by Pablo Neruda
I barely knew Jorge Bellet, the friend who was waiting for me. An ex-flier, a cross between a practical man and a prospector, in boots and a short heavy combat jacket, he had the air of a born leader, a military man’s cocky attitude that somehow fitted into the surroundings, although the colossal trees of the forest were the only troops in formation there.
The lady of the house was a very frail, whining woman afflicted with neurosis. The humdrum solitude of the place, the everlasting rain, the cold all seemed a personal affront to her. She spent a good part of the day whimpering, yet the house was run like clockwork and the food was wholesome, fresh from the forest and the water.
Bellet managed the lumber company, which specialized in railroad ties for Sweden and Denmark. The saws cutting the huge logs ground out their shrill lament all day long. First you heard the deep underground thud of the felled tree. Every five or ten minutes the ground shuddered like a drum in the dark at the hard impact of crashing rauli, mañiu, and larch trees, giant works of nature, seeded there by the wind a thousand years before. Then the saw sectioning the bodies of these giants struck up its whine. The metallic sound of the saw, grating and high-pitched like a savage violin, following the obscure drum of the earth welcoming its gods, created the tense atmosphere of a legend, a ring of mystery and cosmic terror. The forest was dying. I heard its lamentations with a heavy heart, as if I had come there to listen to the oldest voices anyone had ever heard.
The big boss, the owner of the forest, was a man from Santiago whom I hadn’t met. His visit, slated for later on in the summer, was feared. His name was Pepe Rodríguez, and I was told he was a latter-day capitalist who owned looms and other mills, a busy, dynamic, electrifying man, and an out-and-out reactionary, a prominent member of Chile’s most extreme right-wing party. I was passing through his domain without his knowledge, and those qualities of his were an asset to me. No one would possibly come to look for me here. The civil authorities and the police were loyal subjects of the great man whose hospitality I was enjoying, and there was little or no chance that I would ever run into him.
My departure was imminent. The snows were about to come down on the cordillera, and the Andes are no joking matter. My friends studied the road conditions every day. To say “roads” is to stretch the word. In reality, we would be venturing out over tracks the humus and the snow had blotted out long ago. The wait was becoming torture. Also, my friends on the Argentine side must be looking for me by this time.
When everything seemed to be ready, Jorge Bellet, captain general of the timberland, warned me that something had cropped up. He looked down in the mouth as he said it. The owner had sent word that he was on his way and would arrive in two days.
I was upset. We hadn’t quite completed our preparations. After all the tedious work, there was now great danger that the proprietor would discover that I was staying on his land. Everyone knew he was a close friend of my persecutor, González Videla. And everyone knew González Videla had put a price on my head. What should we do?
From the outset, Bellet was all for confronting Rodríguez, the owner. “I know him very well,” he told me. “He’s quite a man, he will never turn you in.”
I objected. The party’s instructions called for absolute secrecy, and Bellet was proposing that we violate those instructions. I said so. We had a heated discussion. And after weighing the political pros and cons, we decided that I should go to an Indian cacique’s house, a cabin nestled at the foot of the jungle.
I moved into the cabin and there my situation became very precarious. So much so that finally, after many objections, I agreed to meet Pepe Rodríguez, the owner of the business, the sawmills, and the forests. We settled on a neutral point, neither his house nor the cacique’s cabin. At sundown I saw a jeep approaching. A man who was both mature and youngish, with graying hair and set features, got out of the jeep with my friend Bellet. The first thing he said was that, from then on, he would be responsible for my safety. Under those circumstances, no one would dare try anything against me.
We talked without much warmth, but the man gradually won me over. It was very raw out and I invited him into the cacique’s house, where we continued our conversation. At a word from him, a bottle of champagne, another of whiskey, and some ice appeared.
At the fourth glass of whiskey, we were arguing in loud voices. The man was an absolutist in his convictions. He was well informed and said interesting things, but the edge of insolence in his voice infuriated me. We both banged on the cacique’s table with the palms of our hands, but we finished the bottle in relative peace.
