Finally, the operative from Buenos Aires arrived; there had been some complications with the military. Everything was all set, and the next morning Neruda left after a festive send-off by his new San Martín friends.
The Argentine Communists drove Neruda to Buenos Aires. He borrowed the passport of his friend Miguel Ángel Asturias, who happened to be serving there as the Guatemalan consul. His face had an uncanny resemblance to Neruda’s. Neruda traveled across the Río de la Plata to Montevideo, Uruguay, and then flew to France. Nearly two years had passed since the order for his arrest had been issued.
Neruda’s Nobel speech provides a fitting coda to the whole sinister and exhilarating ordeal:
I say that I do not know, after so many years, whether the lessons I learned when I crossed a daunting river, when I danced around the skull of an ox, when I bathed my body in the cleansing water from the topmost heights—I do not know whether these lessons welled forth from me in order to be imparted to many others or whether it was all a message that was sent to me by others as a demand or an accusation. I do not know whether I experienced this or created it, I do not know whether it was truth or poetry, something passing or permanent, the poems I experienced in this hour, the experiences that I later put into verse. From all this, my friends, there arises an insight that the poet must learn through other people. There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence, in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song—but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in a common destiny.
Chapter Seventeen
Exile and Matilde
This book ends here. It was born
of fury like a live coal, like territories
of burned forests, and I hope
that it continues like a red tree
spreading its bright flame.
Yet it wasn’t only rage you found
in its branches: its roots sought
sorrow but also strength,
and I am the strength of pensive stone,
the joy of joined hands.
—“I End Here (1949)”
When Neruda arrived in Paris, many illustrious leftists were in town for the First World Congress of Partisans for Peace. Pablo Picasso found him a safeguarded apartment: the home of Françoise Giroud, a journalist and leader of the French feminist movement. She had hidden Jews during the German occupation. Neruda adored the apartment—it was filled with Picasso’s paintings—and sent for Delia immediately.
The World Congress had opened on April 20, 1949, with 2,895 delegates from seventy-two nations who claimed to speak for six hundred million people. (The French government barred 384 delegates because of their supposed subversive character.) A simultaneous conference convened in Prague, connecting to the action in Paris by phone and radio. There was money to cover the expenses. The goal of the World Congress was “to unite all the active forces in all countries for the defense of peace.”
In Paris, the gathering was based at the splendid art deco Salle Pleyel, one of the city’s largest and most celebrated concert halls. Picasso contributed his recently painted dove, which was displayed on the walls and prominently sewn into the main stage’s curtain. It would become a universal symbol of peace. A banner on one wall declared: “Hitler wanted us to fight the U.S.S.R. We didn’t go nor shall we go for Truman.” (Many were suspicious that the military escalation by the United States and its allies was not a defensive measure, but rather a move toward initiating a war against the Soviets.)
At the conclusion of the World Congress, on April 25, Picasso stirred the crowd when he announced that he had a surprise. Timed perfectly, an apparently relaxed Neruda walked out on the stage in a pin-striped suit. It was his first public appearance since fleeing Chile, and it was in a hall filled with friends and admirers. Neruda beamed as Picasso kissed him on the cheek. The audience roared. Among them were iconic luminaries such as the artists Diego Rivera, Marc Chagall, and Henri Matisse; the Italian writer Italo Calvino; the French feminist and scientist Eugénie Cotton; and the French poets Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon. Delegates from the United States included the author of Spartacus, Howard Fast, who would be imprisoned a year later for refusing to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC); the African American activist-scholar W. E. B. Du Bois; and the singer, actor, and civil rights champion Paul Robeson. (Charlie Chaplin and Henry Miller, among many other renowned leftists, did not attend but lent their names in support of the conference.)
Du Bois noted the diversity of the crowd. There was the crucial “patent fact that the Colored World was present,” not as token representatives, “but as members of a world movement in full right and with full participation.” Du Bois, a veteran of such gatherings, declared that in Paris “I have attended the greatest meeting of men ever assembled in modern times to advance the progress of all men.”
On the last day, the World Congress organized “the most impressive mass demonstration” Du Bois had ever witnessed: one hundred thousand peaceful people in a stadium crying, “Peace! Peace!” “No lying, distortion and twisting of our prostituted press can conceal or erase the heartbreaking significance of this spectacle,” Du Bois wrote. “None who saw it will ever forget.”
The day before
