The Complete Memoirs

by Pablo Neruda

  He came to see me in my hideout.

  “Friend chompipe,” I said to him, “lend me your passport. Allow me the pleasure of arriving in Europe as Miguel Angel Asturias.”

  Let me say that Asturias has always been a liberal but has stayed out of activist politics. Yet he didn’t think about it twice. A few days later, between “Señor Asturias this” and “Señor Asturias that,” I crossed the wide river separating Argentina and Uruguay. I went into Montevideo, got past airports and police lookouts, and finally reached Paris, disguised as the eminent Guatemalan novelist.

  But in France my identity posed a problem once more. My brand-new passport would never get me past the implacable close scrutiny of the Sûreté. I would have to give up being Miguel Angel Asturias and turn back into Pablo Neruda. But how could I, when Pablo Neruda had never arrived in France? Miguel Angel Asturias had.

  My advisers made me check in at the George V Hotel. “There, among international celebrities, no one is going to ask you for your papers,” they said. So I stayed there for several days, without giving much thought to my mountain clothes, which struck a discordant note in that rich and elegant world.

  And then Picasso showed up, whose kindness matched his genius. He was as thrilled as a little boy, because he had just given the first speech of his life. Its theme had been my poetry, my persecution, my absence. Now, with brotherly feeling, the inspired minotaur of modern painting got me out of my predicament, taking care of all the details this involved. He spoke to the authorities; he called up a good many people. I don’t know how many marvelous paintings he failed to paint on account of me. I felt very badly that he was losing time so precious to him.

  * * *

  A congress for peace was meeting in Paris at this time. I showed up at the congress at the last minute, just to read one of my poems. All the delegates applauded and embraced me. Many had thought me dead. They couldn’t imagine how I had dodged the relentless persecution of the Chilean police.

  On the following day Alderete, a veteran newspaperman for France-Presse, dropped in at my hotel. “When the press gave out the news that you were in Paris,” he said, “the Chilean government roundly denied it. Your double had showed up here; Pablo Neruda was in Chile, they were hot on his trail, it was only a matter of hours till his arrest. What should we answer back?”

  I recalled that during an argument about whether Shakespeare had or had not written his works, a preposterous and fine-spun discussion, Mark Twain had chipped in: “It wasn’t William Shakespeare who really wrote those plays, but another Englishman who was born on the same day at the same hour as he, and who died on the same day, and, to carry the coincidences still further, was also named William Shakespeare.”

  “Say that I am not Pablo Neruda,” I told the newspaperman, “but another Chilean who writes poetry, fights for freedom, and is also called Pablo Neruda.”

  * * *

  Getting my papers straightened out was not easy. Aragon and Paul Eluard were helping me. In the meantime, I had to lead a semi-clandestine life.

  One of the places where I took shelter was Mme Françoise Giroux’s home. I shall never forget this highly original and intelligent lady. Her apartment was in the Palais-Royal, next door to Colette’s. She had adopted a little Vietnamese boy. The French army was doing the work the North Americans would take over later on: killing innocent people in far-off Vietnam. So she adopted the child.

  I remember that one of the most beautiful Picassos I have ever seen was in this house. It was a very large painting, from his pre-cubist period. It showed a pair of red plush drapes, falling, coming together like the two halves of a window, above a table. A loaf of long French bread spanned the table from end to end. The painting inspired reverence. The enormous loaf of bread on the table was like the central figure in an ancient icon, or like El Greco’s St. Maurice in El Escorial. I gave the painting my own title: The Ascension of the Holy Bread.

  One day Picasso himself came to visit me in my hideout. I led him over to the painting he’d done so many years before. He had forgotten it completely. He started going over it very earnestly, sinking into an extraordinary and rather sad absorption very seldom seen in him. He spent more than ten minutes in silence, stepping up close to the forgotten work and then back.

  “I like it more all the time,” I said to him when he ended his contemplation. “I am going to suggest that my country’s national museum buy it. Madame Giroux is prepared to sell it to us.”

