The Complete Memoirs

by Pablo Neruda

  As for me, I continue to be the same person who wrote Canción de gesta. It is a book I still like. I can’t forget that with it I became the first poet to devote an entire book to praising the Cuban revolution.

  I understand, of course, that revolutions, and particularly those who take part in them, fall into error and injustice, from time to time. The unwritten precepts of the human race affect revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries equally. No one can escape errors. A blind spot, a tiny blind spot in a revolutionary process is not very important within the larger context of a great cause. I have continued to sing, love, and respect the Cuban revolution, its people, its noble protagonists.

  But everyone has his failings. I have many. For instance, I don’t like to give up the pride I feel about my inflexible stand as a fighting revolutionary. Maybe that, or some other flaw in my insignificant self, has made me refuse until now, and I will go on refusing, to shake hands with any of those who knowingly or unknowingly signed that letter which still seems ignominious to me.

  12

  Cruel, Beloved Homeland

  EXTREMISM AND SPIES

  Former anarchists—and the same thing will happen tomorrow to the anarchists of today—very often drift off toward a very comfortable position, anarcho-capitalism, the refuge of political snipers, would-be leftists, and false liberals. Repressive capitalism considers Communists its biggest enemies, and its aim seldom misses the mark. All those individualist rebels are delighted, one way or another, by the reactionary know-how, the strong-arm method that treats them as heroic defenders of sacrosanct principles. Reactionaries know that the danger of change in a society is not in individual revolts but in the organization of the masses and in a widespread class consciousness.

  I saw all this clearly in Spain during the war. Some anti-Fascist groups were playing out a masked carnival before Hitler’s and Franco’s forces, which were advancing on Madrid. Naturally, I don’t include anarchists like Durruti and his Catalans, who fought like lions in Barcelona.

  Spies are a thousand times worse than extremists. From time to time, enemy agents hired by the police, reactionary parties, or foreign governments filter in among the activists of revolutionary parties. Some of them carry out special missions of provocation; others are patient observers. Azev’s is a classic case. Before the fall of Tsarism, he took part in numerous terrorist acts and was jailed many times. The memoirs of the chief of the Tsar’s secret police, published after the revolution, related in detail how Azev had always been an agent of the Okhrana. The terrorist and the informer coexisted in the mind of this bizarre character, whose actions were responsible for the death of a grand duke.

  Another curious incident occurred in Los Angeles, San Francisco, or some other California city. During the insane wave of McCarthyism, all the activists in the Communist Party in town were arrested. There were seventy-five persons, all told, with complete files on their lives and their day-to-day movements. Well, the seventy-five turned out to be police agents. The F.B.I. had permitted itself the luxury of creating its own miniature “Communist Party,” with individuals who were strangers to one another, in order to prosecute them later and claim sensational victories over non-existent enemies. This way of doing things got the F.B.I. into such grotesque predicaments as the one where some fellow called Chambers, an ex-Communist bought by police dollars, kept the most explosive international secrets hidden in a pumpkin. The F.B.I. was also implicated in horrifying acts, among them the execution, or assassination, of the Rosenbergs, which particularly outraged the world.

  It was always more difficult for these agents to infiltrate Chile’s Communist Party, an organization with a long history and a strictly proletarian origin. On the other hand, guerrilla methods in Latin America opened the floodgates for all kinds of squealers. The spontaneous character and the youth of these organizations made it hard to detect and unmask spies. That’s why the guerrilla leaders were haunted by suspicions and had to keep an eye even on their own shadows. In a way, this cult of risk was encouraged by the romantic spirit and the wild guerrilla theories that swept Latin America. This era may have come to an end with the assassination and heroic death of Ernesto Guevara. But for a long time the supporters of this tactic saturated the continent with theses and documents that virtually allotted the popular revolutionary government of the future, not to the classes exploited by capitalism, but to all and sundry armed groups. The flaw in this line of reasoning is its political weakness: It is sometimes possible for a great guerrilla and a powerful political mind to coexist, as in the case of Che Guevara, but that is an exception and wholly dependent on chance. The survivors of a guerrilla war cannot lead a proletarian state simply because they were braver, or because they were luckier in the face of death, or better shots when facing the living.

  * * *

  Now I’ll recount a personal experience. I was in Chile, just back from Mexico. At one of the political gatherings I attended, a man came over to say hello to me. He was a middle-aged man, the model man of today, very correctly dressed and wearing those glasses that make people look so respectable, rimless glasses that are clipped to the nose. He turned out to be a very affable person. “Don Pablo, I had never been able to build up the courage to approach you, although I owe you my life. I am one of the refugees you saved from the concentration camps and gas ovens when you put us aboard the Winnipeg, bound for Chile. I am a Catalan, a Freemason. I’ve established a place for myself here. I work as a top salesman of sanitary articles for Such and Such Co., the most important of its kind in Chile.”

  He told me he lived in a nice apartment in the center of Santiago. His next-door neighbor was a well-known tennis champion named Iglesias, who had been my schoolmate. They spoke of me frequently and had finally decided to invite me to the house and entertain me. That’s why he had come to see me.

