by Pablo Neruda
Wandering around one day somewhere in Denmark, I entered an old shop where objects of natural history were for sale—a business, unknown in our America, that holds great fascination for me. There, in a corner, I discovered three or four narwhal horns. The largest was five meters long. I thrust and parried with them and stroked them for a long while.
The old man who owned the shop watched me tilting, with an ivory lance in my hands, at imaginary windmills, invisible windmills of the sea. Then I replaced each one in its corner. All I could buy myself was a tiny one, from a baby narwhal, one of those which go out to explore the cold Arctic waters with their innocent spur.
I put it away in my suitcase, but in a small pension facing Lake Leman in Switzerland I had a craving to see and touch the sea unicorn’s magic treasure. And I took it out of my suitcase.
I can’t find it now.
Did I leave it lying somewhere in the Vésenaz pension, or did it roll under the bed at the last minute? Or could it have returned in some unaccountable way to the polar circle one night?
I look at the small waves of a new day on the Atlantic.
On either side of its bow, the ship leaves a white, blue, and sul-phuric gash of water, foam, and churned-up depths.
The portals of the ocean are trembling.
Over them soar diminutive flying fish, silver and translucent.
I am on my way back from exile.
I gaze at the waters a long time. I am sailing over them to other waters: the tormented waves of my country.
The sky of a long day covers all the ocean.
Night will come once more to hide the huge green palace of mystery with its shadow.
10
Voyage and Homecoming
A LAMB IN MY HOUSE
I had a relative, a senator who, having triumphed in some recent elections, came to spend a few days at my house in Isla Negra. That’s how the story of the lamb begins.
Well, the senator’s most enthusiastic supporters came to throw a feast for him. On the first afternoon of the feasting, a lamb was cooked in the Chilean country style, with a huge fire outdoors and the animal’s body stuck on a wooden spit. This is called “roast on the stick” and is enjoyed with lots of wine and plaintive creole guitars.
Another lamb was being kept for the following day’s festivities. While his fate hung in the balance, he was tethered outside my window. All night long, he moaned and cried, bleating and complaining of his loneliness. It was heartbreaking to listen to the lamb’s modulations, so much so that I decided to get up at dawn and abduct him.
I put him in a car and drove a hundred and fifty kilometers to my house in Santiago, where the knives would not get him. He had no sooner arrived than he set to munching greedily on the choicest things in my garden. He loved the tulips and didn’t spare a single one. He didn’t take liberties with the rosebushes, for thorny reasons, but he gobbled down the gillyflowers and the lilies with uncanny delight. There was nothing I could do but tether him again. And he set to bleating at once, obviously trying to move my heart as he had done before. I was desperate.
Now the story of Juanito and the story of the lamb will join. At about that time there had been a farm laborers’ strike in the south. The landowners in the area, who paid the tenant farmers only twenty cents a day, ended the strike with sticks and jail sentences. One country boy was so scared that he hopped a moving train. The boy’s name was Juanito; he was a devout Catholic and knew nothing of the things of this world. When the conductor on the train came by to check the tickets, the boy said he didn’t have one, he was going to Santiago, he thought trains were for people to get on and travel whenever they had to. Naturally, they were going to put him off. But the third-class passengers—country people, as always big-hearted—took up a collection and paid the fare.
Juanito walked the streets and squares of the capital with a parcel of clothes under his arm. He didn’t know anyone and so did not talk to anyone. In the country it was said that in Santiago the thieves outnumbered the other people, and the boy was afraid they would take the shirt and espadrilles he carried wrapped in newspaper under his arm. In the daytime he roamed the busiest streets, where people were always in a hurry and jostled out of their way this Kaspar Hauser fallen from another star. At night he also sought the most crowded neighborhoods, but these were the avenues with cabarets and night life, and he looked even more outlandish there, a pale shepherd lost among sinners. Without a cent to his name, he couldn’t eat, and one day he collapsed on the ground in a dead faint.
A crowd of curious people gathered around the boy lying on the street. He had fallen in front of a small restaurant. He was carried inside and set down on the floor. It’s his heart, some said. It’s his liver, others said. The restaurant owner came over, took one look, and said, “It’s an empty stomach.” The corpse revived as soon as it had had a few mouthfuls. The proprietor set him to washing dishes and took a great liking to him. He had reason; the country boy washed mountains of dishes and was always smiling. Everything was going well; he had a lot more to eat than in the country.
