The Complete Memoirs

by Pablo Neruda

  At times I, too, have spoken harshly of Residencia en la tierra, but in doing so, I did not have in mind its poetry but the rigidly pessimistic air breathed by my book. I cannot forget that a few years ago a boy from Santiago killed himself at the foot of a tree and left my book open at the poem “Significa sombras” (“It Means Shadows”).

  I believe that both Residencia en la tierra, a dark and gloomy but essential book within my work, and Las uvas y el viento, a book of wide spaces and abundant light, have a right to exist somewhere. And I am not contradicting myself when I say this.

  In fact, I have a soft spot for Las uvas y el viento, perhaps because it is my most misunderstood book; or because it was in its pages that I set out on my wanderings through the world. It contains the dust of roads and the water of rivers; it contains creatures, continuities, and places beyond the seas I had not known until I discovered them in my many travels. I repeat, it is one of the books I love most.

  Of all my books, Estravagario is not the one that sings most but the one that has the best leaps. Its leaping poems skip over distinction, respect, mutual protection, establishments, and obligations to sponsor reverent irreverence. Because of its disrespect, it’s my most personal book. Because of its range, it is one of the most important. For my taste, it’s a terrific book, with the tang of salt that the truth always has.

  In Odas elementales I decided to deal with things from their beginnings, starting with the primary state, from birth onward. I wanted to describe many things that had been sung and said over and over again. My intention was to start like the boy chewing on his pencil, setting to work on his composition assignment about the sun, the blackboard, the clock, or the family. Nothing was to be omitted from my field of action; walking or flying, I had to touch on everything, expressing myself as clearly and freshly as possible.

  An Uruguayan critic was shocked because I compared some stones to small ducks. He had established that small ducks, and some other kinds of small animals, are not material for poetry. Literary refinement has come to this kind of flippancy. They are trying to force creative artists to deal only with sublime themes. But they are wrong. We’ll even make poetry from those things most scorned by the arbiters of good taste.

  The bourgeoisie demands a poetry that is more and more isolated from reality. The poet who knows how to call a spade a spade is dangerous to a capitalism on its last legs. It is more convenient for the poet to believe himself “a small god,” as Vicente Huidobro said. This belief, this stand, does not upset the ruling classes. The poet basks in his own divine isolation, and there is no need to bribe or crush him. He has bribed himself by condemning himself to his heaven. Meanwhile, the earth trembles in his path, in his dazzling light.

  * * *

  Our Latin American countries have millions of illiterates; this cultural lag survives as a heritage and a privilege of feudalism. In the face of this stumbling block of seventy million illiterates, we can say that our readers have not yet been born. We must speed up the birth, so that we and all poets will be read. We must open America’s matrix to bring out her glorious light.

  Literary critics are often happy to render service to the notions of feudal promoters. In 1961, for example, three of my books appeared: Canción de gesta, Las piedras de Chile, and Cantos ceremoniales. Critics in my country did not even mention these titles during the entire year.

  When my poem Alturas de Macchu Picchu was first published, no one in Chile dared mention it, either. Its publisher went to the offices of Chile’s bulkiest newspaper, El mercurio, which has been in existence almost a hundred and fifty years; he had with him a paid announcement of the book’s publication. They accepted it on condition that my name be removed.

  “But Neruda is the author,” Neira protested.

  “That doesn’t matter,” they said.

  Alturas de Macchu Picchu had to appear as an anonymous poem in the announcement. What good had the newspaper’s hundred and fifty years of life been to it? In all that time, it had not learned to respect the truth, or the facts, or poetry.

  Sometimes the negative passions turned against me are not merely a bitter reflex of the class struggle, but obey other causes. I have more than forty years of work and several literary prizes to my credit, and my books have been published in the most surprising languages, yet not a single day goes by that I do not receive a jab or a pommeling from the envious elements around me. My house is a case in point. I bought this house in Isla Negra, in a deserted spot, when there was no drinking water or electricity here. With the proceeds from my books, I repaired and refurbished it; I bought wooden statues now dear to me, old ships’ figureheads that found shelter and rest in my home after long journeys.

