by Pablo Neruda
This invitation became a ritual. Each night, Garfias was welcomed by the bartender, lonely like him, with no wife or family. Little by little their tongues loosened up. Garfias told him about the Spanish war, with exclamations, oaths, and curses that were typically Andalusian. The other man listened in religious silence, not understanding a word, of course.
The Scotsman, in turn, poured out his miseries, probably the story of a wife who had deserted him, the exploits of his sons, whose pictures in military uniform decorated the fireplace. I say “probably,” because during the long months that these strange conversations lasted, Garfias did not understand a word either.
Still, the bond of fellowship grew stronger and stronger between the two lonely men, each speaking with deep feeling about his own affairs in his own language, inaccessible to the other. Seeing each other every night and talking into the small hours became a necessity for both.
When Garfias had to leave for Mexico, they said goodbye, drinking and talking, embracing and weeping. The feeling that bound them so deeply was the sundering of their two solitudes.
“Pedro,” I often said to the poet, “what do you think he was telling you?”
“I never understood a word, Pablo, but when I listened to him I always felt, I was always sure, that I knew what he meant. And when I talked, I was sure that he also knew what I meant.”
THE WINNIPEG
One morning when I got to the Embassy, I was handed a pretty long cable by the officials. Everyone was smiling, which was odd, since they no longer even greeted me. There had to be something in the message that delighted them.
It was a cable from Chile, signed by the President himself, Don Pedro Aguirre Cerda, from whom I had received clear instructions to put the Spanish exiles on a ship bound for Chile.
I was shocked to read that our good President, Don Pedro, had learned that very morning, much to his surprise, that I was arranging for the Spanish emigrants to go to Chile. He asked me to deny this outlandish news immediately.
What was outlandish to me was the President’s cable. The job of organizing, screening, selecting the immigrants had been hard, lonely work. Fortunately, Spain’s government-in-exile had understood the importance of my mission. Yet new and unexpected obstacles presented themselves daily. Meanwhile, hundreds of refugees were leaving or preparing to leave the concentration camps in France and Africa, where thousands of them were crowded together, and go to Chile.
The Republican government-in-exile had succeeded in buying a ship, the Winnipeg. It had been converted to increase its passenger capacity and was waiting, tied up at the pier at Trompe-loup, a little port near Bordeaux.
What should I do? This time-consuming and vital work, on the brink of the Second World War, was the crowning point of my life. The hand I held out to the persecuted meant their salvation, and showed them the true nature of my country, which welcomed and championed them. The President’s cable was about to collapse all these dreams.
I decided to talk things over with Negrín. I had had the good luck to make friends with President Juan Negrín, Minister Alvarez del Vayo, and some of the other members of the Spanish Republican government. Negrín was the most interesting. Spanish high politics had always seemed to me a bit parochial, provincial, shortsighted. Negrín was cosmopolitan, or European, anyway. He had studied in Leipzig and had university standing. In Paris he kept alive, with all dignity, the flimsy shadow that a government-in-exile is.
We talked. I explained the situation, the President’s strange cable, which in fact made me look like an impostor, a charlatan offering a people in exile a pipe dream asylum. There were three possible ways out. The first, a revolting one, was simply to announce that the immigration of Spaniards to Chile had been called off. The second, a dramatic one, was to air publicly my objections, consider my mission ended, and put a bullet through my head. The third, a defiant one, was to fill the ship with immigrants, go aboard with them, and set out for Valparaíso without authorization, come what may.
Negrín leaned back in his armchair, puffing on his huge cigar. Then a melancholy smile crossed his lips and he said: “Can’t you use the telephone?”
In those days, telephone communication between Europe and America was intolerably difficult, with hours of waiting. Between deafening noises and abrupt interruptions, I managed to hear the Foreign Minister’s voice far away. In a broken conversation, with phrases having to be repeated twenty times, without knowing whether we were getting through to each other, screaming our heads off and hearing only the ocean’s trumpet blasts in reply, I thought I made it clear to Minister Ortega that I wasn’t obeying the President’s countermand. I also felt sure I had heard him ask me to wait until the following day.
