by Pablo Neruda
Ehrenburg is advanced in age but is still one of the most genuine and ebullient of the great agitators of Soviet culture. I often visited my good friend at his apartment on Gorky Street, where Picasso paintings and lithographs lined the walls, or at his dacha near Moscow. Ehrenburg has a passion for plants and is almost always in his garden pulling weeds and conclusions out of everything that grows around him.
Later the poet Kirsanov, who translated my poetry into Russian so admirably, became a good friend of mine. Like all Soviet poets, Kirsanov is an ardent patriot. In his poetry there are brilliant flashes and the rich music of the beautiful Russian language, which his pen releases into the air in cascades.
Another poet I frequently visited in Moscow and in the country was a Turk, Nazim Hikmet, a legendary writer kept in prison for eighteen years by his country’s bizarre governments. Accused of attempting to incite the Turkish navy into rebellion, Nazim was condemned to the punishments of hell. The trial was held on a warship. He told me he was forced to walk on the ship’s bridge until he was too weak to stay on his feet, then they stuck him into a section of the latrines where the excrement rose half a meter above the floor. My brother poet felt his strength failing him. The stench made him reel. Then the thought struck him: My tormentors are keeping an eye on me, they want to see me drop, they want to watch me suffer. His strength came back with pride. He began to sing, low at first, then louder, and finally at the top of his lungs. He sang all the songs, all the love poems he could remember, his own poems, the ballads of the peasants, the people’s battle hymns. He sang everything he knew. And so he vanquished the filth and his torturers. When he told me those things I said to him: “You sang for all of us, my brother. We need have no doubts any longer, or wonder what to do. We know now that we must begin to sing.”
He also told me of the sufferings of his people. The peasants are brutally persecuted by feudal lords in Turkey. Nazim would see them arrive in prison; he would watch them swapping for tobacco the crust of bread doled out to them as their daily ration. Eventually, they would begin looking at the grass distractedly. Then with closer attention, almost avidly. And one day they would stuff a few blades of grass into their mouths. Later they would pull up fistfuls and gulp them down. In the end, they would eat the grass on all fours, like horses.
Passionately anti-dogmatic, Nazim has lived many long years of exile in the U.S.S.R. His love for this country, which took him in, comes tumbling out in his words: “I believe in the future of poetry. I believe, because I am living in the country where the soul craves poetry more than anything else.” Many secrets that people have to see for themselves vibrate in these words. The Soviet man, with doors open to him in all the libraries, all the classrooms, all the theaters, is at the center of the writers’ thoughts. This is something that should not be forgotten when the objectives of literary action come under discussion. On the one hand, the new forms, the urgent renewal of all that exists, must transcend and break down literary molds. On the other, how can one fail to fall in step with such a profound and far-flung revolution? How can one exclude from one’s central themes the victories, conflicts, human problems, abundances, progress, growth of an immense country facing a total change in political, economic, and social systems? How can one not make common cause with a people battered by ferocious invasions, hemmed in by implacable colonialists, obscurantists of every stripe and color? Can literature or the arts assume an air of ethereal independence before events of such vital significance?
* * *
The sky is white. By four in the afternoon it is black. From that hour on, night blankets the city.
Moscow is a winter city. It is a beautiful city of winter. The snow has settled on the infinitely repeated roofs. The pavements shine, invariably clean. The air is hard transparent glass. A soft steel color, the tiny feathers of the snow swirling about, the coming and going of thousands of passers-by as if they didn’t feel the cold, all of it suggests a dream in which Moscow becomes a huge winter palace with extraordinary ornamentations, ghostly as well as living ones.
It is thirty degrees below zero in this Moscow set like a star of fire and snow, a burning heart, in the earth’s breast.
I look out the window. There’s an honor guard in the streets. What is happening? Even the snow is motionless where it has fallen. It is the great Vishinsky’s funeral. The streets clear solemnly to let the procession pass. A profound silence settles down, a peacefulness in the heart of winter, for the great soldier. Vishinsky’s fire returns to the roots of the Soviet mother country.
