The Complete Memoirs

by Pablo Neruda

  He returned from his outing at noon, for lunch. The minute he opened the door, he asked his secretary: “Were there any phone calls?”

  “Yes, sir. You had a call from Stockholm a few minutes ago.”

  “What did they have to say?” he asked, obviously moved.

  “It was a Swedish newspaperwoman who wanted to know your views on the women’s suffragette movement.”

  Valéry himself used to tell this anecdote with some irony. And the truth is that this great poet, so impeccable a writer, never received the celebrated prize.

  As for me, no one can say I wasn’t very careful. In a book by a Chilean scholar praising Gabriela Mistral, I had read about the letters my austere countrywoman sent out in many directions, without compromising her austerity but driven by her natural desire to improve her chances for the prize. This made me more reticent. I no sooner learned that my name was being mentioned as a candidate (and I’ve lost track of how many times it was mentioned) than I made up my mind not to return to Sweden, a country I had been attracted to since boyhood, when Tomás Lago and I set ourselves up as true disciples of an excommunicated drunken Protestant minister by the name of Gösta Berling.

  Besides, I was tired of being mentioned every year but never getting anywhere. It grated on me to see my name listed in the annual competition, as if I were a race horse. On the other hand, some literary and popular Chilean writers felt slighted by the Swedish Academy’s indifference to them. It was a situation bordering dangerously on the ridiculous.

  * * *

  At last, as everyone knows, I was awarded the Nobel Prize. In 1971 I was in Paris, where I had just arrived to take up my post as Chilean ambassador, when my name began to appear in the news once again. Matilde and I frowned. We were used to the annual disappointment and had grown hard-skinned. One night in October of that year Jorge Edwards, our Embassy’s counselor and a writer as well, came into the dining room of my home. Thrifty by nature, he offered to make a very simple bet with me. If I was given the Nobel Prize that year, I would treat him and his wife to dinner in the best restaurant in Paris. If it was not given to me, he would treat Matilde and me.

  “Agreed,” I said. “We’ll have a splendid dinner at your expense.”

  A part of the secret reason for Jorge Edwards’s risky bet began to leak out on the following day. I found out that a friend of his had called him from Stockholm. A writer and a journalist, she had told him that this time Pablo Neruda had every chance of winning the Nobel Prize.

  The newsmen began to call long-distance. From Buenos Aires, from Mexico, and, above all, from Spain. There it was a foregone conclusion. Naturally, I refused to make any statement, but my doubts began to surface once more.

  That evening Artur Lundkvist, my only Swedish friend who was a writer, came to see me. Lundkvist had been in the Academy for three or four years. He had come from Sweden to visit the South of France. After dinner I told him the fix I was in, having to reply to the long-distance questions of newsmen who had already conceded me the prize.

  “I want to ask you one favor, Artur,” I said. “If it is true, I would really like to know before it comes out in the papers. I want to be the first to tell Salvador Allende, with whom I have shared so many battles. It would make him very happy to have the news first.”

  Lundkvist, academician and poet, looked at me with his Swedish eyes, very seriously. “I can’t tell you a thing. If there is anything to it, the King of Sweden will let you know by telegram, or else the Swedish ambassador in Paris will.”

  This was on the nineteenth or twentieth of October. On the morning of the twenty-first, the anterooms at the Embassy started to fill up with newsmen. Television crews from Sweden, Germany, France, and Latin America showed an impatience at my silence—due solely to lack of information—that threatened to turn into mutiny. At eleven-thirty the Swedish ambassador called and asked me if I would receive him, without saying what about. This did nothing to slacken the tension, since the interview would not take place until two hours later. The telephone kept on shrilling hysterically.

  Then one of the Paris radio stations released a flash, a last-minute news bulletin, announcing that the Nobel Prize for 1971 had been awarded to the “poète chilien Pablo Neruda.” I immediately went down to face the noisy assemblage from the news media. Fortunately, at this moment my old friends Jean Marcenac and Aragon appeared. Marcenac, a fine poet and a brother to me in France, let out shouts of joy. For his part, Aragon seemed happier at the news than I. Both helped me through the hard test of parrying the journalists.