Naturally, I spent a troubled night in my tiny Paris hotel. The next afternoon, I learned that the Foreign Minister had resigned that morning. He would not accept the withdrawal of my authority, either. The Cabinet tottered, and our fine President, after a temporary disruption due to pressures beyond his control, recovered his authority. I received a fresh cable with instructions to go ahead with the immigration.
We finally put them aboard the Winnipeg. Husbands and wives, parents and children who had been separated for a long time and were coming from one or the other end of Europe or Africa were reunited at the embarkation point. The waiting crowd surged forward as each train came in. Rushing up and down, weeping and shouting, they would recognize their dear ones among those putting their heads out the windows in clusters. Everyone eventually got aboard ship. There were fishermen, peasants, laborers, intellectuals, a cross section of strength, heroism, and hard work. My poetry, in its struggle, had succeeded in finding them a country. And I was filled with pride.
I bought a newspaper. I was strolling down a street in Villennes-sur-Seine. I was passing by the ancient castle whose ruins, scarlet with vines, lifted small slate towers skyward. That ancient castle where Ronsard and the Pléiade poets met centuries ago captured my imagination with its stone and marble, its hendecasyllables set down in ancient gold characters. I opened the newspaper. The Second World War had broken out that day. The newspaper which my hands dropped in that old, lost village said so in bold characters in smudgy black ink.
Everyone had been expecting it. Hitler had been gobbling up territories, while English and French statesmen scurried with their umbrellas to offer him more cities, kingdoms, human beings.
A great smoke drift of confusion filled people’s consciences. From my window in Paris I looked out on Les Invalides and I saw the first contingents leaving, youngsters who had not yet learned how to wear their soldier’s uniforms but were marching straight into death’s gaping mouth.
Their going was sad, and nothing could disguise that. It was like a war lost beforehand, something inexpressible. Chauvinist groups prowled the streets, hunting down progressive intellectuals. To them, the enemy was not Hitler’s disciples, the Lavals, but the flower of French thought. At the Embassy, which had undergone a significant change, we received the great poet Louis Aragon. He spent four days there, writing day and night, while the hordes searched for him to take his life. In the Chilean Embassy he finished his novel Passengers of Destiny. The fifth day, he left for the front, in uniform. It was his second war against the Germans.
In those twilight days, I grew accustomed to the European lack of resolve, which does not permit continual revolutions or earthquakes yet allows the deadly poison of war to permeate the air we breathe and the bread we eat. In constant fear of bombings, the great metropolis blacked out every night, and this darkness shared by seven million people, a thick darkness in the heart of the city of light, still clings to my memory.
* * *
At the end of this era, I am alone once more in newly discovered lands, as if this whole long voyage had been a waste. I go into an agony, into a second solitude, just as in the throes of birth, in the alarming beginning, filled with the metaphysical terror from which the spring of my early poems flowed, in the new twilight my own
creation has provoked. Where am I to go? Which way should I return, aim for, which way to silence or a breathing space? I turn the light and the darkness upside down and inside out, and I find nothing but the emptiness my hands built with such deadly care.
And yet what has always been closest to me, the most fundamental, the most extensive, the completely unexpected, would appear in my path for the first time now. I had thought hard about all the world, but not about man. Cruelly and painfully, I had probed man’s heart; without a thought for mankind, I had seen cities, but empty cities; I had seen factories whose very presence was a tragedy, but I had not really seen the suffering under those roofs, on the streets, at every way station, in the cities and the countryside.
As the first bullets ripped into the guitars of Spain, when blood instead of music gushed out of them, my poetry stopped dead like a ghost in the streets of human anguish and a rush of roots and blood surged up through it. From then on, my road meets everyman’s road. And suddenly I see that from the south of solitude I have moved to the north, which is the people, the people whose sword, whose handkerchief my humble poetry wants to be, to dry the sweat of its vast sorrows and give it a weapon in its struggle for bread.
