The Complete Memoirs

by Pablo Neruda

  * * *

  At about this time I lost my mongoose. Kiria had the dangerous habit of tagging after me wherever I went, with quick, imperceptible steps. Following me meant plunging into streets traveled by cars, trucks, rickshaws, and Dutch, Chinese, and Malay pedestrians. A turbulent life for a trusting mongoose who knew only two persons in the whole world.

  The inevitable happened. On my return to the hotel one day, I saw the tragedy written all over Bhrampy’s face. I didn’t ask him anything. But when I sat down on the verandah, she did not come to jump on my knees or brush her furry tail against my head.

  I placed an ad in the papers: “Lost: mongoose, answers to the name of Kiria.” There was no reply. None of the neighbors had seen her. Maybe she was already dead. She had disappeared forever.

  Bhrampy, her guardian, felt so disgraced that he stayed out of sight. My clothes, my shoes were taken care of by a phantom. Sometimes I thought I heard Kiria squeal, calling me from a tree during the night. I would turn on the light, open the windows and doors, peer into the coconut trees. It wasn’t she. The world Kiria knew had betrayed her; her trustfulness had shattered in the city’s dangerous jungle. I was grief-stricken for a long time.

  Overcome with shame, Bhrampy decided to go back to his native country. I was not happy about it, but the mongoose had really been the only thing we had in common. One afternoon he came in to show me the new suit he had bought so that he could return well dressed to his home town in Ceylon. He showed up suddenly, dressed in white and buttoned all the way up to his neck. The most surprising thing was the huge chef’s cap he had settled on his jet-black head. I burst out laughing, in spite of myself. Bhrampy was not insulted. On the contrary, he smiled at me sweetly, with a smile of understanding for my ignorance.

  * * *

  My new home in Batavia was on a street called Probolinggo. It had a living room, a bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom. I never owned a car, but I did have a garage that was always empty. I had more than enough space in this tiny house. I took on a Javanese cook, an old peasant woman, charming and egalitarian. A “boy,” also Javanese, served table and looked after my clothes. There I finished Residencia en la tierra.

  My solitude became even deeper. I decided to get married. I had met a creole—to be exact, a Dutch girl with a few drops of Malay blood—and I became very fond of her. She was a tall, gentle girl and knew nothing of the world of arts and letters. (About this marriage of mine, my friend and biographer Margarita Aguirre was to write several years later: “Neruda returned to Chile in 1932. Two years earlier, in Batavia, he had married María Antonieta Hagenaar, a young Dutch woman who lived in Java. She is quite proud of being a consul’s wife and has a most exotic opinion of America. She doesn’t know any Spanish, but she’s learning it. However, there is no doubt that it is not just the language that she has had trouble learning. In spite of all this, she’s very much attached to Neruda, and they are always together. Maruca, that’s what Pablo calls her, is tall, stately, hieratic.”)

  My life was very simple. I was soon meeting other amiable people. Linked by our common language, the Cuban consul and his wife became my friends as a matter of course. Capablanca’s countryman talked nonstop, like a self-winding machine. Officially he was representing Machado, the Cuban tyrant. Yet he would tell me how items belonging to political prisoners—watches, rings, sometimes even gold teeth—would turn up in the bellies of sharks caught in Havana’s bay.

  The German consul, Hertz, was a great admirer of the modern plastic arts, Franz Marc’s blue horses, Wilhelm Lehmbruck’s elongated figures. He was a sensitive person, romantic in temperament, a Jew with a centuries-old cultural heritage.

  I once asked him: “And this Hitler whose name appears from time to time in the newspapers, this anti-Semite, anti-Communist leader, don’t you think he can assume power?”

  “Impossible,” he told me.

  “Why impossible, when history is full of the most absurd incidents?”

  “But you don’t know Germany,” he stated flatly. “That’s the one place where it is absolutely impossible for a mad agitator like him to run even a village.”

  My poor friend, poor Consul Hertz! That mad agitator barely missed running the world. And the ingenuous Hertz, with all his culture and his noble romanticism, must have ended up in some monstrous, anonymous gas chamber.

