by Pablo Neruda
When I wrote my first lonely books, it never entered my mind that, with the passing years, I would find myself in squares, streets, factories, lecture halls, theaters, and gardens, reading my poems. I have gone into practically every corner of Chile, scattering my poetry like seed among the people of my country.
I am going to recount what happened to me in Vega Central, the largest and most popular market in Santiago, Chile. An endless line of pushcarts, horse wagons, oxcarts, and trucks comes in at dawn, bringing vegetables, fruits, edibles from all the track farms surrounding the voracious capital. The market men—a huge union whose members are badly paid and often go barefoot—swarm through the coffee shops, flophouses, and cheap eating places of the neighborhoods near the Vega.
One day someone came to fetch me in a car, which I climbed into without knowing exactly where or why I was going. I had a copy of my book España en el corazón in my pocket. In the car they explained to me that I was invited to give a lecture at the union hall of the Vega market loaders.
When I entered the ramshackle hall, a chill like that in José Asunción Silva’s poem “Nocturno” ran through me, not only because winter was so far along but because the atmosphere in the place gave me quite a shock. About fifty men sat waiting for me on crates or improvised wooden benches. Some had a sack tied around their waist like an apron, others covered their bodies with old patched undershirts, and still others braved Chile’s cold July bare from the waist up. I sat down behind a small table that separated me from that unusual audience. They all looked at me with the fixed, coal-black eyes of the people of my country.
I remembered old Lafertte. He had given such impassive spectators, who don’t move a facial muscle but fasten their eyes on you, a name that made me chuckle. Once, on the nitrate pampa, he had said to me: “Look, there at the back of the hall, leaning against that column, two Mohammedans are watching us. All they need is the burnoose to look like the fearless believers of the desert.”
How should I handle this audience? What could I speak to them about? What things in my life would hold their interest? I could not make up my mind, but disguising my desire to run out of there, I took the book I was carrying with me and said to them: “I was in Spain a short time back. A lot of fighting and a lot of shooting were going on there. Listen to what I’ve written about it.”
I should explain that my book España en el corazón has never seemed to me an easy book to understand. It tries to be clear, but it is steeped in the torrent of overwhelming and painful events.
Well, I thought I would just read a handful of poems, add a few words, and say goodbye. But it didn’t work out that way. Reading poem after poem, hearing the deep well of silence into which my words were falling, watching those eyes and dark eyebrows following my verses so intently, I realized that my book was hitting its mark. I went on reading and reading, affected by the sound of my own poetry, shaken by the magnetic power that linked my poems and those forsaken souls.
The reading lasted more than an hour. As I was about to leave, one of the men rose to his feet. He was one of those who had a sack knotted around his waist. “I want to thank you for all of us,” he spoke out. “I want to tell you, too, that nothing has ever moved us so much.”
When he finished talking, he couldn’t hold back a sob. Several others were also weeping. I walked out into the street between moist eyes and rough handclasps.
Can a poet still be the same after going through these trials of fire and ice?
* * *
When I want to remember Tina Modotti, I have to work as hard as if I were trying to scoop up a handful of mist. Fragile, almost invisible. Had I or had I not known her?
She was still very lovely then: a pale oval framed by two black wings of hair, gathered at the back, and huge velvety eyes that go on watching across the years. Diego Rivera put her face into one of his murals, glorified with crowns of plants and spears of corn.
This Italian revolutionary, an extraordinary artist with a camera, went to the Soviet Union a long time ago to take photographs of its people and monuments. But she was caught up in the uncontainable rhythm of socialism in full progress and flung her camera into the Moscow River, vowing to consecrate her life to the most menial work of the Communist Party. I met her while she was carrying out this vow in Mexico, where I was deeply moved by her death one night.
This was in 1941, and Vittorio Vidali, Commandant Carlos, was her husband. Tina Modotti died of a heart attack in a taxi, on her way home. She knew that she had a bad heart, but she never mentioned it, so that they wouldn’t make her cut down on her revolutionary work. She was always ready to do whatever no one else wanted to do: sweeping offices, going long distances on foot, sitting up nights to write letters and translate articles. She nursed the Republican wounded during the Spanish war.
