by Pablo Neruda
Back in the thirties, Sócrates Aguirre, the subtle and excellent man who was my superior at the consulate in Buenos Aires, asked me, one December 24, to play Santa Claus, or Old Saint Nick, at his house. I have bungled many things in my life, but nothing had ever turned out as badly as my Old Saint Nick. The wads of cotton in my beard kept slipping off, and I got things all mixed up when I passed the toys around. And how could I disguise the voice that the climate of southern Chile had turned into a twang, nasal and unmistakable, from my earliest years? I had to use a trick: I spoke to the children in English, but the children pierced me with several pairs of black or blue eyes and showed more suspicion than seemed proper in well-brought-up youngsters.
Who would have guessed that among those children was one destined to become a dearest friend, an important writer, the author of one of the best biographies written about me? I am speaking of Margarita Aguirre.
* * *
In my house I have put together a collection of small and large toys I can’t live without. The child who doesn’t play is not a child, but the man who doesn’t play has lost forever the child who lived in him and he will certainly miss him. I have also built my house like a toy house and I play in it from morning till night.
These are my own toys. I have collected them all my life for the scientific purpose of amusing myself alone. I shall describe them for small children and for others of all ages.
I have a sailboat inside a bottle. In fact, I have more than one. It’s a whole fleet. They have their written names, masts, sails, prows, and anchors. Some come from far away, from other tiny little seas. One of the most beautiful was sent to me from Spain, in payment for the rights to a book of my odes. Above, on the mainmast, is our flag, with its tiny lone star. Almost all the others, however, are the work of Señor Carlos Hollander. Señor Hollander is an old seaman and he has reproduced for me many of the famous and majestic ships that came from Hamburg, Salem, or the Breton coast to load nitrate or hunt whales in the South Seas.
When I go down Chile’s long highway to find the old sailor in Coronel, and into the southern city’s smell of coal and rain, I actually enter the finest shipyard in the world. In the small parlor, the dining room, the kitchen, the garden, are accumulated, all in order, the parts that will be inserted into the clear bottles which the pisco has vacated. Don Carlos’s whistle is a magic wand touching prows and sails, foresails and topsails. Even the tiniest puff of smoke from the port passes through his hands and is re-created to rise from a new bottled ship, gleaming and fresh, ready to set out for some chimerical sea.
In my collection the ships that have come out of the modest hands of the navigator from Coronel stand out from the others bought in Antwerp or Marseilles. For not only did he give them life, he also embellished them with his knowledge, pasting a label on each that tells the name and number of the ship’s feats, the voyages it saw through wind and tide, the cargoes it distributed, fluttering across the Pacific with sails we shall never see again.
In bottles I have famous ships like the powerful Potosí, and the grand Prussia, from Hamburg, wrecked in the English Channel in 1910. Captain Hollander also delighted me by making me two versions of the María Celeste, which in 1882 was converted into a star, into a mystery of mysteries.
I am not about to reveal the navigational secret that lives on in its own translucence. I mean, how the tiny ships got into their loving bottles. Being a professional deceiver, and in order to mystify, I gave a detailed description, in an ode, of the long-drawn-out and minutely detailed work of the mysterious shipbuilders and recounted how they went in and out of their sea bottles. But the secret still stands.
* * *
The figureheads are my largest toys. Like so many of my things, these figureheads have been photographed for newspapers and magazines and have been discussed in a friendly light or with spite. Those who are well disposed toward them laugh understandingly and say, “What a crazy guy! Look at the kind of thing he’s decided to collect!”
The mean ones see things differently. Soured by my collections and by the blue flag with a white fish which I hoist at my home in Isla Negra, one of them said, “I don’t run up my own flag. I don’t have figureheads.”
The poor man was whining like a little kid who is jealous because other kids have tops. All this time, my figureheads from the sea smiled, flattered by the envy they aroused.
One should really refer to them as prow figureheads. They are figures with a bosom, sea statues, effigies from lost oceans. When he built his ships, man was trying to endow the prows with a higher meaning. In ancient days he placed on his ships the figures of birds, totem birds, mythical birds cut in wood. Then in the nineteenth century the whaling ships had symbolic figures carved for them: half-nude goddesses, or republican matrons with Phrygian caps.
I own both male and female figureheads. The smallest and most delightful, which Salvador Allende has often tried to take from me, is the María Celeste. She belonged to one of the smaller French vessels and may possibly have sailed only in the Seine’s waters. She is darkish, carved in oak; many years and voyages have given her a dusky complexion for all time. She is a small woman who looks like she’s flying, with signs of a wind carved into her lovely Second Empire clothes. Her porcelain eyes look out over the dimples in her cheeks, into the horizon. And strange as it seems, these eyes shed tears every winter. No one can explain it. The brown wood may possibly have pores that collect the humidity. But the fact is that those French eyes weep in wintertime and I see María Celeste’s precious tears roll down her small face every year.
RELIGION AND POETRY
One of those figureheads from a prow, representing a colossal woman with large, round breasts, rested after her navigations in my garden beside the sea.
She is my most beloved ornament. She brings me memories of a vanished era: great clippers slicing the seven seas.
