by Pablo Neruda
On that July 12, my birthday, we had our roasted chicken on the table, the golden booty of the controversy. A couple of tomatoes and slices of onion brightened a small dish. The huge table stretched on beyond it, embellished, as it was every day, with dishes gleaming with luscious Chinese food.
* * *
In 1928 I had passed through Hong Kong and Shanghai. That China was a colony ruled with an iron hand—a paradise of gamblers, opium smokers, brothels, nighttime muggers, phony Russian duchesses, sea and land pirates. In contrast to the great banking institutions in those huge cities, the presence of eight or more gray battleships revealed the insecurity and the fear, the colonial extortion, the death throes of a world beginning to smell like a corpse. With the sanction of contemptible consuls, the flags of many countries waved over the privateers of Chinese and Malay criminals. The bordellos were financed by international companies. I have already told elsewhere in these memoirs how I was attacked on one occasion, stripped of clothes and money, and abandoned on a Chinese street.
All these memories came back to me when I arrived in the China of the revolution. This was a new country; I was struck by its ethical cleanliness. The defects, the small conflicts and misunderstandings, a good deal of what I am recounting, are just minor details. My predominant impression has been that of watching a triumphant change in the vast land of the oldest culture in the world. Countless experiments were underway everywhere. Feudal agriculture was about to undergo a change. The moral air was as clear as after the passing of a cyclone.
What has estranged me from the Chinese revolutionary process has not been Mao Tse-tung but Mao Tse-tungism. I mean Mao-Stalinism, the repetition of a cult to a socialist deity. Who can deny Mao the political personality of a great organizer, of the great liberator of a people? How could I fail to be impressed by his epic halo, his simplicity which is so poetic, so melancholy, and so ancient?
Yet during my trip I saw hundreds of poor peasants, returning from their labors, prostrate themselves, before putting away their tools, to salute the portrait of the modest guerrilla fighter from Yünnan, transformed into a god now. I saw hundreds of persons waving a little red book, the universal panacea for winning at Ping-Pong, curing appendicitis, and solving political problems. This adulation flows from every mouth, and every day, from every newspaper and every magazine, from every notebook and every other kind of book, from every almanac and every theater, from every sculpture and every painting.
In Stalin’s case, I had contributed my share to the personality cult. But in those days Stalin seemed to us the conqueror who had crushed Hitler’s armies, the savior of all humanity. The deterioration of his character was a mysterious process, still an enigma for many of us.
And now, here in plain sight, in the vast expanse of the new China’s land and skies, once more a man was turning into a myth right before my eyes. A myth destined to lord it over the revolutionary conscience, to put in one man’s grip the creation of a world that must belong to all. I could not swallow that bitter pill a second time.
* * *
In Chungking my Chinese friends took me to the city’s famous bridge. I have loved bridges all my life. My father, the railroad man, instilled in me a great respect for them. He never called them bridges. That would have been a desecration. He called them works of art, a distinction he never conceded to paintings, sculptures, or poems, of course. Only to bridges. My father took me many times to contemplate the marvelous Malleco Viaduct in the south of Chile. Until now, I had believed that the bridge stretching between the green of the southern mountains, tall and slender and pure, like a steel violin with taut strings ready to be played by the wind of Collipulli, was the most beautiful bridge in the world. The monumental bridge that spans the Yangtze is something else again. It is China’s most magnificent feat of engineering, carried out with help from Soviet engineers. And in addition, it represents the end of an age-old struggle. For centuries, the city of Chungking was divided by the river, which kept it behind the times, slow, and isolated.
The enthusiasm of the Chinese friends who are showing me the bridge is too much for my poor legs. They make me go up towers and climb down to great depths to look at the water, which has been running its course for thousands of years, crossed today by this ironwork several kilometers long. Over these rails trains will run; these are bicycle paths; this enormous avenue will be for pedestrians. All this grandeur overwhelms me.
