The UP’s land-reform program also lacked a clear vision and resulted in the disorganization of the agricultural economy. Production dropped so sharply that the government was forced to import food to meet the increased demand brought on by the higher incomes of workers. At the same time, sparked on by the MIR and radical Mapuche, campesinos temporarily or permanently occupied some seventeen hundred rural properties. The owners of these properties were terrified, and this helped fuel the opposition against Allende. Many think it was the Ultra-Left’s intimidation of centrists and landowners that sealed the fate of the UP.
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Even before Allende’s victory, Neruda had had concerns about Chile. According to Jorge Edwards, Neruda feared the situation in Chile might be difficult: “He wasn’t optimistic at all; he held no illusions about it . . . If Allende won, as his party quite realistically supposed, he was afraid that things would end badly.”
Nevertheless, Neruda was tremendously proud of what his country had done. After all, he had played a role in its success, both on and off the page. His sentiments could be heard in his reading at the Royal Festival Hall in London in April 1972. With his earnest, at times dramatic voice carrying a twinge of sweetness, he began by telling the audience, in English:
Last time I read some of my poems before you [pauses, breathes out] but this time I am a different person, I am two persons, you see I was a [pauses] roving poet in that moment when I was here, but something happened to my country in Chile. After one hundred years of struggles of the humiliated and the trashed and the working class, we had [raises his voice just enough, with a dramatic pause] a great victory. [Applause.] We had at last a good and great victory and I am not only a roaming poet now, I am also the proud representative of the first popular government after centuries in my country, Chile. [Long, raucous applause.]
He was not without his detractors, though. Someone jeered at Neruda during his opening remarks but was quickly drowned out by loud noise in favor of the poet. The writer Jay Parini, then a graduate student, was at that London reading, sitting toward the back. He recalled how there had been a great deal of muttering in the audience, people talking over each other. At one point, “a bald-headed man in front of me was shouting something in Spanish—I couldn’t really understand it, but it seemed offensive.” Several people were telling him to shut up when “a well-dressed woman sitting next to me took off one shoe and brought a stiletto heel down hard on the man’s scalp, producing shrieks and a good deal of blood. A policeman dragged off the man, with the woman chasing after him, hitting him more times. The audience was in pandemonium, until Neruda—a large, impressive-looking man—raised a big hand and, like Moses parting the Red Sea, made a way for his poem, reading his masterpiece ‘The Heights of Macchu Picchu.’”
Neruda was accompanied on the stage by Alastair Reid, his Scottish-born English translator and dear friend. Reid read the English first, followed by Neruda reading the Spanish, in sections, so that the “sense comes first and the sound follows,” as Reid put it. If four decades earlier Neruda’s reading voice had been nasal and monotone, now it resounded, especially pronounced by the crisscross rhythm between the Spanish and the English, alternating long strands or stanzas or just couplets back and forth, the poems broken up as if into meter, creating varying speeds and tension and song. Reid had heard Neruda read many times, but on that night he sensed something truly special: the Chilean’s voice was “spreading itself like a balm over the English audience.” It was “a magical sound.”
Fueled by the energy of the crowd, Neruda’s voice reached a climax while reading “Macchu Picchu.” The pace of the poem was growing with force as he struck the lectern loudly with his fist while speaking the final line, “Hablar por mis palabras y mi sangre.” “Speak through my words and my blood.” The dramatic, emotional flair of his voice was both inspiring and chilling. With his country’s revolution as a backdrop, Neruda’s words resonated with authority and power. The audience erupted into a thunderous, jubilant applause.*
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Neruda’s domestic life was once again in turmoil in 1970. Matilde’s niece Alicia had found out that her husband, the father of her child, was already married to another woman. As Alicia struggled to recover, Matilde invited her to live at Isla Negra in exchange for occasional domestic work, including as a dressmaker. Alicia was in her early thirties, exuberant and light skinned. Very quickly, she and Neruda became intimate. The affair was evident to visitors who had known Neruda through his relationships with Delia and Matilde. Aida Figueroa reported that Neruda summoned Alicia frequently and that his attachment struck her as profoundly sad, his “one last senile love.” Neruda never wanted to be disturbed during his daily siestas, so it was at this time that Matilde would take a long walk on the beach. And it was also then that Alicia and Neruda were alone together. Neruda wrote and published a book of poetry for and about her. There is a consensus among those who knew Neruda that the book, the phallically titled La espada encendida (The Flaming Sword), was intended as a mythological work in which a new Adam (Neruda) and Eve (Alicia) find each other in the destruction after nuclear war. Together, they set off to found a utopia.
Long before the book was published, Matilde became suspicious. One day when Alicia had gone to Santiago, Neruda made up a trip, saying he didn’t want Matilde to come along. He left alone with the chauffeur. Matilde followed him and caught them in a tryst. “I’ll tell you that your friend is not a healthy man,” Matilde told Neruda’s comrade
