The Complete Memoirs

by Pablo Neruda

  At that time, Tomic was not only the most promising Christian-Democrat but their most attractive personality and most gifted speaker.

  Things had changed very much in 1964 when the Christian-Democrats won the elections that carried Frei to the presidency of the Republic. The campaign of the candidate who defeated Allende was based on unprecedented anti-Communist attacks, conducted with newspaper and radio warnings intended to terrorize the people. This propaganda was enough to make anybody’s hair stand on end: nuns would be shot, little boys would die run through by the bayonets of bearded men just like Fidel, little girls would be torn from their parents and shipped to Siberia. Later, from testimony given before a U.S. Senate special committee, we learned that the C.I.A. had spent twenty million dollars in that savage campaign of terror.

  Once he had been anointed President, Frei gave his only big rival in the party a Greek gift: he appointed Radomiro Tomic Chilean ambassador to the United States. Frei knew that his government would renegotiate with the American copper companies. At this time, the entire country was pleading for nationalization. Like an expert sleight-of-hand artist, Frei changed this term to “Chileanization,” and with new agreements, he insured the delivery of our major national wealth into the hands of the powerful consortiums, Kennecott and Anaconda. The economic consequences were disastrous for Chile and heartbreaking for Tomic: Frei had wiped him off the map. An ambassador of Chile to the United States who collaborated in handing over the copper would not receive the support of the Chilean people. Of the three candidates at the next election, Tomic took a poor third place.

  Shortly after resigning from his post as ambassador to the United States, at the beginning of 1968, Tomic came to see me in Isla Negra. He had recently arrived from the north and was not yet officially a candidate for the presidency. Our friendship stood firm through the political storms, and still does. But we had a hard time understanding each other this time. He wanted a wider alliance of the progressive forces to take the place of our Popular Unity, under the name of the Union of the People. This proposal was impossible; his part in the copper negotiations disqualified him with the political left. Moreover, the two major parties of the popular movement, the Communists and the socialists, had come of age and could carry a man of their own to the presidency.

  Discouraged as he was, Tomic revealed something to me before leaving my home. Andrés Zaldívar, the Christian-Democratic secretary of the Treasury, had shown him documents that proved the country’s economy was already bankrupt. “We’re heading for a fall,” Tomic told me. “The situation can’t last four more months. It’s disastrous. Zaldívar has given me the details, our bankruptcy is inevitable.”

  A month after Allende was elected, but before he took over the presidency, the same cabinet minister, Zaldívar, publicly announced the country’s imminent economic disaster, but this time he blamed it on the international repercussions of Allende’s election. That’s how history is written. At least that’s how it is written by twisted, opportunist politicians like Zaldívar.

  ALLENDE

  My country has been betrayed more than any other in our time. From the nitrate deserts, from the submarine coal mines, from the terrible heights where the copper lies buried and is extracted with inhuman labor by the hands of our people, a freedom movement of magnificent proportions sprang up. That movement raised a man named Allende to the presidency of Chile to carry out reforms and measures of justice that could not be postponed, and to rescue our national wealth from the claws of foreigners.

  Wherever he went, in the most far-off countries, the people admired our President and praised the remarkable pluralism of our government. Never in the history of the United Nations in New York had an ovation been heard like the one given the President of Chile by delegates from all over the world. Here in Chile, in the middle of enormous difficulties, a truly just society was being erected, based on our sovereignty, our national pride, and the heroism of the best of Chile’s population. On our side, on the side of the Chilean revolution, were the constitution and the law, democracy and hope.

  They had everything they wanted on their side. They had harlequins and jumping jacks, lots of clowns, terrorists with pistols and chains, phony monks and degraded members of the armed services. They all rode the merry-go-round of petty spite. Jarpa the Fascist went along, hand in hand with his nephews from “Fatherland and Freedom,” ready to break anyone’s head or spirit, as long as they recovered for themselves the huge hacienda they called Chile. With them, livening up the show, tripped a great banker and dancer, spattered with blood, González Videla, the rumba king; rumbaing from side to side, he had long ago handed his party over to the enemies of the people. Now it was Frei who was dangling his Christian-Democratic Party before the same enemies of the people, dancing to the tune these enemies played, dancing, moreover, with ex-Colonel Viaux, whose dirty work he had shared. These were the principal actors in the comedy. They had in readiness all the food they had hoarded, the “miguelitos,”1 the clubs, and bullets like those that had inflicted mortal wounds on our people in Iquique, Ránquil, Salvador, Puerto Montt, José María Caro, Frutillar, Puente Alto, and so many other places. Hernán Mery’s assassins danced with those who should have been defending his memory. They danced with a light heart, as if they could never hurt a fly. They were offended at being reproached for those “silly little details.”

  * * *

  Chile has a long civil history with few revolutions and many stable governments, all of them conservative and mediocre. Many little Presidents and only two great ones: Balmaceda and Allende. Curiously enough, both came from the same background, the moneyed class, which calls itself the aristocracy here. As men of principles bent on making a great country out of one diminished by a mediocre oligarchy, the two were steered down the same road to death. Balmaceda was driven to suicide for refusing to deliver the nitrate riches to foreign companies.

