Less than two weeks after the Salvador Allende-led Chilean government was overthrown in a violent coup d’etat, Pablo Neruda, Allende’s friend and comrade, died in his Santiago home on September 23, 1973.
He had been seriously ill for some time. Yet, when the end came, it was not clear if disease, rather than murder, had claimed Chile’s greatest poet. Indeed, 45 years after his passing, the jury is still out on whether Neruda had been poisoned at the insistence of Augusto Pinochet, the brutal dictator who was to soon turn Chile into a vast, open tomb.
But while a cloud of uncertainty hangs over his death still, there is no doubt at all about why Neruda chose to be a poet. Indeed, he did not choose his calling himself. It was poetry that came calling for the young man, as Neruda was to record in an audacious poetic testament years later:
And it was at that age… Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don’t know how or when,
no they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.
The conversational tone of that prefatory ‘And’ imparts a strong sense of immediacy, of urgency, to the lines. Clearly, for Neruda, there was no getting away from that ‘summons’, that call which it is the privilege of only the rare artist to hear, and
I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadows perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.
One can never miss the elemental – you could almost say, the primordial – in Neruda’s work, perhaps more so in his early poems than in his later work, but it is there all the same. In Twenty Love Poems, he lets the reader hold the throbbing, pulsating earth in her very hands:
Here I love you.
In the dark pines the wind disentangles itself.
The moon glows like phosphorous on the vagrant waters.
Days, all one kind, go chasing each other.
Again, in another poem:
Leaning into the afternoons I fling my sad nets
towards the sea that beats on your marine eyes.
The birds of night peck at the first stars
that flash like my soul when I love you.
The night gallops on its shadowy mare
Shedding blue tassels over the land.
“There is a cosmic quality to Neruda’s identification of earth and humanity”, as a critic noted. It is intuitive, even instinctive – persisting like a constant in all that he wrote in different poetic genres, even in his prose, at any rate in most of it. His longing for love, for the woman he loves, has the same cosmic quality:
I was alone like a tunnel. The birds fled from me
and night swamped me with its crushing invasion.
To survive myself I forged you like a weapon,
like an arrow in my bow, a stone in my sling.
But the hour of vengeance falls, and I love you.
Body of skin, of moss, of eager and firm milk.
These verses were written when Neruda was not quite 20. Many, many years later, his Memoirs, first published only after his death, still retained some of the same sublime earthiness, the sensuous richness of language as his early poems. For him, his dear friend Miguel Hernandez – long dead in Franco’s prison – “had a face like a clod of earth or a potato that has just been pulled up from among the roots and still has its subterranean freshness”.
Pablo Neruda with Cesar Vallejo and Nicolas Guillen.
Again, “(h)is face was the face of Spain. Chiselled by the light, rutted like a planted field, it had some of the roundness of bread or of earth”. About Federico Garcia Lorca, another victim of Falangist violence, Neruda writes: “I have never seen grace and genius, a winged heart and a crystalline waterfall, come together in anyone else as they did in him”.
But the very richness of the language’s texture, the extravagances of colour, of fragrances oozing from the poetry can not only be a little overwhelming: they also tend to set the poet apart, cloistered in a world all his own. These poems have a certain hermetic quality; their universe is populated by fiercely private sensations and emotions which have an unmistakable air of exclusivity, and solitariness, about them. Indeed, the young poet had been feeling increasingly, disconsolately lonely through his twenties, as he was to recall in 1948 in Canto General:
When I was writing my love poems, which sprouted out from me
on all sides, and I was dying of depression,
nomadic, abandoned, gnawing on the alphabet,
they said to me :” what a great man you are, Theocritus!”
I am not Theocritus : I took life,
and I faced her and kissed her,
and then went through the tunnels of the mines
to see how other men live.
And when I came out, my hands stained with garbage and sadness,
I held up my hands and showed them to the generals,
and said :” I am not a part of this crime”.
In 1927, aged 23, Neruda set sail from his native land in search of the wide open world where men and women lived their quotidian lives untroubled by loneliness – or so he hoped. Chile’s diplomatic service took him to Burma (Myanmar), Colombo, Java and Singapore in quick succession.
At each place, he felt euphoric to begin with, the new sounds and sights and perfumes assailing his senses. But soon enough, his old loneliness (“like a cup that I hate”) returned with a vengeance, and he started feeling increasingly isolated, thrown back upon himself, forlorn. “My body was a lonely bonfire burning night and day on that tropical coast”, as he was to write later. He married while in Java, read copiously and hungrily, and started writing Residence on Earth. But all this gave him no respite. All through these years, he oscillated desperately between sudden bursts of energy and limp listlessness. And he was hopelessly restless, lonely.