In the evening, Ai Ch’ing takes us to dinner in an old restaurant, home of the most traditional kind of cooking: a shower of cherry blossoms, a rainbow of bamboo salad, hundred-year-old eggs, lips of a young she-shark. Words can’t do justice to this Chinese cooking in all its complexity, its fabulous variety, its extravagant inventiveness, its incredible formality. Ai Ch’ing gives us some pointers. The three supreme precepts for a good dinner are: first of all, flavor; second, aroma; third, color. These three elements of a meal must be respected to the letter. The flavor must be exquisite. The aroma must be delicious. And the color must be appetizing and harmonious. In this restaurant where we are going to eat—Ai Ch’ing said—another virtuoso element comes into play: sound. To the huge porcelain dish surrounded by delicacies is added, at the last minute, a small cascade of shrimp tails; falling onto a red-hot metal griddle, they produce a flute-like melody, a musical phrase that is always repeated the same way.
* * *
In Peking we were received by Ting Ling, who headed the writers’ committee chosen to welcome Jorge Amado and me. Our old friend Siao Emi, the poet, was also there with his German wife, a photographer. Everything was pleasant and merry. We took a boat ride among the lotus flowers on the huge artificial lake built for the amusement of the last empress. We visited factories, publishing houses, museums, and pagodas. We ate in the most exclusive restaurant in the world (so exclusive that it has only one table), catered by the descendants of the Imperial House. We, the two South American couples, met in the home of the Chinese writers to drink, smoke, and have a good time, as we would have done anywhere on our own continent.
I would hand the daily newspaper to my young interpreter, whose name was Li. Pointing to the impenetrable column of Chinese characters with my finger, I would say: “Translate for me.”
He would start right in in his newly acquired Spanish. He read me editorials on agriculture, accounts of Mao Tse-tung’s swimming feats, Mao-Marxist apologies, military news that bored me the moment he began.
“Stop,” I would say. “Maybe you’d better read to me from this column.”
And so I got the surprise of my life one day when I put my finger in a sore. It was a reference to a political trial in which the accused were the very friends we were seeing every day. They were still part of our “welcoming committee.” The trial seemed to have been underway for some time, but they had never said a word about being under investigation, nor had they mentioned that their futures hung by a thread.
Times had changed. All the flowers were wilting. When these flowers bloomed, on orders from Mao Tse-tung, innumerable slips of paper had appeared in factories and workshops, in universities and offices, on farms and in hamlets, denouncing injustices, extortions, dishonest actions by leaders and bureaucrats. And just as the war against the flies and the sparrows had been called to a halt by order of the supreme commander, when it was disclosed that their destruction would bring unexpected consequences, so the period that had come in with the opening of the corollas also ended drastically. A new order came from above: hunt out the rightists. And immediately, in every organization, on every job, in every home, the Chinese began to force confessions out of their neighbors or to confess their own rightism.
My friend the novelist Ting Ling was accused of having had a love affair with one of Chiang Kai-shek’s soldiers. It was true, but it had happened before the great revolutionary movement. She gave up her lover for the revolution, and from Yenan, with her baby in her arms, she made the long march of those heroic years. But this did not help her. She was stripped of
her position as President of the Writers’ Union and sentenced to wait on tables at the restaurant of the same Writers’ Union she had headed for so many years. However, she did her work as a waitress with so much pride and dignity that she was soon transferred to the kitchen in a remote peasants’ commune. This is the last news I had of this great Communist writer, one of the most important figures of Chinese letters.
I don’t know what became of Siao Emi. As for Ai Ch’ing, the poet who accompanied us everywhere, his fate was very sad. First he was sent off to the Gobi Desert. Later he was allowed to write, as long as he never signed his writings with his own name, a name already famous in and outside China. So he was condemned to literary suicide.
Jorge Amado had left for Brazil. I would take my leave a little later with a bitter taste in my mouth. I still have it.
