When Matilde arrived in Berlin, her friends told her that Pablo was at the theater at the moment and that he wanted her to meet him there immediately. As Matilde wrote in her memoir, “I was radiant. I got to the theater and there he was. His face lit up when he saw me. We embraced and he said to me, ‘This is over. I never want to be separated from you again.’”
The next day, Matilde played her guitar and sang at the festival, and later that evening Neruda surprised her in her hotel room when she returned. Neruda had the boisterous Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet convince a dubious Delia that he and Neruda had to attend an urgent, nonexistent party meeting that would last until dawn and that her presence was not required. This was the first of many lies to Delia that involved fictitious party meetings as a way to be with Matilde. With Delia duped, the lovers had the whole night to themselves. As Matilde placed her head on Neruda’s chest, she said, “You have the smell of tenderness.”
“Be careful!” Neruda answered. “That’s poetry—don’t go literary on me.”
When the East Berlin festival ended, Matilde received an invitation to sing on the radio in Czechoslovakia, where Neruda and Delia were traveling as well. The three of them went together by car. Two weeks later, at the end of August, they went to Bucharest, Romania. They all stayed together in one large house. Neruda and Matilde pretended that they were jovial, good friends, and Delia seemed to accept this.
One night while they were entertaining Romanian friends, Neruda slipped away. When he came back he secretly passed Matilde a piece of paper. It was a poem, “Always,” the first of many he would write to her in Europe, which would form the book The Captain’s Verses:
In front of you,
I’m not jealous.
Come with a man
at your back,
come with a hundred men in your hair,
come with a thousand men between your breasts and your feet,
come like a river,
full of drowned men
that finds the furious sea,
the eternal foam, the weather.
Bring them all
where I wait for you:
we will always be alone,
we will always be you and I,
alone upon the earth
to begin life.
The poem is curious, as Matilde was already in love with him and would never be with another man. Neruda, on the other hand, had both Delia and Maruca to contend with.
In her memoir, Matilde wrote that she wasn’t jealous of Delia; instead, she “saw her like a solicitous and affectionate mother or older sister who took care of him.” But living in the same house with her was difficult. The intensity of Matilde and Pablo’s love, the restrictions the situation placed on it, and the confusion and discomfort caused by the secrecy became too much. Matilde broke out with a terrible case of hives. Neruda prioritized finding time to be with her then, and the two Chileans took a trip alone to Constant¸a on the Black Sea. Yet the vacation didn’t alleviate her symptoms, despite the poetry Neruda was writing for her daily and despite Delia’s relative acceptance of her presence. The inability to be fully out in the open during a period of constant travel and the uncertainty of when Neruda actually might leave his wife were just all too much for her. As grounded as she could appear, her emotions were getting the best of her, living their love this way. She told Neruda, at least for leverage, that she wanted to end the affair, go back to Paris and then Mexico.
They returned to Bucharest, where Matilde would board a train to Paris and Neruda would fly to Prague and Delia. Matilde wrote that their good-bye was so emotional that afterward she turned and ran away from her lover. But before she ran, Neruda gave her a letter to read later. She opened it on the train. It was a poem, “The Potter”:
Your whole body holds
a goblet or gentle sweetness destined for me.
When I let my hand climb,
in each place I find a dove
that was looking for me, as if
my love, they had made you out of clay
for my very own potter’s hands.
Your knees, your breasts,
your waist
are missing in me, like in the hollow
of a thirsting earth
where they relinquished
a form,
and together
we are complete like one single river,
like one single grain of sand.
But the next poem in the letter furiously blamed Matilde for having lost their baby in Mexico. Neruda had already accused her of not taking enough care of the baby and herself. He entitled the poem “La pródiga”—the prodigal, the squanderer, the wasteful woman.
I ask you, where is my son?
Didn’t he await me inside you, recognizing me,
and telling me, “Call on me to come onto the land
to continue your struggles and your songs”?
Give me back my son!
“As I read those words, I felt as if they had been addressed to a different woman,” Matilde wrote after Neruda died. “Nothing had ever mattered more to me than to have his child.” Still, there is no sign that she defended herself directly from his reproach in the days after reading those scathing, authoritative lines. He would actually include the poem in The Captain’s Verses. This was cruel and narcissistic in any case, but Neruda’s recent history makes it all the more galling. After having blithely abandoned his first child with hardly a glance back, now he was righteously indignant for having lost his second, callously hurling blame at the mistress he claimed to love.
* * *
With Matilde gone, Neruda and Delia traveled to Beijing, China, to deliver the Stalin Peace Prize to Soong Ching-ling, the widow of Sun Yat-sen, known as the “Father of the Nation.” Instead of flying, Neruda wanted to see the Siberian landscapes out the window of a train.
Meanwhile, Matilde returned to Paris, back to the third floor of the rue Pierre Mille chalet. She walked around the city, dejected, but then on
