by Pablo Neruda
NEW ENCOUNTER WITH CEYLON
A universal cause, the fight against atomic death, was taking me back to Colombo. We crossed the Soviet Union en route to India in the Tu-104, a marvelous jet making the flight just to carry our huge delegation. Our only stop was Tashkent, near Samarkand. The airplane would set us down in the heart of India two days later.
We were flying at ten thousand meters. To cross the Himalayas, the giant bird soared even higher, close to fifteen thousand meters. From that altitude, an almost motionless landscape can be seen. The first barriers come into view, blue and white spurs of the Himalayas. Somewhere below, the awesome Abominable Snowman walks around in his terrifying solitude. Then, on the left, Mt. Everest’s mass looms like one more small irregularity in the diadems of snow. The sun beats down on the entire strange landscape; its light cuts out profiles, jagged rocks, the commanding sight of the snowy silence.
The American Andes, which I have crossed so many times, come to mind. The disorder, the Cyclopean fury, the raging desert of our mountains do not prevail here. The Asian mountains appear more classical to me, more well-ordered. Their domes have shapes like monasteries and pagodas in the infinite vastness. The solitude reaches farther out. The shadows do not rise like walls of awe-inspiring stone but spread out like the enigmatic blue gardens of a colossal monastery.
I remind myself that I am breathing the most rarefied air in the world and watching from the skies the tallest peaks on earth. It’s a unique sensation in which are mingled clarity and pride, speed and snow.
We are flying to Ceylon. Now we are losing altitude over the hot regions of India. We left the Soviet craft in New Delhi to take this Indian airplane. Its wings quiver and creak in violent storm clouds. In the middle of this seesawing motion, my thoughts go down to the flowering island. At twenty-two I lived a lonely life in Ceylon, writing my bitterest poetry there, surrounded by the beauty of nature’s paradise.
I am returning, a long time afterward, for this impressive reunion in behalf of peace, whose cause the government has espoused. I see great numbers, perhaps hundreds, of Buddhist monks, in groups, dressed in their saffron tunics, immersed deep in the meditation that marks Buddha’s disciples. By fighting against war, destruction, and death, these priests reaffirm the ancient sentiments of peace and harmony preached by Prince Siddhārtha Gautama, known as Buddha. How far from this—I think—is the church of our American countries, a church like Spain’s, official and belligerent. How comforting it would be to true Christians if they saw Catholic priests fighting from their pulpits against the gravest and most terrifying of crimes: atomic death, which slaughters millions of innocent people and leaves its biological maculae in the human race for all time.
I went off, guessing my way through the narrow streets, to look for the house where I had lived, in the suburb of Wellawatte. I had a hard time finding it. The trees had grown. The face of the street had changed.
The old place where I had written so many painful poems was going to be torn down soon. Its doors were worm-eaten, the tropical dampness had damaged its walls, but it had stood there waiting for this final moment of parting.
I found none of my old friends. And yet the island knocked on the door of my heart again with its sharp sound, with its immense scintillation of light. The sea was still humming the same old tune under the palms, over against the reefs. I followed the forest tracks again, I saw the elephants again, with their majestic walk, blocking the paths, again I felt the headiness produced by overpowering perfumes, and I heard the sound of green things growing and the life of the forest. I reached the rock of Sigiriya, where a mad king had built his fortress. As in other days, I paid homage to the huge statues of Buddha in whose shadow men walk like tiny insects.
And I went away once more, knowing that this time I was never to return.
SECOND VISIT TO CHINA
From this peace congress in Colombo I flew across India with Jorge Amado and Zelia, his wife. The Indian planes were always crammed with turbaned passengers, covered with colors and loaded with baskets. It seemed impossible to squeeze so many people into an airplane. A crowd got off at the first airport, and another piled in to take its place. We had to go on beyond Madras, to Calcutta. The plane shuddered under the tropical storms. A day like night, darker than true night, suddenly covered us, and then left to make room for a glaring sky. The plane began staggering again; lightning and thunder illuminated the sudden darkness. I watched Jorge Amado’s face go from white to yellow and from yellow to green. And he saw the same mutation of color produced in my own face by the terror that gripped our throats. It started to rain inside the plane. The water came in in heavy drops that reminded me of my house in Temuco in winter. But ten thousand meters up, those leaks did not amuse me. The amusing thing, though, was a monk sitting behind us. He opened an umbrella and with Oriental serenity went on reading his texts of ancient wisdom.
We arrived uneventfully in Rangoon, Burma. The thirtieth anniversary of my residence on earth fell just about then, my residence in Burma, where I, a complete unknown, had written my poems. In 1927, to be exact, at the age of twenty-three, I landed in this same Rangoon. It was delirious with color, a torrid and fascinating place, and its languages were impenetrable. The colony was being exploited and preyed on by its English rulers, but the city was clean and luminous, its streets sparkled with life, the shop windows displayed their colonial temptations.
