Neruda named his new Valparaíso home La Sebastiana, in honor of the old Spaniard who had built the house, Sebastián Collado. La Sebastiana may have been Neruda’s smallest home, but it had its own unique charm with its view of the city and cylindrical shape, and during the work on initial repairs, he subtly modified it to fit the Nerudian fashion. Each house was like a private stage: he would design the sets, and he always played the lead.
The house grows and speaks,
stands on its own feet,
has clothes wrapped round its skeleton,
and as from seaward the spring,
swimming like a water nymph,
kisses the sand of Valparaíso.
Now we can stop thinking. This is the house.
Now all that’s missing will be blue.
All it needs now is to bloom.
And that is work for the spring.
—“To La Sebastiana”
As a mover hung up a large portrait of Whitman, he asked Neruda, “Is this your father?”
“The father of my poetry,” Neruda answered.
* * *
Neruda’s unusual book of conversational poetry, Estravagario, was published in August 1958. The title is a word created by Neruda. As Karl Ragnar Gierow put it in his Nobel Prize presentation to Neruda in 1971, Estravagario “comprises both extravagance and vagabondage, whim and errantry.”
Once again, the book marked a radical change in Neruda’s style. In this new, very personal prose, Neruda isn’t creating poems as practical or utilitarian as the odes had been. Gone too is the overtly political poetry. Neruda had reached the point where he felt he could relax and be whimsical, with himself as the main subject. Influenced by his compatriot Nicanor Parra’s antipoesía, Neruda had come to recognize that poetry did not have to be solemn, and, like other literary genres, it could entertain. The outlandish type and comical illustrations in Estravagario add to the effect. Neruda is not preaching. He is a liberated man: liberated to love Matilde, liberated from his literary past, liberating himself from Stalinism, now more interested in individual liberation rather than collectivism. His new voice is heard in “Keeping Quiet,” where the narrator seems to want to take a breather from the tensions of the Cold War:
Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.
For once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.
It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness . . .*
* * *
Despite his more internal focus, Neruda was inspired to action by political events that disrupted his serenity. The triumph of Fidel Castro’s Cuban Revolution on January 1, 1959, shook Latin America. Neruda sang exaltation to it and its leader, at first. He met Castro in Caracas soon after the victory. The Cuban was there to thank the Venezuelan people for supporting his revolution. Neruda was touring Venezuela and joined the enthusiastic multitude gathered to celebrate Castro and hear his four-hour speech.
The day after the rally, Neruda and Matilde were picnicking in a Caracas park when some motorcyclists approached with an invitation to go to the Cuban embassy for a reception that afternoon. The embassy was overflowing. Celia Sánchez, Castro’s supposed lover and “the heart of the revolution,” sent Neruda to a room alone, while she stayed with Matilde. Suddenly the room’s door opened and Castro filled the space with his height. As Neruda wrote in his memoirs:
He was a head taller than I. He walked toward me quickly.
“Hello, Pablo!” he said, submerging me in a tight hug.
Unbeknownst to me, a news photographer had entered the room and was taking pictures of us from the corner. Fidel was by his side in a second. I saw him grab the photographer by the neck; he was shaking him.
Neruda saved the photographer, who abandoned his camera and fled.
Neruda changed the focus of the book he was currently writing from the colonial situation of Puerto Rico to, now, after the Cuban Revolution, assessing the situation throughout the Caribbean. The new book was called Canción de gesta, as in the French chanson de geste, songs of heroic deeds. He dedicated it to “the liberators of Cuba: Fidel Castro, his compañeros, and the Cuban people,” and continued:
There is much for us to wash and burn in all of America.
Many of us must build.
Everyone contributes what they can, with sacrifice and happiness.
Our peoples have suffered so much; us giving our all is very little for them.
From Venezuela, Neruda and Matilde went for a nine-month stay in Europe. On the way back, they arrived in Havana in December 1960. Lawrence Ferlinghetti was there. His book A Coney Island of the Mind had just been published and was on its way to being one of the bestselling books of poetry in the United States (by the twenty-first century it would have sold over a million copies). The great Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante, thirty-one at the time (Ferlinghetti was ten years older), arranged for him to meet Neruda, who was staying at the Hotel Habana Libre—the former Habana Hilton, now controlled by the government. “Neruda sitting in plush suite with open
