by Pablo Neruda
But they didn’t survive the Menéndez, the Montes, the Echelarte families, who felt it endangered the raising of their sheep to have those squalid Patagonians as neighbors, and who hunted them down to a man and killed them, woman by woman, child by child, paying a pound sterling for the head of every southern native the hunters brought them. In the evenings, the new owners counted the harvest of heads as if they were counting melons and paying their minions.
And thus, in the Tierra del Fuego, the Menéndez family, whose descendants are now directors of the Union Club in Santiago and the Jockey Club in Buenos Aires, raised their flocks of sheep.
And there remained three or four survivors of those races lost in the confines of the world of my fatherland.
And so, the Chilean-Argentine Menéndez family came to own, only a few years back, more than a million sheep.
SEPTEMBER FLAGS
In the southern part of the Latin American continent, September is a wide open, flowering month. This month is also decked in flags.
At the beginning of the last century, in 1810, in the month of September, insurrections against Spanish dominion broke out or consolidated in many territories of South America. In September we South Americans commemorate the emancipation, honor our heroes, and welcome spring, spreading out so far and wide that it reaches across the Strait of Magellan to blossom as far down as southern Patagonia and Cape Horn.
The regular chain of revolutions that sprouted from Mexico to Argentina and Chile was very important for the world.
The leaders were dissimilar. Bolívar, warrior and courtier, gifted with the brilliance of a prophet; San Martín, inspired organizer of an army that crossed the tallest and most hostile mountain ranges of the planet to fight the decisive battles of Chile’s liberation; José Miguel Carrera and Bernardo O’Higgins, who established the first Chilean armies as well as the first printing presses and the first laws against slavery, abolished in Chile many years before it was abolished in the United States.
Like Bolívar and some of the other liberators, José Miguel Carrera came from the aristocratic creole class. The interests of this class clashed sharply with those of the Spaniards in America. The people were not an organized entity but an enormous mass of bondsmen at the service of Spanish rule. Men like Bolívar and Carrera, readers of the Encyclopedists, students from the military academies in Spain, had to break through walls of isolation and ignorance to stir up a national spirit.
Carrera’s life was brief and resplendent as lightning. El húsar desdichado (The Unfortunate Hussar) is the title I gave to a book about him I put together and published some years ago. His fascinating personality drew antagonisms down on his head the way a lightning rod draws sparks during a storm. He was finally shot in Mendoza by the rulers of the newly declared Argentine Republic. His desperate desire to overthrow the Spanish yoke had put him at the head of the wild Indians of the Argentine pampas. He besieged Buenos Aires and came very close to taking it. But he really wanted to free Chile and his heart was so set on it that he started premature civil and guerrilla wars that led him to his death. During those turbulent years, the revolution devoured one of its most brilliant and courageous sons. History has pinned the blame for this bloody deed on O’Higgins and San Martín. However, the history of the month of September, month of spring and banners, covers with its wings the memory of the three heroes of the combats waged in the vast setting of the wide pampas and the eternal snows.
O’Higgins, another of Chile’s liberators, was a man of humble beginnings. His would have been an obscure, peaceful life if he had not met in London, when he was only seventeen, an old revolutionary who was making the rounds of all the courts of Europe, seeking assistance for the cause of American liberation. His name was Don Francisco de Miranda and he had the powerful affection of Empress Catherine of Russia, one of many friends. He arrived in Paris with a Russian passport, and the doors of all the chancelleries of Europe were open to him.
It’s a romantic story, with such a “period” air that it sounds like an opera. O’Higgins was the natural son of a Spanish viceroy, a soldier of fortune of Irish descent, who had been governor of Chile. Miranda made it a point to look into O’Higgins’s family background when he realized that the young man could be very useful to the insurrection of Spain’s American colonies. Someone has told the story of the exact moment when Miranda told the young O’Higgins the secret of his birth and plunged him into insurgent action. The young revolutionary fell to his knees and, throwing his arms around Miranda, sobbed out the promise to leave immediately for his country, Chile, and lead the rebellions against Spanish power there. O’Higgins was the one who won the final battles against colonial rule and is considered the founder of our republic.
Miranda was taken prisoner by the Spaniards and died in the horrible La Carraca prison, in Cádiz. The body of this former general of the French Revolution and teacher of revolutionaries was bundled into a sack and thrown into the sea from the top of the prison wall.
Exiled by his countrymen, San Martín died a lonely old man in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France.
O’Higgins, Chile’s liberator, died in Peru, far from everything he loved, banished by the creole landowning class, which quickly took over the revolution.
On my way through Lima a short time ago, in Peru’s Museum of History, I discovered some paintings done by General O’Higgins in his final years. All those paintings have Chile as their theme. He painted spring in Chile, the leaves and the flowers in September.
This September I have sat down to remember the names, the events, the loves, and the sorrows of that age of insurrections. A century later the peoples are stirring again, and a turbulent current of wind and fury is waving the flags. Everything has changed since those far-off years, but history goes on its way and a new spring fills out the interminable spaces of our America.