Some time ago I saw the wives of the farmhands kneeling and lighting candles by that robust pagan sculpture. I had a hard time convincing the women that she was neither a virgin nor a goddess. That she was only a goddess for me, a goddess of sea and of distance. But however much that tall, solemn figurehead may resemble Gabriela Mistral, we had to dispel the illusions of the believers so they would not go on adorning so innocently that icon of a woman from the seas who has sailed through the most corrupt waters of our corrupt planet.
Later, I took her from the garden, and now she is closer to me, beside the fireplace.
I believe this episode represents the kernel of all religions. There is the idol, there are the believers, and there I am, and if I had fewer scruples, I could well have been a priest, a necromancer, an exploiter of fears, of the primitive idolatry that one way or another the backward and aggrieved of humankind inevitably seek out.
Then the church is built, the mystery embellished with art and craft, then dogma arrives, and no one can raise a voice against it.
It’s an easy business.
For centuries, priests, in different rites and languages, have sold a slice of heaven with all the comforts included: running water, electric light, television above all, a satisfied conscience, etc. The curious thing is that this domain, where there lives a terrible being by the name of God, has never been seen by anyone. Yet they go on selling it, and the price per cubic meter of heavenly air or divine land keeps rising higher and higher.
Since I was a boy, I have rebelled against this always invisible kingdom and against the strange proceedings of the assorted gods.
There are often natural disasters in the Americas. Here, geology has yet to finish its work. The volcanoes keep spewing flames from their huge maws, the sea swells past the shore and irrupts into inhabited lands, destroying villages, human beings, and animals. Earthquakes shake our countries and entire cities are wiped out. The rivers do what they can to avoid man’s dominion, and in my country, only two of them are navigable.
Great fires devour the mountains and reduce the fragrant forest to ash.
In all these catastrophes, only the poor, the forgotten, the helpless, men, women, and children, are victims. These are the people Christ preached for. And yet the God of the Christians won’t have much to do with them. He lives somewhere else. In homes not destroyed by earthquakes, not annihilated by fire, not swept away by floods. Apparently God lives in the homes of the rich.
Since I was a boy, I’ve been unable to understand these practical aspects of religion. Nor could I grasp the theological mysteries. Nor did I comprehend why God lashed out against his own fervent followers. My country was stirred by a fire at a church a hundred years ago in the very center of the capital. The heat made the doors swell, and they refused to open, even when the faithful trampled one another to reach them. God didn’t open them either, though the whole thing took place during Mass. More than a thousand devout Catholics died there.
Church fires like this have occurred many times across the face of America. Mostly in little churches built of wood. No one is saved, not even the priest giving his sermon. How are we to understand this?
I also never made sense of the constant obligation to believe avec la foi du charbonnier, as Pascal says. The church hangs a sword of Damocles over your head. Hell is the punishment for nonbelievers. But why? Logically, understanding must have a divine origin, according to the systems of religion, and it is impossible that someone should be obliged to believe in what he doesn’t understand; moreover, rightness or wrongness in this matter cannot be the grounds for reward or punishment. It is obvious that the inscrutability of divine intentions is a system of deceit and contempt for human reason.
Regardless, it’s impossible to imagine that the continuous praise of divinities, deliberate humiliation, everything that constitutes the meaning of prayer, could have an influence on divine decisions. These things are inexplicable, whereas prayers are repeated mechanically. They have become mere formulas devoid of truth. In their degeneration, certain religious systems have substituted for these prayers already lacking in meaning mechanisms that require neither thought nor words: little wheels that spin or rosary beads that glide softly between the fingers.
In the America of before, five centuries ago, something took place that gave rise to incalculable consequences. In the name of the Catholic religion, the Spanish conquistadors felled the millenary statues of the ancient gods of America, which had served the indigenous, theocratic hierarchies to exploit the primitive inhabitants. The invaders, aided by priests from the Spanish religion, destroyed temples, burned libraries that held treasures, manuscripts of inestimable value, and cruelly spilled the blood of the populations they overtook. The conquest was draped in the guise of a holy war. With cross and sword completely united, they attacked and destroyed the ancient empires, pastoral tribes, luminous cultures. Only one priest, the extraordinary Father de Las Casas, protested the butchery, thanks to the humanism that many times reached even to the convents. But he, too, was persecuted and defeated by the power of arms and the church.
The church, in its long road, had one undeniable value: with the sacrifice of the people, it raised temples that are often great artworks of undying splendor. It was superior to the political power of our time because it called not on the worst painters and sculptors but on the greatest and most creative to execute its artworks. Even today, Henri Matisse, though progressive in his values, has carried out a commission for the church in France, the exquisite decorations for the chapel in Vence. To my mind, the old Russian icons are the most interesting artworks humanity has produced.
But that is another question, and another relation of values, and possibly a subtle way of attracting a vast number of people to the various creeds. The church has also relied on the best music of former times.
In my poem “The Ship,” I have tried to show a panorama of humanity in the present capitalist state. It is a small poem that protests the way social injustice seems to be accepted as something immovable.
