now, all burned, they aren’t anyone’s,
they are everyone’s,
they are our bones, seek
your death in that death,
because those same people are stalking you
and they intend for you to enter that same mud.
—“In Vietnam”
Neruda’s next book, Aún (published in English as Still Another Day), is from the earth and of the earth, which nurtures but also takes away:
Forgive me, if when I want
to recount my life
it is the earth of that I talk.
This is the earth.
It grows in your blood
and you grow.
If it’s extinguished in your blood,
you are extinguished.
As seen in his verse, Neruda was now moving from the autumn of his life into a more focused meditation on mortality. The lines above presage his coming illness. Neruda was now sixty-five and clearly reflecting on the course of his life, though he still maintained his humanitarian duties to which he was called, as a poet and as a person.
* * *
Political tumult around the world contributed to Neruda’s reflections on his life choices—his acts of omission and commission, his choices of heroes and villains. In 1968, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic bowed to the winds of change in what became known as the Prague Spring, a period in which newly elected leaders there enacted brave new reforms to liberalize their economy and give citizens more rights, including a ten-year plan to establish democratic socialism. The Soviet ruler, Leonid Brezhnev, threatened to use military force if needed to stop any of Russia’s satellite states from compromising the rest of the Eastern Bloc’s national interests and cohesion. He was particularly fearful Czechoslovakia would leave the bloc, weakening it and opening up the possibility of more defections.
On August 20, 1968, Russia and the Warsaw Pact countries of East Germany, Poland, Bulgaria, and Hungary (all of which had been similarly invaded in 1956) attacked Czechoslovakia with a half million troops. The hope and progress that had developed that spring were quickly destroyed. Reformists and liberals were arrested; a student set himself on fire in a Prague square protesting the repression. A Moscow-friendly government was installed.
Jorge Edwards, among other friends, was at Isla Negra with Neruda the day after the invasion of Czechoslovakia. As Edwards wrote in his memoir, Adíos, poeta . . . :
Books and authors were discussed; we commented on people we considered friends and those we didn’t; we told repetitive, hackneyed jokes in an atmosphere of naturalness or relaxation that was rather fake. And not a word was spoken, not one, about the events in Czechoslovakia. Upon leaving, as we were sharing—under the fresh night air—one of those prolonged good-byes so typical of Chileans, I asked Pablo when he was leaving for Europe. “I don’t think I’ll travel after all,” he responded pensively, worried, upset: “It seems to me the situation is too Czechoslovakian.”
When asked what he thought about the Prague Spring a month later while in Brazil, Neruda first tried to evade the question and then couldn’t commit to a side publicly:
I am a friend of Czechoslovakia, the country that gave me asylum when I needed it, and I am also a friend of the Soviet Union. For that reason, when you ask me what side I am on, I feel like a child who is being asked if he is with his father or with his mother. I am with both.
He then admitted, “I suffered a lot from the events. But now things are normalizing and I hope that the process of democracy continues in that country.”
A year later, Neruda published Fin del mundo (World’s End). The following poem, “1968,” is emblematic of the book:
The hour of Prague fell
on my head like a stone,
my destiny was unsteady,
a moment of darkness
as in a tunnel on a journey
and now, by trying to understand
I do not understand anything:
when we should be singing
instead we must knock upon a sarcophagus
and how awful it is that they hear you
and that the coffin invites you.
Throughout the book, Neruda purges his allegiance to Stalin in particular, as well as Soviet stances that followed in his wake. In “1968” he appeals “to the coming age / to judge my affliction / the company I kept / despite so many mistakes.” In these poems of repentance, it may seem that Neruda wants to be absolved too easily. In the second of two poems in the book aptly titled “The Worship,” he postulates,
I was unaware of that which we were unaware.
And that madness, so long lasting,
was blind and buried
in a demented grandeur.
But he had been aware and admitted as much. Aida Figueroa and her husband, Sergio Insunza, traveled with Salvador Allende to the Soviet Union in 1954, a year after Stalin’s death. “When we made that trip Pablo had already warned us of the excesses of Stalinism, verbally,” Aida explained in 2005. “Twenty million people had died, and he said so in conversations.” Yet he seemed to have said that only after Stalin died.
He was not “unaware,” but he had indeed turned a blind eye: in the poem “1968” he pleads, “I beg forgiveness for this blind man / who saw [the crimes of Stalin and the Soviets] and who didn’t see.” For a political poet so in tune with the metaphor of his eyes as his poetic vision ever since his adolescent poetry, this is a critical admission of change. Still, one must take all his remorse with a grain of salt.
In a literal example of how his former idealism had now turned into a sense of hopelessness, in a 1947 prose piece he had written, “Tyranny cuts off the singer’s head, but the voice from the bottom of the well returns to the secret springs of the earth and rises out of nowhere through the mouths of the people.” Now, he ends his poem about the Prague Spring:
The doors of the century close
on those left unburied
and again they will call in vain
and we will leave without hearing,
pondering the grandest
