The Complete Memoirs

by Pablo Neruda

  When I entered with the dog, Rafael immediately christened it “Mist” because it looked to be steeped in that mysterious substance. Down it sat in the middle of the room, object of the poets’ adoration, that strange dog that was natural and necessary from that point forward, there amid the arbitrary, abstract sculptures in stone and iron by Alberto Sánchez that filled the Alberti León household.

  Mist, with that name and that sylvatic hair, became Rafael’s unforgettable dog and abiding companion, helping him on his strolls through the street and even when he wrote his poems, because a dog like that, which materializes out of the night, is good for everything. They only separated with the coming of the war, which took so much away from us and left Rafael bereft of his Spain and his dog named Mist.

  It may be that was all I ever gave, my whole life long, to Rafael Alberti, poet of the shores of Puerto de Santa María, of heroic Madrid, of fertile exile.

  What Rafael gave me in those long, long years, and what I owe him, is another matter. I have spoken of it occasionally, in more than one poem.

  Is it possible that this is everything? It is already a lot. And yet I could have owed him much more. And that is what I would have wished for.

  Now that he is turning seventy, ahead of me, but not by much, as age is nipping at our heels, it should be said that when they emigrated, and I brought him and his beloved to American soil, I had arranged for them to go to my country, but they got lost amid the brilliance of Buenos Aires.

  All these long years would have indebted me deeply to Rafael and to her. They both have the gift of light, and of bringing happiness as no others can.

  Rafael is radiant. I would have owed him for these years of friendship and that joy he knows how to provoke. I am a territorial type, imbued with the black light of the regions of my birth, the Antarctic south, the rain of the great forests, the volcanoes that form the cold diadem of my fatherland. For me, Rafael is a window opening onto honey, onto the open space of his florid origins.

  With no one else do I enjoy myself so much as with Rafael. Perhaps Federico García Lorca, our brother in common, made me laugh as Rafael does. Laugh with pure laughter, with that laughter as needful as bread and fruit. The two of them, so different, have never lived far from my heart. Until one of them was murdered by the other’s enemies.

  But now I am speaking of the one still alive, of Rafael Alberti, who remains resplendent, jubilant, and combative. Because his perfect personality, like the grave combat that has been his life, continues and shall continue to be joined to the exemplary transparency of his immortal poetry.

  NAZIS IN CHILE

  Once again I returned to my country, third-class. In Latin America there were no eminent writers, like Céline, Drieu La Rochelle, or Ezra Pound, who turned traitor to serve Fascism, but there was a strong Fascist movement nurtured, with or without financial aid, by Hitlerism. Groups sprang up everywhere whose members dressed like storm troopers and raised their arm in the Fascist salute. And they weren’t just small groups. The old feudal oligarchies of the continent sided, and still side, with anti-Communism of any kind, whether it came from Germany or the creole ultra-left. What’s more, let’s remember that people of German descent make up the bulk of the population in some parts of Chile, Brazil, and Mexico. Those areas were easily seduced by Hitler’s meteoric rise and by the fabled millennium of German greatness.

  More than once, in those days of Hitler’s resounding victories, I literally had to walk through a street, in some small village or town in the south of Chile, under forests of flags bearing the swastika. Once, in a small southern town, I was forced to pay an involuntary tribute to the Führer in order to use the telephone. The German owner of the establishment, which had the only telephone in town, had managed to place the instrument so that, to take the receiver off the hook, you had to raise your arm to a portrait of Hitler, whose arm was also raised.

  I was editor of the magazine Aurora de Chile. All its literary weapons (we had no others) were aimed at the Nazis, who were swallowing country after country. Hitler’s ambassador to Chile donated books, by authors of the so-called neo-German culture, to the National Library. We countered by asking our readers to send us German books that were faithful to the real Germany, the Germany banned by Hitler. It was a momentous experience. I received death threats. And many neatly wrapped packages arrived with books smeared with filth. We also received whole collections of Der Stürmer, a pornographic periodical that was sadistic and anti-Semitic, edited by Julius Streicher, deservedly hanged in Nuremberg years later. German-language editions of Heinrich Heine, Thomas Mann, Anna Seghers, Einstein, Arnold Zweig also trickled in. And when we had nearly five hundred volumes, we took them to the National Library.

  We were in for a surprise. The National Library had padlocked its doors to us.

  Then we organized a march and entered the university’s hall of honor carrying pictures of the Reverend Niemöller and Carl von Ossietzky. Some kind of ceremonial act was taking place, presided over by Don Miguel Cruchaga Tocornal, the Foreign Minister. We set the books and portraits down carefully on the speakers’ dais. The battle was won. The books were accepted.

  ISLA NEGRA

  I made up my mind to throw myself into my writing with more devotion and energy. My visit to Spain had given me added strength and maturity. The bitterness in my poetry had to end. The brooding subjectivity of my Veinte poemas de amor, the painful moodiness of my Residencia en la tierra were coming to a close. In them, I now believed, I had struck a vein, not in rocks underground, but in the pages of books. Can poetry serve our fellow men? Can it find a place in man’s struggles? I had already done enough tramping over the irrational and the negative. I had to pause and find the road to humanism, outlawed from contemporary literature but deeply rooted in the aspirations of mankind.

