Neruda portrays the Spanish conquest as a tragic injustice forced on “his” people, despite his own European heritage. The Europeans in his view were barbarous and ruthless, while the pre-Columbian societies are described in idealized terms. “Like a wild rose / a red drop”—the blood of the indigenous people after European colonization—“fell on the thickness / and a lamp on earth was extinguished.” So ended America’s Edenic first phase of history. He reaches back to when he was compelled to drink the goblet of blood from the slaughtered lamb back in Temuco, but now the blood is the tragedy of imperialism:
My land without name, without América,
equinoctial stamen, purple lance,
your aroma climbed to me through my roots
into the goblet that I drank, into the thinnest
word still unborn in my mouth.
Neruda fails to mention the violence that many pre-Columbian societies had perpetrated on the continent: the Incas’ and Aztecs’ aggressive war making, the Mayans’ human sacrifices, or the bloody raids of the Apache. He is selective in the service of a romantic notion and a political cause.
Neruda directly identifies himself with the indigenous people. “I searched for you, my father, / young warrior of darkness and copper,” he writes in “Amor América (1400).” Here, all indigenous people are his “fathers” and he is their son, despite the fact there is no evidence that he had any indigenous blood in his own heritage.
In the opening of the book, Neruda declares, “I am here to tell the story.” “The story” he is telling in this case is their story, as the construction engineer José Corriel put it: the “story of the conquered,” the people of the Americas, so as to give name to that which was “without name, without América,” before the Spanish came. Canto General is a book of naming, of identifying, of constructing a narrative, a history, and in developing this language within a text, Neruda invites the reader to bear witness to injustice, as he attempts to give voice to the oppressed.
The epic spans the 450 years of history from the arrival of Columbus to the publication of the book. By the fifteenth and final section, the betrayals of the past are bridged to the optimism of a brighter future, as that original language has been reclaimed and restored. Through the Marxist belief that the roots of a better future grow in the hardships of the past, Neruda returns to a utopian image of Latin America and the world. This optimism, though, is dependent on continued social commitment by the masses, on collective action to sustain this new day, this better world.
Neruda and the two muralists signed a special edition of five hundred books, each 567 pages, large format (14 x 10 inches), featuring magnificent illustrations by the two painters. The publisher, Oceana, contributed some of its own money, but Neruda had for some time been working to sell advance subscriptions in order to fund the production. Three hundred books had already been sold to sponsors in Italy, Russia, Hungary, England, France, Czechoslovakia, Spain, the United States, and all over Latin America, as well as to many Mexicans who were there that night.*
Neruda, Rivera, and Siqueiros were united by friendship, art, and their political commitment. Neruda wanted the reader to experience all of that in the book. In his memoirs, Neruda wrote that when he first came to Mexico City in 1940, Rivera, Siqueiros, and the other great revolutionary muralist José Clemente Orozco were “covering the streets of the city with history and geography, with civil uprisings, with iron-hard polemics.” This directly inspired Neruda’s vision and the writing for the book: their epic sweep painted on a large scale, incorporating all of history, centered on the indigenous and the proletariat; crowding the canvas with events, emboldened people, and images of struggle and victory. Just like Neruda’s new poetry, they aimed their work at the common person. Canto General is the book-length, poetic version of their art. Neruda had also invited Orozco to participate, but he died of heart failure six months before the book’s release.
One of Rivera’s paintings opens the book, on the front endpapers. True to his form, Rivera’s illustration/painting is titled Pre-Hispanic America. It is stunning. The piece is divided in two, with the left side portraying the Aztec and Mayan cultures and the right side the Inca and perhaps the Quechua in Peru. The largest subject in the painting is a strong, earthen man, with skin the color of burnt orange, sitting on top of an altar. It seems he has been sacrificed, as his blood is flowing in the shape of a dagger down the golden steps beneath him. Above him hangs the bottom half of a sun, sharp red rays bursting out from a gray core, suggesting that his blood perhaps went to feed Tezcatlipoca, the sun god, who needed to be nourished well enough so that he had the strength to raise the sun each morning. The sun gives light to both sides, all cultures.
The Aztec death god, Mictlantecuhtli, with his white toothy skull, stands in a pyramid to the left of the sacrificed man. He is dressed in blue, with embellishments of red, white, and yellow; his mouth is wide open, and his hands reach out to the sun. Purple and yellow hands sit atop the pyramid with their fingers pointed skyward. On the left border, away from the central image, Rivera includes a black snowcapped volcano, magenta volcanoes spewing fire, and a lithe deer being hunted. The bottom of that half of the section paints a more tranquil scene of Mayans: one is tilling a field; one is chiseling a door; there are other craftsmen working and people cooking. A fertile, Edenic scene of a serpent, a shell, and a waterfall adjoins them. A dolphin, a fish, and an alligator decorate the borders.
The Peruvian scene is simpler, with grander images, including Machu Picchu in beautiful shades of silver, white, and gray; a condor soaring over an
