When she saw him in a corner of the café where they were to meet, he seemed thinner, his eyes sad and lacking the luster they usually had. Immediately Matilde realized that their time apart had been worth it, because now she could feel how completely she was in love with him. She cried as he took her hands. He looked at her with great tenderness and said, “I don’t ever want to see you cry again. That final sob when we left Bucharest has tortured me.” He had wonderful news: he had made arrangements for them to go to Nyon, a provincial village on the shore of Lake Geneva, for a few days, just the two of them. Nobody would know where they were. Nobody in that village would know them either. Nyon was idyllic, surrounded by vineyards and rolling hills, and with a lake teeming with swans and seagulls. The couple would finally be able to be together without hiding. They could breathe and laugh and be in love freely.
They used their time in Nyon to learn about each other, swapping endless childhood stories. They both hailed from the provincial south of Chile. They both came from modest childhoods. This connection with Matilde must have been refreshing for Neruda, who had discovered in his new lover a tie to his humble roots. “You are from the poor South, from where my soul comes: / in her heaven your mother keeps washing clothes / with my mother,” he would write to her in a love sonnet a few years later. “That’s why I chose you, compañera.”
He told her how it felt to have his poet’s temperament as a boy, to be too sensitive for others to understand. He revealed the intimate vulnerabilities and moments of beauty of his childhood. As he shared his stories with Matilde, he prodded her to share her own. She claimed that this was the first time anyone had taken a sincere interest in her past. She had long ago set aside her personal history, having departed from the south of Chile at the age of eighteen to lead a bohemian life as a singer, dancer, and sometime actor. She reveled in recounting stories for Neruda, in making him laugh with her tales of the exploits of small-town folk. She told Neruda about how her mother, who was called Transitito, was widowed and left to raise Matilde on her own. She managed by running a boardinghouse in Chillán. They hosted several guests, among them a man called Jarita, who happened upon a discarded crystal ball one day in the town’s central plaza and promptly refashioned himself as a fortune-teller. He was moderately successful in his new career, greatly helping Matilde and Transitito with his gains.
But Matilde’s stories of the expansive, wild garden seemed to Neruda the most comforting. He’d repeatedly ask Matilde to tell him about that magical place where she spent so much of her childhood, helping her mother grow vegetables, fruits, and wheat. In her family’s lush gardens, roses and camellias commingled with lettuce, celery stalks, and garlic’s fragile spears. They shared a passion for Chile’s verdant, abundant natural world. These conversations were at times wistful and made Neruda long for Chile. Through Matilde, he reconnected with his place of birth and its people. While he may have been doing well in exile, part of his heart was constantly longing for home.
Matilde quickly transformed their modest hotel room into a homey place, decorating it with paper flowers, fresh flowers, and small pieces of artwork they found in shops in the village. She set a table for them to take their meals. Her instinct for homemaking was new for Neruda; it was not something that interested Delia. Matilde’s deep domestic streak was also a maternal one. She had thought she could no longer hope to be a mother; she met Neruda in Mexico City when she was thirty-seven and was now thirty-nine. Matilde didn’t know it yet, but she was pregnant again.
She returned to Paris by train as Neruda went first to Prague and then to an event at the Kremlin. In the final weeks of 1951, Neruda and Delia traveled to Rome. He was growing weary from the travel, his knees were bothering him, and he wanted to rest and write. Matilde was already there, staying with Mexican friends. Forgetting his exhaustion, Neruda left Delia to tour the city with Matilde every day. Some of Neruda’s friends in Europe knew of the affair, as much as Neruda tried to keep it hidden. Delia remained in denial.
On January 11, 1952, newspaper headlines around Italy announced that the Chilean government had convinced the Italian government to expel Neruda from the country. The poet had just taken a quick trip to visit friends in Naples; the news broke as he was returning to Rome by train. Hundreds swarmed the station, chanting, “Pablo! Pablo!” Years later, Matilde would write in her memoirs of her astonishment at the scene. She struggled to make her way to the platform and was able to catch Neruda’s eye after he got off the train: “He smiled to me as if to say, ‘Get used to it. This is my life.’” She lost him within the mass of shouting people. Soon a riot broke out, the people versus the police, the writer Elsa Morante enthusiastically wielding her umbrella in the battle.