  Picasso turned his head toward the painting once more, his eyes piercing the magnificent loaf, and his only comment was: “It’s not bad at all.”

  * * *

  I found a house for rent that seemed an extravagance to me. It was on Pierre-Mille Street, in the fifteenth arrondissement, that is, to hell and gone. It was a neighborhood of workers and poor people. You had to travel for hours on the Métro to get there. What attracted me to the house was that it looked like a cage. It had three floors, tiny hallways and rooms. It was a tall bird cage defying description.

  The ground floor, which was the largest and had a wood-burning stove, I made into a library and a room for entertaining, which I did from time to time. Some friends, almost all Chileans, moved into the upper floors. José Venturelli and Nemesio Antúnez, painters both, and others I can’t remember, stayed there.

  About this time, I received a visit from three outstanding figures in Soviet literature: the poet Nikolai Tikhonov, the playwright Alexander Korneichuk (who was also a government official in the Ukraine), and the novelist Konstantin Simonov. I had never seen them before. They embraced me like a long-lost brother. And, besides a hug, each gave me a resounding kiss, one of those Slavic kisses between men that are a sign of friendship and respect, and which I had a hard time getting used to. Years later, when I understood the meaning of those brotherly, masculine kisses, I had occasion once to begin an anecdote with these words: “The first man who ever kissed me was a Czechoslovakian consul…”

  * * *

  The Chilean government did not want me. Did not want me at home or abroad. Wherever I went, I was preceded by notes and telephone calls asking other governments to make things difficult for me.

  I found out that there was a file on me at the Quai d’Orsay which said, roughly: “Neruda and his wife, Delia del Carril, make frequent trips to Spain, carrying Soviet instructions back and forth. They receive these instructions from the Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg, with whom Neruda also makes clandestine trips to Spain. In order to keep closer contact with Ehrenburg, Neruda has rented and moved into an apartment in the same building where the Soviet writer lives.”

  It was a string of lies. Jean-Richard Bloch gave me a letter for a friend of his who was an important official in the Ministry of Foreign Relations. I explained to the functionary that they were trying to get me deported from France on the basis of the wildest assumptions. I told him that I was very eager to meet Ehrenburg but, unfortunately, had not yet had the honor. The important functionary threw me a look of pity and promised to investigate. This was never done, however, and the absurd charges were allowed to stand.

  So I decided to introduce myself to Ehrenburg. I knew he went to La Coupole every day, where he lunched at a Russian hour, that is, around sundown. “I’m Pablo Neruda, the poet, from Chile,” I said to him. “According to the police, we’re close friends. They claim that I live in the same building as you. Since they’re going to throw me out of France because of you, I wish to meet you, at least, and shake hands.”

  I don’t believe Ehrenburg ever blinked at any phenomenon in the world. And yet I saw something very much like a look of stupefaction emerging from his shaggy brows, from under his angry mop of gray hair. “I also wanted to meet you, Neruda,” he said. “I like your poetry. But, to begin with, have some of this choucroute à l’Alsacienne.”

  From then on, we became great friends. I believe he began to translate my España en el corazón that same day. I must admit that the French police unintentionally provided m
e with one of the most gratifying friendships I have ever had, and also presented me with the most eminent of my Russian translators.

  * * *

  One day, Jules Supervielle came to see me. By then I had a legal Chilean passport in my own name. The aging and noble Uruguayan poet very seldom went out any more. I was touched and surprised by his visit.

  “I’ve brought you an important message. My son-in-law, Bertaux, wants to see you. I don’t know what it’s about.”

  Bertaux was the chief of police. We went to his office. The old poet and I sat down facing the officer across his desk. I have never seen more telephones on one table. How many were there? No fewer than twenty, I believe. His intelligent and shrewd face looked at me across the forest of telephones. I was sure every line to Paris’s underground life was there on that overloaded spot. I thought of Fantômas and Inspector Maigret.

