The Complete Memoirs

by Pablo Neruda

  ARAUCANÍA

  While I was far away, at my post on the islands of the remote archipelago, the sea hummed to me and the silent world was filled with things that spoke to my solitude. But cold and hot wars corrupted the consular service and eventually made each consul an automaton, without personality, unable to make any decisions for himself, and his work became suspiciously close to that of the police. The Ministry insisted on my checking the ethnic origins of immigrants; Africans, Asians, and Jews could not enter my country.

  This stupidity reached such extremes that I, too, became its victim when I started a handsome magazine (without a subsidy from the national treasury) and named it Araucanía. On the cover I used the picture of a lovely Araucanian wearing a toothy smile. That’s all the Foreign Minister needed to give me a severe dressing down for what he considered something debasing, even though Don Pedro Aguirre Cerda, whose pleasant and noble face had all the features of our mixed race, was President of the Republic.

  It is common knowledge that the Araucanians were crushed and, finally, forgotten or conquered. What’s more, history is written by the conquerors or by those who reap the spoils of victory. There are few races worthier than the Araucanian. Someday we’ll see Araucanian universities, books printed in Araucanian, and we’ll realize how much we have lost with their clarity, their purity and volcanic energy.

  The absurd “racial” pretensions of some South American countries, which are themselves the results of many national origins and mixed breeding, are a colonialist vice. They want to set up a dais where a handful of snobs, scrupulously white or light-skinned, can appear in society, posturing in front of pure Aryans or pretentious tourists. Fortunately, all this is becoming a thing of the past and the UN is filling up with black and Mongolian representatives; in short, as the sap of intelligence rises, the foliage of all the races is gradually displaying all the colors of its leaves.

  I ended by getting fed up and one day I resigned from my career as Consul General forever.

  MAGIC AND MYSTERY

  Furthermore, I realized that the Mexican world—repressed, violent, and nationalistic, cloaked in its pre-Columbian civility—would get along without my presence or approval. When I decided to return to my country, I understood less about Mexican life than when I came to Mexico. Arts and letters thrived in rival circles, but God help any outsider who sided with or against any individual or group: everyone came down on him.

  When I was almost ready to leave, I was honored with a monstrous public demonstration: a dinner for almost three thousand persons, not counting hundreds who couldn’t even get in. Several presidents sent congratulations. Still, Mexico is the touchstone of America, and it was not an accident that the solar calendar of ancient America, the node of irradiation, wisdom, and mystery, was carved there.

  Everything could happen, everything did happen there. The only opposition newspaper was subsidized by the government. It was the most dictatorial democracy anyone can imagine.

  I recall a tragic event that left me badly shaken. A strike was dragging on in a factory, with no solution in sight. The strikers’ wives got together and agreed to try to see the President and tell him perhaps of their privations and their distress. Of course, they had no weapons. Along the way they got some flowers to present to the head of state and his wife. A guard halted the women as they were entering the palace, and they were allowed no farther. The President would not receive them; they would have to go to the appropriate government bureau. Anyway, they must vacate the premises. It was an ultimatum.

  The women pleaded their cause. They wouldn’t be any trouble. They just wanted to deliver the flowers to the President and ask if he could do something to settle the strike soon. Their children had no food; they couldn’t go on like that. The officer of the guard refused to relay any message. And the women would not go.

  Then a volley of shots from the direction of the palace guard splintered the air. Six or seven women were killed on the spot, and many others wounded.

  A hasty funeral took place on the following day. I had believed an immense procession would follow the caskets of the assassinated women, but only a few people showed up. Oh, yes, the union leader made a speech. He was known as a prominent revolutionary. His speech at the cemetery was in an irreproachable style. I read the entire text the next day in the newspapers. It did not contain a single line of protest, not a single angry word or any demand that those responsible for such an atrocity be put on trial. Two weeks later, no one even spoke of the massacre. And I have never seen it mentioned in writing by anyone.

  The President was an Aztec ruler, a thousand times more untouchable than England’s royal family. No newspaper could criticize the exalted functionary, either in jest or seriously, without suffering immediate consequences.