The soldiers who presented arms as the procession went past remain in formation. From time to time, one of them performs a little jig, raising his gloved hands and stomping his high boots for a second. Other than this, they seem immutable.
A Spanish friend told me that during World War II, immediately after a bombing, on the most intensely cold days, the Muscovites could be seen eating ice cream in the streets. “I knew then that they would win the war,” my friend said, “when I saw them eating ice cream so calmly in the middle of a horrifying war and in below-zero weather.”
The trees in the park, white with snow, are frosted over. Nothing can match these crystallized petals in the parks, during the Moscow winter. The sun makes them translucent, drawing white flames from them, but not one drop melts from their flower patterns. This is an arborescent world that lets us glimpse, through its spring garden of snow, the Kremlin’s ancient towers, the thousand-year-old slender spires, the golden domes of St. Basil’s.
* * *
After leaving the outskirts of Moscow, on the way to another city, I see broad white highways. They are frozen rivers. On those still riverbeds the silhouetted figure of a fisherman absorbed in himself appears, from time to time, like a fly on a glossy tablecloth. The fisherman halts at that long frozen sheet, picks out a spot, and drills the ice until he has an opening through which the buried current can be seen. He can’t catch anything right away because the fish have fled, frightened by the iron that made the hole. Then the fisherman sprinkles a little food to lure the runaways back. He drops his hook and waits. He waits for hours on end in that hellish cold.
The work of writers, I say, has much in common with the work of these Arctic fishermen. The writer has to look for the river, and if he finds it frozen over, he has to drill a hole in the ice. He must have a good deal of patience, weather the cold and the adverse criticism, stand up to ridicule, look for the deep water, cast the proper hook, and after all that work, he pulls out a tiny little fish. So he must fish again, facing the cold, the water, the critic, eventually landing a bigger fish, and another and another.
I was invited to a writers’ congress. In the seats of honor were the great fishermen, the great writers of the Soviet Union. Fadeyev with his white smile and his silver hair; Fedin with the face of an English fisherman, thin and sharp; Ehrenburg with his turbulent shock of hair and his suit which, even when worn for the first time, gives the impression of having been slept in; Tikhonov.
Also on the dais, with Mongolian features and their recently printed books, were the spokesmen of the farthest Soviet republics, peoples I had never even heard mentioned by name before, nomad countries with no alphabets.
TO PUSHKIN
Dear Friend:
One hundred fifty years after your birth, the writers invited me to celebrate you. And so I came to know the Soviet Union for the first time. I don’t know why, but I felt as if it was you who invited me, who invited us, and since then I have felt that I have some connec-tion to your tormented life—that I am your friend. The celebration was so beautiful, amid the settings and landscapes of your life and your poetry. Spring was suffused with Pushkin. Your growing, crystalline work ran like a river beside us. Your verses blossomed in the trees.
There are masters of what we call literature who transcend it, changing not only the language of books, but language as it is spoken in daily life; changing the combinations of words, giving them new velocities and space to m
ove. A national poet throws open the windows and lets inside the silence and the sound of the earth, the passionate movement of history, the thundering of the sea and the song of birds. That was your grandeur, and it is your legacy.
I wish now to attest in this solemn congress that this legacy has been defended through fifty years of Soviet literature. These authors were profoundly national and at the same time immensely generous toward foreign cultures. These writers the revolution gave your fatherland, hand in hand with the Soviet people, created buildings, paper, printing presses, until the book was loved and respected, until it became the center of a new society. This was far from easy in that era of transformations and struggle of a kind never before seen on the face of the earth. The Soviet writers were heroes not only of their people, but of human hope.