THE MONKEYS OF SUKHUMI
I have returned to the Soviet Union and have been invited to make a trip to the south. When I get out of the airplane, after crossing vast territories, I have left behind me the great steppes, the factories and the highways, the large Soviet cities and the smaller towns. I have come to the imposing Caucasus Mountains populated by firs and wild animals. At my feet, the Black Sea has dressed up in blue to receive us. An overpowering scent of blossoming orange trees comes from everywhere.
We are in Sukhumi, capital of Abkhazia, a small Soviet republic. This is legendary Colchis, the land of the Golden Fleece, which, six centuries before Christ, Jason had come to steal—the Greek country of the Dioscuri. Later, in a museum, I will see an enormous bas-relief in Greek marble, recently dredged out of the waters of the Black Sea. On these shores the Hellenic gods celebrated their mysteries. Today the mystery has been replaced by the simple, hard-working life of the Soviet people. These are not the same people you see in Leningrad. This land of sunlight, wheat, and huge vineyards has another tone, a Mediterranean accent. These men walk differently, these women have the eyes and hands of Italian or Greek women.
I am living in the home of the novelist Simonov for a few days and we go swimming in the Black Sea’s warm waters. Simonov shows me the beautiful trees in his orchard. I recognize them and at each name he gives me I repeat like a patriotic peasant: “We have it in Chile. We also have this kind in Chile. And that one, too.”
Simonov looks at me with a waggish smile. I tell him: “I’m really sorry that you’ll probably never see the wild grapevine at my home in Santiago, or the poplars gilded by the Chilean autumn. There’s no other gold like it. If only you could see the cherries blossom in spring and know the scent of Chile’s boldo tree. If you could see how the peasants set the golden ears of corn on the roofs along the Melipilla road. If you could dip your feet in the pure, cold waters of Isla Negra. But, my dear Simonov, countries put up barriers, they play at being enemies, they exchange fire in cold wars, and we humans are cut off from one another. We reach the sky in fantastic rockets, but we don’t reach our hands out in brotherly love.”
“Perhaps things will change,” Simonov says, smiling, and he flings a white stone at the gods submerged in the Black Sea.
* * *
The pride of Sukhumi is its fine collection of monkeys. Taking advantage of its subtropical climate, the Institute of Experimental Medicine has bred every kind of monkey in the world there. Let’s go in. In huge cages we shall see fidgety and stolid monkeys, enormous and minuscule ones, hairless and hairy ones, monkeys with thoughtful faces or with a spark in their eyes. There are also sullen monkeys, and despotic ones.
There are gray monkeys and white monkeys; apes with tricolored rumps; thickset, serious ones; and others that are polygamous and won’t let their females eat without permission, which they concede only after solemnly devouring their own food.
The most advanced biological studies are conducted at this institute. The monkey is used for the study of the nervous system, of heredity, and for delicate investigations into the mystery of life and its prolongation.
A small she-monkey with two babies catches our eye. One follows her around constantly, and she carries the other in her arms with human tenderness. The director tells us that the small monkey she babies so much is not hers but an adoptive child. She had recently given birth when another female, who had also just had a baby, died. This mother promptly adopted the orphan. From then on, her mother love, her every minute of sweetness, was given to the adopted child even more than to her own. The scientists believed that such intense maternal calling would lead her to adopt other babies that were not hers, but she has rejected one after the other. Her attitude obeyed not simply a life principle but an awareness of the solidarity of mothers.