  I was just getting over an operation. Anemic and shaky on my legs, I had little desire to move about. Friends came to dine with me that evening. Matta, from Italy; García Márquez, from Barcelona; Siqueiros, from Mexico; Miguel Otero Silva, from Caracas; Arturo Camacho Ramírez, from Paris itself; Cortázar, from his hide- out. Carlos Vasallo, Chilean, traveled from Rome to go with me to Stockholm.

  The telegrams grew into such mountains that I still have not been able to read or answer all of them. One of the countless letters I received was odd and a bit menacing. It was written from Holland by a husky black man; this was obvious from the newspaper clipping he sent along. “I represent,” the letter said, more or less, “the anti-colonialist movement in Georgetown, British Guiana. I have requested a pass to attend the Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm. I was informed at the Swedish Embassy that evening dress is a requirement, absolutely necessary for this occasion. I have no money to buy a tail coat and I shall never wear a rented one, it would be humiliating for a free man from America to put on used clothing. I am therefore informing you that, with the little money I can scrape together, I shall travel to Stockholm to hold a press conference to denounce the imperialist and anti-popular character of this ceremony, even if it is being held to honor the most anti-imperialist and most popular of the world’s poets.”

  * * *

  In November, Matilde and I traveled to Stockholm. A few old friends went along with us. We were given rooms in the luxurious Grand Hotel and from there we could see the beautiful cold city, the Royal Palace across from our windows. Also staying at the hotel were the other laureates of that year, in physics, chemistry, medicine, etc., and several celebrities, some articulate and very fine-mannered, others as simple and rustic as mechanics whom chance had brought out of their workshops. Willy Brandt, a German, was not staying at the hotel; he would receive his Nobel Peace Prize in Norway. It was a pity, because, of all the award winners, he was the one I would have been most interested in meeting and talking to. I only managed to see him later at the receptions, where we were always separated by three or four people.

  We had to have a practice session for the grand ceremony, and Swedish protocol actually made us stage it where it would be held. It was really comical to see such serious-looking people get out of bed and leave their hotel at a specific hour, go punctually to an empty building, climb several flights of stairs without missing a step, march left or right in strict order, sit on the stage in the same armchairs we would occupy on the day of the ceremony. All this, facing television cameras, and in an enormous empty hall where the seats of honor for the King and the Royal Family stood out, also forlornly empty. I have never been able to understand just what whim would make Swedish television film that rehearsal performed by such terrible actors.

  * * *

  The day the prize was to be awarded started off with the St. Lucia festivities. I was awakened by voices chanting sweetly in the hotel corridors. Then blond Scandinavian maidens crowned with flowers, their faces lit by burning candles, burst into my room. They brought me breakfast as well as a gift, a beautiful long painting of the sea.

  A little later, something happened that stirred up the Stockholm police force. A letter for me was delivered at the hotel reception desk. It bore the signature of the wild anti-colonialist from Georgetown, British Guiana. “I have just arrived in Stockholm,” it read. His attempt to call a press conference had failed, but as a revolutiona
ry man of action, he was taking certain steps. It couldn’t be possible that Pablo Neruda, the poet of the humiliated and the oppressed, would receive the Nobel Prize in tails. Consequently, he had bought a pair of green scissors which he would use to snip off the “tails of your cut-away, and any other appendages … So I am doing my duty and warning you. When you see a black man stand up at the rear of the hall, equipped with a huge pair of green scissors, you can guess exactly what is going to happen to you.”

  I handed the strange letter to the young diplomat assigned to me by Swedish protocol, who followed me around on all my errands. I told him, with a smile, that I had received another letter in Paris from the same crank and that I didn’t think we should worry about him. The young Swede disagreed. “With all the dissenters around at this time, anything can happen. It is my duty to warn the Stockholm police,” he said, and sped off to carry out what he considered his duty.

