Roberto
But suddenly, Fernández Retamar and more than 150 Cuban writers and intellectuals, including Alejo Carpentier, Nicolás Guillén, and José Lezama Lima, signed an open letter denouncing Neruda and his attendance at the PEN Club meeting. On July 31, 1966, the letter was published in the Cuban Communist Party’s newspaper, Granma. Addressed to “Compañero Pablo,” it began by saying, “We believe it is our duty to let you know the anxiety and uneasiness that our enemies’ use of your recent activities has caused in Cuba.” “It wouldn’t have occurred to us that we would have to automatically censure your participation in the PEN Club Congress, from which positive conclusions could have been made, or even your visit to the United States, because this visit could also derive positive results for our causes. But has that been the case?” they asked. They wondered why Neruda was permitted a U.S. visa while other Communists had been denied it for twenty years.
The letter hurt Neruda profoundly. The fact that it was published for all to read in Cuba’s main newspaper added to the pain. The letter was even covered in the Washington Post. Neruda replied in an open telegram the next day: “Dear compañeros: I am deeply surprised by the unfounded concern expressed for me by a group of Cuban writers.” He stated that “it appears” they are unaware that his entry into the United States, “as with that of Communist writers from other countries, was achieved by breaking the prohibitions of the State Department, thanks to the actions of left-wing intellectuals.” He continued:
In the United States and the other countries I visited, I maintained my communist ideals, my unbreakable principles, and my revolutionary poetry. I have the right to hope and demand that you, who know me, would not harbor or spread inadmissible doubts about this.
In the United States and everywhere else I went, I have been listened to and respected, based firmly on who I am and who I will always be: a poet who does not hide what he thinks, who has put his life and work at the service of the freedom of our peoples . . .
Once again, I express to you, as I have done through my poetry, my passionate fidelity to the Cuban revolution.
He would never forgive his former friends who had signed the letter; they remained his enemies until death, with no movement made toward reconciliation.
Chapter Twenty
Triumph, Destruction, Death
Right, comrade, it’s the hour of the garden
and the hour up in arms, each day
follows from flower or blood:
our time surrenders us to an obligation
to water the jasmines
or bleed to death in a dark street:
virtue or pain blows off
into frozen realms, into hissing embers,
and there never was a choice . . .
Ours is a lank country
and on the naked edge of her knife
our frail flag burns.
—Untitled (1973)
On August 8, 1966, Neruda and Matilde wrote to their friend and secretary Margarita Aguirre and her husband, Rodolfo Aráoz Alfaro: “Confidential: We are getting married, Chilean style (Shhh! Quiet! Discretion! Silence!).” On a beautiful spring day at Isla Negra, October 28, they were married in a small private ceremony, Matilde in a white dress and Neruda in a dark suit, a flower in his lapel, a folded white handkerchief in his breast pocket. Neruda was now sixty-two, Matilde, fifty-four.
It was an extraordinarily fruitful time for his writing. That same year, Neruda published two more books. The first, Arte de pájaros (Art of Birds), was a private, numbered, illustrated edition. It contains poems to real and imaginary birds, including “El pájaro yo: (Pablo Insulidae Nigra)” (“The ‘I’ Bird: [Pablo of Isla Negra]”), where the poet is a “bird of one single feather / flyer of clear shadow,” “the furious bird / of the tranquil storm.”
Un casa en la arena (A House in the Sand) is a thin, poignant book of love to Isla Negra, thirty-eight prose poems, accompanied by photographs, all revolving around Neruda’s home, the coast, and the sea: “The Pacific Ocean overflowed the map. There wasn’t any place to put it. It was so large, unruly, and blue that it didn’t fit anywhere. That’s why they left it in front of my window.” Neruda seemed to see the world as though it were made just for him.
On October 14, 1967, Neruda’s play Fulgor y muerte de Joaquín Murieta (The Splendor and Death of Joaquín Murieta) premiered to an enthusiastic sold-out crowd in Santiago. The real-life bandit Murieta is usually thought to be Mexican, but due to a translation of the California gold rush story by a Chilean, many people in Chile claim him as their hero, the one who stood up and defended all Latinos.
The work unfolds like an opera, populated by “the voice of the poet”; a chorus of campesinos, miners, fishermen, and their wives; and other singers with songs often in rhyme, all the while following real figures and events from the last century. The plot begins with the righteous bandit Murieta and his friend Juan Three-Fingers following the lure of the California gold rush, sailing up from Valparaíso in 1850—as many Chileans did at that time. On the ship, Murieta marries Teresa. In California, the Chileans are shown only with Latinos, while the white rangers and hooded men are always looking over them. The hooded men quote John L. O’Sullivan of the New York Morning News, words that Neruda directed to be projected on a screen at the back of the set-less stage for most of the production: “It is our manifest destiny to extend ourselves until we are owners of the entire continent that providence has given us for the grand experiment in liberty.”
“Only the white race!” the hooded men yell. “America for the Americans!” “We won the war” (referring to the Mexican-American War [1846–1848]). The hooded men kill Latinos and blacks, then rape and murder Teresa. Murieta then avenges the murder of his wife and all the other Latinos by killing the white oppressors. Murieta, Three-Fingers, and a gang of fellow bandits set