  5

  Spain in My Heart

  WHAT FEDERICO WAS LIKE

  A long sea voyage of two months brought me back to Chile in 1932. There I published El hondero entusiasta, which had been mislaid among my papers, and Residencia en la tierra, which I had written in the Orient. In 1933 I was appointed consul of Chile in Buenos Aires, and there I arrived in the month of August.

  Federico García Lorca arrived in that city almost at the same time, to direct his tragedy Blood Wedding, performed by Lola Membrives’s troupe. We hadn’t known each other, but we met in Buenos Aires and were often feted together by writers and friends. Of course, we had our share of incidents. Federico had his detractors. So did I, and I still have them. These detractors are driven by a desire to snuff out the lights, to keep us from being seen. That’s what happened this time. Because there was a lot of interest in attending the banquet the P.E.N. club was holding for Federico and me at the Plaza Hotel, someone kept the phones busy all day long spreading the word that the dinner in our honor had been called off. They were so persistent that they even called the hotel manager, the telephone operators, and the chef to make sure no reservations were accepted and no dinner was prepared. But the maneuver fell through and in the end Federico García Lorca and I got together with a hundred Argentine writers.

  We came up with a big surprise. We had prepared a talk al alimón. You probably don’t know what that means, and neither did I. Federico, who always had some invention or idea up his sleeve, explained: “Two bullfighters can fight the same bull at the same time, using only one cape between them. This is one of the most perilous feats in bullfighting. That’s why it is so seldom seen. Not more than twice or three times in a century, and it can be done only by two bullfighters who are brothers, or at least blood relations. This is called fighting a bull al alimón. And that’s the way we’ll do our talk.”

  And that is what we did. But no one knew about it beforehand. When we got up to thank the president of the P.E.N. club for honoring us with the banquet, we did it together, like two bullfighters, to make our single speech. The diners sat at small, separate tables, and Federico was at one end of the room, I at the other. People on my side tugged at my jacket to make me sit down, believing there was a mix-up, and the same thing happened to Federico on the other side of the room. Well, we set out speaking together, with me saying “Ladies” and he continuing with “and gentlemen,” twining our phrases throughout, so that they flowed like a single speech, right to the end. The oration was dedicated to Rubén Darío, because, though no one could accuse us of being modernists, both García Lorca and I regarded Rubén Darío as one of the most creative poets in the Spanish language.

  Here is the text of the speech:

  NERUDA: Ladies …

  LORCA:… and gentlemen: In bullfighting there is what is known as “bullfighting al alimón,” in which two toreros, holding one cape between them, outwit the bull together.

  NERUDA: Linked as if by an electrical impulse, Federico and I will together thank you for this prestigious reception.

  LORCA: At these gatherings it is customary for a poet to bring forth his living word, be it of silver or wood, and hail his companions and friends with his own voice.

  NERUDA: We, however, are going to seat a dead man among you, to bring you a table companion who is widowed, obscured by the darkness of a death greater than other deaths, widowed of life, whose dazzling spouse he was, in his shining hour. We shall stand in his fiery shadow, we shall call out his name until his powers leap back from oblivion.

  LORCA: First, a symbolic embrace, with our penguin-like tenderness, to that exquisite poet Amado
Villar. Then we offer a great name upon the festal board, in the knowledge that wineglasses will shatter, forks fly in search of the eye they hunger for, and a tidal wave stain the table linen. We give you the poet of America and Spain: Rubén …

  NERUDA: Darío. Because, ladies …

  LORCA: and gentlemen …

  NERUDA: Where, in Bueno Aires, is there a Rubén Darío Plaza?

  LORCA: Where is Rubén Darío’s statue?

  NERUDA: He loved parks. Where is Rubén Darío Park?

  LORCA: What florist carries Rubén Darío roses?

  NERUDA: Where are Rubén Darío apple trees? Rubén Darío apples?

  LORCA: Where is the cast of Rubén Darío’s hand?

  NERUDA: Where?

  LORCA: Rubén Darío sleeps in the Nicaragua of his birth under a ghastly lion made of plaster like those the rich set at their gates.

  NERUDA: A mail-order lion for him who was a founder of lions, a lion without stars for him who dedicated the stars to others.

