by Pablo Neruda
Incidentally, he once aided me in an erotic-cosmic adventure, an episode of juvenile urgency that still makes me smile when it surfaces in my memory.
We had been invited one night by one of those millionaire big shots of a kind only to be found in Argentina or the U.S.A. He was a headstrong, self-taught man who had made a spectacular fortune with his sensationalist news rag. His house, surrounded by an enormous park, was the very incarnation of the dreams of a vigorous nouveau riche. Hundreds of cages lined the walkway with pheasants of all colors from all possible countries. The bookshelves were lined with antique books my host bought by cable at bibliophile auctions in Europe: his library was extensive and the shelves were bursting. But most extraordinary of all was the floor of this enormous room, covered entirely in panther skins sewn together to form a single, gigantic tapestry. I found out the man had had agents in Africa, Asia, and the Amazon whose sole function was to gather pelts of leopards, ocelots, and other great cats, whose spots now glimmered beneath my feet in the library of this capricious capitalist.
Such was the lay of the land at the home of the famous Natalio Botana, redoubtable nouveau riche, master of Buenos Aires. Federico and I sat at the table next to the man of the house and across from a tall, blond, wispy poetess whose eyes were more on me than on Federico during our meal: an entire grilled ox brought out still roasting over coals and ashes on a kind of colossal litter borne on the shoulders of eight or ten gauchos. The night was a starred and furious blue. The aroma of the roasted meat in its skin, a sublime invention of the Argentines, mingled with the air of the pampa, with the fragrance of clover and mint, with the murmur of thousands of crickets and toads.
I got up after dining with the poetess and Federico, who rejoiced at everything and laughed at everything, and walked to the illuminated pool. García Lorca went ahead of me and laughed and talked the whole time. He was happy. That was typical. Happiness was his skin.
A tall tower rose up over the brightly lit pool. Its whiteness, like limewash, glowed phosphorescent in the nocturnal lights.
The three of us were alone, and we climbed slowly up to the lookout at the top of the tower. Once there, the three of us, three different sorts of poet, were all cut off from the world. The blue eye of the pool glimmered below. Farther off, guitars and singing from the party could be heard. The night above was so near and starry that it seemed to envelop our heads, to submerge them in its depths.
I took the tall, golden girl in my arms, and when I kissed her, I realized she was a compact, carnal woman through and through.
To Federico’s surprise, we lay down on the floor of the lookout, and I had already started to undress her and myself when I saw Federico’s bulging eyes pinned to us, watching without daring to believe what was happening or was going to happen.
I shouted: “Get out! Go away, and make sure no one comes upstairs!”
And so, while we were consummating the sacrifice to the starry sky and nocturnal Aphrodite in the tower’s heights, Federico, pleased with his mission of matchmaker and citadel, hurried so quickly down the dark steps of the tower that he stumbled on several of them. My new friend and I had to lower him, with great difficulty, the rest of the way. He limped for fifteen days.
When I arrived in Madrid in 1934, I met all García Lorca’s and Alberti’s friends. There were many of them, and in a few days I was just one more Spanish poet. Naturally the Spanish are very different from us Latin Americans, and this inevitably leads to pridefulness on one or the other side, however misplaced that may be.
I found that the Spanish of my generation showed far more solidarity and kindness than my colleagues back in Latin America. At the same time, I saw we were more universal, more familiar with other languages and cultures. Few people in Spain spoke foreign languages. When Desnos and Crevel came to Madrid, I had to translate for them so they could be understood. Federico didn’t even know four words in French. Naturally, there were exceptions: Alberti, Guillén, Salinas had traveled, and the world was broader for them. But generally, the Spanish struck me as the provincials of Europe. At first, I liked that a great deal. Later I came to grasp that Spain’s principle strength, its spiritual purpose or lack thereof, lay in its geographical limitations, and that its tragedy, perhaps, had its roots there as well.