  I started work on my Canto general.

  For this, I needed a place to work. I found a stone house facing the ocean, in a place nobody knew about, Isla Negra. Its owner, a Spanish socialist of long standing, a sea captain, Don Eladio Sobrino, was building it for his family but agreed to sell it to me. How could I buy it? I submitted a projected Canto general, but it was turned down by Editorial Ercilla, my publisher at the time. In 1939, with the help of another publisher, who reimbursed the owner of the house directly, I was finally able to get my house on Isla Negra to work in.

  I felt a pressing need to write a central poem that would bring together the historical events, the geographical situations, the life and struggles of our peoples. Isla Negra’s wild coastal strip, with its turbulent ocean, was the place to give myself passionately to the writing of my new song.

  “BRING ME SPANIARDS”

  But life wrested me away almost at once.

  The chilling news of the Spanish exodus reached Chile. More than five hundred thousand men and women, combatants and civilians, had crossed the French border. In France, under pressure from reactionary forces, Léon Blum’s government herded them into concentration camps, dispersed them to fortresses and prisons, massed them together in its African possessions near the Sahara.

  In Chile the government had changed. The vicissitudes of the Spanish people had brought fresh strength to Chile’s popular forces and we had a progressive government now.

  Chile’s Popular Front government decided to send me to France on the noblest mission I have ever undertaken: to get Spaniards out of their French prisons and send them to my country. And so, like a radiant light from America, my poetry would spread among throngs of human beings burdened with suffering and heroic like no other people. My poetry would become one with material assistance from America, which, by taking in the Spaniards, would be paying an age-old debt.

  Virtually an invalid, just recovering from an operation and with one leg in a cast—such was my health at the time—I left my haven and went to see the President of the Republic. Don Pedro Aguirre Cerda received me warmly. “Yes, bring me thousands of Spaniards. We have work for all of them. Bring me fis
hermen; bring me Basques, Castilians, people from Extremadura.”

  A few days later I left for France, still in my cast, to fetch Spaniards to Chile. I had a specific mission. My appointment papers stated that I was consul in charge of the immigration of the Spaniards. I showed up at the Chilean Embassy in Paris flashing my credentials.

  My country’s government and political situation were not what they had been, but the Embassy in Paris was still the same. The idea of sending Spaniards to Chile infuriated our smartly dressed diplomats. They set me up in an office next to the kitchen, they harassed me in every way they could, even going so far as to deny me writing paper. The wave of undesirables was already beginning to reach the doors of the Embassy: wounded veterans, jurists and writers, professionals who had lost their practice, all kinds of skilled workers.

  They had to make their way against hell and high water to get to my office, and since it was on the fourth floor, our Embassy people thought up a fiendish scheme: they cut off elevator service. Many of the Spaniards had war wounds and were survivors of the African concentration camps; it broke my heart to see them come up to the fourth floor with such painful effort, while the cruel officials gloated over my difficulties.

  A DIABOLICAL CHARACTER

  To complicate my life, the Popular Front government sent me word of the arrival of a chargé d’affaires. This made me very happy, because a new department head at the Embassy would be able to rid me of the many stumbling blocks the old diplomatic personnel had put in my way to impede the immigration of the Spaniards. A slender youngster with a pince-nez that gave him the air of an old bookworm came out of the Gare Saint-Lazare. He must have been twenty-four or twenty-five. In a high-pitched, effeminate voice broken by emotion, he told me that he accepted me as his boss and that the sole purpose of his coming was to act as my helper in the great task of sending to Chile “the glorious vanquished of the war.” My satisfaction at having a new assistant continued, but this character made me uncomfortable. In spite of the adulation and excessive attention he lavished on me, something about him did not ring true. I found out later that, with the triumph of the Popular Front in Chile, he had done an abrupt about-face, leaving the Knights of Columbus, that Jesuit organization, to become a member of the Communist youth movement, which was avidly recruiting members and was delighted with his intellectual qualifications. Arellano Marín wrote plays and articles, was an erudite lecturer, and seemed to know everything.

  World War II was almost upon us. Paris waited every night for the German bombings, and every home had instructions on how to protect itself from the aerial attacks. I went home to Villennes-sur-Seine every evening, to a small house facing the river, which I left with a heavy heart every morning to return to the Embassy.

  Within a few days the new arrival, Arellano Marín, had assumed an importance I had never attained. I had introduced him to Negrín, Alvarez del Vayo, and a few leaders of the Spanish parties. A week later the new functionary was on familiar terms with almost all of them. Spanish leaders whom I didn’t know went in and out of his office. Their extensive conversations were a mystery to me. From time to time he called me over to show me a diamond or an emerald he had bought for his mother, or to confide in me about a very cute blonde who made him spend more than he should in the Paris cabarets. Arellano Marín became a close friend of the Aragons’, especially of Elsa, when the Embassy took them in to protect them from anti-Communist repression; he regaled them with attentions and little presents. This person’s psychology must have intrigued Elsa Triolet, for she mentions him in one or two of her novels.

