Neruda wasn’t alone as he launched his Senate campaign in this tumultuous and economically important region. He found a lieutenant in a former nitrate worker, Elías Lafertte Gaviño, a cofounder of the Socialist Workers Party and leader of its newer incarnation, the Chilean Communist Party. Lafertte was running for the other Senate seat in the north. They took their campaign to the workers in the mines, involving themselves in their daily lives, endorsing their calls for better wages, education, and working conditions.
Lafertte wrote about visiting a worker’s living quarters in company housing at a nitrate mine:
I enter her home and she shows me makeshift beds, some of them on the ground, a table made of boxes and only one chair for the entire house. They didn’t build a kitchen for the houses . . . there’s no toilet or bathroom in the camp, and since water is scarce, they sometimes have to buy it. The eczema and ulcers caused by the acids of the nitrate process are just one more problem in their fearful lives.
On February 24, 1945, Neruda and Lafertte held a huge rally at the stadium of the province’s largest city, Antofagasta, presided over by the city’s mayor and congressman, both Communists. Neruda read a new poem, “Salute to the North,” with economical phrasing and rhymed consonants throughout, which effectively worked as a campaign speech (the rhymes are lost in translation):
North, I finally arrive at your wild
mineral silence of yesterday and today,
seeking your voice and to find my own,
and I don’t bring you an empty heart:
I bring you everything that I am.*
Neruda would be true to his verse; he and Lafertte were elected senators on March 4. Up and down the length of Chile, the Communist Party felt victorious, with two other senators and twenty deputies elected.
That same month Neruda was awarded the Chilean National Prize for Literature, despite a strong political opposition within the current conservative government’s self-selected jury. “This triumph over prejudice and anti-communist action,” Neruda said, “with which they want to poison the world to take advantage of the leftover remnants of Nazism, is more than a personal triumph for me; it represents the hope that my homeland will achieve a more prestigious status in the world as a democratic nation.” But divisive tension between communists and capitalists was brimming. The McCarthy era had begun, and anti-communist fever was being fanned in the United States and down throughout Latin America.
During his years in the Senate, Neruda demonstrated a duality in his character that many have remarked upon. Not only did he write great poetry, including political poetry, but he also proved to be an agile politician. He was much more than just a renowned figure whom the party could deploy as a candidate to capture a seat. Instead he galvanized the chamber on a variety of issues, from demanding women’s suffrage—which was realized in 1949—to labor rights. His political shrewdness was such that, over the following decades, many politicians and party members would go to Isla Negra to discuss their concerns.
Neruda loved part of this new life and loathed the rest. He may have been a very effective politician, but that didn’t mean he always enjoyed serving the public, as he commented in an interview in the Venezuelan newspaper El Nacional: “In politics, not everything can be productive, brilliant action: the strongest, most absorbing part is the everyday, routine work, the bureaucratic function of the politician that does not have an apparent objective or point, but is inevitable nonetheless.”
He found the social and personal aspects—writing and answering letters, receiving and greeting people, the constant meetings, talks, bland dinner parties—to be “extremely boring and tiresome, and worse yet, it takes time that could be used to write poetry.” Politics and literature were both such “overwhelming, all-consuming occupations that they are incompatible.” He wrote much less during this time, but what he wrote hit its mark.
On July 8, at a ceremony in the Teatro Caupolicán, Neruda officially joined the Chilean Communist Party. Six days later, he traveled to São Paulo, Brazil, for a public celebration of Luís Carlos Prestes, the leftist leader who’d been forbidden release from prison for his mother’s funeral in Mexico, setting off a firestorm. Prestes had now been let free after a decade of incarceration. Jorge Amado, one of Brazil’s greatest writers and a member of the Brazilian Communist Party, received Neruda for the Prestes freedom celebration; the two would be friends for life.
Amado, Neruda, and Prestes spoke before a crowd of more than one hundred thousand enthusiastic people at the Estádio do Pacaembu. Neruda read a poem, written for the occasion, which started by him telling the crowd
How many things I’d like to tell you today, Brazilians,
how many stories, struggles, disappointments, victories
harbored in my heart for many years, unexpressed thoughts
and greetings.
The greetings he carried included words spoken to him from Chilean workers, miners, stonemasons, sailors; even the snow, cloud, and fog; and “the little girl who gave me some ears of grain”:
Their message was one. It was: Greetings to Prestes.
Go look for him, they told me, in the jungles and rivers.
Remove his shackles, look for his cell, call him.
And if they don’t let you talk to him, look at him until
your eyes are tired, and tell us tomorrow what you’ve seen.
—“Spoken in Pacaembú (Brazil, 1945)”
* * *
While Neruda was in Brazil, nitrate workers held a strike in northern Chile. Companies had broken the union’s negotiated freeze on company store prices. Violence erupted between the workers and the authorities. Then the government intervened and outlawed unions in Tarapacá. Senators Lafertte and Neruda, now back in the country, tried to visit the mines but were denied entry. On January 28 the Chilean Workers Federation organized a solidarity march in Santiago.