  The chief of police had read my books and knew my poetry surprisingly well.

  “I’ve received a request from the Chilean ambassador to take away your passport. The ambassador claims that you are using a diplomatic passport, and that would be illegal. Is this information correct?”

  “I don’t have a diplomatic passport,” I replied. “This is simply an official passport. I am a senator in my country, and as such, I have a right to this document. What’s more, here it is. You may examine but not take it away, because it is my private property.”

  “Is it up-to-date? Who renewed it?” Monsieur Bertaux asked me, taking my passport.

  “It’s up-to-date, of course,” I said to him. “As for saying who renewed it, that’s something I can’t do. The Chilean government would remove that official.”

  The chief of police examined my papers slowly. Then he picked up one of his numberless telephones and asked to be put through to the Chilean ambassador. The telephone conversation took place in my presence.

  “No, Mr. Ambassador, I cannot do it. His passport is in order. I don’t know who renewed it. I repeat, it would be wrong to take away his papers. I cannot, Mr. Ambassador. I am very sorry.”

  The ambassador’s insistence was plain, and a slight note of irritation was also evident in Bertaux’s voice. He finally put down the receiver and said to me: “He seems to be your determined enemy. But you can stay in France as long as you wish.”

  I left with Supervielle. The old poet couldn’t quite understand what was going on. For my part, a feeling of triumph mingled with revulsion went through me. The ambassador who was harassing me, collaborating with my persecutor in Chile, was the same Joaquín Fernández who boasted of his friendship with me and who never passed up a chance to play up to me, who that same morning had sent me a little affectionate message via the Guatemalan ambassador.

  ROOTS

  Ehrenburg, who was reading and translating my poems, scolded me: Too much root, too many roots in your poems. Why so many?

  It’s true. The frontier regions sank their roots into my poetry and these roots have never been able to wrench themselves out. My life is a long pilgrimage that is always turning on itself, always returning to the woods in the south, to the forest lost to me.

  There the huge trees were sometimes felled by their seven hundred years of powerful life, uprooted by storms, blighted by the snow, or destroyed by fire. I have heard titanic trees crashing deep in the forest: the oak tree plunging down with the sound of a muffled cataclysm, as if pounding with a giant hand on the earth’s doors, asking for burial.

  But the roots are left out in the open, exposed to their enemy, time, to the dampness, to the lichens, to one destruction after the other.

  Nothing more beautiful than those huge, open hands, wounded or burned, that tell us, when we come across them on a forest path, the secret of the buried tree, the mystery that nourished the leaves, the deep-reaching muscles of the vegetable kingdom. Tragic and shaggy, they show us a new beauty: they are sculptures molded by the depths of the earth: nature’s secret masterpieces.

  Once, Rafael Alberti and I were walking together, with waterfalls, thickets, and woods all around us, near Osorno, and he pointed out that each branch was different from the next, the leaves seemed to be competing for an infinite variety of style. “They look as if they had been selected by a landscape gardener for a magnificent park,” he said. Years later, in Rome, Rafael remembered that walk and the natural abundance of our forests.

  That is what it was like. It isn’t, not any more. I grow sad, thinking of my wanderings as a boy and as a young man, between Boroa and Carahue, or around Toltén in the hills along the coast. How many discoveries! The graceful bearing and the fragrance of the cinnamon tree after the rain, the mosses whose winter beard hangs from the forest’s innumerable faces!

  I pushed aside the fallen leaves, trying to uncover the lightning streak of some beetles: the golden carabus, who dresses in iridescence to dance a minuscule ballet under the roots.

  Or later, when I rode across the mountains to the Argentine side, under the green domes of the giant trees, an obstacle loomed up ahead: the root of one of them, taller than our mounts, blocking our way. Strenuous work and the ax made the crossing possible. Those roots were like overturned cathedrals: greatness laid bare to overwhelm us with its grandeur.