The city wove its spell in a strange way to make the shepherd and the sheep meet one day in my house.
The shepherd felt like seeing the city and ventured a little beyond the mountains of dishes. He went down one street eagerly, crossed a square, and found everything fascinating. But when he tried to go back, he couldn’t. He hadn’t taken down the address of the hospitable premises that had taken him in, because he didn’t know how to write, and he searched for them in vain. He never found them again.
Touched by his predicament, someone told him to come to me, Pablo Neruda, the poet. I don’t know why the fellow suggested this. Probably because in Chile people are in the habit of passing on to me any strange thing that wanders through their heads, and of blaming me, moreover, for whatever happens afterward. These are strange national customs.
Anyhow, the boy came to my house one day and made the acquaintance of the captive animal. Having taken charge of a lamb I didn’t need, I found it easy to take the next step—taking the shepherd under my wing. I gave him the job of seeing to it that the gourmet lamb did not devour my flowers exclusively but from time to time also sated its appetite on the grass in my garden.
They took to each other on the spot. During the first days, as a formality, the boy tied a string around the animal’s neck, like a ribbon, and led him from place to place. The lamb ate incessantly, and his personal shepherd, too; both roamed all over the house, even into my rooms. It was a perfect kinship; they were linked by mother earth’s umbilical cord, by the natural law of man. Many months went by. Shepherd and lamb rounded their anatomies with fat, especially the ruminant, who blew up to such proportions that he could barely follow his master around. Sometimes he came cautiously into my room, regarded me with indifference, and went out, dropping a small rosary of dark beads on the floor.
It all came to an end when the peasant started to pine for the provinces and told me he was returning to his remote corner of the world. It was a last-minute decision, he had to keep a vow he had made to the Virgin who was patroness of his home town, and he couldn’t very well take the sheep. It was a tender parting. The shepherd took the train, with his ticket in hand this time. It was all very sad.
What was left in my garden was not a lamb but a serious, or rather, a fat problem. What was I to do with the creature? Who would look after him now? I had too many political commitments.
My house was a wreck after the persecutions my militant poetry had brought down on me. The lamb took up his plaintive tune once more.
I looked the other way and told my sister to take him with her. Alas! This time I was sure he would not escape the roasting stick.
AUGUST 1952 TO APRIL 1957
The years between August 1952 and April 1957 will not be detailed in my memoirs, since I spent almost all this time in Chile and nothing out of the ordinary happened to me, no adventures that would amuse my readers. But I ought to mention some import
ant things that occurred during those years. I published Las uvas y el viento, which had been written earlier. I worked intensely on Odas elementales, Nuevas odas elementales, and Tercer libro de las odas. I organized a Continental Congress of Culture, held in Santiago and attended by outstanding personalities from all the Americas. I also celebrated my fiftieth birthday in Santiago, and prominent writers came from all over the world: Ai Ch’ing and Siao Emi came from China; Ilya Ehrenburg flew in from the Soviet Union; Drda and Kutvalek from Czechoslovakia; and among the Latin Americans present were Miguel Angel Asturias, Oliverio Girondo, Norah Lange, Elvio Romero, María Rosa Oliver, Raúl Larra, and many others. I donated my library and other property to the University of Chile. I made a trip to the Soviet Union, as juror for the Lenin Peace Prize, which I myself had received during this period, when it was still called the Stalin Prize. Delia del Carril and I separated for good. I built my house La Chascona and moved into it with Matilde Urrutia. I started the magazine Gaceta de Chile and edited several issues. I took part in the electoral campaigns and other activities of Chile’s Communist Party. The Losada publishing house in Buenos Aires brought out my collected works on Bible paper.
THE YOUNG POET BARQUERO
When the twenty-year-old poet Efraín Barquero comes to my house, he reminds me of myself when I arrived in my country’s capital thirty years back with a book of homespun verses under my arm. I went from one publisher to the next and met no one who would publish my first poems.