  Allende was murdered because he nationalized the other wealth of Chile’s subsoil: copper. In both cases, the Chilean oligarchy set bloody revolutions in motion. In both cases, the military played the bloodhounds. The English companies in Balmaceda’s time, the North Americans in Allende’s time instigated and financed these military actions.

  In both cases, the homes of the Presidents were sacked by orders from our distinguished “aristocrats.” Balmaceda’s rooms were smashed with axes. Allende’s home, thanks to world progress, was bombed from the air by our heroic airmen.

  Yet these two men were very different. Balmaceda was a captivating orator. His imperious nature drove him to rely more and more on himself. He was sure of the high purpose of his intentions. He was surrounded by enemies at all times. His superiority over those around him was so great, and his solitude so vast, that he ended by withdrawing into himself. The people, who should have gone to his aid, did not exist as a power, that is, were not organized. This President was doomed to behave like a visionary, a dreamer: his dream of greatness remained a dream. After his death, the rapacious foreign businessmen and our creole parliamentarians gained possession of the nitrate: for the foreigners, the property and the concessions; for the creoles, the bribe money. Once the thirty pieces of silver had been exchanged, everything returned to normal. The blood of a few thousand men of the people dried up quickly on the battlefields. The most exploited workers in the world, those in Chile’s northern regions, never stopped producing enormous quantities of pounds sterling for London.

  Allende was never a great orator. And as a statesman he never took a step without consulting his advisers. He was the anti-dictator, the democrat of principles, even in the smallest particulars. The country that fell to his lot was no longer Balmaceda’s inexperienced people; he found a powerful working class that knew what it was all about. Allende was a collective leader; although not from the popular classes, he was a product of the struggle of those classes against the paralysis and corruption of their exploiters. This makes the work Allende realized in such a short time superior to Balmaceda�
��s; going further, it is the most important achievement in the history of Chile. The nationalization of copper alone was a titanic accomplishment. As were the ending of the monopolies, the farsighted agrarian reform, and many other objectives attained under his government, whose essential nature was collective.

  Allende’s acts and works, whose value to the nation can never be obliterated, enraged the enemies of our liberation. The tragic symbolism of this crisis became clear in the bombing of the government palace; it brings to mind the blitzkrieg of the Nazi air force against defenseless foreign cities—Spanish, English, Russian. Now the same crime was being carried out again in Chile. Chilean pilots were dive-bombing the palace, which for centuries had been the center of the city’s civic life.

  I am writing these quick lines for my memoirs only three days after the unspeakable events took my great comrade President Allende to his death. His assassination was hushed up, he was buried secretly, and only his widow was allowed to accompany that immortal body. The aggressors’ version is that they found clear signs of suicide on his lifeless body. The version published abroad is different. Immediately after the aerial bombardment, the tanks went into action, many tanks, fighting heroically against a single man: the President of the Republic of Chile, Salvador Allende, who was waiting for them in his office, with no other company but his great heart, surrounded by smoke and flames.

  They couldn’t pass up such a beautiful occasion. He had to be machine-gunned because he would never have resigned from office. That body was buried secretly, in an inconspicuous spot. That corpse, followed to its grave only by a woman who carried with her the grief of the world, that glorious dead figure, was riddled and ripped to pieces by the machine guns of Chile’s soldiers, who had betrayed Chile once more.

  Farewell

  And with this, we end our journey around myself. While speaking, while being with you all, while submitting my poetry and my battles to your criteria and your hearts, I have wanted to wound no conscience and to snuff out none of your dreams. Hopefully in my words you’ve found answers to some hidden questions tucked against your breast. But I also wish for new questions, new dissatisfactions to awaken in you this evening. For the life, the joys, the heartaches of the world to enter into our house every day, knocking down the doors. Life is made of the mysterious substances of the night that dies and the dawn that will be born. May there arise, for each of you, a newborn question along with every recently discovered answer. Till tomorrow, ladies and gentlemen. Till the mystery of tomorrow.

  PABLO NERUDA, “Journey Through My Poetry”

  Note

  12. CRUEL, BELOVED HOMELAND

  1 Probably devised by someone named Miguel, these are clusters of nails sharpened at both ends and bent into a curve. They are dropped along the road to puncture the tires of oncoming vehicles. —Trans.

  Editorial Note: Texts Added to This Edition

  1. JOURNEY THROUGH MY POETRY

  This text is made up of two fragments, probably the introduction and epilogue of the lecture-recital that Neruda gave in Santiago after returning to Mexico on December 8, 1943, in the tribute to him held at the Municipal Theater. The writer Fernando Alegría, who was present at the event, conveyed to Professor Hernán Loyola a spoken version of an oft-quoted affirmation of Neruda’s. “If you ask me what my poetry is, I have to tell you: I don’t know. But if you ask my poetry, it will tell you who I am.” We now publish, for the first time, the only known version in writing of this phrase: “What is my poetry? I don’t know. It would be easier to ask my poetry who am I.”