  Mexican dramas are so clothed in the picturesque that one comes away astounded by all the allegory—allegory that is every day more remote from the essential throb of life, the blood-spattered skeleton. The philosophers have become euphuistic and launch into existentialist dissertations that seem foolish under a volcano. Civilian action is intermittent and difficult. Submission takes on varying aspects that stratify around the throne.

  But every kind of magic is always appearing and reappearing in Mexico: from the volcano born before a peasant’s eyes in his humble orchard, while he was planting beans, to the wild search for the skeleton of Cortés, who, rumor has it, rests in Mexican soil with his gold helmet protecting the conquistador’s skull these many centuries, and the no less intense hunt for the remains of the Aztec emperor Cuauhtémoc. Lost four centuries ago, they keep showing up here and there, safeguarded by secretive Indians, only to sink back time and again into unfathomable darkness.

  Mexico lives on in me like a small stray eagle circulating through my veins. Only death will fold its wings over my sleeping soldier’s heart.

  8

  My Country in Darkness

  MACCHU PICCHU

  The Ministry lost no time in accepting the voluntary end to my career.

  My diplomatic suicide gave me the infinite pleasure of being able to return to Chile. I believe a man should live in his own country and I think the deracination of human beings leads to frustration, in one way or another obstructing the light of the soul. I can live only in my own country. I cannot live without having my feet and my hands on it and my ear against it, without feeling the movement of its waters and its shadows, without feeling my roots reach down into its soil for maternal nourishment.

  But, before getting back to Chile, I made another discovery that was to add a new layer of growth to my poetry.

  I stopped in Peru and made a trip to the ruins of Macchu Picchu. There was no highway then and we rode up on horseback. At the top I saw the ancient stone structures hedged in by the tall peaks of the verdant Andes. Torrents hurtled down from the citadel, eaten away and weathered by the passage of the centuries. White fog drifted up in masses from the Willkamayu River. I felt infinitely small in the center of that navel of rocks, the navel of a deserted world, proud, towering high, to which I somehow belonged. I felt that my own hands had labored there at some remote point in time, digging furrows, polishing the rocks.

  I felt Chilean, Peruvian, American. On those difficult heights, among those glorious, scattered ruins, I had found the principles of faith I needed to continue my poetry.

  My poem Alturas de Macchu Picchu was born there.

  THE NITRATE PAMPA

  At the end of 1943 I arrived in Santiago once more. I settled down in a house I bought on the installment plan. I piled all my books into this house surrounded by huge trees, and took up the hard life again.

  Once more I sought my country’s beauty, the loveliness of its women, nature’s overpowering splendor, the work of my fellows, the intelligence of my countrymen. The country had not changed. Fields and sleeping villages, heartbreaking poverty in the mining regions, elegant people crowding into the country clubs. I had to make a de-cision.

  My decisio
n brought me harassments as well as moments of glory.

  What poet could have regretted that?

  Curzio Malaparte, who interviewed me some years after what I am about to relate, stated it well in his article: “I am not a Communist, but if I were a Chilean poet, I would be one, like Pablo Neruda. You have to take sides here, with the Cadillacs or with people who have no schooling or shoes.”

  These people without schooling or shoes elected me senator on March 4, 1945. I shall always cherish with pride the fact that thousands of people from Chile’s most inhospitable region, the great mining region of copper and nitrate, gave me their vote.

  Walking over the pampa was laborious and rough. It hasn’t rained for half a century there, and the desert has done its work on the faces of the miners. They are men with scorched features; their solitude and the neglect they are consigned to have been fixed in the dark intensity of their eyes. Going from the desert up to the mountains, entering any needy home, getting to know the inhuman labor these people do, and feeling that the hopes of isolated and sunken men have been entrusted to you, is not a light responsibility. But my poetry opened the way for communication, making it possible for me to walk and move among them and be accepted as a lifelong brother by my countrymen, who led such a hard life.