  I should point out that Miguel Otero Silva was among those who had gone with me to Stockholm; an important novelist and a brilliant poet, he is not only a perfect representative of the American conscience but also an incomparable friend. There were just a few hours left before the ceremony. During lunch I mentioned that the Swedes had taken the incident of the letter of protest quite seriously.

  Otero Silva, who was lunching with us, slapped himself on the forehead. “Why, I wrote that letter with my own hand; I was just pulling your leg, Pablo. What are we going to do now, with the police looking for a writer who doesn’t exist?”

  “You’ll be taken off to jail. For your practical joke about the wild man from the Caribbean,” I said to him, “you’ll be punished instead of the man from Georgetown.”

  Just then, my young Swedish aide, back from warning the authorities, joined us at the table. I told him what had happened. “It was a practical joke. Its author is having lunch with us right now.”

  He dashed out again. The police had already gone to all the hotels in Stockholm, looking for a black man from Georgetown, or some such place. And they didn’t relax their precautions. As we went in to the ceremony, and as we came out of the celebration ball, Matilde and I noticed that, instead of the usual ushers, four or five hefty young fellows rushed forward to take care of us—solid, yellow-haired, scissors-proof bodyguards.

  * * *

  The Nobel Prize ritual had an immense, disciplined, and calm audience, which applauded politely, in the right places. The aged monarch shook hands with each of us; gave us the diploma, the medal, and the check; and we returned to our seats on the stage, which was no longer squalid, as it had been during the rehearsal, but covered now with flowers and occupied chairs. They say (or said it to Matilde to impress her) that the King spent more time with me than with the other laureates and pressed my hand longer, treating me with obvious friendliness. Perhaps it was a reminiscence of the ancient kindliness of the palace toward the troubadours. In any case, no other king has shaken my hand, for a long or even a brief moment.

  No doubt, that ceremony, carried out with such strict protocol, had the proper solemnity. Perhaps the solemnity given to important occasions will always exist in the world. Human beings seem to need it. But I found a charming similarity between the parade of eminent laureates and the handing out of school prizes in any small country town.

  CHILE CHICO

  I was coming from Puerto Ibáñez, still awed by the great General Carrera Lake, awed by its metallic waters, a paroxysm of nature comparable only to the turquoise-blue sea of Varadero in Cuba, or to our own Petrohué. And then the savage falls of the Ibáñez River, with the full effect of their terrifying grandeur. I was also shaken by the isolation and the poverty of the people in the neighboring towns, near the gigantic source of energy but without electricity, living among countless sheep, but dressed in cheap rags. At last I came to Chile Chico.

  There at the end of the day the wide twilight was waiting for me. The everlasting wind was cutting up the clouds like quartz. Rivers of light isolated one huge block the wind was holding up between the earth and the sky.

  Cattle lands and sown fields struggling under polar pressure from the wind. The earth rose all around, turning into the hard rock towers of Roca Castillo, sharpened points, Gothic spires, nature’s granite battlements. The irregular Aysén mountains, round as spheres, tall and flat as tables, intensified the rectangles and triangles of snow.

  And the sky was working on its twilight with sheer silks and metals: a yellowness shimmered in the sky, like an immense bird suspended by pure space. Everything went through abrupt mutations, changing into a whale’s mouth, a fiery leopard, glowing abstract forms.

  I felt the immensity spreading out in formation overhead, picking me to witness the dazzling Aysén range with its cluster of hills, waterfalls, millions of dead and blighted trees accusing their ancient killers with the silence of a world about to be born, for which everything was in readiness: the ceremonies of the sky and the earth. But there was something missing—shelter, collective organization, houses, man. Those who live in such difficult solitudes need a common bond as vast as the huge spaces around them.

  I left as the twilight was going dim and the night was coming on, overpowering, blue.

