With the new royalties added to the prize money, Neruda started to spend without restraint: old, rare books and manuscripts, seashells, antiques, plane tickets, good hotels, and pocket money for hard-up Chileans and other kindred Latin Americans traveling through Europe—“poets, students, painters, filmmakers, musicians, or whoever else—in search of art, love, and revolution.” He also instructed Inés that “if this Chilean girl comes from Mexico . . . Matilde Urrutia—a very responsible person—give her 10,000 francs.”
Neruda and Delia had rented a little three-story chalet at 12 rue Pierre Mille in the Fifteenth Arrondissement, right behind the Porte de Versailles. It was a popular, bohemian neighborhood that Neruda enjoyed. He roamed among mustached French workers, open markets, and cozy bistros. Each floor of the chalet was a separate apartment. Delia and Neruda lived on the first floor, which included a bedroom, living room, dining room, and kitchen.
Delia, who cared nothing about the interior design, had signed the rental agreement in her name, telling the owner that her husband, “Monsieur del Carril,” was temporarily out of the country. As it already felt like an ideal art studio, Inés; her husband, Nemesio; and their young son, Pablo, took the second floor. Neruda and Delia rented the top floor for themselves as well, just so no stranger, or possible spy, could occupy it.
Neruda could not stay too long in Paris at one time, as the Chilean government was exerting a great deal of effort to convince France to expel or extradite him. France was an allied country that, as much as it respected the romantic image of Neruda, did not like his outspoken Stalinist side. As a guest of the Czech Writers’ Union, Neruda took up a residency at the Dobříš Castle outside of Prague. It became his second home base from which he would travel to other countries, usually France and Italy, meeting with writer and painter friends, participating in peace assemblies, reciting poems, and speaking about Chile. At this point, all governments kept him under strict surveillance and gave him only short-term visas.
One day while Delia and Neruda were at the castle, a former Spanish Republican general told them their mutual friend Artur London, the Czech vice minister of foreign affairs, had been imprisoned. Czechoslovakia’s president, Klement Gottwald, was cracking down on Communists who resisted Stalin. London and thirteen other high-ranking party members had been arrested and tortured, accused of being Titoists, Trotskyites, and Zionists; eleven of the fourteen were Jewish. After their show trials in 1952, London would be one of just three who were not hanged, but he would spend fourteen years in prison. Similar purges occurred in the new regimes in Hungary and Bulgaria. Even as his friends became victims of Stalin’s repression, Neruda remained uncritical of the Soviet leader. He had wrapped himself in Stalin’s flag, so committed now that it seems he lacked the courage to renounce it.
* * *
Nearly a year had passed since Neruda had returned to Europe from Mexico City following his phlebitis and the release of Canto General. Finally, the situation was right for Matilde and Neruda to reunite. On the stationery of Geneva’s Hotel Cornavin, he wrote to her that they would arrange for her to travel to Europe by ship in early January 1952. “Our angel or devil continues to watch over our love and H. [la Hormiga] has accepted it fully.” He ends the letter:
Perhaps you’ll have good news for me as well: that you’re the same as I left you: firm, loved, sweet, brave, happy, responsible, faithful, and hugged for a lifetime by your
Captain.
Delia may have seemed “generous and full of youthful happiness,” as if “she never aged,” as Aida Figueroa said. But Neruda now needed more than character, intellect, companionship, political alliance, editorial help, and deep friendship. She had been an important bedrock for him for some fifteen very intense years, and she had influenced him like few other people. And yet there was no denying the fact that she was closing in on seventy, while Matilde was not yet forty. And Matilde was as Neruda hoped she would be: a vital, happy, firm, strong, attentive woman, ready to devote herself to him.
Matilde was simple, natural, and earthen, just like the rural town where she grew up in a large family with little money. She had to struggle to get by, working at a variety of jobs. While Matilde had little cultural training, she was extraordinarily intelligent, as well as spontaneous, willful, capable, and strong. For her part, Delia was extremely intelligent and cultured, with an education rooted in Paris, funded by tremendously rich parents. But she was not well versed in the mundane essentials: Delia could barely make eggs. Matilde offered domesticity. Her adoration for Neruda was warm, effusive, dedicated, and romantic. It swelled his heart and pride. When he was around Matilde, especially at first, he would beam with an almost childlike joy, even seeming to act a bit giddy at times. Though Delia still admired him, it was in a less affectionate way. And Matilde also offered something Delia could not: youth.
Many in Matilde’s family were militant Communists, but she wasn’t political. If anything, she seemed at this time to be conservative in comparison to Neruda and his friends; the Marxist Delia she was not. While Neruda was caught up in his promotion of Stalinism, this may have been a welcome relief, a sanctuary to escape the constant political rhetoric and show driving his life at the moment.
When Matilde first arrived in Paris, Neruda was unable to meet her; he had been in Eastern Europe, and the French had denied him reentry. He sent Matilde a welcoming telegram and told her to meet him at the Third World Festival of Youth and Students in East Berlin. At the festival, Neruda spoke
