by Pablo Neruda
THE CAPTAIN’S VERSES
In the course of these wanderings from place to place as an exile, I came to a country I had never visited, and I learned to love it deeply: Italy. Everything in that country seemed fabulous to me. Especially the Italian simplicity: the olive oil, the bread and the wine of spontaneity. Even the police … The police, who never mistreated me but hounded me without respite. It was a police force I found everywhere, even in my sleep and in my soup.
Writers invited me to read my poems. I read them, in good faith, everywhere, in universities, in amphitheaters, to the dockworkers of Genoa, in Florence at the Palazzo dell’ Arte della Lana, in Turin, in Venice.
I read to capacity crowds with infinite pleasure. Someone next to me would repeat each poem after me in the sublime Italian tongue, and I liked to hear my poems with the added splendor of that magnificent language. The police, however, did not like it very much. In Castilian, fine, but the Italian version was full of ellipses. Lines in praise of peace, a word already proscribed by the “Western” world, and especially my poetry’s slant in favor of the people’s struggles, were dangerous.
In the municipal elections, the town council seats had gone to the people’s parties and I was received as guest of honor at the stately town halls. Often, I was made an honorary citizen of the city. This was the case in Milan, Florence, and Genoa. The councilmen conferred their distinctions on me before or after my readings. Notables, aristocrats, and bishops would gather in the hall. We would drink a glass of champagne, which I accepted in behalf of my remote country. Between embraces and hand kissing I would finally make it down the front steps of the city hall. The police, who never gave me a moment’s rest, would be waiting for me in the street.
What happened in Venice was a slapstick comedy. I gave my reading in the lecture hall. I was once more made an honorary citizen. But the police wanted me out of the city where Desdemona was born and suffered; they were stationed at the doors of my hotel, day and night.
My old friend Vittorio Vidali, Commandant Carlos, had come from Trieste to hear my poems. He shared with me the infinite pleasure of riding over the canals and seeing from the gondola the ash-gray palaces going past. As for the police, they were pestering me more than ever, always at our heels, a couple of paces behind us. I decided to make my escape, like Casanova, from a Venice that was trying to bottle me up. I put on a burst of speed, with Vittorio Vidali and the Costa Rican writer Joaquín Gutiérrez, who happened to be with us. Two Venetian policemen charged after us. We managed to jump quickly into the only gondola in Venice with a motor, the Communist mayor’s. The municipal authority’s gondola cut swiftly through the canal waters, while the representatives of the other authority scurried about like deer, looking for a boat. They took one of the many romantic vessels, painted black and with gold decorations, used by lovers in Venice. It followed us far off, hopelessly, like a duck chasing a sea dolphin.
* * *
All this persecution came to a head one morning in Naples. The police came to my hotel, not very early, because in Naples no one goes to work early, not even the police. Using an alleged error in my passport as a pretext, they asked me to accompany them to the prefecture. There they offered me an espresso and informed me that I must leave Italian soil that same day.
My love for Italy did not help me any.
“I am sure there’s some misunderstanding,” I said.
“Not at all. We think very highly of you, but you have to leave the country.”
And then, in a roundabout way, as obliquely as possible, they let it be known that the Chilean Embassy was asking for my expulsion.
The train was leaving that afternoon. My friends were already at the station to say goodbye. Kisses. Flowers. Shouts. Paolo Ricci. The Alicattas. Many, many others. Arrivederci. Adiós. Adiós.
During my train ride to Rome, my police guards spared no efforts to be nice to me. They carried my suitcases aboard and stowed them away. They bought me L’unità and Paese sera, but by no means the rightist newspapers. They asked me for autographs, some for themselves and others for their relatives. I have never seen such well-mannered policemen: “We are sorry, Eccellenza. We are poor, we have families to think of. We must obey orders. We hate to…”
At the station in Rome, where I had to get off to change trains to go on to the border, I was able to make out an enormous crowd from my window. I heard shouting. I saw great commotion and confusion. Armfuls of flowers advanced toward the train, raised over a river of heads. “Pablo! Pablo!”
