I ever forget the train that took us to Marseilles, loaded, like a basket of exotic fruit, with a motley crowd of people, country girls, and sailors, with accordions and songs chorused by everyone in the coach. We were heading for the Mediterranean Sea, toward the doors of light … This was 1927. I was fascinated by Marseilles, with its commercial romanticism and the Vieux-Port winged with sails seething in their own ominous turbulence. But the Messageries Maritimes ship on which we sailed for Singapore was a piece of France at sea, with its petite bourgeoisie emigrating to occupy posts in the remote colonies. During the trip, when the crew noticed our typewriters and our writers’ manuscripts and papers, they asked us to pound out their letters on our machines. We took down the most incredible letters, dictated by the crew for their girls in Marseilles, in Bordeaux, in the provinces. Deep down, they were more interested in their letters being typewritten than in the message. Still, the things they said in them sounded like poems by Tristan Sepúlveda, artless, tender messages, all of them. The Mediterranean, with its ports, its carpets, its traders, its markets, slowly opened before our prow. In the Red Sea I was impressed by the port of Djibouti. The calcined sand, tracked so often by Arthur Rimbaud’s comings and goings; Negresses like statues with their baskets of fruit, the miserable huts of the native population; and the ramshackle look of cafés lit by spectral overhead lights … They served iced tea with lemon there.

  * * *

  The thing to do was to see what went on at night in Shanghai. Cities with a bad reputation draw you like deadly women. Shanghai opened its night mouth for us, two country boys set adrift in the world, third-class passengers with little money and a joyless curiosity.

  We went to the big nightclubs, one after the other. It was a weekday night and they were empty. It was depressing to look at those enormous dance floors, big enough for hundreds of elephants to dance on, and nobody dancing there. Women from the Tsar’s Russia, thin as skeletons, came out of dark corners, yawning and asking us to invite them to drink champagne. So we did the rounds of six or seven dens of sin and lost souls, where all we were losing was our time.

  It was late to be getting back to the ship we had left a long ways behind, beyond the crisscrossing, narrow streets of the waterfront. We each took a rickshaw. We weren’t used to this kind of transportation provided by human horses. In 1927, those Chinese trotted for long distances, pulling the little cart without ever stopping to rest.

  Since it had started raining and the rain was coming down harder now, our rickshawmen thoughtfully halted their carriages and carefully covered the fronts of the rickshaws with rainproof cloth so that not one drop should spatter our foreign noses. “They’re such a refined and considerate people. Two thousand years of culture have not gone for nothing,” Alvaro and I thought, in our mobile seats.

  And yet something began to make me feel uneasy. I couldn’t see a thing, shut in under the hood considerately put up for our protection, but through the oilskin I could hear my driver’s voice sending out a kind of buzz. The sound of his bare feet was soon joined by the rhythmic sounds of other bare feet trotting alongside on the wet pavement. The sounds finally became muffled, it was a sign that the pavement had ended. Apparently, we were now traveling over open ground, outside the city.

  All at once my rickshaw halted. The driver skillfully undid the cloth that protected me from the rain. There wasn’t the shadow of a ship in those deserted outskirts. The other rickshaw was standing beside mine, and Alvaro climbed down from his seat, obviously alarmed.

  “Money! Money!” seven or eight Chinese who circled us kept repeating steadily.

  My friend moved as if to reach for a weapon in his trousers pocket, and it was enough to earn each of us a rabbit punch. I fell back, but the Chinese caught my head in mid-air, keeping me from crashing down, and gently laid me out on the wet ground. With lightning speed they went through my pockets, shirt, hat, shoes and socks, and my necktie, like sleight-of-hand artists putting on an extravagant display of skill. Not one inch of clothin
g remained unaccounted for, not a penny of the little money we had. But one thing: with the traditional consideration of Shanghai thieves, they scrupulously respected our papers and our passports.

  Once we were alone, we walked toward the lights we could make out far off. Before long, we ran into hundreds of Chinese who were out at this hour and yet were honest. None of them knew French, or English, or Spanish, but all wanted to help us in our predicament, and somehow we were guided to the yearned-for paradise of our third-class cabin.

  * * *

  We got to Japan. The money we were expecting from Chile was supposed to be at the consulate. In the interim, we had to put up at a seaman’s shelter in Yokohama. We slept on dreadful straw mattresses. A glass pane had been knocked out, it was snowing, and the cold went right through our bones. No one noticed us. One morning, at daybreak, an oil tanker split in two off the Japanese coast and the refuge was filled with stranded seamen. Among them was a Basque who could only speak Spanish and his own language. He told us his adventure: for four days and nights he had stayed afloat on a piece of the wreck, surrounded by waves of burning oil. The survivors were supplied with blankets and rations, and the Basque, a big-hearted fellow, became our benefactor.

  The Consul General of Chile, on the other hand—I think his name was De la Marina or De la Rivera—received us in a high-handed manner, letting us know our place as lowly castaways. He had no time to spare. He was dining with Countess Yufu San that evening. The Imperial Court had invited him to tea. Or else he was immersed in profound studies of the reigning dynasty. “The emperor is such a refined man”—and so on.

  No. He didn’t have a telephone. Why have a telephone in Yokohama? They would only call him up in Japanese. As for news about our money, the manager of the bank, a close friend of his, hadn’t mentioned it. He was very sorry but he must leave. He was expected at a gala reception. See you tomorrow.