ANDRÉS BELLO
We came from the tempestuous sea to the north. The sky turned blue, the air soft and warm.
The ship that would take me to my fatherland would touch American soil. Guayra, in Venezuela, would be our first port of call.
For an American, no country can be a substitute for the continent, we know its almost always bloody history, the popular music of all its peoples lulls and enchants us. The fruits we love are here.
I was readying myself to reach Venezuela. At the doors of the university in Santiago stands the finest monument in all of Chile: a seated man with a stern face. He incarnates, for the younger generations, the timeworn ideals of liberty and independence that gave birth to the sister republics. This marble statue, darkened beautifully by the sun, rain, and Chilean weather, represents a political writer, a professor of great intelligence. His name is Andrés Bello, he was a friend of Bolívar’s, Venezuelan by birth, first rector of the university of my fatherland.
As I approached Guayra I could make out, amid the ragged green coastline, the marble gaze of Andrés Bello. That gaze that accompanied my student struggles, my first verses, my first loves. That Venezuelan who founded in London the greatest literary and scientific journal of revolutionary romanticism in Spanish was for us, and continues to be for many Chileans, the unity of the two republics, separated by a vast expanse of the American continent, but unified in a single longing for liberation. The Venezuelan Bello gave deep meaning and structure to the new Chilean Republic. He wrote the laws, inspired by the ideas of the French Revolution; he founded the study of sciences and letters in this country of mine, which had only just emerged from the shadows of colonialism.
My personal story is, in a certain way, conjoined to that statue on the streets of Santiago.
Bello was not a brilliant poet. The politician, the legislator, the scientist in him predominated, but his literary works, particularly his verses, were full of love for the American soil, for our mountains and our rivers. Bello tried to give a national meaning to literature at the dawn of America’s independence. This tradition was forgotten, and with the enrichment of the bourgeoisie, a cosmopo
litan literature, European in outlook, came to stand in for it almost entirely. When I wrote my Canto general, my aim was to restore to Latin American poetry its multinational character, to return, in other words, to the path marked out by the great Venezuelan.
And now there appeared from the blue of the sea, green and brilliant like an aquamarine beryl, the coast of Venezuela, fatherland of Bolívar and Bello.
RECABARREN
Recabarren and Lafertte form part of that narrow group of Chileans who make up the nation’s soul, the nationality itself. By dictating that popular struggle would strive definitively for greater dignity, well-being, and culture for the workers in Chile, these patriots helped the people gain due consideration in our history.
That was their labor, as patriots and Communists.
Even now, it is impossible to summarize the life and works of Luis Emilio Recabarren.
Any search for a fighter so powerful, of such colossal stature, in the political and social history of the American continent would be in vain. There is no other titan like Recabarren, not in North America, not in Central America, not in South America.
His figure towers like a summit over the American panorama. And yet his traits will forever leave their impress on the struggles of the Chilean people. Turbulent, grandiose warriors like Emiliano Zapata in Mexico or Sandino in Nicaragua impressed insurrection on the souls of the people to the north with gunpowder and blood.
It is right that they be recalled with veneration for their deeds and daring.
Recabarren knew our fatherland like none other. He, too, is a grandiose hero: but he is a hero of organization. He is the shaper of the conscience of the masses: an indefatigable agitator. But his agitation walks toward a single point: the organized action of the people. He is the first in the Americas to bring unions and syndicates to life from nothing, to make them multiply, give them new life in this land of destruction, sacrifice, and massacre.
The bourgeois governments saw for the first time the people before them, pounding the table and demanding their rights. The social reforms of the first Alessandri are the direct consequence of the tenacious organizing, the revolutionary morality of Recabarren.
We all know that Recabarren systematically created the workers’ press.
But do you know what it means to publish a newspaper dedicated to the struggle, and what it meant to do so before 1920?
To publish it is to plan it, to write it, to print it on underground presses, to publicize it, to send it out to one man at a time, to pass it from hand to hand, to finance it without resources—without sources beyond solidarity. And solidarity must be created, must be sown in the sandy soil of indifference and under the threat of implacable reprisal.
* * *
Recabarren founded dozens of newspapers in these conditions. Because he understood the power of the written word, as he understood personal contact with the great masses of workers.
In the Norte Chico, my comrades took me once to see an old printing press that was still producing a small daily for the party. It was ancient, a museum piece, but it still worked. There were tremendous dents in its rollers. I asked what had caused such damage. They told me that less than half a century before, the police had raided the place. The press was destroyed, the type cases were dumped out in the street, and the building was set alight and destroyed. But the old press was still running, still defending the cause of the people.
I passed my hand over those old wounds, and when they touched that metal, I felt I was touching Recabarren’s soul and his unbreakable legacy.
LAFERTTE
For many, he was Comrade Lafertte. For others, Elías. For me he was and will always remain in my memory Don Elías.
I learned many things from him. I have the feeling that before I met him, I had learned man’s virtues only halfway. I had learned rectitude halfway, simplicity halfway. I had halfway acquired a sense of dignity. Walking through the pampa with Don Elías, I was able to see a man simple through and through, to come to know a completely upright human being, to befriend a person of absolute dignity.