In Federico’s circle, which I frequented every day during my life in Spain, there were hardly any homosexuals. Perhaps Federico, who was flamboyant as a championship bullfighter, conducted his affairs elsewhere. Later, when we met to drink and chat, he always brought along the same stout, manly, handsome young man. Little by little, I realized the boy was Federico’s longstanding love, his last one. His name was Rafael Rapín [Rafael Rodríguez Rapún]. He was from working-class stock. Timid, with long, curly hair, neither tall nor thin, he had that simplicity typical of the popular classes in Spain and struck me as completely normal. He and the guys who accompanied him to the café looked sexually forlorn, so one day, like a loving father, I took two or three, including Federico’s friend, to a brothel near the tavern where we used to meet. For me, a precocious boy from the Americas, it was inconceivable that these kids had still never been with a woman.
Sexual hunger in Spain was ravenous. One afternoon we were passing through the suburbs on our way to La Bombilla, a classic neighborhood for those out for a good time. We drove down toward the Manzanares River on a dusty road that stretched on forever, hemmed in by walls that ran for kilometers on both sides. I noticed the white walls were covered end to end with graffiti, to the point that they were almost black.
I got out of the car to examine the curious inscriptions. All of them spelled out the same legend, in clumsy letters of all shapes and sizes: “Pepe was here and wanted to fuck!!” “Antonio, Alberto, and José María were here and wanted to fuck!!!” “On July 3, P.S. and R. were here and wanted to fuck!!”
This rabid eroticism forms a part of Spain, its silence, its iron suit of armor. For me, this was scandalous. Little more than a teenager, I had already been in and out of women’s beds and bodies. Even if colonial chastity had been imposed on Spanish America, everyone had still found a way to flout it.
I didn’t think much of having taken the kids for an adventure, and Federico, whom I must have been cagey with, laughed the whole thing off. I retell the story now to give some sense of how little the poet’s deviance mattered.
Because it seems to me that, just as he lambasted fiercely the perversion of vice in his poems about New York, he was a pure human creature. He doled out his tenderness eccentrically, following a sacred order of nature that he was incapable of disobeying.
During the war, the armed insurrection of the reactionary forces ended the life of that happy poet.
A few weeks after his death, Rafael Rapín, the protagonist of that strange idyll, paid his tribute to death in turn.
He fell in the heart of Teruel. He was manning an antiaircraft gun. The enemy’s machine guns fired straight into his post.
Nothing was left of that handsome young man. His bones and blood were scattered in minuscule fragments, almost invisible mottles on the Spanish soil, which every day swallowed thousands of other anonymous dead.
MY BOOK ON SPAIN
Time passed. We were beginning to lose the war. The poets sided with the Spanish people: Federico had been murdered in Granada. Miguel Hernández had been transformed from a goatherd into a fighting word. In soldier’s uniform, he read his poems on the front lines. Manuel Altolaguirre kept his printing presses going. He set one up on the eastern front, near Gerona, in an old monastery. My book España en el corazón was printed there in a unique way. I believe few books, in the extraordinary history of so many books, have had such a curious birth and fate.
The soldiers at the front learned to set type. But there was no paper. They found an old mill and decided to make it there. A strange mixture was concocted, between one falling bomb and the next, in the middle of the fighting. They threw everything they could get their hands on into the mill, from
an enemy flag to a Moorish soldier’s bloodstained tunic. And in spite of the unusual materials used and the total inexperience of its manufacturers, the paper turned out to be very beautiful. The few copies of that book still in existence produce astonishment at its typography and at its mysteriously manufactured pages. Years later I saw a copy in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., displayed in a showcase as one of the rarest books of our time.
My book had just been printed and bound when the Republic’s defeat was suddenly upon us. Hundreds of thousands of refugees glutted the roads leading out of Spain. It was the exodus, the most painful event in the history of that country.
Among those lines of people going into exile were the survivors of the eastern front, and with them Manuel Altolaguirre and the soldiers who had made the paper and printed España en el corazón. My book was the pride of these men who had worked to bring out my poetry in the face of death. I learned that many carried copies of the book in their sacks, instead of their own food and clothing. With those sacks over their shoulders, they set out on the long march to France.