She had gone through a tragic experience while living with the remarkable Cuban youth leader Julio Antonio Mella, exiled in Mexico at the time. Gerardo Machado, the tyrant, sent several gunmen from Havana to kill the revolutionary leader. They were coming out of the movies one afternoon, Tina leaning on Mella’s arm, when he collapsed under a burst of machine-gun fire. They toppled to the ground together, she with the blood of her dead companion all over her, while the assassins fled, protected by the police. To crown it all, the same authorities who protected the criminals tried to pin the murder on Tina Modotti.
Twelve years later, Tina Modotti’s strength quietly ebbed away. The Mexican reactionaries tried to expose her to infamy again by surrounding her death with scandal, as they had once tried to involve her in Mella’s death. Carlos and I stood watch over the tiny corpse. Seeing such a tough and courageous man suffer is not easy. That lion bled when they rubbed the caustic poison of slander into his wound by reviling Tina Modotti again, now that she was dead. Red-eyed from weeping, Commandant Carlos let out a roar of pain; in her small exile’s coffin, Tina seemed to be made of wax. I was helplessly silent before the grief that filled the room.
The newspapers covered whole pages with sensational filth. They called her the “mystery woman from Moscow.” Some added: “She died because she knew too much.” Deeply moved by Carlos’s savage grief, I decided to do something, and I wrote a poem challenging those who were smearing our dead friend’s good name. I sent it to all the newspapers, without any hope that it would be published. Wonder of wonders! On the following day, instead of the new and juicy exposés promised the evening before, it was my outraged and insolent poem that made the front pages of all the newspapers.
The poem’s title was “Tina Modotti ha muerto” (Tina Modotti Is Dead). I read it that morning at the cemetery in Mexico where we left her body to lie forever under a slab of Mexican granite. My lines are engraved on that stone.
The Mexican press did not write another line against her.
* * *
It was in Lota, many years ago. Ten thousand miners had shown up for the meeting. The coal-mining district, in constant agitation over its traditional poverty, had filled the Lota town square with miners. The political speakers talked on and on. An odor of coal and sea brine floated in the sultry noon air. The ocean was close by; under its waters the dark tunnels, where these men dug out the coal, stretched for more than ten kilometers.
Now, at high noon, they listened. The speakers’ platform was very high and from it I could make out that sea of blackened hats and miners’ helmets. I was the last speaker. When my name and my poem “Nuevo canto de amor a Stalingrado” (New Love Song to Stalingrad) were announced, something extraordinary occurred, a ceremony I can never forget.
As soon as they heard my name and the title of the poem, the huge mass of people uncovered their heads. They bared their heads because, after all the categorical and political words that had been spouted, my poetry, poetry itself, was about to speak. From the raised platform I saw that immense movement of hats and helmets: ten thousand hands went down in unison, in a groundswell impossible to describe, a huge soundless wave, a black foam of quiet reverenc
e.
Then my poem outdid itself. It took on, as it never had before, a tone of combat and liberation.
* * *
This other incident happened when I was still quite young. I was the student poet wearing a dark cape, thin and underfed like any poet in those days. I had just published Crepusculario and I weighed less than a black feather.
I went into a run-down cabaret with some friends. This was in the heyday of tangos and troublemaking gangs of toughs. Suddenly the dancing stopped and the tango broke up like a glass smashed against a wall.
Two notorious thugs were gesturing animatedly and insulting each other in the middle of the dance floor. Whenever one stepped forward to get in a blow, the other backed away, and with him the crowd of music lovers huddling for protection behind the barrier of tables also retreated. They looked like two primitive beasts dancing in a clearing in a primordial forest.
Without thinking, I stepped forward and lashed out from behind my scrawny impotence: “You miserable bullies, fat-brained apes, you despicable scum, stop annoying people who’re here to dance, not to watch a two-bit farce!”
They exchanged looks of surprise, they couldn’t believe their ears. The shorter one, who had been a boxer before becoming a thug, stepped in my direction, ready to murder me. And the gorilla would have done it, if a well-aimed fist had not floored him. His opponent had finally decided to hit him.