  9

  Beginning and End of Exile

  IN THE SOVIET UNION

  In 1949, my exile just over, I was invited for the first time to the Soviet Union, to the celebration of Pushkin’s sesquicentennial. The twilight and I came at the same time to my appointment with the cold pearl of the Baltic, the ancient, new, noble, heroic Leningrad. The city of Peter the Great and Lenin the Great has “angel,” like Paris. A gray angel: steel-colored avenues, lead-colored stone palaces, and a steel-green sea. The most magnificent museums in the world, the treasures of the Tsars, their paintings, their uniforms, their dazzling jewels, their ceremonial dress, their weapons, their tableware, were all before my eyes. And the new, immortal mementos: the cruiser Aurora, whose cannons backed Lenin’s thought, knocked down the walls of the past, and opened history’s doors.

  I was there for an appointment with a poet dead over a hundred years, Alexander Pushkin, author of imperishable legends and novels. This prince of poets of the people holds the heart of the great Soviet Union. To celebrate his sesquicentennial, the Russians had reconstructed the palace of the Tsars, stone by stone. Each wall had been rebuilt exactly as it had existed in the past, rising again from the dusty rubble to which it had been reduced by Nazi artillery. The old blueprints of the palace, the documents of the times, were consulted to reconstruct the luminous windows, the embroidered cornices, the flowery capitals. To build a museum in honor of an extraordinary poet of another era.

  * * *

  What first impressed me in the U.S.S.R. was the feeling of immensity it gives, of unity within that vast country’s population, the movements of the birches on the plains, the huge forests so miraculously unspoiled, the great rivers, the horses running like waves across the wheat fields.

  I loved the Soviet land at first sight, and I realized that not only does it offer a moral lesson for every corner of the globe where human life exists, a way of comparing possibilities, an ever-increasing progress in working together and sharing, but I sensed, too, that an extraordinary flight would begin from this land of steppes, which preserved so much natural purity. The entire human race knows that a colossal truth is being worked out there, and the whole world awaits eagerly to see what will happen. Some wait in terror, others simply wait, still others believe they can see what is coming.

  I was in the middle of a forest where thousands of peasants in traditional festive costumes were listening to Pushkin’s poems. Everything hummed with life: men, leaves, vast stretches of land where the new wheat was beginning to show its first signs of life. Nature seemed to form a triumphant union with man. Out of those poems of Pushkin’s in the Mikhailovsky forest, the man who would fly to other planets must inevitably rise.

  A heavy rain came down while the peasants were a
t the celebration. A lightning bolt struck close to us, charring a man and the tree sheltering him. It all seemed a part of the torrential natural scene. What’s more, that poetry accompanied by rain was already in my books, it concerned me.

  * * *

  The Soviet countryside is steadily changing. Huge cities and canals are under construction; the geography itself is altering. But even on that first visit I recognized the affinities that linked me to them, and also everything that seemed beyond my grasp or furthest from my spirit.

  In Moscow, writers live in constant ferment, a continual exchange of ideas. There, long before the scandalmongering West discovered it, I learned that Pasternak and Mayakovsky were the best Soviet poets. Mayakovsky was the public poet, with a thundering voice and a countenance like bronze, a magnanimous heart that revolutionized language and met head-on the most difficult problems in political poetry. Pasternak was a great poet of evening shadows, of metaphysical inwardness, and politically an honest reactionary who in the transformation of his country saw no further than an enlightened deacon. Yet the severest critics of his static political views often recited Pasternak’s poems to me by heart.

  The existence of a Soviet dogmatism in the arts for long periods of time cannot be denied, but it should also be mentioned that this dogmatism was always considered a defect and combated openly. With the critical essays of Zhdanov, a brilliant dogmatist, the personality cult produced a serious hardening in attitude toward the development of Soviet culture. But there were rebuttals from every quarter, and we know that life is stronger and more obstinate than precepts. The revolution is life; precepts prepare their own grave.

  * * *