Religion, religions have helped maintain this ship, this vessel where inequality and agony are so evident, to keep things as they are, to keep it from sinking.
I cannot argue or enter into the philosophical or historical depths of the entire process of religion.
My task as a poet is to denounce what contributes to backwardness and lift up the hopes, open the possibilities, increase the joy of the human race.
BOOKS AND SEASHELLS
A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don’t slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices.
And yet, after many tries, out comes the pearl.
I remember the bookseller García Rico’s surprise, in Madrid in 1934, when I offered to buy an old set of Góngora’s works that cost only a hundred pesetas, in monthly payments of twenty. It was very little money, but I didn’t have it. I paid punctually, in five months. It was the Foppens edition. This seventeenth-century Flemish publisher printed, in peerless type, the work of the masters of Spain’s Golden Age. I only enjoy reading Quevedo in editions where the sonnets are bravely deployed for battle, like tough fighting ships.
Later I lost myself in the forest of bookshops, in the suburban nooks and crannies of secondhand bookstalls and the cathedral naves of the marvelous bookstores of France and England. My hands came out covered with dust, but from time to time I obtained a treasure, or at least the thrill of thinking that I had.
Ready cash from literary prizes helped me to buy some editions at outlandish prices. My library grew to a considerable size. Antique books of poetry brightened it, and my bent for natural history filled it with magnificent books on botany, illustrated in full color, and books on birds, insects, and fish. I found wonderful travel books in various parts of the world; incredible Don Quixotes, printed by Ibarra; Dante folios in exquisite Bodoni type; even a Molière from a very limited edition prepared, “Ad usum Delphini,” for the son of the King of France.
But, actually, the loveliest things I ever collected were my seashells. They gave me the pleasure of their extraordinary structure: a mysterious porcelain with the purity of moonlight combined with numerous tactile, Gothic, functional forms.
Thousands of tiny undersea doors opened for me to dip into, from the day Don Carlos de la Torre, the noted Cuban malacologist, gave me the best specimens from his collection. Since then I have crossed the seven seas, wherever my travels took me, stalking and hunting down shells. But I must confess that it was the sea of Paris that, wave after wave, washed ashore most of my shells for me. Paris had transported all the mother-of-pearl of Oceania to its naturalist shops, to its flea markets.
Finding the exquisite contours of the Oliva textilina under the city’s sargasso, among broken lamps and old shoes, was easier than plunging my hands in among the rocks of Vera Cruz or Baja California. Or catching the spear of quartz that tapers off, like a sea poem, into Rostellaria fusus. No one can take away the thrill I felt when I pulled out of that sea the Spondylus roseo, a large oyster studded with coral spines. Or when, farther on, I opened the white Spondylus with its snowy barbs like stalagmites in a Góngoran grotto.
Some of these trophies may have had a historic past. I remember that in the Peking Museum the most sacred box of mollusks from the China Sea was opened to give me the second of the only two specimens of the Thatcheria mirabilis in existence. And thus I was able to own that remarkable work of art in which the ocean gave China the style for temples and pagodas that still survives in those latitudes.
* * *
It took me thirty years to collect a large library. My shelves held incunabula and other books I treasured: first editions of Quevedo, Cervantes, Góngora, as well as Laforgue, Rimbaud, and Lautréamont. I felt as if these pages still preserved the touch of the poets I loved. I had manuscripts by Rimbaud. In Paris, Paul Eluard gave me, as a birthday present, Isabelle Rimbaud’s two letters to her mother, written in the hospital at Marseilles where the wanderer had one leg amputated. These were treasures coveted by the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris
and by Chicago’s voracious book collectors.
I covered so many parts of the world that my library grew much too large, beyond the normal bounds of a private library. One day I gave away the wonderful collection of shells it had taken me twenty years to put together and the five thousand volumes I had selected with so much love from so many countries. I gave them to my country’s university. And they were accepted by the rector, with beautiful words, as a dazzling gift.
Any genuine person will imagine the rejoicing with which this gift of mine must have been received. But there are also people with twisted minds. An official critic wrote some furious articles protesting vehemently. “When will it be possible to stop international Communism?” he raved. Another gentleman made a fiery speech in parliament attacking the university for having accepted my marvelous cunabula and incunabula, and threatened to cut off the subsidies the national institute receives. Between them, the writer of the articles and the parliamentarian launched an icy wave over the small world of Chile. The rector of the university paced up and down the halls of Congress, looking sick.
Incidentally, twenty years have gone by and no one has ever seen my books or my shells again. It’s as if they had slipped back into the bookstores and the ocean.
BROKEN GLASS
Three days ago I came back to my home in Valparaíso, after being away a long time. Huge cracks in the walls were just like wounds. Disheartening rugs of shattered glass covered the floors of the rooms. The clocks, also on the floor, grimly recorded the time of the earthquake. How many lovely things Matilde’s broom was now sweeping up from the floor; how many rare objects the earth’s tremors had turned into trash.
We have to clean up, to put things back, and start all over again. Paper is hard to find in the middle of the mess; and then, it’s hard to collect one’s thoughts.