Our friendship was a lasting one. One of the best things about him was his unconditional frankness, the frankness of a man who is used to running things. But he also read my poetry in an extraordinary way, with such an intelligent and virile voice that my poems seemed to be born all over again.
Rodríguez went back to the capital, to his businesses. He made one final gesture in my behalf. He called his subordinates together around me and said to them, in his typical voice of command: “If any obstacles come up within the next week to keep Señor Legarreta from crossing into Argentina through the smugglers’ pass, you will open another road so he can get to the border. Drop all work on the timber, and open that road. Those are my orders.”
Legarreta was my name at the time.
Pepe Rodríguez, that domineering, feudal man, died two years later, bankrupt and persecuted. He had been accused of heading a big smuggling operation and spent many months in jail. That must have meant unbearable suffering for a man with such an arrogant nature. I have never known for certain if he was guilty or innocent of the crime he was accused of. But I did learn that our oligarchy, who years before would have lost sleep hoping for an invitation from the generous Rodríguez, deserted him as soon as they saw him on trial and broken. As for me, I still stand by him and can’t put him out of my memory. Pepe Rodríguez was a small emperor who gave orders to open sixty kilometers of road in the jungle to help a poet reach freedom.
THE ANDEAN MOUNTAINS
The Andean mountains have hidden passes, used by smugglers in the old days, so hostile and difficult that the rural police no longer bother to patrol them. Rivers and precipices block the traveler’s way.
My companion Jorge Bellet headed the expedition. Our five-man escort, expert horsemen and road scouts, was joined by my old friend Victor Bianchi, who had come to the region as surveyor in some land disputes. He did not recognize me. I had a heavy beard after a year and a half of living in hiding. As soon as he knew about my plan to cross the jungle, he offered us his invaluable services as veteran explorer. He had once climbed Aconcagua on a tragic expedition in which he had been one of the only survivors.
We traveled single-file, protected by the solemn hour of dawn. I had not ridden a horse in many years, not since childhood, but here we were, on our way to the pass. The southern Andean forest is populated by huge trees set apart from one another: giant larches and mayten trees, as well as tepa and coniferous trees. The rauli trees have an amazing girth. I stopped to measure one. It had the diameter of a horse. The sky overhead can’t be seen. Below, leaves have been falling for centuries, forming a layer of humus the hoofs of the mounts sink down into. We were passing through one of primitive nature’s great cathedrals.
Our way took us through hidden and forbidden territory, and we accepted even the flimsiest indications we could follow. There were no tracks, no trails; my four mounted companions and I wove in and out, overcoming such obstacles as powerful trees, impassable rivers, enormous crags, desolate snows, guessing more often than not, looking for the road to my freedom. My companions were sure of their bearings, the best way between the thick clumps of vegetation, but, to be on the safe side, they notched the bark of the huge trees here and there with a machete, blazing a trail to guide them back, once they had left me to my fate.
Each one moved along, absorbed in that solitude without boundary lines, in the green and white silence: the trees, th
e long vines, the humus deposited by hundreds of years, the partly fallen trees suddenly becoming another roadblock. It was all the dazzling and secretive work of nature and at the same time a growing threat of cold, snow, and pursuit. It all came into play: solitude, danger, silence, and the urgency of my mission.
Sometimes we followed a dim trail left by smugglers perhaps or by common outlaws fleeing from justice; we wondered how many had perished, surprised by winter’s icy hand, in the heavy snowstorms that break loose in the Andes and surround the traveler, burying him under seven stories of snow.
On either side of the trail in that wild desolation, I saw something that looked like the work of human hands. Broken branches piled together, they had endured many winters; a vegetable offering from hundreds of travelers, tall wooden tombs to remember the fallen, to remind us of those who had not been able to go on and had been left there forever, under the snows. With their machetes, my companions also lopped off those branches that touched our heads, diving at us from the tops of the huge conifers, from the oaks whose last leaves were fluttering before the coming of the winter storms. And on each grave mound I, too, left a memento, a wooden calling card, a branch from the forest to adorn the tomb of some unknown traveler.
