The next day, Neruda again spoke on the Senate floor, this time in a special session. Before it started, a conservative senator asked Arturo Alessandri, the former president of the republic and current president of the Senate, to stop the session on the grounds that there were no pending issues. Rudecindo Ortega Mason, who had first showed Neruda’s poems to Claridad, was a recently elected senator himself.* Senator Mason joined Alessandri in arguing vigorously that if they prevented Neruda from speaking, it would amount to censure. They failed to persuade the chamber, and the Senate voted in favor of closing the session, effectively censoring Neruda. Alessandri then resigned in protest and disgust of what had just occurred. His resignation wasn’t accepted, though, and after much haggling, Neruda was allowed to speak.
He began his historic speech by announcing that he was returning “to occupy the Senate’s attention, in these dramatic times in which our country is living,” to address the “Crisis of Democracy” article, which he had written “in defense of the prestige of Chile.” He then chastised González Videla, especially for his “reckless political persecution,” in order to avoid “criticisms of repressive methods.” “This will be the only thing in Chilean history that remains of his presidency,” Neruda prophesied.
Neruda then shifted into a more sophisticated form of rhetoric:
Speaking before the Honorable Senate on this day, an extraordinary memory comes to my mind.
On a January 6 like this one—January 6, 1941—a titan of struggles and of freedoms, a distinguished president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, sent a message to the world of four freedoms, which formed the foundation of the future for which so many people in the world fought and bled.
He named them: “freedom of speech and expression; freedom of every person to worship God in his own way; freedom from want; freedom from fear.” “That was the world that Roosevelt promised,” he said, but Truman, along with Latin American dictators and the González Videlas of the world, “want a different kind of world. There is no freedom of speech in Chile; people are not free from fear. [Those] who fight to free our country from misery are persecuted, mistreated, injured, and condemned.”
The address would later be published under the name “Yo acuso” (“I Accuse”), taken from Émile Zola’s 1898 open letter in defense of the French Jew Alfred Dreyfus, accused of selling secrets to Germany.
The threat of retaliation followed the Nerudas everywhere. Right after Neruda gave his speech, Delia went to the hairdresser Monsieur Paul; if they were sent to Pisagua, she wanted to be ready. Neruda had lost over eleven pounds and was having trouble sleeping.
On January 13, the Senate debated giving the president more emergency powers in certain parts of the country, which would be put under the control of the armed forces. The president would be given a free hand to suppress any form of “antipatriotic propaganda” and to restrict the right to meet and assemble. Neruda continued his outspoken criticism, and after debate on the emergency powers had ended, he began to read the names of political prisoners at Pisagua, giving homage to each one. He read more than 450 names until he was cut off by the close of the Senate session. He continued with the remaining fifty-six names the next day.
The Senate granted González Videla the extraordinary powers he had asked for in a vote at the end of that session, twenty-eight votes in favor, only eight against. Six days later, the country’s appellate court sent the case against Neruda to the Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent a cable to its diplomatic corps in Brussels, telling them to “give every class of help to allow the legitimate wife of Señor Neruda to travel to Chile.” Charges of bigamy against Neruda were coming out in the press, accusing him of still being married to Maruca. The government wanted to bring her to Chile to prove that he had two wives.
On January 21, 1948, Alessandri, still president of the Senate, granted Neruda constitutional permission to leave the country for thirty days. But while Neruda had permission to be absent from the Senate, he did not have permission from the president, who controlled the borders. Neruda asked the Mexican ambassador Pedro de Alba to help him leave Chile. De Alba had the Mexican military attaché accompany Neruda and Delia to the Argentine border in a car with diplomatic plates. But Chilean border police turned them around, claiming the documents to cross the border didn’t correspond to the plates and make of their car. The Mexican attaché tried to negotiate, but the police refused. Neruda called the Mexican ambassador, who told him to return to the Mexican embassy in Santiago. Neruda was visibly anxious. He announced he would not leave the embassy because he feared for his life.
Ambassador de Alba wanted to give Neruda asylum in Mexico, but Mexico’s minister of foreign affairs directed him not to, fearing an international incident. Neruda didn’t want to cause problems for de Alba, so he took a taxi to the home of a friend, Carmen Cuevas, the founder of an influential folk music and dance group. The taxi driver didn’t speak to or look at him during the trip. According to Neruda’s friend and biographer Margarita Aguirre, when Neruda got out and asked how much the fare was, the driver responded, “You don’t owe me anything, Don Pablo, and good luck.”
On January 30, young members of an anti-communist organization burned a coffin symbolically marked as Neruda’s in Santiago’s main plaza. Three days later, Neruda and Delia once again drove to the Argentine border, but they were turned back because his documents used the name Ricardo Neftalí Reyes (he had legally changed his name to Pablo Neruda the year before). The next day, the Supreme Court, in a sixteen-to-one vote, stripped Neruda of his immunity on the grounds that he had published false and tendentious statements. The government officially ordered his arrest.
Chapter Sixteen
The Flight
To everyone, to you,
silent