  The Catalan’s apartment had all the signs of the comfortable life of our bourgeoisie. Impeccable furniture; a golden and abundant paella. Iglesias was with us all through lunch. We laughed at the memory of the old schoolhouse in Temuco, in whose basements the bats’ wings brushed our faces. At the end of lunch, the hospitable Catalan gave a little speech and made me a gift of two splendidly reproduced photographs: one of Baudelaire and the other of Edgar Allan Poe. Splendid heads of poets, which, of course, I still have in my library.

  One day our Catalan had a stroke that left him immobile in bed, without the use of speech or facial expression. Only his eyes moved, filled with pain, as if trying to say something to his wife, an excellent Spanish Republican with an irreproachable past, or to his neighbor Iglesias, my friend the tennis champion. The man died without speaking or moving again.

  While the house was still filled with tears, friends, and wreaths, his neighbor the tennis player received a mysterious call: “We know of your close friendship with the dead man. He never tired of praising you. If you want to do a very important service to the memory of your friend, open his strong box and take out a little steel case put away for safekeeping there. I’ll call you again in three days.”

  The widow wouldn’t hear of such a thing. Her grief was extreme, she didn’t want to know about anything. She left the apartment and moved to a rooming house on Santo Domingo Street. The landlord was a Yugoslav, a member of the resistance, a man toughened by politics. The widow begged him to examine her husband’s papers. The Yugoslav found the little metal case and opened it with much difficulty. Then the strangest cat was let out of the bag. The documents which had been put away there disclosed that the dead man had been a Fascist agent. Copies of his letters revealed the names of dozens of emigrants who, on returning to Spain secretly, had been thrown into prison or executed. There was even a letter in Franco’s hand, thanking him for his services. Information from the Catalan also helped the Nazi navy sink freighters leaving the Chilean coast with war materials. One of these was our beautiful ship the veteran Lautaro, pride of Chile’s navy. It was sunk during the war, with its cargo of nitrate, as it left Tocop
illa. The wreck took the lives of seventeen naval cadets, drowned or burned to death.

  These had been the criminal acts of a smiling Catalan who invited me to lunch one day.

  THE COMMUNISTS

  … Some years have passed since I became a member of the party … I am happy … Communists make a good family … They have weather-beaten hides and warm hearts … They take whacks everywhere … Whacks exclusively for them … Long live spiritists, royalists, deviates, criminals of every ilk … Long live philosophy with its smoke screen but without skeletons … Long live the dog that barks but also bites, long live lecherous astrologers, pornography, cynicism, long live the shrimp, long live everyone, except Communists … Long live chastity belts, long live the conservatives who haven’t washed their ideological feet in five hundred years … Long live the lice of the poor, the free trip to potter’s field, anarcho-capitalism, Rilke, André Gide and his sweet little Corydon, long live all kinds of mysticism … Anything goes … They’re all heroes … All newspapers should be brought out … They can all be published, except the Communist papers … Let all politicians into Santo Domingo free as birds … Let them all celebrate the death of bloodthirsty Trujillo, except those who fought him hardest … Long live the carnival, the last days of the carnival … There are masks for everyone … Christian idealist masks, extreme-left masks, good-gray-lady and charitable-matron masks … But watch out, don’t let the Communists in . . Lock the door tight … Don’t make a mistake … They have no right to anything … Let’s worry about the subjective, man’s essence, the essence of essence … We’ll all be happy that way … We’ve got freedom … Freedom is great!… They don’t respect it, they don’t know what it is . . Freedom to worry about the essence … About the essentials of essence …

  … That’s how the last years passed … Jazz went out, soul arrived, we floundered in the postulates of abstract painting, the war staggered and killed us … Everything remained the same on this side … Or didn’t it…? After so many speeches about the spirit and so many whacks on the head, something was going badly … Very badly … They had figured it out wrong … The people were organizing … The guerrilla wars and the strikes went on . . Cuba and Chile won their freedom … Countless men and women sang the Internationale … How odd … How disheartening … Now they sing it in Chinese, Bulgarian, in the Spanish of Latin America … We’ve got to do something about it quickly … We must ban it … We must talk about the spirit some more … And sing the praises of the free world some more … We must hand out some more whacks, some more dollars … This can’t go on … Between the freedom to hand out whacks and Germán Arciniegas’s fear … And now Cuba … In the middle of our hemisphere, in the middle of our apple, these long-beards all singing the same song … And what good is Christ to us…? What good have the priests done us…? We can’t trust anybody any more … Not even the priests … They don’t see eye to eye with us … They don’t see how our stocks are plunging in the market …

  … Meanwhile, men are soaring into the solar system … Shoes track up the moon … Everything struggles to change, except the outworn systems … These outworn systems were spawned in the immense spiderwebs of the Middle Ages … Spiderwebs stronger than the steel of machinery … Yet there are people who believe in change, who have made changes, who have made the changes work, who have made change burst into flower … Caramba!… Nobody can hold spring back!

  POETRY AND POLITICS

  I have spent almost all of 1969 in Isla Negra. Starting early in the morning, the sea goes into its fantastic swelling-up routine, looking as if it were kneading an infinite loaf of bread. The spilling foam, driven up by the icy yeast of the deep, is white like flour.