We had to cross a river. Those small springs born on the Andean peaks plummet down, unload their vertiginous, crushing power, turn into waterfalls, tear up land and rocks with the energy and speed gathered in those staggering altitudes. But this time we came upon a pool, a huge mirror of water, a ford. The horses went in, lost their footing, and swam to the other side. My mount was soon almost totally covered by the water, I began to sway unsteadily, my drifting feet thrashed about, while the animal struggled to keep its head above water. So we went across. And no sooner had we reached the other shore than my guides, the peasants who accompanied me, grinned and asked: “Were you very scared?”
“Very. I thought my end had come,” I replied.
“We were behind you with a rope ready in our hands,” they said.
“My father fell in right there,” one of them added, “and the current dragged him away. We weren’t about to let the same thing happen to you.”
We went on, eventually entering a natural tunnel opened in the impressive rock perhaps by a powerful river that has since disappeared or by a spasm of the earth that created this formation in the mountains, dug this canal in the hinterlands, excavated from the rock, the granite which we were now entering. A little farther on, the mounts kept slipping, they would try to get a footing in the rocky depressions, their legs buckled, sparks flew from their shoes. I was thrown from my horse and sprawled out on the rocks more than once. My horse was bleeding at the nose and legs, but we stubbornly continued on our vast, magnificent, grueling way.
There was something waiting for us in that wild forest. Suddenly we came out into a neat little meadow, an unbelievable vision, nestled in the mountain’s lap: crystalline water, green grass, wildflowers, the murmur of streams, and a blue sky over us, a generous light unbroken by foliage.
We stopped inside this magic circle, like guests in a holy place: and even holier was the ceremony in which I took part. The cowboys dismounted. A bull’s skull had been set down in the center of the hollow, as if for some ritual. My companions approached it in silence, one by one, and left a few coins and some food in its bone sockets. I joined them in that offering intended for rough-mannered men who had strayed away like Ulysses, for fugitives of every breed, who would find bread and assistance in the dead bull’s eyepits.
But the unforgettable ceremony did not end here. My rustic friends shed their hats and started a strange dance, hopping around the abandoned skull on one foot, retracing the circles of tracks left by the dances of so many others who had passed that way before. There with my inscrutable companions I came to understand then, in some only vaguely defined way, that communication existed between people who did not know one another, that there was solicitude, pleas and answers to those pleas, even in the most far-flung and out-of-the-way places in the world.
Farther along, that night, just before we were to cross the frontier that would separate me from my country for many years, we came to the last mountain gorges. Suddenly we saw a burning light, a sure sign of human life, and coming closer, we found several ramshackle sheds that looked empty. We entered one of them and saw, by the firelight, huge logs burning in the center of the room, bodies of giant trees that burned there day and night, releasing, through cracks in the roof, smoke that drifted in the dark like a heavy blue veil. We saw piles of cheeses, stacked there by those who had curdled them at that altitude. Several men, huddled together like sacks, were lying next to the fire. In the silence, we heard the strings of a guitar and the words of a song, born of the live coals and the darkness, bringing us the first human voice we had met on our trip. It was a song of love and faraway places, a lament of love and yearning addressed to spring, which was still far off, to the cities from which we came, to life’s infinite spaces. They didn’t know who we were, they knew nothing about the fugitive, they didn’t know my poetry or my name. Or did they know it, did they know us? Anyway, we sang and ate next to that fire, and later we walked through the dark into some crude rooms. A thermal spring passed through them, volcanic water we plunged into, a warmth that broke from the mountains and drew us close to itself.
