by Pablo Neruda
Once again I went to visit Ehrenburg. The first thing my good friend showed me was a bottle of Norwegian liquor, aqua vitae. The label had a great painted sailing ship. Somewhere else were the departure and return dates of the ship that had taken this bottle to Australia and brought it back to its native Scandinavia.
We began to talk about wines. I recalled my young days, when the wines of our country traveled abroad, in great demand because of their excellence. They were always too expensive for those of us who wore railwayman’s clothing and lived a stormy Bohemian life.
In every country I would take an interest in tracking down the wine, from the time its life began at the “feet of the people” until it was bottled in green glass or cut crystal. In Galicia, Spain, I enjoyed drinking Ribeiro wine, which is sipped from a cup and leaves a thick stain like blood on the porcelain. I remember a full-bodied wine in Hungary, called bull’s blood, whose onslaughts make the violins of the gypsies tremble.
My great-great-grandparents owned vineyards. Parral, the town where I was born, is the cradle of the crude musts. From my father and uncles Don José Angel, Don Joel, Don Oseas, and Don Amós I learned to tell the difference between new wine and filtered wine. It was hard for me to follow their liking for the unrefined wine that runs out of the cask, with its original and irreducible heart. As in all things, it was difficult for me to return to the primitive, the early lustiness, after having learned the subtle distinctions of taste, having relished the epicurean bouquet. The same thing occurs in art: you wake up one morning with Praxiteles’ Aphrodite and end up living with the savage statuary of Oceania.
* * *
It was in Paris that I tasted a noble wine in the noblest of homes. The wine was Mouton-Rothschild, with an impeccable body, undescribable aroma, perfect smoothness. It was at the home of Aragon and Elsa Triolet.
“I’ve just received these bottles and I am opening them especially for you,” Aragon said.
And he told me the story.
The German armies were gaining ground in French territory. France’s most intelligent soldier, poet and officer Louis Aragon, reached an advance post. He commanded a detachment of male nurses. His orders were to go beyond this post to a building located three hundred meters ahead. The captain in charge there stopped him. He was Count Alphonse de Rothschild, younger than Aragon and as quick-blooded as he.
“You can’t pass beyond this point,” he said. “The German fire is too close.”
“My instructions are to get to that building,” Aragon replied pertly.
“My orders are that you are not to go on, you must stay right here,” the captain replied.
Knowing Aragon as well as I do, I am sure that during the argument sparks flew like hand grenades, answers like sword thrusts. But it didn’t even last ten minutes. Suddenly, before the startled eyes of Rothschild and Aragon, a grenade from a German mortar struck the building, converting it instantly to smoke, rubble, and smoldering ashes.
And so France’s first poet was saved, thanks to the stubbornness of a Rothschild.
Ever since then, on the anniversary of this incident, Aragon receives several bonnes bouteilles of Mouton-Rothschild from the vineyards of the count who was his captain during the last war.
* * *
Now I am in Moscow, at Ilya Ehrenburg’s home. This great guerrilla of literature, as dangerous to Nazism as a division of forty thousand men, was also a refined epicure. I could never tell if he knew more about Stendhal or about foie gras. He relished Jorge Manrique’s verses with as much gusto as he showed when he tasted Pommery et Greno. He was in love with everything French, with the body and soul of delicious and fragrant France.
Anyway, after the war, the rumor spread through Moscow that some mysterious bottles of French wine would go on sale. On its march toward Berlin, the Red Army had taken a fortress-cave filled with Goebbels’s insane propaganda and also with the wines he had appropriated from the cellars of noble France. Papers and bottles were shipped to the general headquarters of the victorious army, the Red Army, which took the documents in for study but didn’t know what to do with the bottles.
They were splendid glass bottles that flashed their dates of birth on very special labels. All were of illustrious origin and celebrated vintage. Romanée, Beaune, Châteauneuf-du-Pape rubbed elbows with blond Pouilly, amberescent Vouvray, velvety Chambertin. The entire collection was distinguished by chronological indications of the most excellent vintages.
