Exactly one hundred years ago today, a poor and magnificent poet, the most tremendous of all woeful souls, wrote this prophecy: “À l’aurore, armés d’une ardente patience, nous entrerons aux splendides villes.” “At dawn, armed with a burning patience, we will enter the splendid cities.”
I believe in the prophecy of Rimbaud, the Visionary. I come from a dark province, a country separated from all others by a sharp geography. I was once the most dejected of poets and my poetry was provincial, painful, and rainy. But I always had faith in humanity. I never lost hope. That is why perhaps I have made it this far, arriving here with my poetry and also my flag.
In closing, I must say to the goodhearted people, to the workers, to the poets, that the future’s entirety is expressed in Rimbaud’s lines: only with a burning patience will we triumph in the splendid city, the city that will give light, justice, and dignity to us all.
* * *
Meanwhile, Neruda had serious diplomatic duties to attend to. In November 1971, due to the depleted treasury, Allende was forced to announce a moratorium on paying back foreign debt. He hoped the creditor nations would reschedule and restructure Chile’s nearly $2 billion owed to eleven countries. This was done through the Paris Club, an informal assembly of representatives of the world’s major creditor nations. With the meetings being held in Paris, Neruda as ambassador led the negotiations for his country. Nearly two-thirds of the debt, though, was owed to the United States, who wanted any refinancing to be tied to compensation for the expropriation of copper companies. Neruda helped to secure what was perceived as a favorable deal. He also worked to persuade the French to dismiss the pressure of expropriated American companies to put an embargo on Chilean copper exports.
* * *
Neruda’s health continued to deteriorate, but this did not prevent him from traveling to New York City, in early April 1972, to deliver the opening speech at the PEN American Center’s fiftieth anniversary celebration. There were no visa issues now, even though Neruda had been writing fervently about Vietnam, and even though he was an ambassador of a government Washington was trying to destroy. Nixon had denied entry to other artists, but Neruda’s star, especially after the Nobel Prize, shone too bright now. Even Nixon understood what Johnson surmised: that to censure his voice, prevent his presence, would do much more damage than good.
The evening began with the president of PEN America reading a greeting from Nixon, to which the seven hundred or so guests who filled the grand ballroom “hissed, laughed and booed,” according to the New York Times. Arthur Miller then introduced Neruda as the “father of contemporary Latin-American literature.” Onstage, Neruda “humbly” asked for forgiveness as he broke away from the literary discourse for a moment to “return to the concerns of my country,” in particular debt relief. “The entire world knows that Chile is undergoing a revolutionary transformation, within the dignity and severity of its laws. That is why there are a lot of people who feel offended.”
While just a few years ago he would have been animated by such attention, now, besieged by an admiring crowd after the conference, Neruda’s dear friend Fernando Alegría saw him turn gray. The press and the fans cornered him, and “there [were] already ashes clinging to his dark suit.” Next, gathered with an intimate group at an elegant salon, his friends offered him breathing room and flutes of champagne. He was fatigued and headed back toward the bathroom with “slow, tired steps,” in Alegría’s words. “He says in passing that he isn’t well, that he will return to Chile in November and that no one must know. But everyone did.”
The endless questions he faced in public seized upon him in his final act in New York, a symposium at Columbia University, where the Q&A became contentious with sharp inquiries into his opinion on international politics, with little attention to poetics. He was done with all this.
He and Matilde quickly took off for Moscow, on April 24, where he got another prognosis. On their flight to Russia, he wrote to Francisco Velasco and María Martner, their La Sebastiana housemates: “We are sick ones but still fighting.” The doctors confirmed what Neruda had been told before: there was nothing to be done. It was his final visit to the Soviet capital, and he wrote a book to it, Elegía (Elegy), poems celebrating his friends and the city, while also denouncing social realism and the former hero he now called “Stalin the terrible.” The book would be published posthumously.
Neruda celebrated his sixty-eighth birthday in warm company at his Normandy country house, along with Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa, arguably four of the five most important Latin American prose writers at the time (Neruda’s quiet rival Jorge Luis Borges being the fifth).
Shortly thereafter, Neruda realized he was too tired to continue as ambassador. He was ready to retire to Isla Negra. He handed over the reins of the embassy to Edwards, but before he left, he met with French president Georges Pompidou in the Palais de l’Élysée. The poet gave him a signed copy of the just-published French translation of García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. They conversed about literature; Pompidou had been a teacher of literature and had edited an anthology of French poetry in his youth. Neruda then put in his word for the nationalization of French interests in Chilean copper, but Pompidou said that was a matter of the courts, not the executive.
When the Velascos met Neruda and Matilde at the airport on their return from France, Neruda told Francisco he wanted to go straight to Isla Negra; he refused to greet anyone in the official committee that awaited him. He got into his friend’s old Citroën with great difficulty. “I realized he was very bad,” wrote Velasco. Neruda was struggling