Nonetheless, in 1922 there was a certain romanticism among publishers, none of which exists today. I don’t know how Barquero’s verses will get printed. Paper costs more now, inflation has made printing costs astronomical, editors don’t want to hear a word about young writers, they barely dare to bring out established authors’ books.
But readers keep growing in Latin America. An indisputable cultural evolution, a never-before-seen turbulence, fills her streets with ideas, polemics, paintings, stories, and poetry. The road is open for the peoples frustrated by betrayal and greed, who have struggled to regain their independence; and the doors are now open, too, and fresh air blows in from the world with books of knowledge old and new arrived from every shore.
During our colonial past, we disguised the writings of the French Encyclopedists as religious texts, and read them to one another in secret. Today, in large parts of Latin America, in Guatemala, in Chile, in Peru, in Colombia, the modern inquisition, North American in character, hunts down, condemns, burns, and prohibits books and magazines. But truth, liberty, and culture germinate powerfully in Latin America today, and the fruits are evident in all her martyred nations.
When Barquero published his first book, with the greatest effort, I said a few things about his future as a poet in the prologue: “Efraín Barquero’s poetry has body. It is a rich material, a reconstruction according to the rules of life, with words, with phrases that seemed pointless and yet at his beckoning shine like swords, gleam like wine, turn to stone, hoist aloft, once more, the dignity of song.”
For all that I said about him in his first book, the publication of his new work worries me.
The years of my youth are over, and the paths of the young have not grown clearer, instead they find more and more obstacles in their way.
Social life in Western countries is not proceeding toward the solution of these problems, which are manifest in a number of painful ways. The talent of the Chilean Barquero seemed to guarantee his fate. And yet here he is now, in 1956, thin, pallid, newly arrived on the river running from the perfumed province of his birth, lost in the capital amid two million inhabitants, with a new bouquet of poems in hand.
When I see him pass through the streets of Santiago, gilded by the early autumn, it seems I am seeing myself, thirty years ago, passing over those same cold streets.
The hard hands of struggle did not snuff out the light of my poetry, they lit it up deep in my blood.
I think of Barquero and of so many young Latin American poets: May the gift of song live on in them, and the stamp of light, despite their helplessness.
Again, their struggle will salvage honor and poetry.
JAILED IN BUENOS AIRES
At the end of this period I was invited to a Congress for Peace which was to meet in Colombo, on the island of Ceylon, where I had lived so many years ago. It was April 1957.
An encounter with the secret police may not seem dangerous, but if it’s the secret police of Argentina, that is something else again—not without humor, but with unpredictable consequences. This particular night, just in from Chile and en route to far-off lands, I fell into bed exhausted. I was just starting to doze off when several policemen burst into the house. They ransacked the place: they picked up books and magazines, they rummaged in closets, and went through the underwear. And they had already taken away the Argentine friend in whose house I was staying, when they discovered me in my room at the back of the house.
“Who is this man?” they asked.
“My name is Pablo Neruda,” I said.
“Is he sick?” they questioned my wife.
“Yes, he is sick and very tired after his trip. We got here today and we’re flying to Europe tomorrow.”
“Well, well,” they said, and left the room.
They were back an hour later with an ambulance. Matilde protested, but this had no effect on them. They had their orders. They were to take me in, weary or fresh, healthy or sick, dead or alive.
It was raining that night. Thick drops came down from the heavy Buenos Aires skies. I couldn’t understand it. Perón had already been ousted. In the name of democracy, General Aramburu had overthrown tyranny. Yet, without knowing how or when, whither or wherefore, whether for this or that, for nothing or everything, dead tired and ill, I was on my way to prison. The stretcher on which the four policemen were carrying me became a knotty problem as we descended stairways, entered elevators, crossed hallways. The four litter-bearers suffered and puffed. To make their distress even greater, Matilde told them in a honeyed voice that I weighed 110 kilos. And I really looked it, in sweater and overcoat, with blankets pulled up over my head—bulging like a huge mass, like Mt. Osorno the volcano, on the stretcher Argentine democracy had proffered me. I imagined, and this eased my phlebitis symptoms, that the poor devils sweating and puffing under my weight were General Aramburu himself carrying the stretcher.