It was a half-empty city now, with bare shop windows, and filth piled up in the streets. A people’s struggle for independence is not an easy road. After the people’s uprising and the flags of freedom, we must open our way through hardships and storms. To date, I don’t know the story of independent Burma, so cloistered is it beside the powerful Irrawaddy River, at the foot of its golden pagodas, but—over and beyond the garbage in its streets and the sadness rippling past—I was able to imagine all those dark dramas that shake up new republics. It was as if the past still oppressed them.
Not a trace of Josie Bliss, my pursuer, the heroine of my “Tango del viudo.” No one could supply me with information about her life or her death. The neighborhood where we had lived together no longer even existed.
* * *
Now we are flying away from Burma, crossing over the mountain spurs that separate it from China. An austere landscape, with an idyllic serenity. From Mandalay the plane soared over the rice paddies, over the baroque pagodas, over millions of palm trees, over Burma’s fratricidal war, and entered the serene, linear calm of the Chinese landscape.
In Kunming, the first Chinese city across the border, our old friend the poet Ai Ch’ing was waiting for us. His broad, dark features, his large eyes brimming with mischief and kindness, his quick intelligence were once more a promise of pleasure during this long journey.
Like Ho Chi Minh, Ai Ch’ing belonged to the old Oriental stock of poets conditioned by colonialist oppression in the Orient and a hard life in Paris. Coming from prisons in their native land, these poets, whose voices were natural and lyrical, became needy students or waiters in restaurants abroad. They never lost confidence in the revolution. Very gentle in their poetry but iron-jawed in politics, they had come home in time to carry out their destinies.
In Kunming, the trees in the park had undergone plastic surgery. They had taken on unnatural forms, and sometimes one could make out an amputation packed in mud or a contorted limb still in bandages, like an injured arm. We were taken to see the gardener, the evil genius who reigned over such an unusual garden. Stumpy old firs had not grown beyond thirty centimeters, and we even saw midget orange trees covered with miniature oranges like golden rice grains.
We also visited a bizarre stone forest. Each rock was elongated like a monolithic needle or bristled like a wave in a still sea. We discovered that this taste for rocks with strange forms was centuries old. Many huge rocks with puzzling shapes decorate the squares in ancient Chinese cities. In bygone days, when governors wanted to give the emperor the best present they could find, they
sent him some of these colossal stones. The presents took years to reach Peking, the huge bulks pushed for thousands of kilometers by dozens of slaves.
China does not seem enigmatic to me. On the contrary, even in the middle of its formidable revolutionary drive, I couldn’t help looking at it as a country built thousands of years ago, constantly solidifying, stratifying itself. An immense pagoda: men and myths, warriors, peasants, and gods go in and out of its ancient structure. There is nothing spontaneous here, not even a smile. One looks everywhere in vain for the small, rough-hewn objects of popular art, made with errors in perspective, art that so often borders on the marvelous. Chinese dolls, pottery, wrought stone, and wood reproduce models that are thousands of years old. Everything has the seal of the object perfected and then repeated.
I had my most pleasant surprise in a village market where I found some cicada cages made of very fine bamboo. They were magnificent, one room superimposed on another with architectonic precision, each with its own captive cicada, forming castles almost three feet high. As I looked at the knots holding the bamboo strips together, and the tender green color of the stems, it seemed to me that the hand of the people, the innocence that can work miracles, had sprung back to life. Seeing my admiration, the peasants would not sell me that castle filled with sound. They gave it to me. And so the ritual song of the cicadas accompanied me for weeks, deep into Chinese territory. Only back in my childhood do I remember having received gifts as memorable and rustic as this.
We start our travels on a ship carrying a thousand passengers, peasants, workers, fishermen, a vigorous throng of people, up the Yangtze. Headed for Nanking, for several days we follow the broad river filled with vessels and work projects, crossed and furrowed by thousands of lives, everyday concerns and dreams. This river is China’s main street. Very wide and tranquil, the Yangtze sometimes narrows and the ship has a difficult time passing through its tyrannical gorges. The extremely high walls on either side seem to meet overhead in the sky, where from time to time a tiny cloud can be glimpsed, sketched with the mastery of an Oriental brush, or a small house among the scars in the rock.
Few landscapes on earth have such overwhelming beauty. Perhaps the violent mountain passes of the Caucasus or our solitary and forbidding Strait of Magellan is comparable.
I observe that a noticeable change has taken place during the five years I have been away from China, and it is more pronounced as I travel deep into the country this time.
This impression is confused at first. What do I notice, what has changed in the streets, in the people? Ah, I miss the color blue. Five years ago at this same time of year I visited the streets of China, always overflowing, always throbbing with human lives. But everyone was dressed in proletarian blue then, some kind of twill or light workingman’s tweed. Men, women, and children wore it. I liked this simplified dress with its varying shades of blue. It was a beautiful thing to see innumerable blue specks crossing streets and roads.
This has changed. What has happened?
The textile industry has simply grown big enough in these five years to clothe millions of Chinese women in all colors, in flowers, stripes, and polka dots, in all varieties of silk; and enough also for millions of Chinese men to wear other colors and better fabrics.