When I went down the car’s steps, elegantly guarded, I became the center of a swirling melee. In a matter of seconds, men and women writers, newsmen, deputies, perhaps close to a thousand persons, snatched me away from the hands of the police. The police, in turn, moved in and rescued me from the arms of my friends. During those dramatic moments I made out a few famous faces. Alberto Moravia and his wife, Elsa Morante, like him a novelist. The eminent painter Renato Guttuso. Other poets. Other painters. Carlo Levi, the celebrated author of Christ Stopped at Eboli, was holding out a bouquet of roses. In the midst of all this, flowers were spilling to the ground, hats and umbrellas flew, fist blows sounded like explosions. The police were getting the worst of it, and I was once more recovered by my friends. During the scuffle I had a glimpse of gentle Elsa Morante striking a policeman on the head with a silk parasol. Suddenly the luggage hand trucks were going by and I saw one of the porters, a corpulent facchino, bring a club down on a policeman’s back. These were the Roman people backing me up. The fray became so confused that the police pulled me aside and appealed to me: “Talk to your friends. Tell them to calm down…”
The crowd was shouting: “Neruda stays in Rome. Neruda is not leaving Italy! Let the poet stay! Let the Chilean stay! Throw the Austrian out!” (The “Austrian” was De Gasperi, the Italian Prime Minister.)
After half an hour of the fracas, a superior order arrived, granting me permission to remain in Italy. My friends hugged and kissed me, and I left the station, sad to be walking on the flowers the battle had scattered everywhere.
* * *
I woke up the next morning in the house of a senator with parliamentary immunity; I had been taken there by the painter Renato Guttuso, who still didn’t have much faith in the word of the government authorities. I received a telegram from the island of Capri. It had been sent by the eminent historian Edwin Cerio, whom I did not know personally. He expressed indignation at what he considered an outrage, a desecration of Italian tradition and culture. He ended by offering me a villa where I could stay on Capri.
It all seemed a dream. And when I got to Capri, with Matilde Urrutia, my Matilde, the unreal sensation of dreaming increased.
We came to the marvelous island on a winter night. The coast loomed through the shadows, whitish and tall, unfamiliar and silent. What would happen? What would happen to us? A little horse car- riage was waiting. Up and up the deserted nighttime streets the carriage climbed. White, mute houses, narrow vertical lanes. It finally pulled up and the coachman took our bags into the house, which was also white and apparently empty.
We went in and saw a fire blazing in the huge hearth. Standing in the glow of the burning candelabra was a tall man, with hair, beard, and suit equally white. He was Signore Edwin Cerio, historian and naturalist, who owned half of Capri. He stood out in the shadows like the image of Taita God in children’s stories. He was almost ninety years old and he was the most distinguished man on the island.
“Make yourselves at home, no one will bother you here.”
And he left us, thoughtfully contenting himself with sending short messages with news or advice, notes written in an exquisite hand, accompanied by a single leaf or a flower from his garden. For us, Edwin Cerio was the embodiment of the large, generous, and perfumed heart of Italy.
Afterward, I got to know his work, books that are more genuine than Axel Munthe’s, though not as famous. Noble old Cerio repeated with roguish humor: “Capri’s town square is God’s
masterpiece.”
Matilde and I took refuge in our love. We went for long walks through Anacapri. The small island, divided into a thousand tiny orchards, has a natural splendor, too much commented on but strictly true. Among the rocks, wherever the sun and the wind beat down most, in the arid earth, diminutive plants and flowers burst out, grown in precise and exquisite patterns. This hidden Capri that you enter only after a long pilgrimage, after the tourist label has peeled off from your clothes, this popular Capri of rocks and minuscule vineyards, of humble people, hard-working and natural people, has an absorbing charm. By now you have assimilated things and people; coachmen and fishwives know you; you are part of the hidden Capri of the poor; and you know where to find the good wine and where to buy the olives that the natives of Capri eat.
All those depraved things we read about in novels may take place behind high palace walls. But I shared a happy life in great solitude or among the simplest people in the world. Unforgettable time! I worked all morning at my poems and Matilde typed them in the afternoon. It was the first time we had lived together in the same house. In that place whose beauty was intoxicating, our love grew steadily. We could never again live apart. There I finished Los versos del capitán, a book of love, passionate but also painful, which was published later in Naples anonymously.
