They took a boat across the massive Lake Maihue to a small landmass that separated it from another lake, on whose opposite shore sat the ranch. As Neruda would describe to Delia, the boat took them through the black night, the lake moving along a heavy swell. They drank shots of Scotch as they passed dark islands surrounded by wilderness. When they got to the next piece of land, “they lit a bonfire with burlap and wood to guide our landing, and from far away we could see the enormously tall mountain rising from the water . . . Soon we left them behind, [Bellet driving us] in a colossal tractor fast in the darkness, through huge trees, tangles of leaves, roots the size of buildings. In sum, all of my poetry.”
After crossing the next lake, which felt to Neruda like approaching the end of the world, they finally reached the shore below the ranch. A rustic log house on a hill with a roof of oak shingles and chairs fashioned out of branches would provide them shelter.
Leoné Mosalvez was fifteen years old when Neruda, a.k.a. Antonio Ruiz, stayed for a month and a half with her, her parents, and her brother on the ranch. She described him as being a bit fat, with a prominent nose. He went around dressed simply, usually in a sweater and a cap with a small visor that he never took off. He wore thick shoes made for the country. “Sometimes he wrote in some notebooks with thick covers. He went around writing, sometimes in bed, sometimes at the table. The door to his room wasn’t closed. When he went out into the fields and forests, he always had a pen and a little notebook.” When not with Bellet, riding horses, or writing, she said, he would often go bird-watching, most content when he saw a local woodpecker.
Soon after Neruda’s arrival, José Rodríguez, the owner of the Hueinahue hacienda, made a surprise visit to the ranch. For political and economic reasons—he had made a great deal of money from Brazilian imports and land and industrial investments—Rodríguez was bound to President González Videla. But he also held his long-term foreman Bellet in great esteem. Despite Neruda’s apprehensions, Bellet thought it best to come clean right away about the fugitive hiding on the property, to avoid any surprises should the owner find out later.
Fortunately, Rodríguez was a lover of poetry. When Bellet told him of Neruda’s presence, Rodríguez asked to see him. Bellet drove him to the cabin where Neruda was staying, and Rodríguez got out of the jeep and walked quickly to Neruda. He hugged the poet and beamed: “You’re a man I’ve always wanted to meet. You’re the poet I most admire. Invite me to spend some time at your marvelous house, because the house that you’re in will always be marvelous.”
They drank whiskey and talked for hours, and Neruda read some Canto General poems he had just written. In a letter to Delia, Neruda described taking Rodríguez off into the woods and searching for, and naming, a whole collection of insects, just like he had done in the southern forests of his youth.
Meanwhile, Bellet had decided that Juvenal Flores and his brother Juan, ox-packers who worked at the ranch bringing down virgin timber from the heights, would guide Neruda up and through the Lilpela Pass. The Flores brothers would not be told about the escape plan until a day before they left. They weren’t told who Antonio Ruiz really was, only that he wanted to learn how to ride horses.
On March 1, 1949, four days before Neruda was to meet several Argentine Communists in San Martín de los Andes on the other side of the cordillera, a serendipitous meeting occurred when Victor Bianchi arrived at the ranch. He was working as an inspector for the Interior Ministry and was an old friend of Neruda’s; his brother Manuel Bianchi had helped Neruda get his first consular appointment at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs twenty-two years earlier. He was as colorful as the rest of his clan, an artist who played guitar and loved to serenade women. He also knew the land of southern Chile exceptionally well.
Bianchi had no idea that Neruda was hiding out at Hueinahue and was astonished to see him. Over sips of whiskey, Bianchi declared he’d join the expedition. Bellet wanted to clear a road all the way to the mountain, but Bianchi, who knew the area well, believed that would be a waste of time and energy and devised a more practical route. The party set off in the early morning of March 3.
Neruda carried all the pages of Canto General he had written so far in a saddlebag. Bianchi claimed that he also brought a typewriter. Neruda also brought along a huge, old illustrated volume about the birds of Chile.
The Flores brothers were armed with new pistols. They cleared the ox trail they were following with machetes. The group passed through dense wilderness, up steep inclines, and across a thin river, working slowly through the primeval forest. They came to a sunlit clearing with a gorgeous green meadow resplendent with wildflowers and a purling brook. According to Neruda, they found an ox skull that seemed to be set within a magical circle in the grass, as if it were part of a ritual. The party stopped, and the Flores brothers dismounted. They went over to the skull and put coins and food in its eye sockets, intended to help lost travelers who might find something to help them within the bones. Then they took off their hats and began a strange dance, hopping on one foot around the abandoned skull, moving in the ring of footprints left behind by the many others who had passed there before them. It was there, “alongside my inscrutable colleagues,” Neruda asserted twenty-two years later in his Nobel acceptance speech, that he
