The Complete Memoirs

by Pablo Neruda

  The same story, day after day. We would leave the consulate shivering, since the robbery had reduced our wardrobe and all we had were some bedraggled sweaters given to us castaways. On the last day, we found out that our funds had arrived in Yokohama ahead of us. The bank had sent the consul three notices, and the pompous mannequin, the high-and-mighty functionary, had overlooked this minor point, so far beneath his station. (Whenever I read in the papers about consuls murdered by their crazed countrymen, I think longingly of that distinguished, bemedaled official.)

  That night we went to the best café in Tokyo, the Koraku, on the Ginza. There was excellent food in Tokyo in those days; besides, our week of hunger gave the delicacies an added flavor. In the pleasant company of lovely Japanese girls, we drank toasts to all the unfortunate travelers neglected by perverse consuls all over the world.

  * * *

  Singapore. We thought we were next door to Rangoon. What a bitter letdown! What had only been a few millimeters on the map had become a gaping abyss. Ahead of us we had several days on board a ship, and what’s more, the one making the regular run had left for Rangoon the previous day. We had no money to pay the hotel or our fares. More funds were waiting for us in Rangoon.

  Ah, but my colleague the Chilean consul in Singapore was there for a purpose. Señor Mansilla hurried in. His smile dwindled little by little until it disappeared completely, giving way to a wry grimace. “I can’t do a thing for you. Get in touch with the Ministry.”

  I suggested that we consuls must stick together, but it was no use. The man had the face of a heartless jailer. He grabbed his hat and was already making a dash for the door when a Machiavellian thought struck me: “Señor Mansilla, I’ll be forced to give some lectures on our country, with paid attendance, to put together enough money for our fares. Please get me a hall, an interpreter, and the necessary permit.”

  The man went white. “Lectures on Chile, in Singapore? I won’t allow it. I am in charge and I am the only one who can give lectures on Chile here.”

  “Calm down, Señor Mansilla,” I said. “The more people like us there are talking about our remote country, the better. I don’t see why you are so upset.”

  In the end, this crazy proposition that boiled down to patriotic blackmail led to a compromise. Shaking with anger, he made us sign receipts and handed us the money. When we counted it, we remarked that the receipts were made out for a larger amount.

  “That’s the interest,” he explained.

  (Ten days later I sent him a check from Rangoon, but without the interest, of course.)

  * * *

  From the deck, as the ship drew into Rangoon, I saw looming ahead the gold funnel of the great pagoda Shwe Dagon. A multitude of strange costumes clashed their vibrant colors on the pier. A broad dirty river’s mouth emptied there, into the Gulf of Martaban. This river has the most beautiful name of all the rivers in the world: Irrawaddy.

  Beside its waters, my new life was about to begin.

  ALVARO

  … A hell of a guy, Alvaro … His name is now Alvaro de Silva … He lives in New York … He has spent most of his life in the New York jungle … I imagine him eating oranges at outlandish hours, burning cigarette paper with a match, asking a lot of people annoying questions … He was always an undisciplined teacher, had a brilliant intelligence, an inquisitive intelligence that seemed to lead nowhere but to New York. It was 1925 … Between the violets that almost slipped from his hands as he rushed them to some passing stranger he wanted to go to bed with right away, without even finding out her name or where she came from, between this and his interminable lectures on Joyce, he revealed to me, and to many others, unsuspected opinions, viewpoints of the man of the world who lives in the city, in his lair, and goes out to investigate the latest in music, painting, books, the dance … Forever eating oranges, paring apples, impossible in his eating habits, amusingly up on everything, in him we finally saw the urbane model of our dreams, what all of us provincials wanted to be, no labels pasted on suitcases, but carried within, an assortment of countries and concerts, cafés in the small hours, universities with snow-covered roofs … He reached a point where he made life impossible for me … Wherever I go, I settle into a vegetable dream, I set my mind on one spot and try to put down roots, so as to think, to go on existing … Alvaro was always jumping from one wild enthusiasm to another, fascinated by any film we could work in, immediately dressing up as Moslems to go to the studio … There are pictures around somewhere of me in a Bengalese costume (I went into a cigarette shop in Calcutta and did not speak, and they took me for a member of Tagore’s family) when we used to go to the Dum-Dum studios to see if they would hire us . . And then we’d have to leave the Y.M.C.A. on the sly because we hadn’t paid our bill … And the nurses who loved us … Alvaro got tangled up in fabulous business ventures … He wanted us to sell tea from Assam, cloth from Kashmir, clocks, ancient treasures … Everything fizzled out quickly … He left samples from Kashmir, his little tea bags, on the tables, on the beds … He had already grabbed another suitcase and was somewhere else … In Munich … In New York …

