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The Chile of October 1972 was a place of upheaval and civil unrest. A conflict that began in a remote region of Patagonia set off a spark, igniting a conflagration of tension that consumed the country that month. Local truckers had protested the Allende administration’s plan to create a state-owned trucking enterprise in Aysén, the country’s least populated area. The government felt the private trucking system was inadequate, while the truckers blamed the government’s inability to secure replacement parts and other supplies to keep them efficient. They announced a strike, and the National Truckers Confederation joined them, forty thousand members staying off the road. Telling of the tension that was gripping the country, the shopkeepers’ and merchants’ organizations joined the now-national strike, adding their own specific demands. They were followed by the Engineers Association, then bank clerks, gas workers, lawyers, architects, and taxi and bus drivers—a national strike that strove to paralyze the economy to leave the government no other choice than to make transformative changes. Patience had simply worn out. Moderate groups like the Christian Democratic Party supported the strike, which had wide consequences: influenced by Christian Democratic union leaders, for instance, one hundred thousand campesinos joined the strike as well.
Allende declared a partial state of emergency. The military, for the moment loyal to the government, was called in to maintain order and, in effect, help shore up the UP’s fragile position. Enough factories were still producing, and there were enough loyal supporters of the government that the economy held and the country wasn’t completely paralyzed, but the strike wore on.
On November 2, Allende shook up his cabinet in hopes of stemming the assaults on his administration and even ending the strike. He invited the army’s commander in chief, Carlos Prats, to serve as minister of the interior while still maintaining his military post. The moves worked. Twenty-five days after they started the strike, the National Truckers Confederation declared their full confidence in General Prats and negotiated an agreement. The government survived, but the strike had made the military the arbiter of the country’s political conflicts.
A year earlier, Neruda had written an article for Le Monde praising Prats, highlighting that, in Chile, the military was loyal to the country’s constitution. Prats, who would remain loyal to Allende, wrote a letter thanking the poet. On December 6, 1972, General Prats was the one to welcome the poet back from France at the National Stadium, in a great celebration for both his homecoming and winning the Nobel Prize. Neruda was very ill, but he mustered his strength for this great homage, complete with a balloon launch and a parade around the stadium’s track of young Communists, workers, horses, and a float dedicated to Luis Emilio Recabarren.
President Salvador Allende and First Lady Hortensia Bussi Soto took a helicopter to Isla Negra to visit the sick poet and officially receive his resignation as ambassador in person. Neruda read from his new book, Incitement to Nixoncide and Praise for the Chilean Revolution. When Neruda became bedridden and no longer made public appearances, his friends brought the outside world to his bedside. Julio Cortázar visited him that February. As he and his wife entered Neruda’s bedroom, the sea breaking directly outside the enormous window that took up a whole wall, it seemed to Cortázar that the poet was still “carrying on his perpetual dialogue with the sea, with those waves that he had always seen as great eyelids.” He went on:
In the evening, although we insisted on leaving so that he could rest, Pablo made us stay with him to watch a dreadful melodrama about vampires on television, which fascinated and amused him at the same time, as he gave himself up to a ghostly present that was more real to him than a future he knew to be closed to him. On my first visit, which had taken place in France two years before, he had embraced me with a “See you soon.” Now, he looked at us for a moment, his hands in mine, and said, “Better not to say good-bye, right?” his tired eyes already far away.
Though he appeared tired to his friends, Neruda still found energy to pursue Alicia, Matilde’s niece. Their separation had put the affair on hold, but their emotions had not faded, and they had maintained a correspondence. Believing her ailing husband was in good hands, Matilde had returned to Europe to settle various affairs, including selling their house in Normandy. On April 29, 1973, Neruda wrote to her, first describing the ten or so people who had come to lunch the day before. Then, showing the state of his health and the difficulties of obtaining even basic medicine in Chile at the time, partly due to economic blockades, Neruda asked Matilde to send or “bring back phenindione [an anticoagulant] for the veins. And Cortancyl (Prednisone) [cortisone, a steroid].”
He ends the letter: “I’m angry because you don’t write, dammit! I forgive you for today. I love you, I kiss you, but enjoy your trip.” He closes it, addressing her as “Perro-tita [little dog], hasta luego, your”—and then draws in a small picture of a dog for himself.
In her absence, when he went to Valparaíso for cancer treatments, he and Alicia reunited at the city’s iconic Hotel Miramar, overlooking the sea. These rendezvous occurred with some frequency, always in the same hotel. She would also accompany him at the hospital. It seems Matilde never knew anything of the post-France affair between her husband and niece. It’s possible that the two also saw each other behind Matilde’s back when she was in Chile, when Neruda dissuaded her from making the trips to Valparaíso for treatment.
Alicia was struck by how thin he was becoming. Sometimes he was so sick a doctor had to come to the hotel.
