by Pablo Neruda
Señora, you have made our America greater.
You gave it a pure river whose waters flow abundantly,
a giant tree with infinite roots,
a son worthy of his deeply rich country.
As the poem progressed, however, it turned on the Brazilian despot more and more violently.
I read it everywhere, and it was reproduced in leaflets and postcards that reached all parts of the continent.
During a stopover in Panama once, I included it in one of my readings, after I had finished reciting my love poems. The hall was jammed and the heat of the isthmus had me perspiring. I had just started to read my invectives against Vargas when I felt my throat drying up. I broke off and reached for a glass I had near me. At that moment, I saw someone dressed in white hurrying toward the rostrum. Thinking it was a general helper in the hall, I held out the glass to let him fill it with water. But the man in white brushed it aside indignantly and addressed the gathering, shouting excitedly: “I am the Brazilian ambassador. I want to protest: Prestes is nothing but a common criminal…”
At these words, the audience cut him off with ear-splitting whistles. A black student, with shoulders as broad as a wardrobe, got up in the middle of the hall and, with his hands threateningly aimed at the ambassador’s throat, thrust his way toward the rostrum. I rushed in to protect the diplomat, and luckily I managed to get him out of the place without any further damage to his high office.
With such credentials, my trip from Isla Negra to Brazil to take part in the popular celebration seemed natural to the Brazilians. I was stunned when I saw the crowd packed into Pacaembú Stadium, in São Paulo. I’m told there were more than 130,000 people. Their heads looked very tiny in the vast circle of the stadium. Small of stature, Prestes, who was at my side, seemed to me a Lazarus who had just walked out of the grave, neat and dressed up for the occasion. He was lean and so white that his skin looked transparent, with that strange whiteness prisoners have. His intense look, the huge violet circles under his eyes, his extremely delicate features, his grave dignity, were all a reminder of the long sacrifice his life had been. Yet he spoke as calmly as a general after a victory.
I read a poem in his honor, written a few hours earlier. Jorge Amado changed only the Spanish word “albañiles,” bricklayers, for the Portuguese “pedreiros.” Contrary to my fears, the poem read in Spanish was understood by the multitude. After each line of my slow reading, there was an explosion of applause from the Brazilians. That applause had a deep resonance in my poetry. A poet who reads his poems to 130,000 people is not the same man, and cannot keep on writing in the same way, after such an experience.
* * *
At last I find myself face-to-face with legendary Luis Carlos Prestes. He is waiting for me in the home of some friends of his. All of Prestes’s features—the small stature, the leanness, the whiteness of onionskin paper—take on the precision of a miniature. His words also, and perhaps his thinking, seem to match his physical make-up.
For a man of his reserve, he is very friendly with me. I believe he is giving me the kind of benevolent treatment we poets frequently receive from others, a tolerance half-tender and half-evasive, very much like that adopted by grownups toward children.
Prestes invited me to lunch one day the following week. Then one of those disasters occurred to me that can only be blamed on fate or my irresponsibility. It so happens that, although the Portuguese language has its Saturday and Sunday, it does not single out the other days of the week as Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc., but with devilish names like segunda-feira, têrça-feira, quarta-feira, skipping, however, the first feira. I get all tangled up in those feiras, and never know which day is which.
I went to spend a few hours at the beach with a lovely Brazilian friend, ever mindful, however, that Prestes had set the luncheon date for the next day. On the quarta-feira I discovered that Prestes had waited for me in vain on the têrça-feira, with the table set, while I idled away the hours on the beach at Ipanema. He looked for me high and low, but no one knew where I was. In deference to my special tastes, the ascetic captain had ordered excellent wines that were difficult to obtain in Brazil. We were to have had lunch alone.
Every time I remember this story, I could die of shame. I have been able to learn just about everything in my life, except the names of the days of the Portuguese week.
CODOVILLA
When I was about to leave Santiago, I heard that Victorio Codovilla wanted to talk to me. I went to see him. We were always good friends, right up to his death.