  THE SOUTHERN COUNTRYSIDE

  Amid comings and goings, fleeting and reprehensible loves of my youth, I grew conscious, not only of the land, but of the conflicts, pain, and devastation that extended over forest and field.

  The Spanish conquest hit the ancient kingdoms of Mexico and Peru like a bolt of lightning: without grief or glory the two indigenous empires, divisive, parasitic, already dilapidated, succumbed ingloriously to the bearded invaders. In Chile, history took a different turn.

  History there was a long mutual massacre stretching out over three centuries. The Indians, defending themselves, and the Spanish conquistadors exterminated each other in turn, but the crusaders and their families, though reduced to penury by the implacable progress of the war, left on the land a system of haciendas that would inexplicably persist. Indeed, not until Chile’s first popular government, that of Salvador Allende, would the latifundias be broken up, between 1971 and these months of 1973 in which I am writing these memoirs. It is a commonplace that memoirs consist, in general, of personal recollections. But in a way my country, along with its problems, has followed me wherever I’ve gone. Someone in Europe, Asia, or the United States may take an interest in my poetry while thinking that Chile, this country long and slender as a comet, is barely visible from the sky, nestled among the geography of the world. But it has never been that way for me.

  We Chileans come from a strange lineage, in part. In the rest of Latin America, the mestizos are the children of Indian women raped by Iberian soldiers. We Chileans, however, come also from the Spanish women stolen by the Arauco warriors. Throughout the centuries of this longest of patriotic wars, the Chilean Indians, implacable as the Spanish, would raze the cities and fortresses and would not leave a single Spaniard alive. But curiously, they never killed the women.

  * * *

  I don’t know the origin of this war custom of theirs, of those Araucanians whose blood I inherited: they remain as mysterious, remote, and inscrutable to me as those who stepped forth in the sixteenth century, half-nude and armed with primitive arrows, opposing the invincible conquistadors.

  The Spanish captives gave children to their Indian captors. These were the Chileans. We come from unusual circumstances. Since 1810, when the Spanish monarchy was expelled, Chile has had a national government, and my more recent compatriots felt at ease in this anachronistic system. They invented titles, called themselves nobles and scions, and went on living from the work of others. To extend their domains, they, too, killed Indians. This bloody stage of Chile’s independence is called by bourgeois history, with repulsive hypocrisy, “The pacification of the Araucanians.”

  The pacifying army decimated the Araucanians and their possessions. Once they’d established themselves in the virgin territories, they instituted laws and installed
judges, lawyers, and police. And thus, with bullets and truncheons to the head, the Spanish made their mark on the land—the bloody land I used to ride through on horseback.

  The working people, like the Hernándezes up in the mountains with their threshers, were like the first soldiers of a new war. Then came the indifferent landholders. The Santiago oligarchy, which had already devoured the extensive wine-growing provinces, spread out through the south. Life was divvied up among a scarce few landed nobles and an incredible multitude of poor farmhands, no less Chilean than the new owners, but underfed, unshod, ignorant, and in tatters.

  This is the social organization in which I spent my youth. Consumed by love and melancholy, we learned slowly, with dread, of the hidden history of the country.

  I began to look for people who would tell me of the past and present, and feverishly, I looked for books that would reveal the truth.

  I learned of the existence of a small, heroic book that told of the atrocities committed in these years. The story of the genocide of the last races of Patagonia, which was taking place when I, an apprentice poet, navigated the rivers in my boat, moved by the melody of an accordion or by the legs of one of those untamed girls.

  I looked for the book, but didn’t find it: the murderous landlords had chased down, bought, or destroyed every copy.

  It was called Tragic Patagonia, and only thirty-five years later did I manage to obtain a copy of this suppressed document.

  It recounted the brutal history of the elimination from the earth of the very last of the Ona people. That pastoral race was the only one left on the planet that conserved the customs and traditions of the Stone Age. But no one cares. They were poor fishing tribes that survived on the harshest terrain in the entire world.