  LORCA: In an adjective he gave us the sounds of the forest. Like Fray Luis de Granada, a master of words, he created constellations with the lemon, and the stag’s foot, and mollusks filled with terror and infinity: he sent us to sea with frigates and shadows in the pupils of our eyes, and he built a limitless esplanade of gin across the grayest afternoon the sky has ever known, and he talked to the south wind in familiar terms, all heart, like the romantic poet he was, and his hand rested on the Corinthian capital, skeptical about all the ages, ironic and sorrowing.

  NERUDA: His luminous name should be remembered in its every essence, with the terrible griefs of his heart, his incandescent incertitude, his descent into the deepest circles of hell, his rise to the castles of fame, his greatness as a poet, then and forever and unequaled.

  LORCA: As a Spanish poet, he was teacher in Spain to the older masters as well as to the children, with a sense of universality and a generosity present-day poets do not possess. He was teacher to Valle-Inclán and Juan Ramón Jiménez and the Machado brothers, and his voice was water and nitrate in the furrows of our time-honored language. From Rodrigo Caro to the Argensolas and Don Juan del Arguijo, the Spanish language had not had such a festival of words, such clashing of consonants, such fire and such form as in Rubén Darío. From Velázquez’s landscape and Goya’s campfire, from Quevedo’s melancholy to the precious apple cheeks of Majorcan peasant girls, Darío traveled over the land of Spain as if it were his own land.

  NERUDA: The tide brought him to Chile, the warm sea of the north, and the sea left him there, abandoned on the rugged, rock-toothed coast, and the ocean pounded him with foam and bells, and Valparaíso’s black wind covered him with songs of salt. Tonight let us make him a statue of air and let smoke, voices, circumstances, and life flow through it, like his magnificent poetry with dreams and sounds flowing through it.

  LORCA: But I want to give this statue of air blood like a coral branch stirred by the sea; nerves like a cluster of lightning in a photograph; the head of a minotaur with Góngora’s snow painted on by a flight of hummingbirds; the wandering and absent eyes of a millionaire of tears; and also his failings. Shelving eaten away by hedge mustard, where the empty spaces are echoes of a flute; the cognac bottles of his spectacular drunken sprees; his charming lack of taste; and the barefaced verbal stunts that make the vast majority of his poems so human. The fertile substance of his great poetry stands outside norms, forms, or schools.

  NERUDA: Federico García Lorca, a Spaniard, and I, a Chilean, turn over the honor of this evening among friends to that great shadow who sang more loftily than we and hailed with his unique voice the Argentine soil on which we stand.

  LORCA: Pablo Neruda, a Chilean, and I, a Spaniard, linked by our language and by the person of the great Nicaraguan, Argentine, Chilean, and Spanish poet Rubén Darío.

  NERUDA AND LORCA: In whose honor and glory we raise our glasses!

  MIGUEL HERNÁNDEZ

  I was not at the consulate in Buenos Aires very long. At the start of 1934, I was transferred to Barcelona in the same capacity. Don Tulio Maqueira, the Consul General of Chile in Spain, was my boss. He was, incidentally, the most dedicated official in the Chilean consular service I have come across. A severe man, with a reputation for reticence, he was extremely kind, understanding, and cordial to me.

  Don Tulio Maqueira quickly learned that I was very bad at subtracting and multiplying, and that I didn’t know how to divide (I have never been able to learn). So he said to me: “Pablo, you should go live in Madrid. That’s where the poetry is. All we have here in Barcelona is that terrible multiplication and division that certainly doesn’t need you around. I can handle it.”

  In Madrid, turned overnight, as if by magic, into a Chilean consul in the capital of Spain, I met García Lorca’s and Alberti’s friends. They were many. And within a few days I was one with the Spanish poets. Spaniards and Latin Americans are different, of course—a difference that is borne with pride, or in error, by either side.

  The young poet Miguel Hernández was one of Federico’s and Alberti’s friends. I met him when he came up, in espadrilles and the typical corduroy trousers peasants wear, from his native Orihuela, where he had been a goatherd. I published his poems in my review Caballo verde (Green Horse), and I was enthusiastic about the radiance and vigor of his exuberant poetry.

