However, all this satisfaction was dampened when the book’s immediate reception fell far short of his expectations. After the book signing, there weren’t any of the expected homages. Not one article of any significant interest was published about the book’s importance in the international press. Those who did write about it at first seemed more interested in the author than the content, skirting around it, perhaps due to apprehension about being the first to critique such a monumental work. Or maybe the sheer magnitude of the book was too intimidating to take on right away, as several scholars have surmised. Even Alone never reviewed the complete Canto General; rather he just wrote about individual, separate parts of the epic, such as “The Heights of Macchu Picchu,” as they were released, before the complete book was published. He was impressed by the poems but in the end didn’t personally care for them.
Neruda was struck by this apparent indifference toward his epic work, produced with great effort, written by possibly the most famous living Latin American poet at the time. He knew it was good; his friends reassured him of it. While recognition would come later, at the time Neruda felt a disturbing emptiness that he hadn’t experienced for a long time. He wanted to leave Mexico. He had recovered from the thrombosis in his leg, but his passion for Matilde had swelled in his heart and mind.
As it became time for him and Delia to return to the normality of their life-in-exile in Europe, representing the Communist Party as needed, both Neruda and Matilde felt that what had occurred between them during the previous ten months, what they felt for each other now, was quite serious. Matilde had been committed to building something real with him from the start. Neruda came to realize that his feelings for her had gone beyond simple attraction to her beauty and charm, or the fact that Delia was now sixty-six.
Delia was still either ambivalent or in denial. The three had even made a quick trip to Guatemala together as he became more mobile, just before the signing party. It would be the first of many times the trio would travel together, and despite the other two’s clear romantic connection, it would be several years until Delia finally gave agency to her suspicions.
Upon their departure, Matilde installed herself in an apartment on the Paseo de la Reforma, down the street from where Neruda and Delia had lived. She made a life for herself, spending many weekends in Cuernavaca, a town she adored. Still, the man she loved and the life she wanted were in Europe.
Neruda and Delia started a surge of traveling as they returned to Europe in June 1950, a frantic international pace driven by requests for him to appear at political events from one country to the next. By planes, trains, and automobiles, the two spent time in Prague, Paris, Moscow, New Delhi, Bucharest, Warsaw, Geneva, Berlin, Beijing, and many parts of Italy.
Matilde lost the baby in Mexico, but she would not lose Neruda. It would take a year, a very long year, but Matilde eventually joined him in Paris. With the help of his friends, Neruda manipulated the levers of the Communist Parties in the various countries to act as a go-between, creating a diverse, almost nonstop itinerary of political/literary (the latter now just a stage for the former) activities of all stripes, most often with financing, which gave him more opportunities to pursue his clandestine relationship with Matilde. Their love flourished, though his poetry suffered from the constant travel and the uncertainty, not to mention his continued embrace of Stalinism and, with it, socialist realism. Regardless of the politics behind the style, it flattened his work. He did, however, manage to write one of his most beloved books of love poetry, Los versos del capitán (The Captain’s Verses), to Matilde, finished right before they finally returned to Chile.
Chapter Eighteen
Matilde and Stalin
Oh you, the one I love,
little one, red grain
of wheat,
the struggle will be hard,
life will be hard,
but you will come with me.
—“The Mountain and the River”
In November 1950, at the World Peace Council’s Second World Congress in Warsaw, Neruda was awarded the World Peace Prize for “Let the Rail-Splitter Awake.” Paul Robeson, Pablo Picasso, and others also received the award. The West always suspected the World Peace Council was a front organization formed and funded by Soviet intelligence, and Moscow did, in fact, aid it financially. The prize money, a million French francs, or around $100,000 at that time, was delivered to Neruda—in cash—in Paris.
Neruda gave the suitcase stuffed with cash to a friend, Inés Figueroa, the wife of the Chilean painter Nemesio Antúnez, and asked her to take care of it. She first hid it in her apartment and then deposited it in a bank account, despite her fears that “tax inspectors or people like that would come by someday to ask me about where it had come from.”
Inés became Neruda’s bookkeeper and book buyer. “He was tyrannical and adorable,” she reflected later. Neruda would write or call her to ask her to buy a first edition of Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell, Victor Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea, and Charles Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil. He had her buy a thirty-nine-volume set of the revolutionary French Enlightenment Encyclopédie (a book that would directly influence some of his future poetry), an edition of Shakespeare’s poetry from 1630, and much more.
Inés was a scrupulous administrator who suffered interminably watching the speed with which Neruda spent his money. Her account books were meticulously detailed. He would give them a distracted glance, then ask, “But how much is left?” Inés worked to make sure Neruda was receiving royalties from
