Matilde came by so frequently to visit and help Delia that she effectively became Neruda’s nurse. She entered their space with competitive displays of domestic abilities, helping to organize and attend to the general concerns of the house where Delia did not excel, especially as she became busier in political and literary activities outside the Mexico City house while Neruda was immobile. Matilde saw the opportunity and took advantage of it. Neruda was aroused by Matilde. She was a very attractive, nimble woman and was there almost every day helping him heal his leg. He was falling in love, the affair developing into something much deeper than a poet’s fling with a pretty admirer. She became pregnant with his child.
Elena Caffarena, an emblematic leader of Chilean feminism, once remarked, “Women follow in Pablo’s footsteps like flies.” Yet while Neruda carries an almost legendary reputation as a love poet who engaged in innumerable affairs, this image doesn’t hold true to reality. One can speculate, but other than Delia (when he was still with Maruca) and Matilde, there’s little evidence that he had extramarital relationships. Only one can be fully corroborated.
According to many of those who knew him well, as close friends or from afar, as fans or skeptics, Neruda wasn’t a typical womanizer. For the most part, he wasn’t the one who went after women, but rather they went after him. He wasn’t a great seducer and could actually be rather timid around women, especially those who were particularly attractive and bold. After leaving behind his depressed youth and lost persona in the Far East, his passion and fame as both an engaging poet and a personality drew women to him.
If Delia suspected something was happening between Neruda and Matilde in the beginning, or with others here and there, she told no one about it.
Meanwhile, González Videla’s government had succeeded in bringing Maruca to Chile. The newspaper La Última Hora ran the headline “Neruda’s First Wife Has Requested Legal Access to His Assets” on May 4, 1948. Maruca officially brought bigamy charges against him in court. Yet without Neruda in the country, and since his Mexican marriage to Delia was never legally recognized by Chile or Delia’s home country, Argentina, it amounted to little more than propaganda and agitation.
The peace congress ended on September 15, three days before Chile’s Independence Day. His debilitated condition wasn’t going to deprive Neruda of celebrating his love for his country. Nor would it prevent him from publicly demonstrating how he was celebrating Chile, despite his being wanted by its government, and doing so amid a group of luminaries and admirers in Mexico rejoicing not just his country’s independence, but the poet himself. He wanted to humiliate President González Videla. He would not be attending the Chilean embassy’s fiesta. Instead, he invited fifty people to a lunch and then some three hundred to a reception that night—according to an account, the majority of them were artists and intellectuals from a variety of countries. They included Siqueiros, Rivera, Éluard, Nicolás Guillén, the vibrant Mexican painter María Izquierdo, and Miguel Otero Silva, the Venezuelan who published the article that sent Neruda into exile.
Neruda still was rather immobile, so Delia presided over most of the festivities. As they celebrated Chile’s independence, guests were given a thirty-two page pamphlet by Neruda that denounced González Videla and the rampant oppression in the country.
The United States continued to keep tabs on Neruda. The American cultural attaché in Mexico met with Neruda’s supposed friend, the Mexican writer Alfonso Reyes. According to a State Department memo, Reyes “has no illusions about Neruda, whom he considers to be a Communist merely to attract attention and publicity to himself, like Diego Rivera.”
Neruda was working furiously to complete a special edition of Canto General he had envisioned. It would include art from the Mexican muralist masters Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, to whom Neruda had given advance galleys. In a letter to Tomás Lago, he wrote:
This book is agitating me more than The Book of Twilights ever did. I change the typefaces, send SOS messages, make corrections in bed, etc. There are lots of subscriptions, at 15 dollars each in the U.S., not one from Chile. Tell me how to send you a copy. The edition costs more than $300.000 [Chilean pesos], it’s going to be wonderful.
Neruda’s health was a distraction, but he was determined to push through his discomfort, as seen in a letter from Delia to his sister, Laura:
As he still can’t go down the stairs, much less walk up them, there need to be two strong men (as his weight is ever imposing) to take him by stretcher. The rest of his health, both physical and spiritual, draws everyone’s attention, especially the latter, since he’s never lost patience and has endured the difficulty of forced immobility without losing his humor or ability to work for a second. Piles of subscriptions [for copies of Canto General] and the most enthusiastic and admiring cards come for Pablo from the United States.
There certainly seemed to be more interest from readers in the States than from other countries. Many of them saw the work as art that protested McCarthyism. They were fascinated by the South American poet whose legend had grown since he denounced González Videla and went into exile, and whose dramatic appearance when Picasso introduced him in Paris caused such a sensation. New translations were making his work more available to an English-language readership.
The production was advancing just as Neruda began to feel better, allowing him to make key public appearances to celebrate the book. On November 5, 1949, Delia wrote to Laura:
Right now his bed is next to the window and people he knows passing on the street shout hello. He is so well that he says I should treat him as if he were healthy and stop giving him the thermometer. From his bed, he continues commanding