  I have seen many writers, steady, inexhaustible, and prolific, but he is the greatest … He almost never publishes anything … I don’t understand … In the morning, without getting out of bed, with glasses mounted on the little hump of his nose, he’s already at it, banging away at the typewriter, consuming reams of every kind of paper, of all the paper he can get his hands on … And yet his mobility, his criticism, his oranges, his periodic communications, his lair in New York, his violets, his muddle that appears to be so clear, his lucidity that is so muddled up … He never turns out the work everyone’s always expected of him … Maybe it’s because he doesn’t feel like it … Maybe it’s because he can’t do it … Because he’s doing too many things at once … Or because he’s not doing anything … But he knows everything, he sees everything across continents with those impulsive blue eyes, with that fine sensibility, nevertheless letting the sands of time sift through his fingers …

  4

  Luminous Solitude

  FOREST IMAGES

  Immersed in these memories, I suddenly have to wake up. It’s the sound of the sea. I am writing in Isla Negra, on the coast, near Valparaíso. The powerful winds that whipped the shore have just blown themselves out. The ocean—rather than my watching it from my window, it watches me with a thousand eyes of foam—still shows signs, in its surf, of the terrible persistence of the storm.

  Years that are so far away! Reconstructing them, it’s as if the sound of the waves I hear now touched something inside me again and again, sometimes lulling me to sleep, then with the abrupt flash of a sword. I shall take up those images without attention to chronological order, just like these waves that come and go.

  Nineteen twenty-nine. Night. I see the crowd pressing together. It’s a Moslem holiday. They have made a long trough in the middle of the street and filled it with burning coals. I move closer. My face is flushed by the powerful heat of the coals heaped, under a thin sheet of ashes, on the scarlet ribbon of living fire. All at once, a fantastic personage appears. With his face smeared red and white, he comes on the shoulders of four men dressed in red. They set him down, he starts to walk drunkenly over the coals, shrieking as he walks: “Allah! Allah!”

  The huge crowd devours the scene, stunned. The magician has now walked unharmed over the long ribbon of coals. Then one man breaks away from the multitude, kicks his sandals off, and goes over the same span on naked feet. Volunteers keep coming forward interminably. Some pause midway along the trough to stomp on the fire, crying out, “Allah! Allah!,” howling, with hair-raising grimaces, rolling their eyes to heaven. Others pass over with children in their arms. No one is burned, or maybe they are, but I’m not sure.

  * * *

  Beside the sacred river looms the temple of Kali, goddess of death. We enter, mingling with hundreds of pilgrims who have come from deep in Hindu country to win her grace. Terrified, in rag
s, they are shoved along by the Brahmins who demand money for something or other, every step of the way. The Brahmins lift one of the execrable goddess’s seven veils, and as they lift it, there is the blast of a gong loud enough to wake up the dead. The pilgrims fall to their knees, make their obeisance with joined hands, touch their foreheads to the ground, and move on to the next veil. The priests drive them into a courtyard, where they chop off the heads of goats with one blow from an ax and collect new tributes. The bleating of wounded animals is drowned out by the blasts of the gong. The filthy whitewashed walls are splashed right up to the roof with blood. The goddess is a statue with a swarthy face and white eyes. A scarlet tongue two meters long hangs from her mouth to the ground. Necklaces of skulls and emblems of death weigh down her ears and her neck. The pilgrims contribute their last coins before being swept out into the street.

  The poets who surrounded me to chant their songs and their poems were nothing like these abject pilgrims. Dressed in their trailing white garments, squatting on the grass, accompanying themselves with their tambourines, each let out a low-pitched, broken cry, and from his lips rose up a song he had composed in the same form and meter as the ancient, millennial songs. But the songs’ emphasis had changed. These were not sensual or joyful songs but songs of protest, songs against hunger, songs written in prison. Many of these young poets I met all over India, whose brooding eyes I’ll never be able to drive out of my mind, had just come out of jail and would perhaps return to their cells tomorrow. For they sought to rise up against misery and against the gods as well. This is the time we have been destined to live in. And this is the golden age of world poetry. While the new songs are hunted down, a million men sleep by the roadside, on the outskirts of Bombay, night after night. They sleep. They are born and they die. There is no housing, no bread, no medicines. Civilized, proud England left her colonial empire like this. She parted from her former subjects without leaving them schools, or industries, or housing, or hospitals, only prisons and mountains of empty whiskey bottles.