While the fallen champion was being dragged out like a sack, and people at the tables were holding bottles out to us, and the dance girls beamed at us eagerly, the giant who had landed the knock-out blow tried, understandably, to join the victory celebration. But I turned on him like a firebrand: “Get away from here! You’re no better than he is!”
A little later, my moment of glory was over. My friends and I had gone down a narrow corridor, when we made out a kind of mountain, with the waist of a panther, blocking the exit. It was the other pugilist from the underworld, the winner I had whipped with my words, who barred our way, waiting to get even.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” he said to me.
He headed me toward another door, with a light shove, while my friends took to their heels like scared rabbits. I stood there helplessly, face-to-face with my nemesis. I glanced around quickly to see what I could grab to defend myself. Nothing. There was nothing. Only the heavy marble tops of the tables and the wrought-iron chairs, which I couldn’t possibly lift. Not a flowerpot or a bottle or even a measly walking stick someone might have forgotten there.
“Let’s have a little talk,” the man said.
I realized how useless it was to try anything, and I thought he just wanted to size me up before devouring me, like a tiger facing a little fawn. I sensed that my only defense lay in not showing how scared I was. I returned the shove he had given me, but I couldn’t budge him an inch. He was a brick wall.
Suddenly he threw back his head and the look of a wild animal left his eyes. “Are you Pablo Neruda, the poet?” he said.
“Yes, I am.”
He hung his head. “What a bastard I am! Here I am, face-to-face with the poet I truly admire, and he has to tell me what a no-good bum I am!” And he went on wailing, with his head in his hands: “I’m just a hood, the other guy I had the fight with is a cocaine pusher. We’re the scum of the earth. But there’s one clean thing in my life. It’s my girl, my girl’s love for me. Look at her, Don Pablito. Look at her picture. I’ll tell her sometime that you actually held it in your hands. It’ll make her so happy.”
He handed me the photograph of a smiling girl. “She loves me because of you, Don Pablito, because of your poems, which we’ve learned together by heart.”
And right then and there he started reciting: “Deep inside you, a sad boy like me kneels, with his eyes on us…”
Just then the door burst open. It was my friends coming back with armed reinforcements. I saw their shocked faces crowding the doorway.
I walked out slowly. The man stayed behind alone, without moving an inch, reciting: “For that life burning in her veins they would have to murder my hands”—defeated by poetry.
* * *
The airplane piloted by Powers on a spying mission over Soviet territory fell from an unbelievable altitude. Two fantastic missiles had hit it and brought it down from the clouds. Newsmen rushed to the secluded mountain spot from which the rockets had left the ground.
The marksmen were two solitary boys. In that vast world of fir trees, rivers, and snows, they munched apples, played chess and the accordion, read books, and stood watch. They had aimed upward, to defend their Russian motherland’s wide sky.
They were plied with questions: “What kind of food do you eat? Who are your parents? Do you like to dance? What books do you read?”
Answering this last question, one of the young men responded that they read poems and that Pushkin, the classic Russian writer, and the Chilean Neruda were two of their favorite poets.
I felt infinitely happy when I heard about this. The missile, which had gone up so high and forced pride to plunge so low, had somehow carried an atom of my impassioned poetry.
THE PERSISTENT INFLUENCE OF TREES
Poetry should be organic in every poet, fluid of his blood, pulse and palpitation of his entire being. It’s a matter so intimate it doesn’t yield to examination, and yet, it must weather storms.
I started writing very young. Perhaps I’ve done nothing good or bad except write my poems. The big trees, the untamed nature of my country, which is also the southern tip of the world, always had a deep influence on me. This is a region of great solitude, barely inhabited, where it rains the better part of the year.
I wrote a melancholic poetry derived from those dark, deserted climes.
* * *
In those days I had lots of far-flung friends. Many came from Russia. They were characters, incidents, intensities of pain, strong joys, the entire extraordinary essence of a great literature that peopled my adolescent solitudes with wrenching lives. I will never forget those nights of fevered readings, when Prince Myshkin’s sentiments or Foma Gordeyev’s adversities mingled in my heart with the crashing of waves on the austral archipelagos.