Then space opens out, makes itself deep and permanent. We are now standing squarely on the earth. We want to take infinite possession of everything that exists. We are not looking for any mystery, we are the mystery. My poetry is becoming a material part of an atmosphere that extends infinitely, that runs under the sea and under the earth both, it begins to enter galleries of startling vegetation, to speak in broad daylight with the specters of the sun, to explore pits of minerals hidden deep in the secretive earth, to establish forgotten links between autumn and man. The air dims and at intervals thunderbolts of phosphorescence and terror light it up; a new structure that is far from the evident, from trite words, looms on the horizon; a new continent rises from the innermost substance of my poetry. I have spent years settling these lands, classifying this kingdom, touching its many mysterious shorelines, soothing its foam, going over its zoology and the length of its geography; in this I have spent dark, solitary, remote years.
7
Mexico, Blossoming and Thorny
My government sent me to Mexico. Oppressed to the breaking point by the memory of so many painful experiences and such chaos, in 1940 I came to the Anáhuac plateau, to breathe what Alfonso Reyes hailed as the most transparent region of the air.
Mexico with its prickly pear and its serpent; Mexico, blossoming and thorny, dry and lashed by hurricane winds, violent in outline and color, violent in eruption and creation, surrounded me with its magic and its extraordinary light.
I traveled through it for years, from market to market. Because Mexico is to be found in its markets. Not in the guttural songs of the movies or in the false image of the Mexican in sombrero, with moustache and pistol. Mexico is a land of crimson and phosphorescent turquoise shawls. Mexico is a land of earthen bowls and pitchers, and fruit lying open to a swarm of insects. Mexico is an infinite countryside of steel-blue century plants with yellow thorns.
The most beautiful markets in the world have all this to offer. Fruit and wool, clay and weaving looms, give evidence of the incredible skill of the fertile and timeless fingers of the Mexicans.
I drifted through Mexico, I roamed over all its coasts, along its steep coastlines set ablaze by uninterrupted flares of shimmering lightning. I came down from Topolobampo in Sinaloa, past names indigenous to this hemisphere, harsh names willed to Mexico by the gods, when men less cruel than those gods came to rule its lands. I traveled through all those mysterious and majestic syllables from the dawn of time. Sonora and Yucatán; Anáhuac, rising like a cold brazier that draws to itself the mixed aromas of the land, from Nayarit to Michoacán, from where you can make out smoke from the islet of Janitzio, and the odor of corn and maguey drifting up from Jalisco, and sulphur from the new volcano, Paricutín, blending in with the wet fragrance of fish from Lake Pátzcuaro. Mexico, the last of the magic countries, because of its age and its history, its music and its geography. Working my way like a tramp over those rocks forever scourged by blood, rocks crisscrossed by a wide ribbon of blood and moss, I felt mighty and ancient, worthy to walk among such timeless things. Abrupt valleys partitioned off by immense walls of rock; tall hills that looked as if cut level with a knife; immense tropical forests teeming with timber and serpents, birds and legends. In that vast land made habitable as far as the eye can see by man’s struggle through the ages, in its huge spaces, I found that we, Chile and Mexico, are the two countries most unlike each other in all America. I have never been moved by the conventional niceties of protocol that lead the ambassador of Japan, looking at Chile’s cherry trees, to find that we are alike; or the Englishman experiencing the fog along our coast, or the Argentine or German seeing our snow, to find that we are much like all other countries. I delight in the diversity of landscapes on this planet, the varied products of the earth in every latitude. I don’t mean to detract in any way from Mexico, a place I love, by describing it as not even remotely resembling our ocean-washed and grain-rich land. I only hold up its differences so that our America may be seen on all its levels, its great heights, and its depths. And in America, perhaps on the whole planet, no country is more profoundly human than Mexico and its people. In its brilliant achievements, as well as its gigantic errors, one sees the same chain of grand generosity, deep-rooted vitality, inexhaustible history, and limitless growth.