Codovilla had been a member of the Third International and possessed all the faults of the time. He was authoritarian, a personalist, and always thought he was right. He imposed his judgment on others easily and cut through their will like a knife going through butter. He was always in a hurry when he came to meetings, giving the impression that he had thought out everything and had all the answers ready, and seemed to listen to the opinions of others out of politeness and with a certain impatience; then he would issue peremptory orders. His tremendous ability and his knack for summing things up were overpowering. He worked without respite, imposing that same rhythm on his fellows, and always gave me the feeling that he was one of the great political thinking machines of the day.
He always showed a very special feeling of understanding and deference toward me. This Italian—transformed and utilitarian in public life—was human to a fault, with a profound artistic sense that made him understand errors and weaknesses in men of culture. But this did not stop him from being implacable, and at times deadly, in political life.
He was worried, he told me, about Prestes’s misinterpretation of Perón’s dictatorship. Codovilla believed Perón and his movement were an offshoot of European Fascism. No anti-Fascist could sit back quietly and accept Perón’s increasing power or his repeated repressive actions. Codovilla and the Argentine Communist Party believed, at this time, that insurrection was the only answer to Perón, and wanted me to talk with Prestes about this. “It’s not a mission,” he told me, but I sensed some preoccupation behind his usual cocksure front.
After the Pacaembu rally, I had a long talk with Prestes. It was impossible to find two men who were more dissimilar, more diametrically opposed. A hefty man brimming with health, the Italo-Argentine invariably seemed to take over a whole room, a whole table, everything around him. Thin and ascetic, Prestes looked frail enough for a puff of wind to sweep him out the window. Yet I dis- covered that, behind their appearances, the two men were equally tough.
“There’s no Fascism in Argentina. Perón is a caudillo but not a Fascist,” Prestes said, answering my questions. “Where are the brown shirts? The Fascist militias?
“Besides, Codovilla is wrong. Lenin says that insurrection is not something to play with. And you can’t always be declaring war without soldiers, with only volunteers to count on.”
Deep down, these two men, so different from each other, were inflexible. One of them, probably Prestes, was right about these things, but the dogmatism of both these admirable revolutionaries often built up an atmosphere around them that I found impossible to breathe.
I should also add that Codovilla was a man of vitality. I was very much in favor of his fight against the hypocrisy and puritanism of the Communist era. Our great Chilean of the old-time party days, Lafertte, was an obsessively militant teetotaler. Old Lafertte also growled constantly against love affairs and flirtations, outside the pale of the Civil Registry, between men and women of the party. Codovilla defeated our limited teacher with his own limitless vital capacity.
MAYAKOVSKY
In my youth, I read with goose bumps that story by Chamisso about the man who sold his shadow. For me, the most dreadful part was when, the transaction complete, the Devil knelt down and carefully rolled up the shadow the man had sold him.
I have always had the feeling that a number of great poets, in one way or another, have sold the shadow that accompanied them; that it was cut from the floor
, rolled up, compressed, torn from its proprietor by various devils, among them passing fads, lethargy and lack of vision, the literary salon, even, at times, slow, steady bribery on the part of the bourgeoisie.
From Mayakovksy we have inherited his incomplete poetry and his extremely vast shadow.
His is the image of the poet who will not sell his shadow, who will make use of it his whole life long, wrapping himself in it like a cape and sleeping in the shelter of that personal shadow that made his every act and dream stand out in black and white with the dramatic light and darkness of his irreplaceable personality.
His poetry, from without, strikes us as incomplete, because death cut it short with its dreadful shears. In the meantime, the Soviet Union grew prodigiously. We need Mayakovsky’s poem about Valentina, the cosmonaut, the woman who went further than all other women in humanity’s history. Only Mayakovsky would achieve those tones like gunshots to celebrate the spaceship. No one will write the poems he never managed to write himself, because he had the imperious elegance of a cosmonaut and even his poems of love and combat possess cosmic substances. He snatched from his era so many new materials, with the craving of a conquistador and that eloquence which is his great attribute, and it blew through poetry and altered it like the passing over of a storm.