This is a rare lesson, a select one, that life and that the party conferred on me.
Another thing Don Elías taught me, because he was a splendid teacher without knowing it, was love for the party. During the hundreds of times we spoke, in circumstances harsh or happy, with the multitudes from the pampas, my love for the party grew, this Communist sentiment I carry inside me with pride and humility grew.
I learned from him that a man, however eminent others might think him, must bow down to the law of struggle, must take on the hopes of his fellow man, must become a living cell of the party. Our own freedom is important, but human liberation is more so.
Don Elías never believed one could be a Communist outside of the party. He was a great personality, and therefore highly disciplined.
There, on the sands of Tarapacá or the mineral heights of Antofagasta, we accompanied each other, walking and talking.
The party had been born there, on the cruel plains, and there I could see the capacity for suffering and heroism of my companions in the struggle. Sometimes we talked facing the machine guns. The strike movements spread. Bad salaries, bitter life, the marvelous children of the pampas growing up in those desolate backwaters with no possibility of culture.
I saw how he tore the saltpeter from the sandy crust, how he descended into the mine shaft, how he reemerged later like a phantom of sweat and pain. Sitting at the table in Iquique with Don Elías, I wrote the sonnet “Saltpeter,” which he memorized.
Many and various are the stories and anecdotes, some of them sorrowful, others scintillating, that emerge from the agitated, agitating lives of Recabarren and Lafertte.
How can one forget the way, chased down by the police of the imperialist companies, unable to gather the workers to speak with them, Recabarren showed the inexhaustible resources of his intelligence. Immediately they gathered in the tunnels of the abandoned mines as though in solitary cemeteries. And when the English saltpeter company prohibited any workers’ protests in the pampa, presuming that their concession took in the whole of the territory, Recabarren had the people there gather between the tracks of the train that crossed the pampa.
“This land, at least, doesn’t belong to them, because it’s the property of the state railroad,” he said, and so, in the narrow space between the rails, the men listened to his words in one long line.
I don’t want these evocations to give the idea that our great comrades were beings lacking in humor or personalities that only lived with their faces turned to the sublime.
Recabarren was gifted with humor and joy, with humanity and tenderness. With Lafertte, much younger, he used to crack jokes and fool around, laughing uproariously at the childish ingenuousness and outlandish ideas of his younger friend.
Don Elías told me that in his first conversations with Recabarren, the theory of the transmigration of souls came up.
“What is that, then, tell me what it’s about, what’s this theory consist of?” Lafertte asked.
“It’s a theory from the Orient. In India they believe that after death, man’s soul occupies the body of an animal, transforming into an elephant, a tortoise, a bird, or a fish.” Such was Recabarren’s answer.
Lafertte remained there lost in thought, not knowing if Recabarren was making fun of him.
Recabarren asked him: “So what do you want to turn into after you die? What animal would you like to become if that theory is true?”
Lafertte responded: “I’d like to turn into a donkey, then, and when I walked by you, I’d give you a kick.”
Recabarren answered him sardonically: “Elías, why would you want to stay in the same family?”
PRESTES
No Communist leader in America has had such a hazardous and extraordinary life as Luis Carlos Prestes, a Brazilian political and military hero. His true life and his legend long ago hurdled ideological barriers, and he has become a living embodiment of the h
eroes of former times. And so, when I received an invitation in Isla Negra to visit Brazil and meet Prestes, I promptly accepted. Besides, I learned that no other foreigner had been invited, and this flattered me. I felt that I was somehow attending a resurrection from the dead.
Prestes had just been freed after more than ten years of detention. These long confinements are nothing exceptional in the “free world.” My friend Nazim Hikmet the poet spent thirteen or fourteen years in a Turkish prison. As I write these memoirs, six or seven Communists have been entombed in Paraguay for twelve years, with no communication whatever with the outside world. Prestes’s German-born wife was turned over to the Gestapo by the Brazilian dictatorship. The Nazis chained her up aboard the ship taking her to martyrdom. She gave birth to a girl, who lives with her father today, rescued from the teeth of the Gestapo by Doña Leocadia Prestes, the leader’s indefatigable mother. Then, after giving birth in a prison yard, Luis Carlos Prestes’s wife was beheaded by the Nazis. All those martyred lives would guarantee that Prestes was never forgotten during his long years in prison.
I was in Mexico when his mother died. She had traveled all over the world, demanding her son’s freedom. General Lázaro Cárdenas, ex-President of the Mexican Republic, telegraphed the Brazilian dictator, requesting a few days of freedom for Prestes, to attend his mother’s funeral. In his message, President Cárdenas personally guaranteed Prestes’s return to jail. Getúlio Vargas’s answer was negative.
I shared the world’s indignation and wrote an elegy to Doña Leocadia, bringing in the memory of her absent son and vehemently denouncing the tyrant. I read it at the tomb of the noble lady who had knocked in vain at the doors of the world for her son’s liberation. My poem began on a sober note: