by Pablo Neruda
I had been left without a consulship and consequently without a penny. I went to work, for four hundred (old) francs, in an organization for the defense of culture, managed by Aragon. Delia del Carril, my wife then and for many years to come, was reputed to be a rich landowner, but she was actually poorer than I. We lived in a dubious, run-down hotel whose first floor was reserved for transient couples that came and went. For months we ate very little and badly. But the congress of anti-Fascist writers became a reality. Priceless replies poured in from all over. One was from Yeats, Ireland’s national poet; another, from Selma Lagerlöf, the notable Swedish writer. They were both too old to travel to a beleaguered city like Madrid, which was being steadily pounded by bombs, but they rallied to the defense of the Spanish Republic.
I have always considered myself a man of few qualifications, especially in practical matters or for high-minded missions. I stared openmouthed, therefore, when I received a bank draft from the Spanish government, for a considerable sum, to cover expenses for the congress, including fares for delegates from other continents. Dozens of writers were flocking to Paris.
I was at a complete loss. What was I to do with the money? I decided to endorse the funds to the organization that was behind the congress. “I haven’t laid eyes on the money, and I wouldn’t know what to do with it, anyway,” I told Rafael Alberti, who was passing through Paris.
“You’re a big fool,” Rafael said. “You’ve lost your consular post defending the Spanish cause, you’re walking around with holes in your shoes, and you won’t even set aside a few thousand francs for your work and your minimum needs.”
I glanced at my shoes, and in fact they did have holes. Alberti made me a gift of a new pair.
We were leaving for Madrid in a few hours, with all the delegates. Delia and Amparo González Tuñón and I were swamped with paperwork to clear the way for the writers who were planning to attend. The French exit visas presented us with endless problems, so we practically took over the Paris police headquarters, where the formal acknowledgments jocularly referred to as recipissé were issued. Sometimes we ourselves stamped the passports with that supreme French contrivance called tampon.
Along with the Norwegians, the Italians, the Argentines, the poet Octavio Paz arrived from Mexico, after a thousand adventures and misadventures. I was proud of having brought him. He had published just one book, which I had received two months before and which seemed to contain genuine promise. No one knew him yet.
My old friend César Vallejo came to see me with a scowl on his face. He was angry because his wife, whom the rest of us found unbearable, had not been issued a ticket. I got one for her quickly. We gave it to Vallejo and he left, as surly as when he had come in. Something was bothering him and it took me several months to discover what it was.
At the bottom of it was this: My countryman Vicente Huidobro had come to Paris to attend the congress. Huidobro and I had had a falling out and were not speaking. But he was a close friend of Vallejo’s and used his few days in Paris to fill my trusting friend’s head with stories about me. Everything was cleared up later in a heated conversation I had with Vallejo.
* * *
Never had a train left Paris packed with so many writers. We recognized or ignored one another in the corridors. Some slept. Others chain-smoked. For many, Spain was both the enigma and the key to that moment of history.
Vallejo and Huidobro were somewhere on the train. André Malraux stopped to talk to me for a moment, with his facial tics, his raincoat tossed over his shoulders. This time he was traveling alone. I had always seen him before with the flier Corniglion-Molinier, who was his right-hand man in his adventures through the skies of Spain: cities lost and discovered, or a vital delivery of planes to the Republic.
I remember that the train was held up a long time at the border. Apparently Huidobro had lost a suitcase. Everyone was occupied, or preoccupied, with the delay and no one was in a mood to listen to him. The Chilean poet picked the wrong moment to come looking for his bag out on the platform, where Malraux, the leader of the expedition, was. Nervous by nature, and with a lot of problems accumulating around him, Malraux was at the end of his tether. Maybe he didn’t know Huidobro by sight or by name. When he came up to complain about losing his suitcase, Malraux lost the little patience he had left. I heard him shout: “Is this the time to be pestering anyone? Get away! Je vous enmerde!”