We splashed around happily, washing, cleansing off the heaviness of our long ride. We felt refreshed, born again, baptized, when we set out at dawn on the final kilometers that would take me away from the shadows hovering over my country. We left on our horses, singing, with a new air filling our lungs, a breath that drove us on to the great highway of the world waiting for me. When we tried—this is still fresh in my mind—to give the mountaineers some money to pay for the songs, the food, the thermal waters, the bed and the roof, that is, for the unexpected welcome we had met, they refused our offer without even considering it. They had done what they could for us, that’s all. And “that’s all,” the silent “that’s all,” implied many things, perhaps recognition, perhaps our common dreams.
SAN MARTÍN DE LOS ANDES
An abandoned shack marked out the frontier for us. I was now a free man. On the cabin’s wall I wrote: “Goodbye, my country. I am leaving, but I take you with me.”
A Chilean friend was supposed to be waiting for us in San Martín de los Andes. This little mountain village in Argentina is so tiny that all I had been told, by way of instructions, was: “Go to the best hotel. Pedrito Ramírez will be waiting for you there.” But such is life: There wasn’t one best hotel in San Martín de los Andes; there were two. Which one should we pick? We decided on the more expensive one, located on the edge of town, after discounting the first, which we had seen on the lovely town square.
It so happened that the hotel we chose was so posh that they wouldn’t take us in. The effects of several days’ journey on horseback, the sacks on our shoulders, our bearded and dusty faces, drew hostile looks. Anyone would have been afraid to let us in. And more so the manager of a hotel whose customers were British aristocrats from Scotland, who came to Argentina for salmon fishing. There was nothing aristocratic about us. The manager gave us the vade retro, alleging, with theatrical glances and gestures, that the last available room had been taken ten minutes before.
Just then an elegant man, obviously an army officer, appeared in the doorway, accompanied by a blonde who looked like a movie star. He roared in a thundering voice: “Hold it. No one kicks Chileans out! They’re staying right here!” And we stayed. Our protector looked so much like Perón, and his lady so like Evita, that we all thought: It’s them! But later, after we had washed and dressed, and were sitting at a table enjoying a bottle of suspect champagne, we found out that the man was the commander of the local garrison and she an actress from Buenos Aires who was paying him a visit.
We passed ourselves off as lumbermen raring to make a good deal. The commander called me the “Mountain Man.” Victor Bianchi, whose friendship and lov
e of adventure had made him come that far with me, got hold of a guitar and charmed the Argentine men and ladies with his suggestive Chilean songs. But three days and their nights went by, and Pedrito Ramírez had not come for me. I was beside myself. We didn’t have a clean shirt left, or any money for new ones. A good lumberman, Victor Bianchi said, should at least have clean shirts.
Meanwhile, the commander gave a lunch for us at his garrison. We became better friends and he confessed to us that, for all his physical likeness to Perón, he was anti-Perón. We spent long hours arguing about who had the worse President, Chile or Argentina.
One morning, Pedrito Ramírez burst into my room. “You bastard!” I shouted at him. “What’s kept you so long?” The inevitable had occurred. He had been patiently waiting for me to come to the other hotel, the one on the square.
Ten minutes later, we were rolling over the pampa. And we rolled day and night. Once in a while, the Argentines would stop the car to sip some maté tea, and then we would set off again across that interminably monotonous land.
IN PARIS WITH PASSPORT
Naturally, my biggest headache in Buenos Aires was to get myself a new identity. The false papers I had used to cross the Argentine border would be no good to me for a transatlantic trip or to move around in Europe. How was I going to get new ones? Alerted by the government of Chile, the Argentine police were looking high and low for me.
In this tight spot, I recalled something that lay hidden in my memory. Miguel Angel Asturias, the novelist, my old Central American friend, was, I thought, in Buenos Aires, on a diplomatic mission for his country, Guatemala. Our faces had a vague likeness. By common consent, we had classed ourselves as chompipe, an Indian word for “turkey” in Guatemala and part of Mexico. Long-nosed, with plenty to spare in face and body, we shared a resemblance to the succulent bird.