the space of our happiness.
He is resigned, if not cynical. In another poem in the book, “Death of a Journalist,” also about the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, he writes, “Let us prepare to die / in the jaws of machinery.” Neruda had always fought against the machinery of materialism, unbridled capitalism, and fascism. Now he could find no escape.
The title of the intense book, World’s End, says it all. In it, Neruda critiques the fact that socialism—in Cuba, China, the Soviet Union, and elsewhere—had failed to create a truly fair society. By the end of the book, it seems he has given up his ardent faith that socialism would be successful. He is ready for the century to end, a century full of horrific war, which he labels the century of destruction.
* * *
Soon after Neruda’s sixty-fifth birthday party, in 1969, he went to the doctor complaining of irritation during urination. A biopsy discovered the cause: prostate cancer. He had a mass that would continue to spread until it metastasized to his bladder. He would go to the best French surgeons, the best Russian surgeons in the Soviet Union, but there was nothing anyone could do. Chemotherapy was not yet widely available as a treatment for cancer.
Despite his illness, Neruda would not give up his political obligations. The 1970 Chilean presidential elections were coming, and the Far Left did not yet have a clear candidate. There was Salvador Allende, but many thought that he was damaged goods after having already lost three presidential races, in 1952, 1958, and 1964. Neruda himself seemed ambivalent; perhaps he believed that Allende had aligned himself too much with Fidel Castro and would try to bring Castroism into Chilean politics.
The Left failed to find a consensus candidate to rally behind, so each party would, for now, run its own candidate in what would amount to a primary contest within the Unidad Popular (Popular Unity, or UP) coalition. The Socialists ran Allende. The Communists at first didn’t have a candidate, but as Sergio Insunza, who would be Allende’s justice minister, explained,
There was disagreement there about which candidate to choose . . . And then a voice: “Why not Pablo Neruda? Why not Pablo Neruda as the Communist Party candidate for the presidency?” And, curiously, it was a candidacy that began as a joke, without any expectations, naturally, that he would win. But it gathered quite a bit of steam, and even he got enthusiastic about it.
Neruda agreed to run, but only with the understanding that once the parties of the UP coalition came to an agreement, he would retire his candidacy. He ran an enthusiastic campaign regardless, touring the country, making proclamations, meeting with unions and organizations, speaking to crowds of all sizes in barns in the countryside and in town plazas. While he dispensed the ritual campaign rhetoric, the heart of his appearances was the recital of his own verse. Sometimes there was no stump speech at all, just poetry.
If he did make a speech, he would close it by saying, “I’ll just read you a poem, okay?” And then he continued to read poems for hours. People would say, “Read that one!” and he would reply, “If you’ve got it.” Inevitably, someone would hand him the poem or recite a few lines from memory. He read them, and often the crowd read along, out loud, reciting in unison with him.
Young Communists armed with guitars and art set out to spread propaganda. His friends saw Neruda quickly revived, acquiring a dynamism that actually surpassed the party’s own ambitions for his candidacy.
The people’s love for the poet took over Santiago on October 9, 1969, when four marches of Communists from different parts of the city rallying for Neruda converged in the working-class Barrancas neighborhood, where fireworks were set off above the multitude that crammed the streets. The crowd roared, “¡Neruda, Neruda, Barrancas te saluda!” “Neruda, Neruda, Barrancas salutes you!” “Viva the future president of Chile!” The poet gave a speech, ending with:
Victory depends on us, all of us together, on our ability to spend time together, argue and change minds, in order to change the historical panorama of our homeland, alter the course of history and bring about a people’s government, so that we can be proud of who we are as Chileans . . .
Neruda’s campaign fired up and mobilized the Communist and Socialist voting base. Once it was evident that he wouldn’t win, he (at least publicly) threw his weight behind Allende. Neruda’s energy and strategy helped to open the road for UP’s success in the general election.
* * *
Done with the campaign trail, the Nerudas began to travel again outside Chile, despite Pablo’s worsening illness. They went to Paris, Moscow, London, and Milan (for a performance of The Splendor and Death of Joaquín Murieta), with a stopover in Barcelona, an emotional visit for Neruda to Franco’s Spain. There he spent the day with Gabriel García Márquez, who would write a fictionalized account of the afternoon in his short story “Me alquilo para soñar” (perhaps translated best as “Dreamer for Rent”), published in Doce cuentos peregrinos (Twelve Pilgrim Stories). García Márquez caricatured his good friend Neruda roaming through bookstores on a “major hunt,” moving among the people “like a crippled elephant, with an infantile interest in the internal mechanism of everything—to him, the world seemed like an immense string toy in which he invented life.” When it was time to eat, he was “gluttonous and refined.” García Márquez writes that he ate three whole lobsters, all the while talking about other culinary delights, especially the “prehistoric shellfish of Chile.”
* * *
On their return from Europe by boat, Neruda and Matilde stopped first in Venezuela, where an elaborate afternoon banquet was held in his honor at El Nacional editor in chief Miguel Otero Silva’s contemporary mansion.
A twenty-two-year-old Columbia University graduate student, Suzanne Jill Levine, now an esteemed translator of Latin American literature, was at the party. She was traveling with the “wonderfully wry” Uruguayan critic Emir Rodríguez Monegal, who was teaching
