The Complete Memoirs

by Pablo Neruda

  I became a member of Chile’s Communist Party on July 15, 1945.

  GONZÁLEZ VIDELA

  The bitter wrongs my comrades and I sought to bring before the senate had a tough time reaching the senate floor. The comfortable parliamentary room seemed padded to keep out the cries of the wretched masses. My colleagues in the opposition were true experts in the art of eloquent patriotic address, and I felt smothered under the tapestry of bogus silks they rolled out.

  Our hopes rose suddenly; one of the presidential candidates, González Videla, swore to see that justice was carried out, and his lively eloquence won him great popularity. I was made his campaign manager and carried the good news to all parts of the country.

  The people elected him President by a landslide.

  But, in our creole America, presidents often go through an extraordinary metamorphosis. In the instance I am speaking of, the new chief of state quickly changed his friends, he married his family into the “aristocracy,” and was gradually transformed from a mere demagogue into a potentate.

  But González Videla does not fit the pattern of the typical South American dictator. Bolivia’s Melgarejo and General López of Venezuela have recognizable grass roots. These men show some glimmer of greatness and seem to be driven by a compulsion both desolate and implacable. At least, they were leaders who braved battles and bullets. González Videla, however, was the product of smoke-filled backroom politics, an irresponsible and frivolous clown, a weakling who put on a tough front.

  In the fauna of our America, the great dictators have been giant saurians, survivors of a colossal feudalism in prehistoric lands. The Chilean Judas was just an amateur tyrant and on the saurian scale would never be anything but a poisonous lizard. Yet he did enough damage to seriously scar Chile, setting the country back hundreds of years. Chileans looked at one another in embarrassment, not quite understanding how it had all happened.

  The man was an equilibrist, an acrobat who played to all sides. He managed to work his way into a spectacular left-wing role, and in this comedy of lies was the undisputed champion. No one questions that. In a country where politicians tend to be or seemingly are overly serious, people welcomed the advent of frivolity, and when this conga dancer changed course in midstream, it was much too late: the prisons were crammed full of political victims, and concentration camps were even set up, such as the one at Pisagua. A police state was then established, as a national novelty. The only course left open was to bide one’s time and go underground to fight for the return of decency.

  Many of González Videla’s friends, persons who had stuck by him right to the end of his electoral campaign, were hustled off to prisons on the high cordillera or in the desert, because they could not accept his metamorphosis. In fact, the upper class around him, with its economic power, had once more swallowed our country’s government, as it had done so often before. This time, however, the digestion was not pleasant and Chile went through a malaise that wavered between shocked daze and agony.

  With the protection of the United States, the President our votes had elected turned into a vile, bloodthirsty vampire. His conscience surely made him lose sleep, though he set up, near the presidential palace, private garçonnières and whorehouses, complete with carpets and mirrors, for his carnal pleasures. The contemptible creature had an insignificant but twisted mind. The same evening he launched his great anti-Communist repression, he invited two or three workers’ leaders to dinner. When the meal was over, he went down the palace stairs with them and embraced them, wiping away a few tears as he said, “I am weeping because I’ve ordered your detention. You’ll be arrested as you go out the door, and I don’t know if I’ll ever see you again.”

  PORTRAIT OF AN ARRIVISTE

  Gabriela Mistral reproached me in Naples for González Videla’s election as President of the Republic of Chile. In her singsongy little voice—not, for all that, less implacable—the poetess rubbed it in my face, as if it had been my doing, as if the Communists and I bore the blame. Blame for what? For not knowing the future?

  Gabriela, why didn’t you speak up at the time? These bits of advice always come too late, and they’re no better than the stick you use to beat a dead mule. No matter how political we Communists may seem, we don’t have the power of divination.

  As she listened to me with those big serene eyes that everything sank into, like those stones one sometimes hurls into the water and that the water swallows while remaining unmoved, I traced out certain of the events for Gabriela. In the timid, tepid atmosphere of Social-Democratic Chile, González Videla was the one person who seemed brave and fit for battle. He was elected president of the anti-Francoists, the anti-Peronists, the Jews who wanted a nation of their own, the associations chanting the slogans of the popular struggle at the time. No one else from the ranks of his party showed the least bit of interest in the people’s causes, in agrarian reform, in concessions to the workers, in the struggle against the North American empire. Naturally, once in power, he put the brakes on the anti-Francoists and the working-class leaders, betrayed the Zionists he’d presided over, closed the unions’ newspapers, broke the miners’ strikes with blood and fire. But this was the culmination of a slower process. All this has come to light now that the State Department has published the reports of Claude Bowers, the U.S. ambassador at the time.

  This innocent man was apprised of all that González Videla was going to do, and well before the fact. He always knew what would happen, and he put it all into his reports: what the traitor would betray, what the seller would sell, how much the renegade was on the take for.

