“He was right,” Matilde realized. “Luckily, I started to cry, which was something Pablo could never bear.” The tears worked; he apologized, adding, “I’m a total brute.” They hugged and reaffirmed, according to Matilde, that “this is how it is. We live here now. We decided to be together forever.”
Neruda began to take Matilde to Isla Negra instead of Delia. Meanwhile, he and his wild-haired lover searched for a home larger than her apartment. They found a piece of land in the bohemian Bellavista neighborhood, at the foot of San Cristóbal Hill. It was filled with vines and weeds on a steep slope. A stream ran across the upper edge of the property, where there was a splendid view of the city and the Andes. Matilde could buy the land and begin construction with a well-invested small inheritance. Neruda loved the idea.
And then she found out that she was pregnant again. The doctor prescribed bed rest. Neruda visited her constantly at her apartment (as the house was still being built). “He spoiled me to the extreme,” she wrote. He brought her Dostoyevsky and Proust. He was hoping for a girl. When she was in her sixth month of pregnancy, the doctor said she was out of danger and could end her bed rest. Fifteen days later, she miscarried again. Matilde was forty-two at the time. She and Neruda would have no children.
On December 21, 1953, Neruda was awarded the Stalin Prize for Strengthening Peace Among the Peoples for “outstanding merit in the struggle for the conservation and consolidation of peace.” It was the Soviet Union’s version of the Nobel Peace Prize. Neruda had served on the prize jury in years past, and many members of the jury were his friends. “I am very moved,” he said upon the news. “This is the most important honor I can have in my life.” He used the prize money for the construction of the new house.
Meanwhile, Maruca appeared before a judge in Santiago to demand money from Neruda. Tomás Lago went to the courthouse to speak on Neruda’s behalf. In his journal, he wrote:
When I saw that woman there, in the crowd of people entering and exiting the second-floor offices, I had the impression that the only thing in the world left for her to do would be to get Pablo to give her enough money to live. It looks like she doesn’t do anything else. She has no other activity or goal. Since she’s very tall, she could be seen from afar. She was dressed in an ad hoc way, like a disgraced woman, the victim of a gutless man, wearing a fur coat that looked borrowed and a dress in a neutral color, which made it look used and cheap.
Neruda had funds to spare, but he probably viewed Maruca’s lawsuit as an attempt to be part of his life once more. He ignored it, with cruel contempt, though to the public he was positioning himself as the humanitarian hero of his continent and beyond. It’s not as if Maruca had slighted him—unless he still somehow held her accountable for Malva Marina’s invalidity, just as he mentally manipulated Matilde for her miscarriages—it was he who had left Maruca and Malva helpless in Europe. He denied her as if to deny her existence, just as he denied the presence of Malva in his memoirs.
Neruda and Delia went to Brazil for a cultural congress organized by Jorge Amado, and Matilde was seen at some of Neruda’s readings there. According to Teitelboim, who was also there, “the girls revolved around the stars, especially Neruda, with la Hormiga—in whose eyes you could see a remote sadness—constantly by his side.”
Neruda moved closer to a decisive break with Delia when he convinced her to go to Paris to work on the production of a luxurious French edition of Canto General. With her gone, Neruda invited a handful of his close friends out to dinner with the purpose of introducing them to his new amor, Matilde, a.k.a. “Rosario.” His friends were sitting down at the table when, as Tomás Lago wrote,
She came dressed in white, in a moire silk suit. She was a vivacious redhead of normal height, with smiling eyes, features that were slightly hard but harmonious, and a sensual air about her. She had a head like Medusa, her hair a nest of vipers. When someone called her name, I started. Her name was Rosario. I had known it for a while . . . Her name appeared in the poem “Let the Rail-Splitter Awake,” at the end: “Peace for my right hand, which only wants to write the name ‘Rosario.’”
During the meal, he would approach her periodically and embrace her, touch her legs and bring her close to him with true pleasure and delight. He called her mi amor each time . . .
Neruda seemed to hope he could orchestrate Delia’s discovery of the relationship. Some days afterward, Lago was returning home with Neruda, who asked to stop off at Matilde’s apartment on the way: “At one point, the two of us were left alone there, and Pablo asked me a question, looking down at his shoes. ‘Well, did you tell Delia everything or not? Tell me the truth.’”
Once a little room, bathroom, and tiny kitchen had been built in Bellavista, Matilde moved in while the construction continued. The house became known as La Chascona, a Chilean word describing Matilde’s wildly curly hair. Like all the houses Neruda built, it is poetically eccentric. The dining room feels like the interior of a ship. There are several pictures of Whitman in various sizes in various rooms. The letters M and P intertwine in iron in front of the windows. The house