The endless column walking to exile was bombed hundreds of times. Soldiers fell and the books were spilled on the highway. Others continued their interminable flight. On the other side of the border, the Spaniards who reached exile met with brutal treatment. The last copies of this impassioned book that was born and perished in the midst of fierce fighting were immolated in a bonfire.
Miguel Hernández sought refuge in the Chilean Embassy, which during the war had granted asylum to four thousand Franco followers. Carlos Morla Lynch, the ambassador, claimed to be his friend but denied the great poet his protection. A few days after, he was arrested and thrown into prison. He died of tuberculosis in jail three years later. The nightingale could not survive in captivity.
My consular duties had come to an end. Because I had taken part in the defense of the Spanish Republic, the Chilean government decided to remove me from my post.
THE WAR AND PARIS
We reached Paris. I took an apartment together with Rafael Alberti and his wife, María Teresa León, on the Quai de l’Horloge, a quiet, marvelous neighborhood. From our place I could see the Pont-Neuf, the statue of Henri IV, and the fishermen dangling over the banks of the Seine. Nerval’s Place Dauphine, with its smell of leaves and restaurants, was behind us. The “French” writer Alejo Carpentier, one of the most uncommitted men I have known, lived there. He didn’t dare voice an opinion on anything, not even on the Nazis, who were about to fall upon Paris like famished wolves.
From my balcony, to the right, I could make out the black towers of the Conciergerie. Its big gold clock was, for me, the neighborhood’s final boundary.
In France then, and for many years after, I had the good fortune to count as dear friends the two foremost figures of her literature, Paul Eluard and Aragon. They were and are extraordinary classic examples of naturalness, with a vital authenticity that gives them a place in the most resonant part of the forest of France. At the same time, they are unshakable and intrinsic adherents of historical morality. Few human beings were as different from each other as these two. I often enjoyed the poetic pleasure of wasting time with Paul Eluard. If poets answered public-opinion polls truthfully, they would give the secret away: There is nothing as beautiful as wasting time. Everyone has his own style for this pastime, as old as time itself. With Paul, I would lose all sense of the passing of day or night, and I never cared if what we were talking about was important or not. Aragon is an electronic machine of intelligence, learning, virulence, high-speed eloquence. I always left Eluard’s home smiling without even knowing why. I come out of a few hours spent with Aragon completely worn out, because this demon of a man has forced me to think. Both men have been my stalwart friends, and perhaps what attracts me most about them is the tremendous difference in the nature of their great talents.
NANCY CUNARD
Nancy Cunard and I decided to put out a poetry review which I titled Les poètes du monde défendent le peuple espagnol (The Poets of the World Defend the Spanish People).
Nancy had a small printing press in her country house, in the French provinces. I don’t remember the name of the place, but it was far from Paris. When we got to her house, it was night and the moon was out. The snow and the moonlight fluttered like a curtain around the estate. I went for a walk, filled with excitement. On my way back, the snowflakes swirled around my head with chilly insistence. I lost my bearings completely and had to grope my way through the whiteness of the night for half an hour.
Nancy had printing experience. During her close relationship with Aragon, she had published the translation of “The Hunting of the Snark” done by Aragon and herself. This Lewis Carroll poem is really untranslatable and only in Góngora, I believe, can we find a parallel to its insane mosaic.
I started setting type for the first time and I am sure there has never been a worse typesetter. I printed p’s upside down and they turned into d’s through my typographical clumsiness. A line in which the word “párpados” (eyelids) appeared twice ended up with two “dardapos.” For years after, Nancy punished me by calling me that. “My dear Dardapo…,” she would begin her letters from London. But it turned out to be an attractive publication and we managed to print six or seven issues. Besides militant poets like González Tuñón or Alberti, and some French ones, we published impassioned poems by W. H. Auden, Spender, etc. These English gentlemen will never know how much my lazy fingers suffered setting their poems.
From time to time, poets would come over from England, friends of Nancy’s, dandies with a white flower in their lapel, who also wrote anti-Franco verses. In the history of the intellect there has not been a subject as fertile for poets as the Spanish war. The blood spilled in Spain was a magnet that sent shudders through the poetry of a great period.