  I gradually realized that his greed for luxury and wealth was growing before my very eyes, which have never been too wide-awake. He slipped easily from one make of automobile to another and rented luxurious homes. And each day the cute blonde seemed to be driving him more and more out of his mind with her demands.

  I had to go to Brussels to attend to a critical problem involving the emigrants. As I was leaving the unpretentious hotel where I was staying, I literally ran into my new assistant, the elegant Arellano Marín. He made a loud fuss over me and invited me to dine that same day.

  We met at his hotel, the most expensive in Brussels. He had had orchids placed on our table. Naturally, he ordered caviar and champagne. During the meal I was silent and preoccupied, listening to my host rave on about his lavish plans, his upcoming pleasure trips, the jewels he had bought. I was listening, I felt, to a nouveau riche with certain symptoms of insanity; his penetrating eyes, his cocksure pronouncements—all of it made me sick. I decided to take a drastic step and tell him openly what was on my mind. I suggested that we have coffee in his room, because I had something to say to him.

  As we were on our way upstairs, two strangers walked up to him at the foot of the grand staircase. He told them in Spanish to wait for him, he would be down in a few minutes.

  Once we were in his room, I thought no more about the coffee. Ours was a strained conversation. “I believe you’re heading down the wrong road,” I said to him. “You are becoming money-mad. Maybe you’re still too young to understand this, but our political obligations are a very serious matter. The fate of thousands of immigrants is in our hands, and this can’t be taken lightly. I don’t want to know anything about your affairs, but I do want to give you a piece of advice. There are a lot of people who say, at the end of an unhappy life: ‘Nobody gave me advice, nobody warned me.’ That’s something you won’t be able to say. I’ve made my speech. And now I am leaving.”

  I looked at him as I said goodbye. Tears rolled down his eyes to his mouth. I could have bitten my tongue. Had I gone too far? I went to him and put my hand on his shoulder. “Don’t cry!”

  “It’s just that I’m furious,” he said.

  I left without another word. I returned to Paris and never saw him again. When they saw me coming down, the two strangers who had been waiting for him hurried up to his room.

  The conclusion of this story came much later, in Mexico, when I was Chilean Consul General there. One day I was invited to lunch by a group of Spanish refugees and two of them recognized me.

  “Where do you know me from?” I asked.

  “We are the two fellows who went up to speak to your countryman Arellano Marín when you came down from his room in Brussels.”

  “Oh, and what happened then? I’ve always been curious about it.”

  They told me something extraordinary. They had found him swimming in tears, hysterical, and he had sobbed out: “I’ve just had the biggest shock of my life. Neruda has gone to turn you in to the Gestapo as dangerous Spanish Communists. I couldn’t talk him into waiting even a few hours. You have only minutes to get away. Leave your suitcases with me, I’ll watch them for you and send them on later.”

  “The bastard!” I exclaimed. “Thank heavens you managed to escape from the Germans, anyway.”

  “Yes, but the suitcases contained ninety thousand dollars that belonged to the Spanish workers’ unions, and we never set eyes on that money again.”

  Still later, I heard that this diabolical character had made an extended pleasure tour of the Near East with his Parisian lover. Incidentally, the cute blonde who had been so demanding turned out to be a blond male student from the Sorbonne.

  Sometime afterward, his resignation from the Communist Party made news in Chile. “Strong ideological differences compel me to make this decision,” he said in his letter to the newspapers.

  A GENERAL AND A POET

  Each man who emerged from the defeat or from captivity was a novel with chapters, tears, laughter, loneliness, and idylls. Some of these stories really amazed me.

  I met an air force general, tall and lean, a military-academy man with all kinds of titles. There he was, roaming the Paris streets, a quixotic shadow from the Spanish soil, old and straight as the poplars of Castile. When Franco’s army split the Republican zone in two, this general, Herrera, had to go the rounds in pitch darkness, inspect defenses, give orders right and left. On the
blackest nights, he flew his airplane, with all its lights out, over enemy territory. Every now and again, gunfire from the Franco side barely missed his craft. But the general became bored with flying in the dark. So he learned Braille. Once he had mastered this writing for the blind, he went on his dangerous missions reading with his fingers, while below him the fire and the pain of the civil war raged on. The general told me that he had read The Count of Monte Cristo and was just getting into The Three Musketeers, when his night reading in Braille was interrupted by defeat and exile.

  Another story I recall with deep feeling is the story of the Andalusian poet Pedro Garfias, who ended up in exile in Scotland at the castle of some lord. The castle was always empty, and Garfias, a restless Andalusian, went to the local tavern every day; speaking no English, only a gypsy Spanish that even I could not always understand, he drank his solitary beer in silence. This wordless customer attracted the tavernkeeper’s interest, and one night, when the other drinkers had left, the tavernkeeper begged him to stay and they went on drinking silently next to the hearth, whose fire sputtered, doing the talking for the two of them.