* * *
And now I am going to relate the story of this book, one of my most controversial works. It remained a secret for a long time, for a long time it did not carry my name on its cover, as if I were disowning it or as if the book itself did not know who its father was. There are natural children, offspring of natural love, and, in that sense, Los versos del capitán was a natural book.
The poems in it were written here and there, during my exile in Europe. They were published anonymously in Naples, in 1952. My love for Matilde, homesickness for Chile, the passions of social consciousness fill the pages of this book that went through many editions without its author’s name.
For its first printing, the artist Paolo Ricci obtained some fine paper, antique Bodoni printing types, and engravings copied from Pompeian urns. Paolo also made up the list of subscribers, with brotherly devotion. The lovely volume was soon out, an edition of only fifty copies. We had a long celebration for this, with a table full of flowers, frutti di mare, wine as transparent as water, a unique offspring of the vines of Capri. And also with the cheer of friends who loved our love.
A few suspicious critics suggested political motives for the appearance of this book without a signature. “The party is against it, the party doesn’t approve,” they said. But it wasn’t true. Fortunately, my party is not against expressions of beauty.
The real truth is that I did not want those poems to wound Delia, whom I was leaving. Delia del Carril, sweetest of consorts, thread of steel and honey tied to me during the years when my poetry sang most, was my perfect mate for eighteen years. This book, filled with sudden and burning love, would have reached her like a rock hurled against her gentleness. That, only that, was the profound, personal, respectable reason for my anonymity.
Later, still without a first and last name, the book reached adulthood, a natural and courageous adulthood. It made its own way through life and I had to acknowledge it, at last. Now the “captain’s verses,” signed by the genuine captain, tramp the roads, that is, bookstores and libraries.
END OF EXILE
My exile was nearing its end. It was the year 1952. We crossed Switzerland en route to Cannes to catch an Italian ship that would take us to Montevideo. This time we didn’t want to see anyone in France. Alice Gascar, my loyal translator and long-time friend, was the only one I notified that we were passing through. In Cannes, however, something unexpected awaited us.
On the street, near the shipping line, I met Paul Eluard and his wife, Dominique. They had heard I was coming and were waiting to invite me to lunch. Picasso would also be there. Then we ran into the Chilean painter Nemesio Antúnez and his wife, Inés Figueroa; both would also be at the lunch.
It was the last time I would see Paul Eluard. I picture him in the Cannes sunlight wearing a blue pajama-like suit. I shall never forget his tanned, ruddy face, his intense blue eyes, his infinitely boyish smile, under the African light of the glaring streets in Cannes. Eluard had come from Saint-Tropez to say goodbye to me; he had brought Picasso along and had arranged the lunch. The party was all set.
A stupid, unforeseen incident ruined my day. Matilde did not have a visa for Uruguay. We had to hurry over to that country’s consulate. We took a taxi and I waited at the door. Matilde smiled optimistically when the consul came out to receive her. He looked like a nice boy. He was humming a melody from Madame Butterfly and wasn’t dressed much like a consul: an undershirt and walking shorts; and it never occurred to her that during their conversation the fellow would turn into a common extortioner. With his Pinkerton looks, he wanted to charge for overtime and raised all sorts of obstacles. He had us chasing around all morning. At lunch the bouillabaisse tasted like bitter gall to me. It took Matilde several hours to get her visa. Pinkerton dug up more and more red tape by the second: she had to have her photograph taken, to change dollars into francs, to pay for a long-distance call to Bordeaux. The fee for a transit visa that should have been free came to more than $120. I even started thinking that Matilde would miss the boat, and I wasn’t going to leave either. For a long time I recalled this as one of the bitterest days in my life.
RANDOM OCEANOGRAPHY
I am an amateur of the sea. For years I have been collecting information that is of little use because I usually navigate on land.
Now I am returning to Chile, to my oceanic country, and my ship is approaching the coasts of Africa. It has now passed the ancient Pillars of Hercules, armed today to serve one of the last bulwarks of imperialism.
