The outcry for Neruda was so great that, after several days of parliamentary and presidential discussions and debate, the government rescinded the order and allowed him to stay for another three months, which he extended for over five more. Edwin Cerio, the affluent Italian writer, invited him to use his house on the island of Capri to rest and write. Neruda convinced Delia to go to Chile, alone, to arrange his return. She left for Buenos Aires, and Matilde and Neruda took refuge on the gorgeous island.
The couple was able to relax there, staring out at the giant limestone rocks that rise from the sea off the coast or lying on its beaches (though they made Neruda long for the waves crashing on Isla Negra’s rocks; he was not satisfied with that quiet pocket off the Mediterranean, the Tyrrhenian Sea). From the plaza lined with its open cafés to the island’s remote corners, wherever they wandered they got to know the locals, who began to call Neruda “Professore.”
Il professore returned to his poetry. While he never stopped writing during his exile, now he had a retreat, a residency on the island. He finished The Captain’s Verses, a book that would soon be published anonymously, so as not to hurt Delia. Besides the intimate love poetry, a couple of poems ranking among the most amorous verses he ever wrote, and the lyrical rebuke for having a miscarriage, the book also contains a political current. The woman he addresses in the book is not just Matilde his lover but his comrade in arms, her potency and sexuality symbols of their intense political commitment. In Neruda’s poem “Letter on the Road” (a twist on Whitman’s classic “Song of the Open Road”) a line jumps out after the first stanza: “My adored, I am off to my fighting.” While this is the final poem of the book, 153 lines long, it was written while they were in Nyon, unsure what awaited their relationship after those first few days alone. He is the captain of his women, of his ideological cause, but Matilde is the woman he’ll wait for.
And when the sadness that I hate comes
to knock on your door,
tell her that I am waiting for you
and when loneliness wants you to change
the ring in which my name is written,
tell loneliness to talk with me,
that I had to go away,
because I am a soldier,
and that there where I am,
under rain or under
fire,
my life,
I wait for you.
I wait for you in the harshest desert . . .
The forty-eight poems in the book were all written when he and Matilde were first in love. Many were included in letters to her as they crisscrossed the continents clandestinely, starting in Bucharest, in August 1951, and then the next month, as he traveled on the Trans-Siberian to China, on the plain between Mongolia and Siberia, followed by Prague, Vienna, Geneva, and other cities in Europe, until Italy, where nine or ten were written on Capri, including the illustrious “The Night on the Island.”
The first edition of just forty-four copies was published in Naples. It begins with an introduction in the form of a letter from the book’s publisher, explaining the source of these poems. It is signed Rosario de la Cerda—that name Rosario appearing once again: Matilde’s full name was Matilde Rosario Urrutia Cerda. Her identity, the letter writer says, doesn’t matter, but she is the poems’ protagonist. The author of the poems came from the war in Spain, but he didn’t come defeated. She never knew his real name, whether it was “Martínez, Ramírez, or Sánchez. I simply called him my Captain, and that’s the name I want to keep for this book.”
The letter firmly establishes the author of the poems as a heroic, idealistic captain, while Rosario portrays herself as a subservient lover. “He was a privileged man of the kind born to great destinies. I felt his force and my greatest pleasure was feeling dwarfed at his side . . . From the first moment, he felt like the owner of my body and my soul.” Yet his captive powers instilled a sense of purpose in his subject: “He made me feel that everything in my life was changing, that little artist’s life of mine, of comfort and ease, transformed like everything he touched.” The captain is a soldier for justice but possesses the traits of a poet: as Monge did for Neftalí, he would search for “a flower, a toy, a river stone” for her, handing it over with tears flowing from his “eyes of infinite tenderness,” in which she’d catch “a glimpse of a child’s soul.”
The forty-four copies were given to subscribers, whose names are printed in it. Most were Italian, including the writer Carlo Levi, except for a few friends from elsewhere who knew of the affair, such as Jorge Amado. Matilde and Neruda were included, as well as one “Neruda Urrutia,” who, according to Matilde’s memoir, represented the child the two were longing for. Soon after, the Buenos Aires publishing house Losada, which was becoming Neruda’s primary publisher, released the book. Losada would print five editions without Neruda’s name attached. It would be a decade after its first printing that Neruda ended the anonymity, when in 1962 The Captain’s Verses was included in the second edition of Obras completas (Complete Works). The following year, Losada republished The Captain’s Verses with Neruda fully credited as the author.*
At the beginning of their stay in Capri, Matilde felt that she
