The reading was packed. Closed-circuit televisions were set up to accommodate those who couldn’t enter the auditorium. In attendance was the future U.S. poet laureate Charles Simic, who was so “deeply moved” that he “even shed a tear or two without knowing any Spanish.” Interestingly, most of the poems Neruda read at the PEN recital were from Residence on Earth or even earlier—beautiful but subdued choices. Missing was his vibrant political verse, here in the heart of the country that he pegged as the cause of so much global injustice.
The PEN Club had received money from the National Endowment for the Arts and other foundations to bring twenty-one other Latin American literary figures to the conference, increasing communication among the writers of the continent. Carlos Fuentes was there from Mexico, and Mario Vargas Llosa from Peru. They held a mini-congress at the Gramercy Park Hotel, a headquarters at the time of high bohemia. The one Latin American country of great writers that was not represented was, notably, Cuba. The Cubans, directed by their government, boycotted the meeting because it was being held in the United States. Whether they could have even gotten visas was also in question.
María Luisa Bombal, Neruda’s “fire bee” who had shared Neruda’s apartment in Buenos Aires in the early 1930s, was living in New York at the time. “They sent a messenger from the Chilean cultural attaché, to ask me to present Neruda at the recital he was going to give in New York,” she remembered. But then three FBI agents came to her apartment. “They had come to very kindly inquire about my link to Pablo. ‘It’s a link between writers, Chilean writers,’ I told them.” Bombal was shaken, fearful for herself, a Chilean; her husband, a Frenchman; and their American daughter. In the end, while she was never threatened, she decided that she had to put her family first. She told Neruda she couldn’t be involved; and he didn’t take the decision well. “He saw it as a betrayal, and he could forgive anything except what he considered to be a betrayal.” She felt that he never forgave her for that, which pained her. After all these years, Neruda’s ego could still cause him to do great harm to those he loved. “I was no longer his ‘fire bee.’ He didn’t want to see me again.” Upon his return to Chile, he seemed to disparage and blame Bombal, telling friends like Volodia Teitelboim that he was terribly disappointed after finding her drinking in bed in her apartment. He died before they had a chance to see each other again.
After New York, Neruda visited Washington, D.C. He had been invited to give a reading at the Inter-American Development Bank, but his visit was met with protests by some of the bank’s staff, calling his presence a “communist provocation.” Above the protests and the sirens, the bank’s president, Felipe Herrera, grabbed a bullhorn and announced the reading would take place at the landmark Mayflower Hotel.
Despite Neruda’s communism, the Library of Congress asked him to come be recorded reading his poetry.* On June 20, 1966, Neruda delivered a wonderful reading in the tiny studio, reciting all twelve cantos of “The Heights of Macchu Picchu.” It was very rare for him to read it in its entirety. Of all his work, that is what he chose then to leave as his legacy, vocalized steadily for thirty-six minutes.
As the tour wore on, Neruda visited San Francisco and read at the University of California, Berkeley, where he said that he “learned on the spot that the North American enemies of our peoples were also enemies of the North American people”—that those in the crowd were against the U.S. government policies too. He was deeply moved when a “spontaneous roar” came from the crowd after he announced he was going to read “The United Fruit Co.” The university’s paper wrote that he received two standing ovations from the crowd of one thousand. Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg were among the attendees. As in New York, the overflow crowd listened in another lecture room.
From San Francisco, Neruda and Matilde traveled to Mexico and then to Peru, where Neruda lunched with the centrist president Fernando Belaúnde Terry and was decorated with the Order of the Sun, the highest honor in Peru. But trouble was brewing in the midst of these accolades.
At the time, Belaúnde Terry was battling Cuban-inspired guerrilleros trying to spread the revolution to Peru. Fidel Castro and the Chilean Communist Party were having a falling-out, and Neruda became a figurehead in the rift. Castro, and in particular Che Guevara, felt that Latin America was ready for a continental revolution using armed guerrillero force. The Chilean Communist Party and Neruda disagreed. Cuba’s revolution took the course of an armed insurrection because of the repressive dictatorship controlling the country—there was no ballot box or patience for a prolonged pacifist approach. In 1965, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Panama, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Haiti were ruled by entrenched dictatorial regimes as Cuba had been. But Chile was not suffering under a repressive dictatorship. Chile’s democratic tradition provided a legitimate system through which to realize a revolution.
Cuban authorities put pressure on the writer Roberto Fernández Retamar and his colleagues to denounce Neruda’s visit to the United States and his meeting with Belaúnde Terry, whom the Peruvian Communist revolutionaries were fighting. Their attack on Neruda was seen as an indirect attack on the Chilean Communist Party. Just a month earlier, Fernández Retamar, a future member of Castro’s cabinet, had sent Neruda an affectionate letter:
Every once in a while, a few words written in green ink come to me from the deep south, which bring me happiness. But you need to come, you and Matilde need to come back, so that we can be together on the island like we were six years ago . . . No one awaits you with more friendship