And when the terrible war reached the feet of the statues, when the invaders tried to destroy these people and this culture, the Soviet Union’s authors fought and fell, fought and won, spilled their blood and their words, their love and their rage, to defend your legacy of crystal and the high humanism of the October Revolution.
Books have grown stronger, have invaded cities, fields, villages, populated libraries, streets, houses, hospitals, factories; have reached remote and obscure regions; all over, Soviet man has labored with book in hand. And he will reach the moon holding a book.
Your luminous heritage was defended and multiplied. A poet tells you this from remote terrains, from austral America. If you were here among us, I would say to you right now, “Comrade Pushkin, you may be happy.”
INDIA REVISITED
In 1950 I had to make a sudden visit to India. In Paris, Joliot-Curie sent for me to ask me to go on a mission. I was to travel to New Delhi, get in touch with people of different political views, gauge on the spot the chances of strengthening the Indian movement for peace.
Joliot-Curie was the world President of the Partisans for Peace. We had a long talk. He was worried because pacifist opinion carried so little weight in India, although India had always been widely known as the pacifist country par excellence. The Prime Minister himself, Nehru, was generally recognized as a leading advocate of peace, a time-honored and deep-rooted cause in that country.
Joliot-Curie handed me two letters: one for a scientist in Bombay, and the other to be delivered personally to the Prime Minister. It seemed strange to me that I should be the one picked for such a long trip and a task apparently so simple. Perhaps my enduring love for that country, where I had spent some years in my youth, had something to do with it. Or else the fact that I had received the Peace Prize that same year for Que despierte el leñador, a distinction accorded Pablo Picasso and Nazim Hikmet also.
I boarded the plane for Bombay. I was going back to India thirty years later. It was no longer a colony fighting for its emancipation, but a sovereign republic: the dream of Gandhi, whose first congresses I had attended in 1928. Perhaps none of my friends from those days were alive, revolutionary students who had confided their stories of struggle to me, like brothers.
I got off the plane and headed straight for customs. From there I would go to some hotel, deliver the letter to the physicist Raman, and go on to New Delhi. I hadn’t counted on my hosts. My suitcases were taking forever to get out of the place. A number of people I thought were customs inspectors were going through my baggage with a fine-tooth comb. I had seen many inspections, but never one like this. My luggage did not amount to much, only a medium-sized suitcase with my clothes, and a small leather bag containing my toilet articles. But my trousers, my shorts, my shoes were lifted out and checked over by five pairs of eyes. Pockets and seams were explored with meticulous attention. In Rome I had wrapped my shoes, so as not to soil my clothes, in a wrinkled newspaper I had found in my hotel room. I believe it was the Osservatore Romano. They spread the page on a table, held it up to the light, folded it as carefully as if it were a secret document, and finally put it aside with some of my papers. My shoes were also studied inside and out, like unique samples of fabulous fossils.
This incredible search lasted two hours. They made an elaborate bundle with my papers (passport, address book, the letter I was to hand the head of state, and the page from the Osservatore Romano) and ceremoniously secured it with sealing wax before my eyes. Then I was told I could go on to a hotel.
Using all my willpower so as not to lose our proverbial Chilean patience, I remarked that no hotel would allow me to register without identification papers and that the object of my trip to India was to hand the Prime Minister a letter, which I could not deliver because they had confiscated it.
“We’ll talk to the hotel and they will take you in. As for the papers, we’ll return them to you in due time.”
This was the country whose struggle for independence was part of my experience as a young man, I thought. I shut my suitcase and my mouth simultaneously. A single word crossed my mind: Shit!
* * *
At the hotel I ran into Professor Baera and told him of my mishaps. He was a good-natured Hindu. He passed these incidents off lightly. He had a tolerant attitude toward his country, which he considered still in the process of formation. I, on the other hand, saw something perverse in that chaos, something very far from the welcome I had expected from a newly independent country.