Socialism’s egalitarian attitude saw to it that these sublime trophies from the French wine presses were distributed in the liquor stores at the same prices as Russian wines. As a restrictive measure, it was decided that each buyer could purchase only a limited, specified number of bottles. Socialism’s intentions are the best, but we poets are the same everywhere. Each of my comrades-in-letters sent relatives, neighbors, friends to buy, at incredibly low prices, bottles of incredibly high lineage. They were sold out in one day.
A quantity I will not disclose reached the home of Ehrenburg, Nazism’s unconditional enemy. And that’s why I find myself in his company now, talking of wines and drinking with him a part of Goebbels’s cellar, in honor of poetry and victory.
PALACES RETAKEN
Magnates have never invited me to their big mansions and, truthfully, I was never very curious about them. In Chile the national pastime is the closing sale. People crowd to the weekly auctions that are so typical of my country. Each of these lordly homes is doomed. When the time comes, to the highest bidder goes the grating that wouldn’t let me pass—me or the common people of whom I am one—and with the grating, armchairs, bleeding Christs, old-fashioned portraits, dishes, spoons, and the sheets between which so many useless lives were procreated, all change hands. The Chilean loves to walk in, touch, and look. Few of them buy anything, in the end. Then the building is pulled down and fragments of the house are put up for sale. The buyers carry off the eyes (the windows), the intestines (the staircases); the floors are the feet; and finally, even the potted palms are divided up.
In Europe, on the other hand, the huge houses are maintained. We can sometimes get a glimpse of the portraits of dukes and duchesses whom only some lucky painter saw in the buff, to the delight of those of us who still enjoy painting and those curves. We can also pry into the secrets, the curious crimes, the wigs, and those astounding files, the tapestried walls, which absorbed so many conversations destined for the electronic entertainments of the future.
I was invited to Rumania and arrived as planned. The writers took me to their collective country house, in the middle of the beautiful Transylvanian forests, to get some rest. The Rumanian writers’ residence had once been the palace of Carol, the madcap monarch whose extra-regal loves became the talk of the world. The palace, with its modern furniture and its marble baths, was now at the service of Rumanian thought and poetry. I had a very good night’s sleep in Her Majesty the Queen’s bed, and the next day was dedicated to visiting other castles converted into museums and houses for rest and vacationing. I was accompanied by the poets Jebeleanu, Beniuc, and Radu Boureanu. In the verdant morning, deep into the fir groves of the ancient royal parks, we sang out of tune, laughed at the top of our lungs, shouted out poems in every language. Rumanian poets, with their long history of suffering during the monarchic-Fascist regimes, are at once the most courageous and the most cheerful poets in the world. That band of troubadours, as Rumanian as the birds in their forest lands, so unshakable in their patriotism, so entrenched in their revolution, and so intoxicatingly in love with life, opened my eyes. In few places have I acquired so many brothers so quickly.
I told the Rumanians about my previous visit to another noble palace, to their great delight. It was the Liria Palace, in wartime Madrid. While Franco marched with his Italians, his Moors, and his swastikas, dedicated to the holy work of killing Spaniards, the militiamen occupied this palace, which I had so often seen—every time I went down Argüelles Street—in 1934 and 1935. I would give it a glance of
respect, not from a feeling of servitude toward the new Duke and Duchess of Alba, who had no power over me, a hopeless American, and a half-savage poet, but fascinated by the majesty that silent, white sarcophagi possess.
When war broke out, the Duke stayed in England; after all, his last name is really Berwick. He remained there with his best paintings and his richest treasures. With the Duke’s flight in mind, I told the Rumanians that after China’s liberation, Confucius’s last descendant, who had made a fortune from a temple and the bones of the dead philosopher, also went away, to Formosa, with paintings, table linens, and dinnerware. And with the bones, too. He must have settled there comfortably, charging visitors a fee to view the relics.