  But there are people who can’t bear the thought that a poet has achieved, as the fruit of widely published work, the material comfort all writers, musicians, and painters deserve. Reactionary hacks, who are behind the times and are constantly demanding honors for Goethe, deny today’s poets the right to live. For instance, my owning an automobile drives them crazy. According to them, the automobile is the exclusive right of businessmen, speculators, brothel managers, usurers, and crooks.

  To gall them even more. I’ll leave my house in Isla Negra to the people. Someday it will be used for union meetings and as a place where miners and peasants can go to get some rest. That will be my poetry’s revenge.

  ANOTHER YEAR BEGINS

  A newspaperman asks me: “How do you see the world during this year that is just beginning?”

  I answer: “At this precise moment, at 9:20 a.m. on January 5, to me the whole world looks absolutely rosy and blue.”

  This has no literary, political, or personal implications. This means that from my window my eyes are struck with wonder by huge beds of pink flowers, and that, farther out, the Pacific and the sky come together in a blue embrace.

  But I realize, and we know it, that there are other colors in the landscape of the world. Who can forget the color of all the blood senselessly spilled in Vietnam every day? Who can forget the color of the villages leveled with napalm?

  I answer another of the journalist’s questions. As in other years, during these 365 days I’ll publish a new book, I am sure of it. I caress it, I rough it up, I write it every day.

  “What is it about?”

  What can I answer? My books are always about the same thing; I always write the same book. I hope my friends will forgive me, because, on this new occasion and in this new year filled with new days, I have nothing to offer them except my poems, the same new poems.

  The year just ended brought victories to all of us on earth: victories out in space and along its routes. During the year, all men wanted to fly. We have all traveled like cosmonauts in our dreams. The conquest of space belongs to all of us, whether it was North Americans or Soviets who were the first to draw a nimbus around the moon and eat the first New Year’s grapes on the moon.

  To us poets should fall the greater portion of the gifts discovered. From Jules Verne, who gave man’s dream of space its first flying machine in a book, to Jules Laforgue, Heinrich Heine, and José Asunción Silva (without forgetting Baudelaire, who discovered its evil spell), the pale planet was investigated, sung, and put into print by us poets, before anyone else.

  * * *

  The years go by. You wear out, thrive, suffer, and enjoy life. The years take life away or restore it to you. Farewells become more frequent; friends enter or get out of jail; they go to Europe and come back, or simply die.

  Those you lose when you are far away from the place where they die seem to die less; they go on living in you just as they were. A poet who outlives his friends tends to fill in his work with an anthology of mourning poems. I did not go on with mine, I was afraid that human grief in the face of death might become monotonous. You don’t want to turn into a register of dead people, even if they are very dear to you. In 1928 in Ceylon, when I wrote “Ausencia de Joaquín” (“Absence of Joaquín”) on the death of my friend Joaquín
Cifuentes Sepúlveda the poet, and later in 1931 in Barcelona, when I wrote “Alberto Rojas Giménez viene volando,” I thought no one else would die on me. Many have. Nearby, in the Argentine hills of Córdoba, lies buried my dearest Argentine friend, Rodolfo Aráoz Alfaro, who left our Chilean Margarita Aguirre a widow.

  In this year that has just ended, the wind carried off the fragile frame of Ilya Ehrenburg, my very dear friend, heroic defender of the truth, a titan at crushing lies. And this same year, in Moscow, they buried the poet Ovadi Savich, who translated Gabriela Mistral’s poetry as well as mine and did it not only faithfully and beautifully but with shining love. The same wind took away my brother poets Nazim Hikmet and Semyon Kirsanov. And others.