We followed prison routine, and I was booked and my personal effects confiscated. I was not even allowed to hang on to the juicy detective story I had with me to keep from being bored. But I really didn’t have time to get bored. Bars clanged open and closed. The stretcher went through courtyards and iron doors, penetrating deeper and deeper, past banging noises and locks. Suddenly I found myself in the middle of a crowd, the rest of the night’s prisoners, more than two thousand of them. I was to be held incommunicado; no one was allowed near me. Yet hands reached under the blankets to shake mine, and one soldier put down his gun and held out a sheet of paper for my autograph.
Finally they deposited me upstairs, in the farthest cell, with a tiny, very high window. I wanted to rest, to get some sleep, sleep, sleep. I couldn’t. Day had broken and the Argentine prisoners were making an ear-splitting racket, a deafening uproar, as if they were watching a soccer match between the River and the Boca teams.
Some hours later, the community of writers and friends had gone into action in Argentina, Chile, and several other countries. They took me from my cell, carried me to the infirmary, returned my belongings, and set me free. I was about to leave the prison, when one of the uniformed guards came up to me and put a sheet of paper in my hands. It was a poem he had dedicated to me, written in crude verse, filled with careless slips, innocent like all popular art. I imagine few poets have received a poetic homage from the men assigned to guard them.
POETRY AND POLICE
One day on Isla Negra the servant girl told us: Ma’am, Don Pablo, I’m pregnant. Soon after that, she had a baby boy. We never knew who the father was
. She didn’t care. What she did care about was that Matilde and I should be the baby’s godparents. But it was not to be. We couldn’t do it. The nearest church is in El Tabo, a cheerful little village where we fill up the station wagon with gas. The priest bristled like a hedgehog. “A Communist godfather? Never. Neruda will not come in that door, not even if he carries your child in his arms.” The girl went back home to her brooms, crestfallen. She did not understand.
Another time, I watched Don Asterio suffer. He is an old watchmaker, well on in years, the best maker of chronometers in Valparaíso. He repairs the navy’s instruments. His wife was dying—his old companion. Fifty years of matrimony. I thought I ought to write something about him. Something that would help him a little in his bitter moment. Something he could read to his dying wife. So I thought. I don’t know if I was right. I wrote the poem. In it I put my admiration and my feelings for the craftsman and his craft. For that life, so pure among the ticktocks of old clocks. Sarita Vial took the poem to a newspaper. The newspaper, La unión, was run by Señor Pascal, a priest. He would not publish the poem; it wouldn’t be published. Neruda, its author, was an excommunicated Communist. He would not. The woman died—Don Asterio’s old companion. The priest would not publish the poem.
I want to live in a world where no one is excommunicated. I will not excommunicate anybody. I would not tell that priest tomorrow: “You can’t baptize So-and-So, because you are an anti-Communist.” I would not tell another priest: “I will not publish your poem, your creation, because you’re an anti-Communist.” I want to live in a world where beings are only human, with no other title but that, without worrying their heads about a rule, a word, a label. I want people to be able to go into all the churches, to all the printing presses. I don’t want anyone to ever again wait at the mayor’s office door to arrest and deport someone else. I want everyone to go in and come out of City Hall smiling. I don’t want anyone to flee in a gondola or be chased on a motorcycle. I want the great majority, the only majority, everyone, to be able to speak out, read, listen, thrive. I have never understood the struggle except as something to end all struggle. I have never understood hard measures except as something to end hard measures. I have taken a road because I believe that road leads us all to lasting brotherhood. I am fighting for that ubiquitous, widespread, inexhaustible goodness. After all the run-ins between my poetry and the police, after all these episodes and others I will not mention because they would sound repetitious, and in spite of other things that did not happen to me but to many who cannot tell them any more, I still have absolute faith in human destiny, a clearer and clearer conviction that we are approaching a great common tenderness. I write knowing that the danger of the bomb hangs over all our heads, a nuclear catastrophe that would leave no one, nothing on this earth. Well, that does not alter my hope. At this critical moment, in this flicker of anguish, we know that the true light will enter those eyes that are vigilant. We shall all understand one another. We shall advance together. And this hope cannot be crushed.