It’s too bad that I had to be the one to witness this incident which deflated the Chilean’s vanity. I wish I had been a thousand miles away at that moment. But life is fickle. I was the one person Huidobro detested on that train. And to make matters worse, I, his countryman, and not any of the hundred other writers traveling with us, had to be the sole spectator of this incident.
When we got underway again, with the night far advanced and the train rolling through the Spanish countryside, I thought of Huidobro, his suitcase, the unpleasant moment he had been through. So I said to some young Central American writers who had come to my compartment: “Go see Huidobro, too, he must be alone and depressed.”
They were back in twenty minutes, their faces beaming. Huidobro had said to them: “Don’t talk to me about the lost bag; that’s not important. What really matters is that although the universities of Chicago, Berlin, Copenhagen, and Prague have conferred honorary titles on me, the small university in the small country you come from insists on ignoring me. I haven’t even been asked to give a lecture on creationism.”
My countryman the great poet was definitely a hopeless case.
* * *
We finally reached Madrid. While the visitors were being welcomed and assigned a place to stay, I decided to visit the home I had left almost a year before. My books and my things, everything had been left behind in it. It was an apartment in a building called the “House of Flowers,” near the entrance to the university campus. Franco’s advance lines had reached it and the block of apartments had changed hands several times.
Miguel Hernández, who was wearing his militia uniform and carrying his rifle, got a van to transport the books and the belongings I was most interested in taking with me.
We went up to the fifth floor and opened the apartment door expectantly. Flak had knocked in the windows and chunks of the walls. The books had toppled off the shelves. It was impossible to find one’s way in the rubble. I searched for things haphazardly. Oddly enough, the most useless, superfluous things had vanished, carried off by invading or defending forces. The pots and pans, the sewing machine, the dishes were there: they were scattered all over, but they had survived, yet there was not a trace of my consul’s tail coat, my Polynesian masks, my Oriental knives.
“War is as whimsical as dreams, Miguel.”
Miguel found some manuscripts of mine somewhere among the strewn papers. That chaos was a final door closing on my life. I said to Miguel, “I don’t want to take anything with me.”
“Nothing? Not even one book?”
“Not even one book.”
And we went back with the van empty.
THE MASKS AND THE WAR
… My house was caught between the two fronts … On one side, Moors and Italians advanced … On the other, Madrid’s defenders advanced, fell back, or were halted … The artillery had crashed through the walls … The windows were smashed to smithereens … On the floor, among my books, I found shrapnel … But my masks were gone … Masks collected in Siam, Bali, Sumatra, the Malay Archipelago, Bandung … Gilded, ashen, tomato-red, with silver eyebrows, blue, demonic eyebrows, lost in thought, my masks had been my sole keepsakes from the Orient I had gone to alone that first time, which had received me with its odor of tea, dung, opium, sweat, the intensest jasmine, frangipani, fruit rotting in the streets … Those masks, a reminder of the purest dances, of the dancing before the temple … Wooden drops colored by myth, the residue of a mythology of flowers that sketched dreams in the air, customs, demons, mysteries alien to my American nature … And then … Perhaps the militiamen had leane
d out the windows of my house between shots with the masks on to strike terror into the Moors … Many masks had been left there smashed, spattered with blood … Others had rolled down from my fifth-floor apartment, wrenched off by a bullet … Franco’s advance lines had taken up their positions in front of them … The horde of illiterate mercenaries had screeched past before them … Thirty masks of Asian gods rising from my house in their last dance, the dance of death … A moment of respite … The positions had reversed … I sat looking at the debris, the bloodstains on the mat … And through the new windows, the gaping holes left by the gunfire … I stared far off, beyond the campus, toward flatlands, toward ancient castles … Spain looked empty to me … It looked as if my last guests had gone off forever … With masks or without, in the middle of the shooting and the war chants, the mad rejoicing, the incredible defense, death or life, all that was over for me … It was the last silence after the feasting … After the last feasting … With the masks that had gone, with the masks that had fallen, with those soldiers I had not invited in, Spain had gone for me …
6
I Went Out to Look for the Fallen
I PICKED A ROAD
I received my activist’s card much later in Chile, when I enrolled in the party officially, but I believe I had looked upon myself as a Communist during the war in Spain. Many things had contributed to my deep conviction.