  Che Guevara’s official assassination, in poor Bolivia, was a bitter blow. The telegram announcing his death ran through the world like a cold shiver of reverence. Millions of elegies tried to join in tribute to his heroic and tragic life. Poems, many of which did not rise to the occasion, came pouring out all over the world. I received a telegram from Cuba, from a literary colonel, asking me for mine. I have not written it yet. I believe that such an elegy must contain not only immediate protest but also the profound echo of the painful story. I shall ponder over that poem until it ripens in my mind and in my blood.

  I am deeply touched that I am the only poet quoted by the great guerrilla leader in his diary. I remember that Che told me once, in front of Sergeant Retamar, that he often read my Canto general to the pioneering, humble, glorious bearded guerrillas in the Sierra Maestra. In his diary, where it stares out like a premonition, he copied out a line from my “Canto para Bolívar” (“Song for Bolívar”): “Your small dead body like a brave captain’s…”

  THE NOBEL PRIZE

  There’s a long story behind my Nobel Prize. For many years my name was always mentioned as a candidate but nothing happened.

  In 1963, things got serious. The radios said repeatedly that my name was very strong in the voting in Stockholm and I would probably be the winner of the Nobel Prize. So Matilde and I put into effect home-defense plan number 3. We laid in supplies of food and red wine and hung a huge padlock on the old gate in Isla Negra. I threw in a few mysteries by Simenon, expecting to be under siege for some time.

  The newsmen got there fast, but we kept them at bay. They could not get past the gate secured with the huge bronze padlock, which was as beautiful as it was powerful. They prowled behind the outer wall like tigers. What were they trying to do, anyway?

  What could I say about a debate in which only the members of the Swedish Academy on the other side of the world were taking part? Still, the journalists didn’t hide their intentions of squeezing blood from a turnip.

  Spring had come late to the South Pacific coast. Those solitary days helped me commune with the spring season by the sea, which, though late, had dressed up for its solitary festivities. In summer not a single drop of rain falls; the earth is marly, rough, rocky; not one green blade is to be seen. In winter, the sea wind unleashes fury, salt, foam from enormous waves, and then nature looks oppressed, a victim of these terrible forces.

  Spring starts off with a widespread yellow operation. Everything is covered with innumerable tiny golden flowers. This tiny, powerful crop spreads over hillsides, circles rocks, presses on toward the sea, and springs up in the middle of our everyday paths, as if it were throwing us a challenge, proving to us that it is there. Those flowers had to endure an invisible life such a long time, the desolate denial of the barren earth kept them under such a long time, that they can’t seem to find enough room for their yellow abundance now.

  Then the tiny pale flowers burn out and everything is covered by an intense violet bloom. Spring has a change of heart from yellow to blue, and then, again, to red. How did the tiny, nameless, innumerable corollas replace one another? The wind shook out one color one day and another color the next day, as if spring’s national colors kept changing in the lonely hills, and various republics took turns sporting their invading banners.

  At this time of year the cactus flowers on the coast. Far from this region, on the ridges of the Andean cordillera, the cacti loom like giants, striated and thorny, like enemy columns. The cacti along the coast, on the other hand, are small and round. I have seen them crowned with twenty scarlet buds, as if some hand had left drops of blood there, a passionate tribute. Then they burst open. Facing the ocean’s huge whitecaps are thousands of cacti lit up by their full-blown flowers.

  The old century plant at home drew its suicidal bloom from deep within itself. This plant, which is blue and yellow, gigantic and fleshy, has lasted more than ten years beside my door, shooting up until it was taller than I. And now it is flowering only to die. It built up a powerful green spear that rose to a height of seven meters, interrupted by a dry inflorescence, lightly covered by a fine, gold dust. Then all the colossal leaves of Agave americana plummet down and die.

  Here, next to the tall dying flower, another titanic blossom is being born. No one outside my country will know it; it only grows on these Antarctic shores. It is called chahual (Puya chilensis). This ancestral plant was worshipped by the Araucanians. The ancient Arauco no longer exists. Blood, death, time, and later the epic songs of Alonso de Ercilla closed the ancient history of a tribe made of clay, rudely awakened from a geological dream to defend its invaded country. When I see its flowers come up again, over centuries of obscure dead, over layers of bloodstained forgetfulness, I believe that the earth’s past blooms in spite of what we are, in spite of what we have become. Only the earth goes on being, preserving its own nature.