  Winter is solidly entrenched and foggy. Every day we add to its local charm with a fire in the hearth. The whiteness of the sands on the beach offers us a world forever solitary, as it was before there were any people or summer vacationers on earth. But don’t think that I hate summer crowds. As soon as summer nears, girls come to the sea, men and children approach the waves cautiously, leaping clear of danger. It’s their version of man’s thousand-year-old dance, perhaps the first of all summer dances.

  In winter the houses in Isla Negra are covered up by night’s darkness. Only mine lights up. Sometimes I think there is someone in the house across the road. I see a light in a window. It’s only an optical illusion. There is no one in the Captain’s house. It’s the light from my window mirrored in his.

  I’ve gone to write every day of the year in the hideaway where I do my work. It’s not easy to get there or stay there. For the moment my two dogs, Panda and Chou Tu, have something to keep them happy. It’s a Bengal tiger’s skin, which I use as a rug in this small room. I brought it from China a good many years ago. Its claws and hair have fallen out. And there’s some danger from the moths, but Matilde and I ward them off.

  My dogs like to sprawl out over the old enemy. They fall asleep instantly, like victors after a battle, drained by the fight.

  They stretch across the door as if to force me to stay in, to go on with my work.

  There’s always something going on in this house. There’s a long-distance call for me. What should the answer be? I’m not in. Someone sends another message. What should the answer be? I’m in.

  I’m not in. I’m in. I’m in. I’m not in. This is the life of a poet whose remote hideaway in Isla Negra has stopped being remote.

  I am always being asked, especially by journalists, what I am writing, what I am working on. This question has always surprised me because it’s so superficial. For, as a matter of fact, I am always doing the same thing. I have never stopped doing the same thing. Poetry?

  I had been at it a long time before I realized that I was writing something called poetry. I have never been interested in definitions or labels. Discussions of aesthetics bore me to death. I am not belittling those who have them, but I am as indifferent to the birth certificate of a literary work as I am to the post-mortem on it. “And nothing exterior shall ever take command of me,” said Walt Whitman. And, for all their merits, the paraphernalia of literature should not take the place of naked creation.

  I changed notebooks several times during the year. Those notebooks bound together by the green thread of my handwriting are around somewhere. I filled many that gradually turned into books, passing from one metamorphosis into another, from immobility into movement, from glowworms into fireflies.

  * * *

  Political life came like a thunderclap to pull me away from my work. I returned to the crowds once more.

  The human crowd has been the lesson of my life. I can come to it with the born timidity of the poet, with the fear of the timid, but once I am in its midst, I feel transfigured. I am part of the essential majority, I am one more leaf on the great human tree.

  Solitude and multitude will go on being the primary obligations of the poet in our time. In solitude, the battle of the surf on the Chilean coast made my life richer. I was intrigued by and have loved passionately the battling waters and the rocks they battled against, the teeming ocean life, the impeccable formation of the “wandering birds,” the splendor of the sea’s foam.

  But I learned much more from the huge tide of lives, from the tenderness I saw in thousands of eyes watching me together. This message may not come to all poets, but anyone who has felt it will keep it in his heart, will work it into his poems.

  To have embodied hope for many men, even for one minute, is something unforgettable and profoundly touching for the poet.

  PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE

  One morning in 1969 the secretary general of my party and other comrades came to my seaside hide-out, my house in Isla Negra. They came to offer me the conditional candidacy for President of the Republic, a candidacy they would propose to the six or seven parties of Popular Unity. They had everything ready: program, type of government, emergency measures for the future, etc. Up until that moment, each of those parties had a candidate and each wanted to keep him. W
e Communists were the only ones who did not have one. Our position was to back the one candidate designated by the leftist parties; he would become Popular Unity’s candidate. But it was all up in the air, and it could not be left like that much longer. The candidates of the right were in the thick of the race and had their publicity machines going strong. Unless we united under a common electoral cause, we would suffer a crushing defeat.

  The only way to achieve some sort of unity quickly was for the Communists to name their own candidate. When I accepted the party’s nomination, we made the Communist position quite clear. Our support would be thrown to the candidate who had the good will of the others. If such a consensus was not reached, I would remain a candidate right through to the end.

  It was a courageous way to force the others to come to an agreement. When I accepted I told Comrade Corvalán I was doing it on condition that my resignation would be accepted when I tendered it. My withdrawal was inevitable, I felt. It was far too improbable that everyone could be rallied around a Communist. In other words, all the other parties needed our support (even the Christian-Democratic candidates), but none of them had to give us theirs.

  However, my candidacy, started that morning in Isla Negra, beside the sea, caught fire. I was in demand everywhere. I was moved by the hundreds and thousands of ordinary men and women who crushed me to them and kissed me and wept. Slum dwellers from the outskirts of Santiago, miners from Coquimbo, men who worked copper in the desert, peasant women who waited for me hours on end with babies in their arms, the neglected and poor from the Bío-Bío River to beyond the Strait of Magellan—I spoke or read my poems to them all in pouring rain, in the mud on streets and roads, in the south wind that sends shivers through each of us.