Delia, then Matilde, or his secretaries Homero Arce and the tireless Margarita Aguirre, would type his handwritten papers. Delia often made corrections and suggestions, which he’d often take to heart and include.
Almost all of La Michoacán was made from organic materials, like the coarse, rustic wood of Neruda and Delia’s long outdoor table, which held vegetables from tender fava beans and spring onions with long green stalks to the ripest tomatoes from just outside Santiago. It might be covered with a sheet, never a more formal tablecloth. It was a stage that Neruda would set, arranging everything spontaneously. Potbellied jugs of peaches in Chilean white wine or strawberries in red wine were placed along the table, with green fluted glass goblets placed beside them.
As Aida Figueroa put it in a 2003 interview, “He was the stage designer of life. He didn’t live overambitiously, but rather he lived a life filled with surprise, excitement, and exploration.” Upon Neruda and Delia’s return, Aida and her husband, Sergio Insunza, became close friends with the two older Communists they had hidden in their apartment before Neruda fled into exile. They came over almost every Saturday for lunch. Aida asserted that she couldn’t think of a more delightful time than the hours they spent at La Michoacán between 1952 and 1955, the “years they were together before Delia knew about Matilde.”
Inés Valenzuela commented on how often people came over and that Neruda “was very tender with Delia. Pablo was attached to Delia, not the other way around; she was affectionate but tranquilla.”
Neruda the Captain was home triumphant, with wife and lover, party and friends, flourishing, beaming, fulfilled. The sickly boy from Temuco and the depressed consul in the Far East were long gone.
To visitors, life at La Michoacán was a celebration of harmony and friendship, of sharing and singing. Sometimes they put on a simple show in the garden’s amphitheater, dedicated to Lorca. Neruda usually spoke little, but he was the great director of everything going on. “He made everything magical,” Aida said. “And la Hormiga complemented him. That house never had a closed door. There never was a key, not to the door to the street, not to the fence, not to Pablo’s room, not anywhere. It was an open house. La Hormiga kept it that way.”
Neruda’s poetry seemed to draw on the same sunny comforts. The poem “The Invisible Man,” written in Italy just before he returned, can be seen as yet another literary manifesto. It is almost diametrically opposed to the surrealistic “Arte poética” he had written during his time in the Far East, the one he continued to shun for its abstraction and negativity in light of the battle the people were waging for justice, peace, and progress. The poem is much lighter, less dense, and while long, it signals the form of his coming odes; most of the 244 lines are short and simple, just three or four words long:
I’m not superior
to my brother,
but I smile,
because when I walk through the streets
and only I do not exist,
life runs
like all the rivers,
I am the only
invisible one,
there aren’t mysterious shadows,
no mist,
the whole world speaks to me,
everyone wants to tell me things,
they talk to me about their relatives,
their miseries
and their joy . . .
Neruda had laid out this new perspective and voice in an interview with Lenka Franulic the day he returned from exile.* She asked if it was true that in Mexico, he publicly renounced Twenty Love Poems and Residence. Not exactly, he answered. “I’ve said that my first poetry is pessimistic, gloomy, and painful, that it expresses the anguish of my youth. That anguish wasn’t produced by me, but rather by society itself, by the decomposition of life in the capitalist system. I don’t want that poetry to influence the youth now. We must fight and struggle.”
He went on to make some of his clearest statements on realism. Because of the struggle, because of the fight, because he had “tremendous faith in Chile,” because the fight must continue, he told Franulic, “I write in a different form now.” His personal approach was about to become a more dynamic, subtle, natural realism, still anchored in the social, still eschewing anything complex or unclear. “When one sends people into combat, they cannot sing funeral songs. From this comes what’s called new realism,” he explained. “The return to realism has a double bottom: the aesthetic needs of humans and the political background. My ambition is to write like one whistles while walking down the street. I think this should be the language of absolutely straightforward, untrembling poetry.”
“The Invisible Man” is his first attempt to realize this ambition. It is neither a political diatribe nor a love poem, but in it Neruda has gone from introvert to extrovert, with a language accessible to all, stripped down to the bare realities. Neruda the man, the monumental man and poet, must make himself invisible, an everyman indistinguishable in the crowd, equal to his fellow workers.
He communicates through the clarity of the language, straightforward and clean, without airs; he becomes transparent. From now on, his poetry will be transparent like never before. “There are no mysterious shadows, / there is no darkness,” Neruda writes in the poem. He is still serving as a poet, but one who has come down off the pedestal to stand with the masses, with the men and women in the street. When he says, “Everyone wants to tell me things,” he’s showing his accessibility. They talk to him about their relatives, just as they’d talk to their friend or neighbor, and he amplifies their voices. By using the first person, the voice is grounded in a being—he is present; he is invested in it.