  I was working in Paris when I met him. My job was to gather and ship off to Chile the defeated Spanish Republicans. A new ambassador showed up one day to the closet they’d assigned me at the Chilean Embassy: the very same man who would become President. I didn’t know him.

  He was short and dressed with ostentatious vulgarity. He concealed his thoughts by showing off his two rows of newly purchased large teeth.

  When he introduced himself, he represented an ideal suited to my own sentiments, told me he wanted to enter the Sorbonne, that he wanted to study, that he knew little, that his education had been hurried and incomplete. He was going to be that strange specimen: an ambassador-student.

  “Magnificent,” I responded.

  He never made it into the Sorbonne, only to the cocktail parties.

  A BODY DIVIDED

  My speeches became virulent and the senate was always filled to listen to me. My ouster was soon demanded and obtained, and the police were given orders to arrest me. But we poets have in us a large proportion of fire and smoke.

  The smoke went into the writing. The historical parallel to all that was happening to me was dramatically close to our ancient American themes. In that year of hiding and danger, I finished my most important book, Canto general.

  I moved from house to house, every day. Doors opened to receive me everywhere. It was always people I didn’t know, who had somehow expressed their wish to put me up for a few days. They wanted to offer me asylum even if only for a few hours, or for weeks. I passed through fields, ports, cities, camps, and was in the homes of peasants, engineers, lawyers, seamen, doctors, miners.

  There’s an old theme, a “body divided,” that recurs in the folk poetry of all our countries. The popular singer imagines his feet in one place, his kidneys somewhere else, and goes on to describe his whole body, which he has left behind, scattered in countrysides and cities. That’s how I felt in those days.

  Among the heartwarming places where I stayed, I recall a two-room house hidden away on one of the poorer hills of Valparaíso. I had to keep to a part of one room, and a small section of window from which I could observe the life of the port. From that humble watchtower, my eyes took in only a fragment of the street. At night I would see people bustling past. It was a poor area, and the narrow street, a hundred meters below my window, monopolized all the light in the neighborhood. Dumpy little stores and junk shops
lined it.

  Trapped as I was in my corner, my curiosity knew no bounds. Private speculations and conjectures. Sometimes I would find myself in a quandary. Why, for example, would passers-by, whether indifferent or in a hurry, always pause at one store? What fascinating merchandise was displayed in that window? Whole families would stop for long minutes, with children on their shoulders. I couldn’t see the rapt look on their faces as they gazed into the magic window, but I could imagine it.

  Six months later I learned that it was just a shoe-store window. Shoes are man’s greatest interest, I concluded. I vowed to study, investigate, and put this matter down in writing. I have never had the time to carry out this intention, this vow made in such odd circumstances. Yet quite a few shoes have gone into my poetry. They tap their way through many of my lines, although I never set out deliberately to put shoes in my poems.

  Visitors would suddenly drop in at the house and carry on long conversations; it never entered their minds that close by, separated by a flimsy partition of cardboard and old newspaper, was a poet, with God knows how many professional man-hunters on his trail.

  Saturday afternoons, and Sunday mornings as well, the sweetheart of one of the girls in the family would come to the house. He was not in on the secret. He was a young worker, the girl’s heart was his, but he hadn’t won their full confidence yet. From my peephole I would watch him get off the bicycle he used on his egg route in the huge working-class neighborhood. Not long after, I would hear him enter the house humming a tune. He was a threat to my tranquility. I call him a threat because he insisted on courting the girl a few centimeters from my ear. She would invite him to go make platonic love in some park or at the movies, but he resisted heroically. And I cursed under my breath at the innocent egg man for being such a stay-at-home.

  The rest of the people in the house were in on the secret: the widowed mother, the two delightful daughters, and the sons, who were seamen. They unloaded bananas in the harbor and were sometimes fit to be tied because no ship would hire them. From them I heard that an old ship was being scrapped. With me directing the operation from my hidden corner, they removed the lovely figure from the ship’s prow and hid it in a storehouse down in the port. I got to know her years later, when my escape and exile were a thing of the past. As I write these memoirs here beside the sea, that handsome woman carved in wood, who has a Greek face like all the figureheads on old sailing ships, gazes at me with her wistful beauty.

  The plan was to ship me out with one of the boys, in his cabin, and put me ashore with the bananas when we reached Guayaquil. The seaman explained to me that when the ship dropped anchor at this port in Ecuador I was to appear on deck suddenly, like a well-dressed passenger, smoking a cigar, although I have never been able to smoke one. Since I was on the verge of departure, the family decided it was time I had the right kind of suit made—elegant and tropical—and I was duly fitted.