From Spain in those days the appalling news went out to the rest of the world: HISTORIC PALACE OF THE DUKE OF ALBA LOOTED BY THE REDS, LEWD SCENES OF DESTRUCTION, LET’S SAVE THIS HISTORIC JEWEL.
I went to see the palace, since I would be allowed in now. The purported looters were at the door in blue overalls, guns in hand. The first bombs were being dropped on Madrid by the German army’s planes. I asked the militiamen to let me pass. They went over my papers carefully. I was all set to take my first steps into the opulent halls when they stopped me, horrified: I hadn’t wiped my shoes on the huge mat at the entrance. The floors literally gleamed like mirrors. I wiped my shoes and went in. The empty rectangles on the walls showed where the absent paintings had been. The militiamen knew everything. They told me that for years the Duke had been keeping the paintings in a London bank, in a good, strong safe. The only things of any importance in the great hall were trophies of the hunt, innumerable antlered heads and snouts of a variety of small beasts. The most striking trophy was an immense white bear standing on two legs in the center of the room, with its two polar arms open wide and a stuffed head that was laughing, with all its teeth bared. It was the militiamen’s favorite, they brushed it every morning.
Naturally, I was interested in the bedrooms where so many Albas had slept, with their nightmares brought on by the Flemish ghosts who came to tickle their feet at night. Those feet were gone, but the largest collection of shoes I have ever seen was conspicuously there. The last duke had not increased his art collection, but his collection of shoes was unbelievable and incalculable. Long, glassed-in shelves that reached the ceiling held thousands of shoes. There were special ladders, like those in libraries, so one could take the shoes down, daintily by the heels, perhaps. I looked closely. There were hundreds of pairs of very fine riding boots, yellow ones and black ones. There were also some of those high shoes, with little plush vests and mother-of-pearl buttons. And scores of overshoes, pumps, and gaiters, all with their shoe trees inside, making them look as if they had solid legs and feet at their beck and call. If the glass case were opened, they would all run off to London in search of the Duke! One could have a wonderful time with these shoes, which ranged the length of three or four rooms. A wonderful time with one’s eyes, and only with one’s eyes, because the militiamen, shouldering arms, wouldn’t let a fly touch those shoes. “Culture,” they said. “History,” they said. And I thought of the poor boys in espadrilles, holding off Fascism on the terrible summits of Somosierra, buried in snow and mud.
Beside the Duke’s bed was a little print in a gold frame whose Gothic characters caught my eye. Caramba! I thought, it must be the Albas’ family tree. I was wrong. It was Rudyard Kipling’s “If—,” that uninspired, sanctimonious poetry, precursor of the Reader’s Digest, whose intellectual level, in my opinion, was no higher than that of the Duke of Alba’s shoes. May the British Empire forgive me!
The Duchess’s bathroom will be exciting, I thought. It evoked so many things. Above all, that madonna reclining in the Prado Museum, whose nipples Goya set so far apart that one thinks how the revolutionary painter must have measured the distance kiss by kiss until he had left her an invisible necklace reaching from breast to breast. But I was wrong again. The bear, the musical-comedy boot shop, “If—,” and, finally, instead of a goddess’s bath I found a circular room, fake Pompeii, with a step-down tub, vulgar little alabaster swans, tacky lampadaires; in short, a bathroom for an odalisque in a Hollywood film.
I was leaving the place with the glum feeling that I had been cheated, when I had my reward. The militiamen invited me to lunch. I went down to the kitchens with them. Forty or fifty of the Duke’s household servants and attendants, cooks and gardeners, continued to cook for themselves and the militiamen who guarded the mansion. They considered me a distinguished visitor. After some whispering, much coming and going, and receipts being signed, they brought out a dusty bottle. It was a hundred-year-old Lachryma Christi, from which I was barely allowed to take a few sips. It was a molten wine, made of honey and fire, severe and impalpable at the same time. Those tears of the Duke of Alba’s will not be easy for me to forget.
A week later the German bombers dropped four incendiary bombs on the Liria Palace. From the terrace of my house I saw the two birds of omen flying over. A red glare told me immediately that I was watching the palace’s final minutes.