If more than one poet corresponds to each revolution, because poetry is electrified in human movement, still, not all revolutions have their body, blood, and soul in a single poet, as was the case with Mayakovsky. The great human palpitation of the October Revolution remained alive in his poetry, and his songs are events, memorable occurrences that support us. In earlier revolutions, a poet offered a song, many others gave more or less accomplished sonorous support. Mayakovksy confided his turbulent soul, which was consumed from top to bottom, sacrificing his poetry like a shimmering material for the construction of socialism.
That is why Mayakovksy’s shadow is so incalculable and doesn’t diminish, but grows.
His shadow passes the equator and arrives like the tail of a comet to the lost outskirts of Latin America, illuminating the conscience of the young writer. This shadow emerges from the library, noisily casting down countless volumes of dogmatic words. It bursts into the streetfights and enters like a subtle influence into the conduct of beings. This shadow is at times like a sword and at others like an orange, it has the color of summer.
The poets of my generation tried to leave Mayakovsky on the shelf like a good classic, assigned to his proper place. But his bad manners make him step out every day, joining with us in the combats and victories of our time. For Mayakovsky was, above all, a good companion.
A great companion for all latitudes, for all races, for all people, for all poets.
And a teacher for the poets of all latitudes, of all races, of all peoples.
STALIN
Many people have thought that I am or have been an important politician. I don’t know where this famous legend got started. One day I was frankly surprised to see my picture, as tiny as a stamp, included in a two-page spread in Life magazine in which it had put on display the leaders of world Communism, for the benefit of its readers. My likeness, stuck in somewhere between Prestes and Mao Tse-tung, seemed a funny joke to me, but I did not disabuse anyone, because I have always detested letters of rectification. Aside from this, it was amusing to have the C.I.A. fall into this error despite the five million agents it has throughout the world.
The longest contact I have maintained with any of the key figures of world socialism was during our visit to Peking. It consisted of a toast I drank with Mao Tse-tung during a ceremony. As our glasses touched, he looked at me with smiling eyes and a broad grin that was half friendly and half ironic. He held my hand in his, squeezing it a few seconds longer than customary. Then he returned to the table he had left.
On my many visits to the U.S.S.R. I saw neither Molotov nor Vishinsky nor Beria; not even Mikoyan or Litvinov, more sociable and less mysterious than the others.
I saw Stalin at a distance, more than once, always in the same spot: the platform which stands high over Red Square and is crowded with high-level leaders every year on May 1 and November 7. I spent long hours in the Kremlin, as part of the jury for the prizes that bore Stalin’s name, without ever meeting him even in a hallway. He never came to see us during our voting sessions or lunches, and he never had us called in even for a word of greeting. The prizes were always awarded unanimously, but there were times when the debate for the selection of the winning candidate was hard fought. I always had the feeling that, before the final decision was made, someone on the jury panel rushed the possible outcome of the voting to the great man to see if it had his blessing. But I really can’t recall a single time when we had any objection from him, and although he was obviously close by, I don’t recall that he ever acknowledged our presence there. Without doubt, Stalin cultivated his mysteriousness systematically; or else he was extremely timid, a man who was his own prisoner. It is possible that this trait had much to do with the strong influence Beria had over him. Beria was the only one who went in and out of Stalin’s rooms unannounced.
