Neruda’s double life was becoming very difficult to maintain. Finally, one day, when he and Matilde were at Isla Negra, the poet somehow offended the housemaid. In revenge, she told Delia about the other woman. Then the gardener at La Michoacán, after being accused by Neruda of stealing bottles of wine, told Delia how Matilde had moved in when Delia had been hospitalized briefly after a car accident. “I’m a Communist, señora, and Communists don’t accept these things,” el jardinero told her.
Then Neruda and Matilde got in a car accident together themselves, which made the news: a famous poet alone with a beautiful single woman. The discovery Neruda had hoped for had happened, but too publicly for his taste, and it brought no relief. Delia started to appear nervous, distracted, and panicked to her friends. Neruda slipped off during his daily siestas at La Michoacán to spend his afternoons with Matilde.
Inés Valenzuela and Diego Muñoz, who were living with Neruda and Delia at La Michoacán, decided they had to confront the issue and raised it with Neruda. He insisted that Delia would always be his señora, that Matilde was willing to take second stage. But Delia wanted no part of such an arrangement. A militant Communist, she took the matter to the heads of her party.
Eventually the party intervened and told Neruda that he had to decide between Matilde and Delia. With his affair gaining more gravitas, with his being a public face of the party, and with Delia being an important member as well, this could not continue. “The truth of the matter is that he didn’t want to have to do without either one,” recalled Inés Valenzuela. “Up until the very end, he begged Delia not to go. It was a complicated situation . . . I remember going with Delia to her room, and I said to her, ‘Don’t go, amiga, stay here.’ And she said to me, ‘Would you accept something like this?’ And there you have it. So she went to Paris . . .”
Neruda sent her a telegram: “Hormiguita, come back, everything will go back to the way it was. Come home.” Soon after he sent her a letter, eleven pages long, in which, according to Inés, “he begged to see her, begged her to continue being his friend. Basically he said he would never erase her from his heart, because she had been the one who had offered him the greatest friendship.”
Some twenty years later, following his death, Delia said, “Since 1952 our activities sent us on divergent paths. Pablo became involved with other people. I became increasingly interested in my art. There was no animosity. There isn’t much more I can say. I loved Pablo and he will always be in my heart.”
At the time of the separation, Neruda was forty-eight, Matilde was forty-three, and Delia was sixty-eight.
Tomás Lago had been one of Neruda’s closest friends for decades, but after the breakup with Delia, a rift occurred between the two. Lago’s sympathy lay with Delia. Despite this, some months after Delia and Neruda’s separation, he asked them both to be witnesses at his daughter’s wedding. Neruda didn’t go, apparently unable to participate alongside Delia. He just sent a gift of antique wine cruets. Lago never saw Neruda again.
Inés Valenzuela and Diego Muñoz, despite their special love for Delia, didn’t take sides in front of Neruda. Shortly after the split, he invited them to a party for Chile’s Independence Day, on September 18, 1955, at La Chascona, where he was now living with Matilde. Inés was reluctant to go, recovering from surgery and still upset with how Neruda had treated Delia. But Diego, Neruda’s friend since grammar school, insisted. As soon as Neruda saw Inés arrive he came down. “Look, this is Matilde. I hope you can be very good friends.” With so many people there celebrating, it was hard to hold a conversation. So Neruda invited them the next day for lunch, just the four of them. There, Matilde said something quite vulgar about Delia, something so inappropriate Inés refused to repeat it when recounting the story (it was a reference to her teeth). “Aside from that being a lie, it’s simply slander,” she told Matilde strongly. “I won’t accept it, and, Matilde, I’m going to ask you that if we’re going to be friends, don’t even talk about la Hormiga in front of me. I don’t like la Hormiga because she was Pablo’s wife; I like her because she is an exceptional human being.” Pablo, with a large smile, raised his glass of wine and said, “Let’s drink to la Hormiga, because I love how you love her so much.”
“And that was the end of that,” Inés concluded.
As Neruda would write almost ten years after the breakup:
Delia is the light of the window open
to truth, to the honey-tree . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Delia, among so many leaves
in the tree of life,
your presence
in the fire,
your virtue
of dew:
in the raging wind,
a dove.
—“Loves: Delia (I)”
Delia eventually returned from Paris and lived out her life in La Michoacán, devoting all her energy to activism and her art, including a well-regarded print series of abstract horses in black, white, and silver gray. She passed away peacefully in her sleep on July 26, 1989, at the age of 104.
Chapter Nineteen
Fully Empowered
I write in the clear sun, in the teeming street,
At full tide, in a place I can sing;
Only the wayward night inhibits me,
But in its interruption I recover space,
I gather shadows to last a long time.
—“Fully Empowered”
By midcentury, Neruda had lived many lives as a poet, each one with its accompanying style, constantly evolving, like a lizard shedding its skin. But there were also many Nerudas, the person with whom the poet coexisted; his personal affectations and conditions always manifested in the new styles, forms, and