  * * *

  The memory of Rango the orangutan is another tender image that comes back in with the waves. In Medan, Sumatra, I knocked at the gate of the run-down Botanical Gardens on more than one occasion. To my amazement, he came to open it for me each time. We used to go down a path hand in hand, to sit down at a table on which he banged with both hands and both feet. A waiter would then appear, and he would serve us our pitcher of beer, not too small, not too large, just right for the orangutan and the poet.

  In the Singapore zoo we saw a lyrebird in a cage, glittering, enraged, with the resplendent beauty of a bird who has just flown out of Eden. And farther along, a black female panther, with the smell of the jungle still fresh on her, was pacing in her cage. She was a strange patch of starry night, a magnetic ribbon in constant motion, a lithe black volcano ready to destroy the world, a dynamo of pure, undulating power, and two yellow eyes, two unerring knives, probing with their fire, unable to understand her imprisonment or the human race.

  * * *

  We came to the strange Snake Temple on the outskirts of the city of Penang, in what used to be called Indochina.

  This temple has been described over and over by travelers and journalists. So many wars, such repeated destruction, and so much time and rain have come down on the streets of Penang that I wonder if it is still there. Under the tiled roof, a low, blackish building, eaten away by the tropical rains, in a thick wilderness of huge plantain leaves. A dank smell. A scent of frangipani. When we first enter the temple, we see nothing in the dimness. A strong odor of incense, and something moving over there. It’s a snake stretching out lazily. Little by little we notice others. Then we see that there may be dozens. Later we realize that there are hundreds or thousands of snakes. There are tiny ones coiled around the candelabras, there are some that are dark, metallic, and slender, they all look drowsy and sated. Sure enough, fine porcelain bowls can be seen everywhere, some brimming with milk, others filled with eggs. The snakes don’t notice us. We pass down the narrow labyrinths of the temple, brushing against them. They are over our heads, hanging from the golden architecture; they are sleeping on the stonework, or curled up on the altars. Over there is the dreaded Russell’s viper; it’s swallowing an egg, near a dozen lethal coral snakes, whose scarlet rings advertise their instant poison. I made out the fer-de-lance, several enormous pythons, the coluber de rusi, and the coluber noya. Green, gray, blue, black serpents filled the hall. A dead silence everywhere. From time to time, a bonze dressed in saffron robes crosses the shadows. The brilliant color of his tunic makes him look like one more snake, stirring lazily in quest of an egg or a bowl of milk.

  Were these snakes brought here? How did they adjust? Our questions are answered with a smile, we are told that they came on their own, and will go on their own when they feel like it. The doors, in fact, are open and there is no grating or glass or anything forcing them to stay in the temple.

  * * *

  The bus was to leave Penang and cross the forest country and villages of Indochina to get to Saigon. No one understood my language, nor did I understand theirs. We made stops along the interminable road at out-of-the-way places in the jungle, and passengers got off, peasants in unusual clothes, slant-eyed and quietly dignified. By now, only three or four remained in the undaunted old rattletrap that whined and threatened to come apart in the sweltering night.

  All of a sudden, I was seized with panic. Where was I? Where was I going? Why was I spending this endless night among these strangers? We were crossing from Laos into Cambodia. I took in the inscrutable faces of the last of my fellow travelers. Their eyes were wide open. They looked like robbers. No doubt about it, I was among the sort of bandits usually found in Oriental stories.

  They exchanged knowing glances and watched me out of the corner of their eyes. Just then, the bus came to a dead stop right in the middle of the jungle. I picked the spot where I would die. I wouldn’t let them carry me off to be sacrificed under those unfamiliar trees whose dark shadows cut off the sky. I would die here, on this bench in the rickety bus, trapped among baskets full of vegetables and chickens in crates, the only friendly things around at that terrible moment. I looked about me, ready to face the fury of my killers, and I noticed that they, too, had vanished.

  I waited a long while, alone, with my spirit completely crushed by the intense darkness of the alien night. I was going to die and no one would hear about it. So far from my small, beloved country! So far away from my books and from all those I loved!

  Suddenly a light appeared, and then another. The road came alive with lights. There was the sound of a drum; an outburst of shrill notes of Cambodian music. Flutes, tambourines, and torches filled the road with music and patches of light. A man got on and told me in English: “The bus has broken down. Since there will be a long wait, perhaps till daybreak, and there is no place to sleep here, the passengers went out to look for a troupe of musicians and dancers to entertain you.”