I observe the sea with the complete detachment of a true oceanographer, who knows its surface and its depth, without literary pleasure, but with a connoisseur’s relish, a cetacean’s palate.
I have always enjoyed sea stories and I have a fishnet in my library. The books I like to look up the most are William Beebe’s or a good monograph on the Volutidae of the Antarctic Ocean.
Plankton interests me—the nutritious waters, molecular and electrified, that stain the sea like violet lightning. Thus I came to know that whales feed almost exclusively on these infinitely proliferating sea creatures. The tiniest plants and unreal Infusoria overrun our shaky continent. Whales open their enormous mouths as they shift from place to place, raising their tongues to their palates to let these living and visceral waters fill and nourish them. That is the feeding method of the glaucus whale (Rhachianectes glaucus), which goes past my Isla Negra windows on its way to the South Pacific and the tropical islands.
That is also the migratory route of the sperm or toothed whale, the most Chilean of hunted whales. Chilean sailors used them to illustrate the folkloric world of the sea. On their teeth the knives of the sailors scrimshawed hearts and arrows, tiny memorials to love, childish drawings of their ships or their sweethearts. But our whalers, the boldest in the watery hemisphere, did not traverse the Strait of Magellan and Cape Horn, the Antarctic and its furies, simply to unstring the teeth of the menacing sperm whale, but to seize its treasure of blubber and, especially, the tiny sac of ambergris this monster hides in its mountainous abdomen.
I am coming from somewhere else now. I have left behind me the last blue sanctuary of the Mediterranean, the grottoes, the marine and submarine contours of the island of Capri, where the sirens climbed on the rocks to comb out their blue hair, for the churning of the sea had dyed and drenched their wild tresses.
In the Naples aquarium I was able to see the electrical molecules of primeval organisms and a jellyfish soaring and falling, made of silver and vapor, fluttering in its solemn blue dance, girdled below by the only electric belt any lady of the deep has ever worn.
Many years ago in Madras, in the gloomy India of my youth, I paid a visit to a marvelous a
quarium. I can still see the shiny fish, the poisonous morays, the schools of fish dressed in fire and rainbow, and, more than that, the super-serious octopuses with their measured strides, metallic computers with innumerable eyes, legs, suckers, and stored-up information.
Of the giant octopus we all encountered for the first time in Victor Hugo’s The Toilers of the Sea (Victor Hugo is also a tentacled and polymorphous octopus of poetry), of that species I only got to see the fragment of an arm in Copenhagen’s Museum of Natural History. This was indeed the legendary kraken, terror of the ancient seas, who would seize a sailing vessel and drag it down, covering it, entangling itself around it. The fragment I saw, preserved in alcohol, indicated that the creature was more than thirty meters long.
But what I was really after was the trail, or rather the body, of the narwhal. Since my friends knew next to nothing about the giant sea unicorn of the North Seas, I came to feel that I was the narwhal’s exclusive spokesman and to believe that I, too, was a narwhal.
Does the narwhal exist? Can such an extraordinarily pacific sea creature with an ivory lance four or five meters long on its brow striated from tip to tip in the style of Solomon, and ending in a needle, can it and its legend, its marvelous name, go unnoticed by millions of human beings?
Of its name—narwhal or narwal—I can only say that it is the most beautiful of undersea names, the name of a sea goblet that sings, the name of a crystal spur. Then why doesn’t anyone know its name? Why isn’t there anyone with Narwal for a last name, or a beautiful Narwal building, even a Narwal Ramírez or a Narwala Carvajal?
There aren’t any. The sea unicorn is shrouded in mystery, in its currents and transmarine shadows, with its long ivory sword submerged in unexplored oceans. In the Middle Ages, hunting unicorns was a mystical, an aesthetic sport. The land unicorn lives on forever in tapestries, a dazzling creature surrounded by alabastrine ladies with high coiffures, aureoled in its majesty by birds that trill or flash their brilliant plumage. As for the narwhal, medieval monarchs considered it a magnificent gift and sent one another fragments of its fabulous body. From it, one scraped a powder which, diluted in liqueurs, bestowed—O eternal dream of man!—health, youth, and virility.