We made a turnoff one day—into fishing villages whose nets are so diaphanous they look like huge butterflies returning to the waters to pick up the silver scales they are missing; through mining centers whose metal turns from hard ingot to resplendent geometric forms almost as soon as it is out of the depths; over roads where Catholic convents loom, thick and thorny like giant cactus plants; through markets where the rich colors and flavors of vegetables displayed like flowers make you dizzy—and crossing Mexico like this, we reached Yucatán, the submerged cradle of the oldest race in the world, the idolatrous Maya. There the earth has been shaken by history and by the germinating seed. Side by side with the century plant, the ruins steeped in human intelligence and sacrifices are still growing.
Having crossed the last roads, we come to the vast territory where the ancient peoples of Mexico left their embroidered history hidden away in the jungle. There we find a new water, the most mysterious water on earth. It is not sea, stream, river, or any of the waters we know. In Yucatán the water is all under the ground, which may crack open suddenly, producing enormous jungle pools whose sides, overgrown with tropical vegetation, leave open to view, down below, a very deep water, deep as the sky, and green. The Mayas discovered those fissures in the earth called cenotes and deified them with their strange rites. Like all religions, in the beginning theirs consecrated necessity and fertility, and the land’s aridity was vanquished by those hidden waters, for which the earth had opened.
Then for thousands of years on the rims of the sacred pools, first the indigenous and then the invaders’ religion increased the mystery of the waters. From the banks of the cenote, after nuptial ceremonies, hundreds of virgins decked with flowers and gold and laden with jewels were hurled into the whirling, bottomless waters. Garlands and golden crowns would float up from the depths to the surface, but the maidens stayed in the mud of the bottom, held fast by their gold chains.
Thousands of years later, only a tiny portion of the jewels has been recovered and they are in the display cases of Mexican and U.S. museums. I went into that wilderness, not in search of gold, but seeking the cries of the drowned maidens. In the shrieks of the birds I seemed to hear the hoarse anguish of the virgins; and in their swift flight, as they swept over the gloomy deeps of the timeless waters, I saw the yellow hands of the dead young girls.
Once I watched a dove light on a statue that stretches its bright stone hand over the eternal waters and the air. An eagle may have been after it. It did not belong in that place
whose only birds—the roadrunner with its stammer, the quetzal with its fabulous plumes, the turquoise hummingbird, and the birds of prey—conquered the jungle for their rapine, for their splendor. The dove lighted on the statue’s hand, like a white snowflake among tropical rocks. I gazed at her because she came from another world, from a measured and harmonious world, from a Pythagorean column or a Mediterranean round number. She had stopped on the edge of the darkness, she respected my silence, for I had become part of this original American, bloodstained, ancient world, and my eyes followed her flight until they lost her in the sky.
THE MEXICAN PAINTERS
Mexico’s intellectual life was dominated by painting. Mexican painters covered the city with history and geography, with civil strife, with fierce controversies. José Clemente Orozco, lean, one-armed titan, has his place on an elevated peak, a sort of Goya in his phantasmagorical country. I talked to him often. The violence that haunted his work seemed alien to his personality. He had the gentleness of a potter who has lost his hand at the potter’s wheel but feels he must go on creating worlds with his other hand. His soldiers and their women, his peasants gunned down by overseers, his sarcophagi with horrible crucified bodies, are immortal in our native American painting, bearing witness to our cruelty.
By this time Diego Rivera had done so much work, and so much squabbling with everyone, that this burly painter was a legend. Looking at him, it seemed strange to me that he didn’t have scaly fishtails or cloven hoofs. Diego Rivera had always been a fabricator. In Paris, before the First World War, Ilya Ehrenburg had published a book about his exploits and hoaxes: The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito. Thirty years later Diego Rivera was still a great master as painter and teller of tall stories. He used to recommend the eating of human flesh as a healthy diet much favored by the greatest gourmets. He gave out recipes for cooking people of all ages. At other times he went to great lengths theorizing on lesbian love, maintaining that it was the only normal relationship, as proved by the oldest historical remains found in excavations he himself had directed.