  My suit was ready in less than no time. I’ve never had so much fun as I had when I received it. The women of the house took their notions of style from a celebrated film of the day: Gone with the Wind. What the boys, on the other hand, considered the last word in elegance was something they had picked up from the dance halls of Harlem and the bars and cheap dance joints of the Caribbean world. The double-breasted jacket was fitted with a belt and came down to my knees. The trousers hugged me at the ankles.

  I put away this picturesque attire, styled by such kindly people, and never had the opportunity to wear it. I never came out of hiding on any ship, and I never went ashore with the bananas in Guayaquil, dressed like a phony Clark Gable. On the contrary, I chose the cold way out. I departed for Chile’s far south, the far south of the Americas, intending to cross the mountains.

  A ROAD IN THE JUNGLE

  Ricardo Fonseca had been the secretary general of my party until this time. He was a strong-minded man with a smile, a southerner like me, from the cold climate of Carahue. My life underground, my hideouts, my clandestine excursions, the publication of my pamphlets had been entrusted to Fonseca; most important of all, he had carefully kept secret the places where I had stopped. During my year and a half in hiding, the only one who always knew where I would eat or sleep each night was my young and radiant leader and secretary general, Ricardo Fonseca. But his health gradually wasted away until the only thing remaining was the green flame that peered out of his eyes; his smile dimmed gradually, and one day our good comrade left us forever.

  While the party was underground, a new leader was elected, a husky man, a longshoreman from Valparaíso, Galo González, a complex man with a deceptive and deadly earnest face. I should mention that there was never a personality cult in our party, although it was an old organization that had survived all the proverbial ideological weaknesses. The Chilean conscience, the conscience of a people that has accomplished everything with its own hands, always rose above these. We have had very few caudillos in the history of Chile, and our party mirrored this.

  Yet, aided by the banning of the party, the pyramidal politics of the Stalin era also produced a somewhat rarefied atmosphere in Chile. Galo González could not stay in touch with the bulk of the party. The persecution was being stepped up. There were thousands of prisoners and there was a special concentration camp on Pisagua’s desert coast. Galo González led an outlaw’s life filled with revolutionary activity, but the lack of contact between the leaders and the general body of the party became more and more pronounced. He was a great man, a wise man of the people, and a courageous fighter.

  Instructions for the next step in my flight reached him and were carried out to the letter this time. I was to be taken somewhere a thousand kilometers from the capital and would go on from there across the cordillera on horseback. Argentine comrades would be waiting for me along the way.

  We left at sundown in the safety of an automobile we were lucky enough to get. My friend Dr. Raúl Bulnes, then a doctor in the mounted police, took me in his automobile, which was above suspicion, to the outskirts of Santiago, where the party’s organization took over. In another car, specially equipped for a long trip, an old party friend, the chauffeur Escobar, was waiting for me.

  We stayed on the road day and night. In the daytime, I bundled up in blankets to increase the effect of my disguise of beard and glasses, especially when we went through towns and cities, or when we stopped for gas.

  I passed through Temuco at noon. I didn’t stop anywhere; no one recognized me. As luck would have it, my old Temuco was my exit route. We crossed the bridge and the village of Padre Las Casas. We halted a fair distance from the city and sat down on a rock to have a bite to eat. There was a creek far down the slope, and the sound of its waters came up to me. It was my childhood saying goodbye. I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests. And now, on the road to freedom, I was pausing for a moment near Temuco and could hear the voice of the water that had taught me to sing.

  We set out again. Only once did we go through a moment of anxiety. From the middle of the highway, a determined-looking carabinero officer flagged down our car. I was struck dumb, but the scare turned out to be groundless. The officer asked us to drive him a hundred kilometers along the road. He sat beside the driver, Comrade Escobar, and carried on a friendly chat with him. I made believe I was sleeping, so as not to speak. Even the stones of Chile knew my poet’s voice.

  * * *

  Without any untoward incidents, we arrived at our destination, a timber estate that looked uninhabited. Water lapped at it on all sides. First you crossed vast Lake Ranco to land among thickets and giant trees. From there you proceeded on horseback for a stretch, until you came to a place where you caught another boat, on Lake Maihue this time. One could barely make out the owner’s house, camouflaged by the hilly countryside, by the giant vegetation, by nature’s unfathomable hum. I’ve heard people say that Chile is the last corner of the world. That place overgrown
with jungle, hemmed in by snow and lakes, was indeed one of the last habitable spots on this planet.

  The house in which I was given a room was makeshift, like everything in the area. A cast iron stove, filled with firewood that looked as if it had just been cut from the forest, burned day and night. Heavy rain from the south pelted the windows without respite, as if it were fighting to break into the house. The rain dominated the sunless forest, the lakes, the volcanoes, the night, and turned savagely on that human shelter for obeying different laws and not accepting its victory.