  We have included both fragments, the introduction and the epilogue, as the opening and closing paragraphs of this edition of the Memoirs.

  2. THE GIRL FROM THE JOURNEY BACK

  This text is clearly the continuation of the threshing episode at the Hernándezes’, which concludes “Childhood and Poetry,” the first part of the Memoirs. The text added here describes the return of the young poet from the place where the threshing was carried out.

  If the chapter “Love in the Wheat” describes the traditional threshing with a mare, the celebrations that follow the day’s work, and finally the sexual initiation of the young traveler, this last part, unpublished before now, tells of his return from this adventure and has a certain ironic tone. Young Neruda is traveling on horseback with a ready and willing girl. This is the moment to show off his newly acquired manhood. But a miserable trifle comes in the way of the consummation: he can’t find a place to tie up his horse.

  3. THE HORSE FROM THE SADDLER’S

  We add this text in the belief that it brings this part of the memoirs to a poignant close, describing the poet’s return to the world of his childhood, which he finds changed and, in a certain way, destroyed. The lone vestige that allows for a proper reencounter is this wooden horse, which had been part of his life as a young student.

  Matilde Urrutia, in her book My Life with Pablo Neruda, notes: “This horse was at a hardware store in Temuco. When Pablo was a schoolboy, he used to take this street and always saw it and stroked its muzzle. He lived with this horse, grew up with it, considered it something of his own. Every time we went to Temuco, he would ask the owner to sell it to him, but it was no use. Nor did the owner’s friends have any luck, insist as they might. But one day, the hardware store caught fire; the firemen arrived, and lots of people, and of course, some of Pablo’s friends were among them. Later they told us that they heard just one single shout: ‘Save Pablo’s horse! Don’t let the horse burn!’” And that was how it was rescued, it was the first thing the firemen took out. Not long afterward, they auctioned off everything that had been salvaged from the fire. The owner, knowing of Pablo’s passion for the horse, had bidders attend to raise the price. He knew Pablo wouldn’t let the horse get away from him, and he wound up paying a pretty penny for it.”

  It is currently housed in the Sala del Caballo in the house in Isla Negra, where it is one of the items from the poet’s youth on display.

  4. ROAMING IN VALPARAÍSO

  Parts of this chapter were written expressly for the memoirs; the rest draws from the article “Valparaíso,” which Neruda wrote in 1965, and which was published in German in the Swiss journal Du Atlantis, Zurich, February 1966, with photographs by Sergio Larrain. The complete version appeared in Spanish for the first time in the Obras completas of Pablo Neruda (third edition, Buenos Aires, Losada, 1968).

  For this edition of the Memoirs, the 1965 article was reordered and added to the original text, which we publish here in a new version, faithful to the original typescript, with handwritten corrections by Neruda himself. This text varies in a number of ways, principally stylistically, from the previous edition of the present work. There are also several paragraphs that were omitted, but that strike the editors as important, because in them, Neruda adopts the position of poet-memoirist—that is, a poet who remembers episodes from his life and writes his memoirs at a mature age from one of his life’s essential backdrops: Isla Negra. Here, Neruda is contemplating nostalgically the lost Valparaíso of his youth.

  5. THE SONNETS OF DARK LOVE AND THE LAST LOVE OF THE POET FEDERICO

  A handwritten note by Matilde Urrutia explains the motive for the non-publication of these texts. She says: “This article was written for the memoirs. Pablo and I talked many times about whether to include it or no. His precise words to me were: ‘Is the public sufficiently free of prejudices to accept Federico’s homosexuality without compromise to his prestige?’ That was his misgiving. I had similar doubts, and I didn’t include it in the memoirs. I leave it here, I don’t believe I have a right to destroy it.”

  6. THE GIFT OF MIST

  This text was written in 1962. On the occasion of Rafael Alberti’s sixtieth birthday, Neruda composed these lines about one of the many nights he walked from his building in Madrid to the home of the poet from Cádiz. It has been included for its interesting atmosphere of evocation: in the middle of the fog that coats the solitary streets, Neruda is follo
wed by a ghostly dog. He reaches Alberti’s home, filled with sculptures by Alberto Sánchez, and there the dog takes up its post. Alberti tells the same story in his memoirs, La arboleda perdida, where he recalls that Neruda gave him “that big Irish sheepdog with the tangled hair and a wounded leg that he found one foggy night in Madrid.”

  7. PORTRAIT OF AN ARRIVISTE

  At the bottom of the first page of this article about González Videla, Neruda’s great political enemy, the following annotation in pencil appears: “This piece was written for the memoirs, and mysteriously got lost.” Further, the following note is written in ink on a piece of typing paper: “This chapter/this piece was written for the memoirs, it mysteriously got lost, it was found in the search for originals of this book.” The annotation is most likely Matilde’s, and the book she mentions is, without a doubt, El fin del viaje (The End of the Journey), an anthology of Neruda’s unpublished works that she prepared in 1981.

  8. TO PUSHKIN