Ferlinghetti was the first to publish Allen Ginsberg, and his City Lights Bookstore had become the headquarters for the West Coast Beats. Neruda had read some of their work, most recently in the literary supplement to Cuba’s daily newspaper. “I love your wide-open poetry,” Neruda told him.
Ferlinghetti replied, “You opened the door.”
There was a large event at the capitol that night, commemorating a hero of Cuba’s independence from Spain. Neruda was to give a speech and asked Ferlinghetti, “Why don’t you come along?” Again from Ferlinghetti’s journal:
Down we go with his beautiful wife and get in limousine from Casa de la Amistad, new international “friendship house” set up by Fidel. En route I tell him I’m staying in hotel near Capitol where there are the biggest bedbugs I ever saw. He laughs and says when he first came to Santiago de Chile from the country as a boy there were bedbugs but he didn’t know what they were until they bit. Then he had Battle of Bedbugs all night, burning them up with a candle . . . says he still has candle back at hotel . . .
They arrived at the back entrance. Neruda and Matilde disappeared behind the stage; Ferlinghetti went to the main floor of the big senate chamber. It was already packed with around two thousand Fidelistas “still in their combat boots and clothes, feet up, smoking wild cigars” where “all the henchmen of the dictator had sat.” The galleries were “now full to roof with campesinos and students.” A “revolutionary euphoria filled the air”; “the whole place was just throbbing with this fantastic energy and vitality and enthusiasm.” When it was his turn to come on, Neruda received an enormous ovation.
Neruda continued to give recitals in universities, libraries, and high schools, traveling all across the island and, of course, taking time to find sensational seashells to add to his collection. Casa de las Américas, a cultural institution with a Pan-American focus founded right after the revolution, published twenty-five thousand copies of Canción de gesta, but the book would never be published again on the island as relations between Neruda and the Cuban government deteriorated. Neruda became a cautious and critical observer of the revolution. He would never again vociferously support it as he had done with the book, which he dedicated to the revolution’s triumph and the idealistic hope that came with it.
Part of Neruda’s change of heart came when he met Che Guevara. Guevara was the head of the National Bank at the time, and he had set the meeting at his office there at midnight. As Neruda opened the door, Guevara didn’t move his feet, which were resting in his thick boots up on his desk. Neruda was accustomed to being treated with deference. “Those aren’t hours, nor manners either!” he told a friend.
Toward the end of their meeting, Neruda mentioned to Guevara that he had seen sandbags in strategic areas all around Havana. As they talked about the possibilities of the United States invading Cuba, Guevara’s eyes moved slowly from Neruda’s to the office’s dark window. Suddenly, Guevara said: “War . . . war . . . we are always against war, but when we make war we cannot live without it. We always want to return to it.”
Neruda felt Guevara was thinking out loud for his benefit, but he was disarmed and surprised. Guevara saw war as an objective, not a threat, Neruda felt, and the young revolutionary would in fact soon leave Cuba to support armed revolution in other countries. For Neruda, meanwhile, nonviolent action, whether through poetry or politics, was the route to change.
In his memoirs, Neruda wrote that it was very pleasing to hear Guevara tell him how he had often read Canto General to soldiers under his command when they fought in Cuba’s Sierra Maestra. Guevara was captured by the Bolivian government in 1967, trying to lead a revolution there. Neruda learned that Guevara “carried two books in his backpack until the day of his death: an arithmetic textbook and my Canto General.”* Neruda wrote in the 1970s, “I think about how my verses were with him when he died.”
Yet when the Bolivian army executed Guevara, Neruda felt he had to publish an elegy for the fallen revolutionary, a poem entitled “Sadness on the Death of a Hero.” Still, Neruda would tell a distressed Aida Figueroa not to cry for the militant Guevara, but for the pacifist founder of Chile’s Communist movement, Luis Emilio Recabarren.
Neruda took a firm stand when he returned from Cuba, announcing that the Chilean Communists should not follow Castro’s example. In Chile, the revolution would be peaceful and democratic. In a press conference he proclaimed, “There is hunger, misery, and backwardness in Latin America. The people can’t wait any longer and are beginning to awaken from their lethargy.” While Cuba was an example, not everywhere could be Cuba. “No revolution can be exported. Each country has different conditions.” He reiterated a line he was very proud of and would continue to promote: “The people of Chile have chosen their path to national liberation, led by popular parties and unions. And they are keeping firm to it.”
* * *
That year, 1959, Neruda published an apolitical work, Cien sonetos de amor (One Hundred Love Sonnets), dedicated to Matilde. Though the title has sold many copies, most of the poems are not as substantial as the love poems of Neruda’s youth or The Captain’s Verses. According to some sources, Neruda himself didn’t take the book seriously. A handful of the poems, however, have become canonical, including Sonnet XVII:
I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as one loves certain obscure things,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries
the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself,
and thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose
from