  For hours, under those trees that were no longer intimidating, I watched the lovely ritual dances of a noble and ancient culture and listened, till sunup, to its delightful music flooding the road.

  The poet cannot be afraid of the people. Life seemed to be handing me a warning and teaching me a lesson I would never forget: the lesson of hidden honor, of fraternity we know nothing about, of beauty that blossoms in the dark.

  A CONGRESS IN INDIA

  This is a glorious day. We are present at the congress of the Indian National Congress Party. A nation in the thick of its fight for liberation. Thousands of delegates pack the galleries. I meet Gandhi. And Pandit Motilal Nehru, another patriarch of the movement. And his son, the elegant young Jawaharlal, recently back from England. Nehru is all for independence, while Gandhi favors simple autonomy as a necessary first step. Gandhi: the sharp profile of a very cunning fox; a practical man; a politician along the lines of our early creole leaders; a mastermind at committees; a shrewd tactician, indefatigable. As t
he multitude passes by in an endless stream, touching the hem of his white tunic worshipfully and crying, “Gandhiji! Gandhiji!,” he gives them a perfunctory salute and smiles without taking off his glasses. He receives messages and reads them; he answers telegrams; all this without effort; he is a saint who never wears himself out. Nehru: the intelligent promulgator of their revolution.

  One of the great figures at the congress was Subhas Chandra Bose, impetuous demagogue, violent anti-imperialist, fascinating political figure of his country. In the war of 1914, during the Japanese invasion, he sided with the invaders against the British Empire. Many years later, here in India, one of his friends tells me how the fortress of Singapore fell. “Our weapons were trained on the Japanese besiegers. Suddenly we began asking ourselves why. We had our soldiers do an about-face and we pointed our guns at the English troops. It was quite simple. The Japanese invaders were just passing through. The English seemed to be here for all eternity.”

  Subhas Bose was arrested, tried, found guilty of high treason, and sentenced to death by the British courts in India. The protests triggered off by the independence movement multiplied. At last, after many legal battles, his lawyer—Nehru himself—won amnesty for him. He became a popular hero from that moment on.

  THE RECLINING GODS

  … Statues of Buddha everywhere, of Lord Buddha … The severe, upright, worm-eaten statues, with a golden patina like an animal’s sheen, deteriorating as if the air were wearing them away … In their cheeks, in the folds of their tunics, at elbows and navel and mouth and smile, tiny blemishes: fungi, pockmarks, traces of jungle excrement … Or the recumbent, the immense, recumbent statues, forty meters of stone, of sand granite, pale, stretched out among the rustling fronds, emerging suddenly from some corner of the jungle, from its surrounding site … Asleep or not asleep, they have been there a hundred years, a thousand, one thousand times a thousand years … Yet there is something soft about them and they are known for an other-worldly air of indecision, longing to stay or go away … And that very soft stone smile, that imponderable majesty which is nevertheless made of hard, everlasting stone—at whom, at how many, on the bloodstained planet are they smiling…? The fleeing peasant women passed, the men from the fire, the visored warriors, the false high priests, the tourists who devour everything … And the statue remained in place, the immense stone with knees, with folds in its stone tunic, with a look lost in the distance and yet really here, thoroughly inhuman and also in some way human, in some form or contradiction a statue, god and not god, stone and not stone, under the screeching of black birds, surrounded by the wingbeats of red birds, of the birds of the forest … We are reminded of the terrible Spanish Christs we inherited wounds and all, pustules and all, scars and all, with that odor given off by churches, of wax candles, of mustiness, of a closed room … Those Christs had second thoughts about being men or gods … To make them human beings, to bring them closer to those who suffer, midwives and beheaded men, cripples and avaricious men, the inner circles of churches and those outside the churches, to make them human, the sculptors gave them the most gruesome wounds, and all this ended up as the religion of suffering, as sin and you’ll suffer, don’t sin and you’ll suffer, live and you’ll suffer, leaving you no possible way out … Not here, here the stone found peace … The sculptors rebelled against the canons of pain, and these colossal Buddhas, with the feet of giant gods, have a smile on their stone faces that is beatifically human, without all that pain … And they give off an odor, not of a dead room, not of sacristies and cobwebs, but an odor of vegetable space, of sudden gusts of wind swooping down in wild swirls of feathers, leaves, pollen from the infinite forest …