  Miguel was a peasant with an aura of earthiness about him. He had a face like a clod of earth or a potato that has just been pulled up from among the roots and still has its subterranean freshness. He was living and writing in my house. My American poetry, with other horizons and plains, had its impact and gradually made changes in him.

  He told me earthy stories about animals and birds. He was the kind of writer who emerges from nature like an uncut stone, with the freshness of the forest and an irresistible vitality. He would tell me how exciting it was to put your ear against the belly of a sleeping she-goat. You could hear the milk coursing down to the udders, a secret sound no one but that poet of goats has been able to listen to.

  At other times he would talk to me about the nightingale’s song. Eastern Spain, where he came from, swarmed with blossoming orange trees and nightingales. Since that bird, that sublime singer, does not exist in my country, crazy Miguel liked to give me the most vivid imitation of what it could do. He would shinny up one of the trees in the street and from its highest branches would whistle or warble like his beloved native birds.

  Since he had nothing to live on, I tried to get him a job. It was hard to find work for a poet in Spain. At last a viscount, a high official in the Ministry of Foreign Relations, took an interest in his case and replied that yes, he was all for it, he had read Miguel’s poems, admired them, and Miguel just had to indicate what position he preferred and he would be given the appointment.

  I was jubilant and said: “Miguel Hernández, your future is all set, at last. The viscount has a job for you. You’ll be a high-ranking employee. Tell me what kind of work you want, and your appointment will go through.”

  Miguel gave it some thought. His face, with its deep, premature lines, clouded up with anxiety. Hours went by and it was not until late in the afternoon that he gave me his answer. With the radiant look of someone who has found the solution to his whole life, he said to me: “Could the viscount put me in charge of a flock of goats somewhere near Madrid?”

  The memory of Miguel Hernández can never be rooted out of my heart. The song of the Levantine nightingales, their spires of sound soaring between the darkness and the orange blossoms, was an obsession with him. They were in his blood, in his earthy and wild poetry, where all the extravagances of color, of perfume, and of the voice of the Spanish Levant came together, with the exuberance and the fragrance of a powerful and virile youth.

  His face was the face of Spain. Chiseled by the light, rutted like a planted field, it had some of the roundness of bread or of earth. Filled with fire, burning in that surface scorched and made leathery by the wind, his eyes were two beams
of strength and tenderness.

  I saw the very elements of poetry rise out of his words, altered now by a new greatness, by a savage light, by the miracle that converts old blood into an infant son. In all my years as poet, as wandering poet, I can say that life has not given me the privilege of setting eyes on anyone with a vocation and an electrical knowledge of words like his.

  GREEN HORSE

  Federico and Alberti, who lived near my house in an apartment overlooking an avenue of trees, his lost grove; the sculptor Alberto, a baker from Toledo who was master of abstract sculpture; Altolaguirre and Bergamín; the great poet Luis Cernuda; Vicente Aleixandre, poet of limitless dimension; Luis Lacasa, the architect—all of us, singly or in groups, would get together every day in someone’s home or in a café.

  From Castellana Avenue or from the Correos tavern we would go to my house, the “House of Flowers,” in the Argüelles sector. Down from the upper deck of one of the double-decker buses that my countryman the great Cotapos called “bombardones” we would come in boisterous groups to eat, drink, and sing. Among my young companions in poetry and merriment, I recall Arturo Serrano Plaja, poet; José Caballero, a painter of dazzling talent and a very amusing fellow; Antonio Aparicio, who came from Andalusia straight to my house; and so many others who are no longer near or no longer alive, but whose friendship I miss as keenly as some part of my body or the substance of my soul.

  Ah, Madrid in those days! I would make the rounds of the working-class neighborhoods with Maruja Mallo, the Galician painter, looking for the places where esparto grass and mats were sold, looking for the streets of the barrelmakers, of the ropemakers, streets where they deal in all the dry goods of Spain, goods that entangle and choke her heart. Spain is dry and rocky, and the high sun beats down on it hard, drawing sparks from the flatlands, building castles of light out of clouds of dust. The only true rivers of Spain are its poets: Quevedo, with his profound green waters and black foam; Calderón, with his syllables that sing; the crystalline Argensolas; Góngora, river of rubies.