I don’t know if the publication was a success or not, because the war in Spain came to its disastrous end at this time and a second world war had its disastrous beginning. In spite of its magnitude, its immeasurable cruelty, and all the heroic blood it spilled, that war did not manage to grip the collective heart of poetry as the one in Spain had.
A short time later I would have to leave Europe to return to my country. Nancy would also be going to Chile soon, with a bullfighter who then left her and the bulls in Santiago to set up a business in sausages and cold cuts. But my dear friend, who was a high-class snob, was not one to give up easily. In Chile she took a poet as her lover, a slovenly vagrant, a Chilean of Basque descent with some talent but no teeth. What’s more, Nancy’s new lover was a hopeless drunk and gave the aristocratic Englishwoman nightly beatings that forced her to appear in public wearing enormous dark glasses.
Quixotic, unalterable, fearless, and pathetic, Nancy was one of the strangest persons I have ever known. The sole heir to the Cunard Line, Nancy, daughter of Lady Cunard, had scandalized London in 1930 by running away with a black man, a musician in one of the first jazz bands imported by the Savoy Hotel.
When Lady Cunard found her daughter’s bed empty and a letter proudly informing her of her black future, the noblewoman went to her lawyer and proceeded to cut her off without a cent. And that was how this young woman I met roaming the world had been disinherited from the British nobility. Her mother’s salons were frequented by George Moore (who, gossip had it, was Nancy’s real father), Sir Thomas Beecham, young Aldous Huxley, and the future Duke of Windsor, still Prince of Wales at the time.
Nancy Cunard struck back. In December of the year in which her mother excommunicated her, the English aristocracy received as a Christmas present a pamphlet bound in red, entitled “Negro Man and White Ladyship.” I have never seen anything more vitriolic. It is as trenchant as Swift, in some passages.
Her arguments in defense of blacks came down like clubs on the heads of Lady Cunard and English society. I recall that she said—I am quoting from memory, and her words were more eloquent—“Suppose you, your white ladyship, or rather your people, had
been kidnapped, beaten, and chained by a more powerful tribe and then shipped far from England to be sold as slaves, displayed as ludicrous specimens of human ugliness, forced to work under the whip and fed poorly. What would be left of your race? The blacks suffered all this violence and cruelty and much more besides. After centuries of suffering, however, they are still the best and most graceful athletes, and they have created a new music that is more universal than any other. Could you, and whites like you, have emerged victorious from so much iniquity? Who is better, then?”
And so on, for thirty pages.
Nancy was never able to live in England after that, and from then on, she embraced the cause of the persecuted black race. During the invasion of Ethiopia she went to Addis Ababa. Then she traveled to the United States to make common cause with the black boys of Scottsboro who were accused of infamous crimes they had not committed. The young blacks were sentenced by racist U.S. justice, and Nancy Cunard was deported by the democratic North American police.
My friend Nancy Cunard would die in 1969 in Paris. A sudden turn in her death agony made her go downstairs in the hotel elevator all but naked. There she collapsed on the floor and closed her lovely sky-blue eyes forever.
She weighed thirty-five kilos at the time of her death. She was a mere skeleton. Her body had wasted away in a long battle against injustice in the world. Her reward was a life that became progressively lonelier, and a godforsaken death.
A CONGRESS IN MADRID
The war in Spain was going from bad to worse, but the Spanish people’s spirit of resistance had captivated the whole world. International brigades were already fighting in Spain. I saw them arrive in Madrid, in 1936, in uniform. They were a magnificent group of people of different ages, coloring, hair.
Now it was 1937 and we were in Paris, and the main thing was to organize an anti-Fascist congress of writers from all over the world. The congress would be held in Madrid. That’s when I began to know Aragon better. The first thing about him that surprised me was his incredible capacity for work and organization. He dictated all his letters, corrected and remembered them. Not even the slightest detail escaped him. He worked long, steady hours in our small office. Yet, as everyone knows, he writes thick volumes of prose, and his poetry is the most beautiful in the French language. I saw him correcting the galleys of translations he had done of Russian and English writers, and I saw him redo them right on the printer’s proofs. He is really an extraordinary man, and that’s when I began to appreciate that fact.