  But I forgot to describe this flower.

  It’s a Bromeliacea with sharp, saw-toothed leaves. It erupts by the roadsides like green fire, arraying its panoply of mysterious emerald swords. And suddenly one colossal flower, a cluster, is born at its waist, an immense green rose as tall as a man. This sole flower, made up of tinier flowers that assemble into a single green cathedral crowned with gold pollen, gleams in the light from the sea. It is the only green flower of its huge size I have ever seen, a solitary monument to the waves.

  Peasants and fishermen in my country forgot the names of the small plants long ago, and the small flowers have no names now. They forgot them little by little, and the flowers eventually lost their pride. They became all mixed up and obscure, like stones the rivers drag down from the Andean snow to unfrequented parts of the coast. Peasants and fishermen, miners and smugglers remained true to their own rough life, to continuous death and the everlasting resurrection of their duties, their defeats. To be a hero in undiscovered territories is to be obscure; these territories and their songs are lit only by the most anonymous blood and by flowers whose name nobody knows.

  Among these flowers there is one that has invaded my whole house. It’s a blue flower with a long, proud, lustrous, and tough stem. At its tip, swarms of tiny infra-blue, ultra-blue flowers sway. I don’t know if all human beings have the gift of seeing the sublimest blue. Is it revealed to a select few? Does it remain hidden, invisible to others? Has some blue god denied them its contemplation? Or is it only my own joy, nursed by solitude and convened into pride, gloating because it has found this blue, this blue wave, this blue star in riotous spring?

  Last, I shall mention the docas. I don’t know if these plants exist anywhere else; multiplied by the million, they drag their triangular fingers over the sand. Spring filled those green hands with rare crimson jewels. The docas have a Greek name: Aizoaceae. Isla Negra’s splendor on these late-spring days is the Aizoaceae that spill out like an invasion from the sea, like the emanation of the sea’s green grotto, like the juice from the purple clusters stored up by Neptune far off in his wine cellar.

  The radio has just announced that a good Greek poet has received the famed prize. The journalists have departed. Matilde and I are finally left in peace. We solemnly withdraw the huge padlock from the old gate, so that anyone, as usual, may come calling at my door unannounced. Like spring.

  In t
he afternoon the Swedish ambassador and his wife came to see me. They brought me a basket filled with bottles and an assortment of delicacies. They had prepared it to celebrate the Nobel Prize which they had considered a sure thing for me. We didn’t really feel sad about it and drank a toast to Seferis, the Greek poet who had won. As he was leaving, the ambassador took me aside and said, “I’m sure the press will interview me, and I don’t know anything about him. Can you tell me who Seferis is?”

  “I don’t know who he is either,” I answered in all honesty.

  * * *

  Every writer on this planet earth would really like to get the Nobel Prize sometime, whether he admits it or not.

  In Latin America particularly, the various countries have their candidates, plan their campaigns, draw up their strategy. They have lost the prize for some writers who should have had it. Rómulo Gallegos is a case in point. His work is copious and dignified. But Venezuela is an oil country—in other words, a country with money—and it was decided to use this to get him the prize. An ambassador to Sweden was appointed whose ultimate goal was to obtain the honor for Gallegos. He was free with dinner invitations; he had the works of the members of the Swedish Academy published in Spanish by printing houses in Stockholm. All this must have appeared excessive to these sensitive and reserved men. Rómulo Gallegos never found out that the exaggerated efficiency of a Venezuelan ambassador may have deprived him of a literary honor he deserved so well.

  In Paris I was once told a sad story edged with cruel humor. This time it was about Paul Valéry. His name was bandied about in France, even in print, as the strongest candidate for the Nobel Prize that year. Trying to ease the nervous tension produced by the imminent news, on the morning the verdict was under debate in Stockholm, Valéry left his country house very early, with his cane and his dog.