However, on one occasion I did have an unexpected encounter, which even now seems remarkable to me, with the Kremlin’s mystery man. The Aragons—Louis and Elsa—and I were on our way to the Kremlin to take part in the meeting that would decide the Stalin Prizes that year. Heavy snowstorms held us up in Warsaw. We would not make our appointment on time. One of the Russians with us radioed ahead to Moscow, in Russian, the names of the candidates Aragon and I favored—who, by the way, were approved at the meeting. But the strange thing about this is that the Russian, who received a reply over the telephone, called me aside and surprised me by saying, “I congratulate you, Comrade Neruda. When the list of possible winners of the prize was submitted to Comrade Stalin, he exclaimed: ‘And why isn’t Neruda’s name among them?’”
The following year, I received the Stalin Prize for Peace and Friendship Among Peoples. I may have deserved it, but I still ask myself how that withdrawn man ever found out that I existed.
Around that time I heard of other similar interventions by Stalin. When the campaign against cosmopolitanism was growing more intense and the starched-collar sectarians were calling for Ehrenburg’s head, the telephone rang one morning in the home of the author of Julio Jurenito. Lyuba answered. A vaguely familiar voice asked: “Is Ilya Gregorievich there?”
“That depends,” Lyuba answered. “Who are you?”
“This is Stalin,” the voice said.
“For you, Ilya, some joker,” Lyuba told Ehrenburg.
But when he got to the telephone, the writer recognized Stalin’s well-known voice: “I spent the night reading your book The Fall of Paris. I am calling to tell you to keep on writing books as interesting as this one, dear Ilya Gregorievich.”
Maybe that unexpected call made the great Ehrenburg’s long life possible.
Another case: Mayakovsky was already dead, but his obstinate reactionary enemies attacked the poet’s memory tooth and nail, determined to wipe him off the map of Soviet literature. Then something happened that upset these designs. His beloved Lili Brik wrote a letter to Stalin pointing out how shameful these attacks were and passionately defending Mayakovsky’s poetry. His assailants, who thought themselves invulnerable, protected by their collective mediocrity, were in for a rude jolt. On the margin of Lili Brik’s letter, Stalin noted down: “Mayakovsky is the best poet of the Soviet era.”
After that, museums and monuments sprang up in honor of Mayakovsky and many editions of his extraordinary poetry were published. His opponents froze, struck powerless by Jehovah’s trumpet blast.
I also learned that among Stalin’s papers found after his death there was a list that read: “Do not touch,” in his own handwriting. That list was headed by the composer Shostakovich, followed by other eminent names: Eisenstein, Pasternak, Ehrenburg, etc.
* * *
Many have believed me a die-hard Stalinist. Fascists and reac
tionaries have described me as a lyric interpreter of Stalin. I am not particularly put out by this. Any judgment is possible in a diabolically confused era.
The private tragedy for us Communists was to face the fact that, in several aspects of the Stalin problem, the enemy was right.
This revelation, which was staggering, left us in a painful state of mind. Some felt that they had been deceived. Desperately, they accepted the enemy’s reasoning and went over to its side. Others believed that the harrowing facts, implacably brought to light during the Twentieth Congress, proved the integrity of a Communist Party which survived, letting the world see the historical truth and accepting its own responsibility.
If it is really true that we all shared this responsibility, the act of denouncing those crimes led us back to self-criticism and analysis, elements essential to our doctrine, and gave us the weapons needed to prevent such horrible things from happening again.
This has been my stand: above the darkness, unknown to me, of the Stalin era, Stalin rose before my eyes, a good-natured man of principles, as sober as a hermit, a titanic defender of the Russian Revolution. Moreover, this small man with his huge moustache had become a giant in wartime. With his name on its lips, the Red Army attacked and demolished the power of Hitler’s demons.
And yet I dedicated only one of my poems to this powerful personality. It was on the occasion of his death. Anyone can find it in my collected works. The death of the Cyclops of the Kremlin had world-wide impact. The human jungle shuddered. My poem captured the feeling of that panic on earth.
A LESSON IN SIMPLICITY
Very put out about it, Gabriel García Márquez told me how some erotic passages of his marvelous One Hundred Years of Solitude had been cut in Moscow.
“That’s not right at all,” I told the publishers.