Now each street is a delicate rainbow of China’s exquisite taste, of this race that doesn’t know how to make anything ugly, this country where the most primitive sandal looks like a straw flower.
Sailing on the Yangtze, I was struck by how faithful the old Chinese paintings are. Up there on the mountain pass, a twisted pine tree like a minuscule pagoda brings to mind the old imaginative prints. There are few places more unreal, more fantastic and surprising than these mountain passes that rise above the great river to incredible heights and display, in any fissure in the rock, age-old signs of this wonderful people: five or six meters of newly planted vegetables, or a small temple with a five-tiered roof, for contemplation and meditation. Farther up on the bald crags we seem to make out the tunics or the vaporous wisps of the ancient myths; they’re just clouds and an occasional flight of birds, painted so often by the oldest and wisest miniaturists on earth. A profound poem comes out of this magnificent world of nature, a poem as brief and bare as the flight of a bird or the silver lightning streak of water that flows, almost without stirring, between walls of rock.
But what is definitely extraordinary about this landscape is to see man working in tiny rectangles, on some little green dab on the rocks. All the way up, on the tip of the vertical walls, wherever there is a recess that holds a little bit of cultivable ground, there is a Chinese farming it. The Chinese mother earth is vast and hard. She has disciplined and shaped man, making him an instrument of work, tireless, subtle, and dogged. The combination of vast land, extraordinary human labor, and the gradual elimination of all injustice will make the people of this beautiful, far-flung, and profound China thrive.
* * *
During this voyage on the Yangtze, Jorge Amado seemed edgy and depressed. Many aspects of life aboard the ship irritated him and Zelia, his wife. Zelia, however, has a calm temperament that can carry her through fire without getting burned.
One of these irritants was the fact that, against our wishes, we were being treated as privileged persons on the trip. With our special cabins and private dining room, we felt uncomfortable in the middle of hundreds of Chinese squeezed together everywhere on the boat. The Brazilian novelist looked at me with sarcastic eyes and dropped one of his witty, biting remarks.
In truth, the revelations about the Stalin era had snapped a coiled spring deep within Jorge Amado. We are old friends, we have shared years of exile, we had always been united by a common conviction and hope. But I believe I have been less sectarian than he; my nature and my Chilean temperament inclined me toward an understanding of others. Jorge, on the other hand, had always been inflexible. His mentor, Luis Carlos Prestes, spent nearly fifteen years of his life in prison. These are things that cannot be forgotten, they harden the spirit. I justified Jorge’s sectarianism to myself, without sharing it.
The report of the Twentieth Congress was a tidal wave that drove all of us revolutionaries to take new stands and draw new conclusions. Many of us had the feeling that, from the anguish produced by those painful revelations, we were being born all over again. We were reborn cleansed of darkness and terror, ready to continue the journey with a firm grip on the truth.
Jorge, on the other hand, seems to have started a different stage in his life on board that ship, between the marvelous cliffs of the Yangtze. From then on, he became quieter, more moderate in his attitudes and declarations. I don’t believe he lost faith in the revolution, but he fell back more on his work and divested it of the direct political character that had marked it until then. As if the epicure in him had suddenly come out into the open, he threw himself into writing his best books, beginning with Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon, a masterpiece brimming with sensuality and joy.
Ai Ch’ing, the poet, was head of the delegation that guided us. Every night Jorge Amado, Zelia, Matilde, Ai Ch’ing, and I ate in our private dining room. The table was covered with golden and green vegetables, sweet-and-sour fish, duck and chicken cooked in unusual ways and always delicious. After several days this exotic fare stuck in our throats, no matter how much we liked it. At last we found an opportunity to get away from such tasty dishes, but our road was rough, and took a turn that became more and more twisted, like a branch on one of those contorted trees.
My birthday happened to come along around this time. Matilde and Zelia made plans to treat me to one of our own Occidental dinners that would break our diet. It was to be a very modest treat: a chicken we would roast our way, with a tomato-and-onion salad fixed Chilean style, to go with it. The women made a big mystery of this surprise. They went secretly to our good friend Ai Ch’ing. The poet said a bit uneasily that he would have to talk to the others on the committee before giving an answer.
Their decision su
rprised us. The whole country was going through a wave of austerity. Mao Tse-tung had passed up his birthday celebration. Considering these severe precedents, how could mine be celebrated? Zelia and Matilde replied that what we had in mind was just the opposite: in place of that table covered with rich food—chickens, ducks, fishes that often went untouched—we would have one single chicken, a very modest chicken, prepared, however, our own way, in an oven. A new meeting between Ai Ch’ing and the invisible committee in charge of austerity measures concluded with the answer, on the following day, that there was no oven on the ship we were traveling on. Zelia and Matilde, who had already spoken to the cook, told Ai Ch’ing that there was a mistake, a magnificent oven was warming up, waiting for our possible chicken. Ai Ch’ing squinted and his eyes gazed into the Yangtze’s waters.