ARMENIA
Now we are flying toward a hard-working and legendary country. We are in Armenia. Far off, to the south, Mt. Ararat’s snowy peak towers over Armenia’s history. This, according to the Bible, is where Noah’s ark came aground to repopulate the earth. A hard undertaking, because Armenia is rocky and volcanic. The Armenians farmed this land with untold sacrifice and raised their national culture to the highest place in the ancient world. The socialist society has brought extraordinary development and flowering to this noble, martyred nation. For centuries, Turkish invaders massacred the Armenians or made them their slaves. Every rock on the plateaus, every tile in the monasteries has a drop of Armenian blood. This country’s socialist renaissance has been a miracle and gives the lie to those who speak, in bad faith, of Soviet imperialism. In Armenia I visited spinning mills that employ five thousand workers; immense irrigation and power works; and other powerful industries. I covered the cities and rural areas from end to end and I saw only Armenians, Armenian men and women. I met only one Russian, a blue-eyed engineer among the thousands of black eyes of this dark-skinned people. The Russian was running a hydroelectric plant on Lake Sevan. The surface area of the lake, whose waters empty out through just one channel, is too large. The precious water evaporates and parched Armenia is unable to gather its riches and put them to use. To beat the evaporation, the river has been widened. Thus the lake’s level will be lowered, and at the same time, with the added water in the river, eight hydroelectric stations, new industries, gigantic aluminum plants, electric power and irrigation for the whole country, will be created. I shall never forget my visit to that hydroelectric plant overlooking the lake, whose pure waters mirror Armenia’s unforgettable blue sky. When the journalists asked me for my impressions of Armenia’s ancient churches and monasteries, I answered them, stretching things a little: “The church I like best is the hydroelectric plant, the temple beside the lake.”
I saw many things in Armenia. I think Erivan is one of the most beautiful cities I have seen; built of volcanic tuff, it has the harmony of a pink rose. I shall never forget my visit to the astronomical observatory of Binakan, where I saw the writing of the stars for the first time. The trembling light of the stars was picked up; very fine mechanisms were taking down the palpitation of the stars in space, like an electrocardiogram of the sky. In those graphics I observed that each star has its own distinct way of writing, tremulous and fascinating, but unintelligible to the eyes of an earth-bound poet.
At the zoo in Erivan I went straight to the condor’s cage, but my countryman did not recognize me. There he stood in a corner of his cage, bald-pated, with the skeptical eyes of a condor without illusions, a great bird homesick for our cordilleras. I looked at him sadly, because I was going back to my country and he would remain behind bars forever.
My experience with the tapir was something different. Erivan’s zoo is one of the few that own a tapir from the Amazon, the remarkable animal with an ox’s body, a long-nosed face, and beady eyes. I must confess that tapirs look like me. This is no secret.
Erivan’s tapir was drowsing in his pen, near the pond. When he saw me his eyes lit up; perhaps we had met in Brazil once. The zoo keeper asked me if I would like to see him swim and I answered that I would go around the world just for the pleasure of watching a tapir swim. They opened a small door for him. He threw
me a happy look and plunged into the water, puffing like some fabled seahorse, like a hairy triton. He rose up, lifting his whole body out of the water; he dived under, stirring up a stormy rush of waves; he surfaced, drunk with joyfulness, he huffed and puffed, and then he went on with his incredible acrobatics at top speed.
“We’ve never seen him so happy,” the zoo keeper said to me.
At noon, during the lunch given for me by the Society of Writers, I told, in my speech of thanks, about the feats of the Amazonian tapir and I spoke about my passion for animals. I never skip a visit to the zoo.
In his answering speech, the president of the Armenian writers said: “Why did Neruda have to go visit our zoo? This visit to the Society of Writers would have been enough for him to find all the animal species. Here we have lions and tigers, foxes and seals, eagles and serpents, camels and macaws.”
WINE AND WAR
I stopped off in Moscow on the way back. For me, this city is the seat of so many accomplished dreams, and also the residence of some of my dearest friends. For me, Moscow is a feast. As soon as I get there, I go out alone into the streets, happy to breathe, whistling cuecas. I look at the faces of the Russian men, the eyes and the braids of the Russian women, the ice cream sold on street corners, the popular paper flowers, the shop windows, in search of new things, little things that make life important.