“That same afternoon I went past the smoldering ruins,” I tell the Rumanian writers, to end my story. “There I discovered a touching detail. With fire falling from the sky, with explosions shaking the earth, and the bonfire growing, the noble militiamen managed to save the white bear only. They were almost killed in the attempt. Beams were crashing down, everything was ablaze, and the huge well-preserved animal refused to pass through windows or doors. I saw it again, for the last time, with its white arms open wide, dying of laughter, on the palace garden’s lawn.”
ERA OF COSMONAUTS
Moscow again. On the morning of November 7, I watched the people’s parade, its athletes, its glowing Soviet youth. They marched with sure and firm step through Red Square. They were being observed by the sharp eyes of a man dead many years, the founder of this security, this joy, and this strength: Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, immortal Lenin.
This time there were few weapons in the parade. But for the first time the enormous intercontinental missiles were rolled out. I could almost have touched those huge cigars with my hand—so innocent-looking, yet capable of carrying atomic destruction to any point on the planet.
The two Russians who had come back from the sky were being decorated that day. I felt as if I, too, had wings. The poet’s job is, in great measure, like a bird’s. It was precisely in the streets of Moscow, along the shores of the Black Sea, among the mountain passes of the Soviet Caucasus, that I was tempted to write a book on the birds of Chile. The poet from Temuco had every intention of investigating birds, of writing about the birds of his remote land, about sparrows and chercanas, mockingbirds and finches, condors and queltehues, while two human birds, two Soviet cosmonauts, soared into space and left the whole world dumbfounded with admiration. Feeling them over our heads, seeing with our own eyes the cosmic flight of the two men, we all held our breaths.
They were decorated that day. Next to them were their relatives—their origins, their earthly roots, roots of the people. The old men had huge peasant moustaches, the old women’s heads were covered with the large shawl that is so typical of the villages and the countryside. The cosmonauts were just like us, people from the country, the village, the factory, the office. In Red Square, Nikita Khrushchev welcomed them in the name of the Soviet nation. Later we saw them in St. George’s Hall. Gherman Titov, the number two astronaut, a nice boy, with big radiant eyes, was introduced to me.
“Tell me. Commander, as you flew through the cosmos and looked at our planet, could you make out Chile clearly?” It was like saying to him: “You understand, don’t you, that the important thing about your trip was to see little Chile from up there.”
He did not smile as I expected him to, but thought it over for a few seconds and said to me: “I do remember some yellow mountain ranges in South America. You could tell that they were very high. Maybe that was Chile.”
Of course it was Chile, Comrade.
; * * *
On the fortieth anniversary of the socialist revolution, I left Moscow by train, for Finland. As I crossed the city on my way to the station, fireworks, huge sheaves of skyrockets—luminous, phosphorescent, blue, red, violet, green, yellow, orange—soared very high, like volleys of cheers, like signals of mutual understanding and friendship going out from this night of victory toward all the countries in the world.
In Finland I bought a narwhal’s tooth and we continued our journey. In Gothenburg we boarded the ship that would take us back to America. America and my country also keep step with life and with the times. Well, when we passed through Venezuela en route to Valparaíso, Pérez Jiménez, the tyrant, the U.S. State Department’s pet baby, bastard son of Trujillo and Somoza, sent enough soldiers for a war, to stop me and my wife from getting off the ship. But by the time I reached Valparaíso, freedom had already kicked out the Venezuelan despot; the majestic satrap had hightailed it to Miami like a rabbit running in its sleep. The world has been moving fast since the first sputnik’s flight. Who would have believed that the first person to knock on my cabin door in Valparaíso to welcome us would be Simonov, the novelist I had left swimming in the Black Sea?
11
Poetry Is an Occupation
THE POWER OF POETRY
It has been the privilege of our time—with its wars, revolutions, and tremendous social upheavals—to cultivate more ground for poetry than anyone had ever imagined. The common man has had to confront it, attacking or attacked, in solitude or with an enormous mass of people at public rallies.