Joliot-Curie’s friend, to whom I had brought a letter of introduction, was the director of nuclear-physics studies in India. He invited me to visit their installations, adding that we had been asked to lunch that same day by the Prime Minister’s sister. Such has been my luck, and such it continues to be, all my life: one hand rams me in the ribs with a club, and the other offers me a bouquet of flowers to make up for it.
The Institute for Nuclear Research was one of those clean, bright, luminous places where men and women dressed in gauzy white circulate like running water, crossing corridors, steering their way around instruments, blackboards, and trays. I understood only a small part of the scientific explanations, but the visit was a purifying bath that washed off the stains of humiliation suffered at the hands of the police. I have a dim memory of seeing what looked like a bowl with some mercury in it. Nothing more surprising than this metal, which displays its energy like some form of animal life. Its mobility, its capacity for liquid, spherical, magical transformation, has always caught my imagination. I have forgotten the name of Nehru’s sister, with whom we had lunch that day. My ill humor dissipated in her presence. She was a woman of great beauty, made up and dressed like an exotic actress. Her sari flashed with color. Gold and pearls heightened her air of opulence. I took to her immediately. It was quite a contrast to see such a refined woman eating with her hand, sticking her long, jeweled fingers into the rice and curry sauce. I told her I was on my way to New Delhi to see her brother and the friends of world peace. She replied that, in her opinion, all the people of India should join the movement.
At the hotel that afternoon I was given the packet with my papers. The double-faced police had broken the sealing wax they themselves had affixed to it after packing up the documents in front of me. They must have photographed them all, including my laundry bills. I eventually found out that the people whose addresses were in my book had all been visited and interrogated by the police. Among them was Ricardo Güiraldes’s widow, who was my sister-in-law then. This shallow woman was a theosophist, and her one passion was the Asian philosophies; she lived in a remote Indian village. She was subjected to a good deal of harassment because her name was in my address book.
In New Delhi I met with six or seven of the Indian capital’s leading personalities the very day of my arrival, sitting under a sunshade for protection from the celestial fire. They were writers, philosophers, Hindu or Buddhist priests, the kind of Indians who are so adorably simple, so stripped of all pretension. Everyone agreed that the supporters of the peace movement were acting in the spirit of their ancient country, with its unbroken tradition of goodness and understanding. They wisely added that they thought any sectarian or hegemonic l
eanings should be corrected: neither the Communists nor the Buddhists nor the middle class should arrogate the movement. The important thing, the crux of the matter, was that all factions should contribute. I agreed with them.
The Chilean ambassador, Dr. Juan Marín, writer and physician, and an old friend of mine, came to see me at dinnertime. After many circumlocutions, he explained that he had had an interview with the chief of police. With the typical calmness the authorities adopt when talking to diplomats, the head of the Indian police had told him that my activities worried the Indian government and that he hoped I would leave the country soon. I told the ambassador that my sole activity had been to speak, in the hotel’s garden, with six or seven eminent persons whose ideas, I assumed, were common knowledge. As for me, I said, the minute I deliver Joliot-Curie’s message to the Prime Minister, I’ll no longer be interested in staying in a country that, in spite of my proven sympathy for its cause, treats me so discourteously, without any reason whatever.
My ambassador had been one of the founders of the Socialist Party in Chile, but he had softened up, possibly because of the years and his diplomatic privileges. He did not resent the Indian government’s stupid attitude, and I did not ask him for his support. We parted amiably—he relieved of the heavy responsibility my visit placed on him, and I with all my illusions about his sensibility and his friendship lost forever.
* * *
Nehru had granted me an appointment for the following morning in his office. He rose and shook my hand without any trace of a welcoming smile. His face has been photographed so often that it’s not worth the trouble of describing. Dark, cold eyes looked at me without feeling. Thirty years before, he and his father had been introduced to me at a huge rally for independence. I mentioned this to him, but it produced no change in his face. He replied in monosyllables to everything I said, scrutinizing me with his steady, cold eyes.