  * * *

  I don’t remember whether it was in Paris or Prague that I was seized by a small doubt about the encyclopedic knowledge of my friends there. Most of them were writers, and the rest, students.

  “We are talking a lot about Chile,” I said to them, “and it’s probably because I am Chilean. But do any of you know anything about my country, which is so far away? For example, what vehicle do we use for locomotion? Elephant, car, train, airplane, bicycle, camel, or sleigh?”

  Most of them replied earnestly: elephant.

  There are no elephants or camels in Chile. But I can see how puzzling a country can be that starts at the frozen South Pole and stretches upward to salt mines and deserts where it hasn’t rained for eons. As senator-elect of the inhabitants of that wilderness, as representative of innumerable nitrate and copper workers who had never worn a shirt collar or a tie, I had to travel those deserts for many years.

  Coming into those lowlands, facing those stretches of sand, is like visiting the moon. This region that looks like an empty planet holds my country’s great wealth, but the white fertilizer and the red mineral have to be extracted from the arid earth and the mountains of rock. There are few places in the world where life is so harsh and offers so little to live for. It takes untold sacrifices to transport water, to nurse a plant that yields even the humblest flower, to raise a dog, a rabbit, a pig.

  I come from the other end of the Republic. I was born in green country with huge, thickly wooded forests. I had a childhood filled with rain and snow. The mere act of facing that lunar desert was a turning point in my life. Representing those men in parliament—their isolation, their titanic land—was also a difficult task. The naked earth, without a single plant, without a drop of water, is an immense, elusive enigma. In the forests, alongside rivers, everything speaks to man. The desert, on the other hand, is uncommunicative. I couldn’t understand its language: that is, its silence.

  * * *

  Over a period of many years the nitrate corporations established veritable principalities, dominions, or empires on the pampas. The English, the Germans, invaders of every kind, took over the productive regions and gave them company names. They imposed their own currency; they prevented any kind of assembly by the people; they banned political parties and the people’s press. You could not enter the premises without special permission, which, of course, very few were able to obtain.

  One afternoon I spoke to the laborers in a machine shop in the offices of the María Elena potassium nitrate mine. The floor of the huge workshop was, as always, slushy with water, oil, and acids. The union leaders and I walked on a plank that kept us off that mire. “These planks,” I was told, “cost us fifteen strikes in a row, eight years of petitioning, and seven dead.”

  The deaths occurred when the company’s private police carried off seven leaders during a strike. The guards rode horses, while the workers, bound with ropes, followed on foot over the lonely stretches of sand. It took only a few shots to murder them. Their bodies were left lying in the desert sun and cold, until they were picked up and buried by their fellow workers.

  Years before that, things were much worse. In 1906, for example, the strikers went from the nitrate-mine offices down to the city of Iquique to take their demands directly to the government. Exhausted by the journey, several thousand men gathered in the town square, in front of the school, to rest. They were going to see the governor in the morning, to lay their petitions before him. But they never had the chance. Troops led by a colonel surrounded the square at daybreak and began shooting and killing, without a word. More than six thousand men fell in that massacre.

  In 1945, things were better, but sometimes it seemed to me that those days when people were exterminated were coming back. Once, for instance, I was denied the right to address a gathering of workers in a union hall. I called them out of the hall and in the middle of the desert I started to explain the situation to them, to consider the possible ways out of the conflict. There were about two hundred of us. Suddenly I heard the purr of motors and saw an army tank approach to within four or five meters of where I was speaking. The turret’s lid lifted and a machine gun pushed up through the opening, aimed right at me. Then, alongside the weapon, an officer stood up straight, nattily dressed but dead serious, and proceeded to stare at me while I went on with my talk. That’s all it came to.

  * * *

  The faith of the huge working class, many of them illiterate, in the Communists was born with Luis Emilio Recabarren, who began his struggles in that desert region. From a simple worker-agitator, an old-time anarchist, Recabarren became a phantasmagoric and colossal presence. He filled the country with unions and federations. Eventually he published more than fifteen newspapers devoted exclusively to the defense of the new organizations he had created. All this without having a cent. The money was raised thanks to the new conscience awakening among the workers.