My contradictory friend the Nietzschean poet León Felipe was a very likable man whose most attractive quality was his anarchist’s proclivity to indiscipline and his mocking rebelliousness. At the height of the civil war he fell easily for the blustery propaganda of the FAI (Iberian Anarchist Federation). He was often at the anarchist fronts, where he lectured on his theories and read his iconoclastic poems. These reflected an ideology that was vaguely libertarian, anti-clerical, capped with invocations and blasphemies. His words captivated the anarchist groups that blossomed like hothouse flowers in Madrid while the rest of the people were at the battlefront, which was coming closer and closer. These lawless groups had painted the trolleys and buses half red and half yellow. With their long hair and beards, wearing bullets strung into necklaces and bracelets, they played a leading role in Spain’s carnival of death. I saw several of them in symbolic leather shoes, half red and half black, which must have put the shoemakers to a lot of trouble. And don’t let anyone think it was all innocent show. They carried knives, revolvers, rifles, and carbines. Groups of them would park themselves at the main entrances of buildings, smoking and spitting, showing off their hardware. Their main concern was to collect rents from terrorized tenants or make them hand over their jewels, rings, and watches.
León Felipe was on his way back from one of his pro-anarchist lectures late one night when we ran into each other at the café on the corner of my block. The poet was wearing a Spanish cape that went very well with his Nazarene beard. On the way out, the elegant folds of his romantic attire brushed against one of his touchy co-religionists. I don’t know if León Felipe’s bearing, that of an old-time hidalgo, annoyed that “hero” of the rear guard, but I do know that we were stopped a few steps farther on by a bunch of anarchists headed by the man who had considered himself offended at the café. They wanted to check our papers, and after they had glanced at them, the Spanish poet was taken away between two armed men.
As he was being led off to a place of execution near my house, where firing squads often kept me awake at night, I saw two armed militiamen coming back from the front. I explained who León Felipe was, the offense he had been accused of, and was able to obtain my friend’s release thanks to them.
This ideological chaos and gratuitous destruction gave me a lot to think about. I heard of the exploits of an Austrian anarchist, an old, nearsighted man with a long blond mane, whose specialty was taking people “for a walk.” He had formed a squad which he dubbed “Dawn” because it went into action at daybreak.
“Haven’t you ever had a headache?” he would ask his victim.
“Yes, of course, sometimes.”
“Well, I’m going to administer an excellent painkiller,” the Austrian would say, pointing his revolver at the other’s forehead and pulling the trigger.
Gangs like these roamed Madrid’s pitch-black nights. The Communists were the only organized group and had put together an army to confront Italians, Germans, Moors, and Falangists. They were also the moral force that kept the resistance and the anti-Fascist struggle going.
It boiled down to this: you had to pick the road you would take. That is what I did and I have never had reason to regret the choice I made between darkness and hope in that tragic time.
RAFAEL ALBERTI
Poetry is an act of peace. Peace goes into the making of a poet as flour goes into the making of bread.
Arsonists, warmongers, wolves hunt down the poet to burn, kill, sink their teeth into him. A swordsman left Pushkin mortally wounded under the trees in a dark and gloomy park. The fiery horses of war charged over Petöfi’s lifeless body. Byron died in Greece, fighting against war. The Spanish Fascists started off the war in Spain by assassinating its greatest poet.
Rafael Alberti is a kind of survivor. He was marked for death a thousand times. One of those times, in Granada, like Lorca. Another time death waited for him in Badajoz. They looked for him in sun-drenched Seville and in Cádiz and Puerto de Santa María in his home province, to kill him, to hang him, and so deal poetry another death blow.
