For Sillen, among others, it was fine to dismiss the incredible poetry Neruda had written before the Spanish Civil War, when, to them, he became a “poet-in-arms.”
However, as Jorge Sanhueza, who was very close to Neruda during these years, put it, “The validity of Neruda’s words renouncing his earlier works, in absolute terms, only stood up for those who, from the first moment, judged those words with the goal of getting some political benefit from them.” Many of Neruda’s admirers virulently defended Residence on Earth in the face of Neruda’s speech. Some started to see that at this moment Neruda, for perhaps the first time in his life, or even the only time in his life, failed to fuse his two essential components: Neruda the poet and Neruda the politician.
In 1951, within two years of his renunciation of his earlier work, the highly regarded publisher Gonzalo Losada suggested that his Buenos Aires press print a new edition of Residence on Earth. Neruda authorized it. (When Franco seized Spain, Losada had fled to Buenos Aires, where he started an important press and became known as the publisher of the “exiles.” Losada would soon become Neruda’s principal publisher, the Chilean wanting to work with him in part for their shared political sympathies, as well as for the fact that Losada’s publishing house was soon more prestigious and reached a larger audience than Nascimento’s.) Even at the time of the Mexico City conference, Neruda’s “older” works started to emerge behind the Iron Curtain. In the Soviet Union, just five years after Neruda’s speech, some of the poems from Twenty Love Poems as well as the disavowed poems from Residence were included in numerous anthologies. Elsewhere, within a decade of the renouncement, new translations of Twenty Love Poems came out in East Germany and Czechoslovakia, among other countries, as the book surpassed the million-copy mark.
As he and Delia traveled from stage to stage, Neruda was often gazed upon by many admiring eyes. They came to see him because he was becoming an icon, and, for the most part, he delivered moving and motivating performances. As much as he loved Delia, his eyes were always open to other women in the crowd. Delia was about to turn sixty-five and he was forty-five, though even if she were younger his eyes would probably have still wandered.
At the peace congress, his eyes caught those of a charming Chilean guitarist with an appealing mix of elegance and natural beauty. She was thirty-seven years old, living in Mexico City and working at a music school. While she held no firm political beliefs—she was certainly not a communist or an activist—when she read about Neruda and the peace congress in the newspaper, she went to one of its sessions. The poet, struck by her natural beauty, which reminded him of southern Chile, went up to her afterward and asked if she was Chilean. “You don’t remember me?” she replied. Her name was Matilde Urrutia.
Supposedly he did not initially recall that they had met three summers earlier, at a concert in Santiago’s Parque Forestal. Neruda’s childhood friend Blanca Hauser had introduced him to her friend Matilde, who had recently returned to Chile after singing in Peru, Argentina, and Mexico. Neruda had invited both Blanca and Matilde to see his seashell collection at La Michoacán. Delia might have been there, or perhaps not.
They both participated in González Videla’s 1946 run for president, Neruda as his chief of communications, Matilde as a musician singing campaign songs. They came face-to-face again at her recording of “Hymn to the Forces of the Left,” which, like many of the campaign’s songs, was a riff off a contemporary hit, in this case the Andrews Sisters’ chart-topper “Rum and Coca-Cola.”
According to Volodia Teitelboim, a friend of both, Neruda was immediately interested in this singer with the impetuous smile. They may even have had a brief affair, cut short by his busy schedule as a senator. He went to spend time with his constituents in Antofagasta and around the north, and his new friend, whose name he had trouble remembering, left to teach music in Mexico. They lost touch after that. Neruda often met people, socialized with them for a while, and then lost contact, only to reconnect later.
In his poem “Let the Rail-Splitter Awake,” published in Canto General but dated 1948, between the time the two met at the concert and the campaign song recording, Neruda wrote:
peace for the Mississippi,
source of rivers,
peace for my brother’s shirt,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
peace for the grimy
iron of Brooklyn, peace for the letter-carrier
who from house to house goes like the day,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
peace for my own right hand
that wants to write only Rosario.
Rosario was the alias Neruda would use for Matilde both to his friends and in poems up until his separation from Delia. If this indeed was written in 1948, and not added on later, it indicates that their affair began earlier.
Shortly after arriving in Mexico City, while attending the conference, Neruda’s leg became severely swollen and red, radiating with pain. It was chronic thrombophlebitis, a condition that causes blood clots to form in the leg, blocking one or more veins. This time it was occurring in a deep muscle, making it even more unpleasant and prolonging the treatment. He and Delia had to remain in Mexico City, where they rented an apartment, again on the Paseo de la Reforma. The poet needed to stay immobile and take anticoagulants for at