This loneliness was to weigh heavily on him till he reached Spain – after a brief tenure in Buenos Aires – where he first took up a post in Barcelona and later became Spain’s consul in Madrid. He soon made friends with Federico García Lorca, Rafael Alberti, the great Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo and many other creative artists, and a vibrant artistic brotherhood began to flourish. Neruda felt as though he had been born again. It was still a bohemian life, but the poet had broken free of his desperate loneliness for good. Then the Spanish Civil War exploded upon the world he had come to identify with, wrenching fibres of experience hitherto untouched, and he erupted in verses like these:
I among men bear the same wounded hand,
suffer the same reddened cup
and live in identical rage.
Not for nothing did he call his new book of verse, printed literally at the Civil War’s frontline, Spain in Our Hearts. “Neruda suddenly saw himself as no longer estranged, but ‘reunited’—not with accidents of matter, in blind processes of cosmic fatality, but with men, in processes of will”. He had moved out of the shadow of the past, no longer trusting to his instincts alone, and now saw his perception and his sensibility firmly aligned with suffering, embattled mankind:
And you’ll ask, why doesn’t his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land?
Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
the blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
in the streets.
Neruda’s long and agonised struggle with feeling and articulating immediate experience – when he had been striving to express the whole ferment of his sensibility through rapid strokes of his brush – now gave way to an overpowering desire to communicate. He now craved to understand and be understood, and while the awakening to a newly-found fellowship with mankind made fresh demands on his idiom, on his style, he was finally at peace with himself. From being a fiercely ‘private’ poet, he became the poet of the Americas, indeed of the whole world, though he lost none of his earlier intensity in the process:
If you should ask me where I’ve been all this time
I have to say “Things happen”.
I have to dwell on stones darkening the earth,
on the river ruined in its own duration.
I know nothing save things the birds have lost,
he sea I left behind, or my sister crying.
Why this abundance of places? Why does day lock
with day? Why the dark night swilling round
in our mouths? And why the dead?
Even in a poem of love, he is now mellower, but also profounder, as fully engaged with his thoughts as his emotions, so that he may as well be speaking to his country as to the woman he loves:
I want you to know
one thing.
You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.
The poet now recognised his obligation to the life men lived around him, in humble huts and run-down settlements; of his obligation to probe why such crushing poverty and misery co-existed with stunning prosperity and plenitude; the obligation to open the doors of men’s prisons
So, through me, freedom and the sea
will call in answer to the shrouded heart.
It was only in 1945 that Neruda formally joined the Communist Party of Chile and was elected a senator. But he had made common cause with communism in Spain, in the very 1930s that had transformed his poetic vision. The theme of the community of all men, of the earth belonging to everyone but especially the disenfranchised and the dispossessed, became a kind of refrain running through Neruda’s work now:
I remember one day in the sandy acres
on the nitrate flats; there were five hundred men
on strike. It was a scorching afternoon
in Tarapaca. And after the faces had absorbed
all the sand and the bloodless dry sun of the desert,
I saw coming into me, like a cup that I hate,
My old depression. At that time of crisis,
in the desolation of the salt flats, in that weak moment
of the fight, when we could have been beaten,
a little pale girl who had come from the mines
spoke a poem of yours in a brave voice
that had glass in it and steel, an old poem of yours that wanders
among the wrinkled eyes
of all the workers of my country, of America.
And that small piece of your poetry blazed suddenly
like a purple blossom in my mouth,
and went down to my blood, filling it once more
with a luxuriant joy born from your poem.
Remarkably, his poetry could now sound like an incantation to help restore meaning to man’s life on earth:
But today has been too much for me: not only one sea bird,
but thousands have gone past my window,
and I have picked up the letters no one reads, letters they take along
to all the shores of the world until they lose them.
Then in each of those letters I read words of yours,
and they resembled the words I write, and dream of, and put in poems,
and so I decided to send this letter to you, which I end here,
so I can watch through the window the world that is ours.
In the 1970 presidential elections, the Chilean CP nominated Neruda as its candidate, but he withdrew later in favour of his old friend, the socialist Salvador Allende. Neruda went instead as Chile’s Ambassador in France, but returned in late 1972 as illness cut short his tenure in Paris. As the Chilean revolution came under concerted attack from all manner of vested interests, the sick poet watched on and agonised. The coup shattered him, and Pinochet’s henchmen ransacked the poet’s house even as he lay on his sick bed.
On September 23, at the hospital, Neruda suspected foul play as he was injected with a substance the doctors were very cagey about. He demanded release from the hospital, returned home, and died a few hours later. He was a heart-broken man, and yet he must have believed that
Someone is hearing me without knowing it
but those I sing of, those who know,
go on being born and will overflow the world.
Anjan Basu is a literary critic, translator and commentator based out of Bangalore. He can be reached at basuanjan52@gmail.com.