But poetry has not died, it has a cat’s nine lives. They harass it, they drag it through the streets, they spit on it and make it the butt of their jokes, they try to strangle it, drive it into exile, throw it into prison, pump lead into it, and it survives every attempt with a clear face and a smile as bright as grains of rice.
I knew Alberti when he walked through the streets of Madrid in a blue shirt and a red tie. I knew him fighting in the ranks of the people when not too many poets were following that difficult course. The bells had not yet tolled for Spain, but he knew what might be coming. He is a man from the south, born near the singing sea and cellars filled with wine as golden yellow as topaz. There his heart took fire from the grape and song from the wave. He was always a poet, but he himself did not know this in his early years. Later all Spain would know it, and still later, the world.
For those of us who have the good fortune to speak and know the language of Castile, Rafael Alberti embodies all the resplendent qualities of Spanish poetry. He is not only a born poet but also a master craftsman. Like a red rose blooming miraculously in winter, his poetry contains a flake of Góngora’s snow, a root from Jorge Manrique, a petal from Garcilaso, a fragrance of mourning from Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer. The true essences of Spanish poetry come together in his crystalline wineglass.
His red rose threw its brilliance over the road for those who tried to stop Fascism in Spain. The world knows this heroic and tragic story. Alberti wrote epic sonnets, he read them in barracks and at the front, and he invented poetry’s guerrilla warfare, poetry’s war against war. He invented songs that grew wings under the thunder of artillery fire, songs that later soared over the entire planet.
A consummate poet, he showed how useful poetry could be at a moment that was critical for the whole world. In this, he resembles Mayakovsky. This application of poetry for the benefit of the majority is based on strength, tenderness, joy, on man’s true nature. Without it, poetry gives off sound, but it doesn’t sing. Alberti’s poems always sing.
THE GIFT OF MIST
In Madrid, not long before the war, I gave a dog to Rafael Alberti, I never really knew if it was male or female.
This is all I ever gave to a person who gave me so much.
I will speak first of my gift, and then of his gifts.
One night, I walked from Casa de las Flores toward Rafael’s building, some ways off on a steep elevation overlooking the Calle Marqués de Urquijo and the foliage of the tree-lined, sonorous park. At the entry to his home, which had belonged to a ferocious general, a sl
ayer of freedom fighters in the colonies, was a gigantic shell from the genus Tridacna, the biggest I have ever seen, brought over, perhaps, from the Philippines.
I liked to cover the six or seven blocks that separated us on foot, then climb the hill to Alberti’s lovely home. I used to always leave behind some keepsake to gall the memory of that colonel from the colonies, and I almost always placed it in that giant shell, which had once been filled with holy water. After mounting the spiral staircase in silence and semidarkness, one arrived at that light that Rafael signified, along with María Teresa, the brilliant blond Castilian, who made a powerful contribution to brightening that ample space. Rafael, like me, revels every night because he works like a mule during the day.
I arrived there with the dog—a boy or girl. Its sex, its breed, the language it barked in were unknowable, so disheveled, so tangled, so thick-browed and bearded was that puff of fog that had followed me from home.
It was deep winter and, unusually for Madrid, the fog had settled over the city with a typically Spanish consistency, serious and compact. And the fog hardly let me walk and made it nearly impossible to see. But it did let me hear, and I noticed along the way that something was following me. Something, maybe a specter, a crow, a never-again. Severely alone, half-lost in the fog, I was a walker in absolute solitude at that hour, no one passed and nothing was audible but that strange tic-tac, like the footfalls of a ghost, trailing behind me. When I stopped, that solicitous sound did, too. And as soon as I set off again, something, whatever it was, began to walk with me. And with this in the midst of all that fog, I grew exasperated. Only when I reached Alberti’s thick door did a fluffy dog emerge from the mist and climb with me up the stairway. A dog from the slums, half fog and half dream, the color of asphalt all over, it looked at us through its crisscrossing thicket of silvery hairs, recollecting in a way a sheep strayed off into the city, but conserving in its eyes the purity of a wild beast.