I have written many love poems, many verses about death and life, I have dedicated much of my poetry to the intense, extreme struggles of the American peoples. Every inch of the immensity of the continent is marked by blood, agony, victory, pain. There is no American geography, there is no American poetry, if the martyred heart of the American people is forgotten. Ravenous parasites came from all over, fanning over the territory like birds of prey, and someone must tell, must sing this story.
And yet, I do not believe poetry should be political, not entirely. Poets must have their senses open to every horizon. These horizons may be unknown. Some of the greatest poems have been a kind of dialogue with darkness. Two of them: Jorge Manrique’s “Coplas on the Death of His Father” and Gray’s “Elegy” are thuds of the knocker against the sealed door of death. We still hear their blows, and they shall be heard so long as man exists.
In my poems, I have wished to speak of simpler, more common, more elemental things. I have made poems about wood, air, stone, the clock, the sea, tomatoes, plums, the onion. They are poems of overwhelming joy, and in them I have tried to sing again all that has ever been sung, so that everything may live again. And just as I believed the poet had a duty to relive the tragic history of blood and exploitation in Indian America, so I believed the poet had a duty to wash and cleanse ordinary things, to put down a new tablecloth for all lives.
It’s strange, but I haven’t been especially well understood by those who ought best to have understood me. A newspaper run by young people in one of the world’s capitals begged me insistently for a few poems. I sent them one about corn and another about plums. They are two simple poems, with the clarity and joy characteristic of that part of my work. They didn’t publish them. They didn’t like them. But they did give me, as an extraordinary gift, the feeling that those young pe
ople perhaps were older than I.
POETRY
… How many works of art … There’s not enough room in the world for them any more … They have to hang outside the rooms … How many books … How many little books … Who can read them all…? If they were food … If, during a wave of great hunger, we tossed a salad, cut them up, poured some dressing on them … We’ve had it … We’re fed up … The world is drowning in a flood tide of books … Reverdy said to me: “I notified the post office not to deliver them. I couldn’t open them. I had no more space. They were climbing up the walls, I was afraid of a disaster, they were going to cave in on my head…” Everybody knows Eliot … Before becoming an illustrator and a playwright, and writing brilliant criticism, he used to read my poems … I was flattered … No one understood them better … Then one day he started to read me his own, and I ran off selfishly, protesting: “Don’t read them to me, don’t read them to me” … I locked myself in the bathroom, but Eliot read them to me through the shut door … I was depressed … Fraser, the Scottish poet, was there … He blasted me: “Why do you treat Eliot like that?” … I replied: “I don’t want to lose my reader. I have cultivated him carefully. He has become familiar even with the wrinkles in my poetry … Eliot has so much talent … He can draw … He writes essays … But I want to keep this reader, to preserve him, to water him like an exotic plant … You understand me, Fraser…” Because, actually, if this continues, poets will publish only for other poets … Each will pull out his little book and put it in the other’s pocket … his poem … and he will leave it on the other’s plate … One day Quevedo left his under a king’s napkin … that was truly worthwhile … Like poetry in a town square at high noon … Or letting the books wear out, fall in shreds between the fingers of mankind … Well, this thing, where one poet publishes for other poets, doesn’t tempt me, doesn’t lure me, only drives me to bury myself deep in nature’s woods, before a rock or a wave, far from the publishing houses, from the printed page … Poetry has lost its ties with the reader, he’s out of reach … It has to get him back … It has to walk in the darkness and encounter the heart of man, the eyes of woman, the strangers in the streets, those who at twilight or in the middle of the starry night feel the need for at least one line of poetry … This visit to the unexpected is worth all the distance covered, everything read, everything learned … We have to disappear into the midst of those we don’t know, so they will suddenly pick up something of ours from the street, from the sand, from the leaves that have fallen for a thousand years in the same forest … and will take up gently the object we made … Only then will we truly be poets … In that object, poetry will live …