  I had a chance to see Recabarren printing presses that had been through heroic service and were still doing the job forty years later. Some of those presses had been smashed up by the police and had later been carefully repaired. Huge scars could be detected under the lovingly soldered seams that had set them in motion again.

  During those long tours I grew accustomed to staying in the humble houses, shacks, or huts of the men of the desert. There was almost always a group with banners waiting for me at the company gates. Then I would be shown the place where I was to be lodged. All day long, men and women filed through my quarters with complaints about working conditions, or with personal problems. Sometimes their grievances were the kind a foreigner might consider comical, capricious, or even grotesque. For instance, the shortage of tea could spark off a strike that would have serious consequences. Are typically British needs like that conceivable in such a desolate region? In fact, the Chilean people can’t live without having tea several times a day. Some of the barefoot workers who asked me unhappily why the exotic but indispensable beverage was so scarce argued by way of apology: “If we don’t drink it, we get a terrible headache.”

  * * *

  Those men locked inside walls of silence, in the loneliest region and under the loneliest sky, had a healthy political curiosity. They wanted to know what was going on in Yugoslavia, in China. They were deeply interested in problems and changes in the socialist countries, the outcome of the big Italian strikes, rumors of war, revolutions breaking out in far-off lands.

  At hundreds of rallies, in places remote from one another, I heard the same request: to read my poems. They were often asked for by title. Of course, I never knew if all these people understood some or many of my poems, or if they didn’t. It was difficult to tell in that atmosphere of absolute silence, o
f reverence, in which they listened to me. But what does it matter? There are quite a few poems by Hölderlin and Mallarmé that I, who am one of the most literate of fools, have never been able to fathom. And I have read them, I confess, with the same great reverence.

  Sometimes dinner took on a more festive air and there was stewed chicken, rara avis on the pampas. The fare that most often found its way to our plates was something I had a hard time sinking my teeth into: fricassee of guinea pig. Conditions had turned this small creature, born to die in laboratories, into a popular dish.

  In the many houses where I stayed, the bed I invariably was assigned had two monastic features: snow-white sheets, so stiff they could have stood up by themselves; and a hardness comparable to the desert floor’s. These people did not know what a mattress was, only some bare boards as unyielding as they were flat.

  Still and all, I slept the sleep of the blessed. I had no trouble dropping off into the deep sleep I shared with a legion of comrades. The day was always dry and incandescent like a live coal, but night spread its coolness out on the desert under a crown exquisitely studded with stars.

  * * *

  My poetry and my life have advanced like an American river, a torrent of Chilean water born in the hidden heart of the southern mountains, endlessly steering the flow of its currents toward the sea. My poetry rejected nothing it could carry along in its course; it accepted passion, unraveled mystery, and worked its way into the hearts of the people.

  I had to suffer and struggle, to love and sing; I drew my worldly share of triumphs and defeats, I tasted bread and blood. What more can a poet want? And all the choices, tears or kisses, loneliness or the fraternity of man, survive in my poetry and are an essential part of it, because I have lived for my poetry and my poetry has nourished everything I have striven for. And if I have received many awards, awards fleeting as butterflies, fragile as pollen, I have attained a greater prize, one that some people may deride but not many can attain. I have gone through a difficult apprenticeship and a long search, and also through the labyrinths of the written word, to become the poet of my people. That is my reward, not the books and the poems that have been translated, or the books written to explicate or to dissect my words. My reward is the momentous occasion when, from the depths of the Lota coal mine, a man came up out of the tunnel into the full sunlight on the fiery nitrate field, as if rising out of hell, his face disfigured by his terrible work, his eyes inflamed by the dust, and stretching his rough hand out to me, a hand whose calluses and lines trace the map of the pampas, he said to me, his eyes shining: “I have known you for a long time, my brother.” That is the laurel crown for my poetry, that opening in the bleak pampa from which a worker emerges who has been told often by the wind and the night and the stars of Chile: “You’re not alone; there’s a poet whose thoughts are with you in your suffering.”