Around two that afternoon, it being Chile’s Independence Day, Neruda declared that they must celebrate it as always, even though they didn’t consider Chile an independent country since the coup. “So we toasted to the eighteenth of September, in parentheses.”
Every Independence Day, the Catholic Church holds a special Mass, the ceremonies of Te Deum. They watched the event on TV. Ex-presidents attended, and this year they saw Jorge Alessandri, Gabriel González Videla, and Eduardo Frei. The turning point in the day came when Neruda saw González Videla, who had called him a traitor and sought his arrest. Neruda became very distressed, like a wild animal. “I think that this was the culmination of his nightmare,” Arévalo said, “and that it led to his end.”
Neruda’s condition started to visibly worsen. Around eleven o’clock that night, as they were watching the news on TV, his hands started to shake. He asked Matilde to take Arévalo and Cofré to their bedroom, where they would hardly sleep. Matilde knocked on their door at five in the morning, saying that Neruda was very ill and that an ambulance was on its way.
On the way to Santiago, the ambulance was stopped at several checkpoints. The military searched it, including underneath the stretcher where Neruda lay. He was taken to the Clínica Santa María. Doctors came in and out of his hospital room, prescribing medicines, some of them distraught themselves. The poet was suffering intense pain. On September 20, the Mexican embassy told Neruda that President Luis Echeverría Álvarez had offered him asylum and a flight to Mexico in a private plane. Neruda thanked the ambassador but said he would stay in Chile because he could never live anywhere else.
On September 21, Matilde found out that the military had ransacked their Santiago home, La Chascona, and flooded it by diverting the canal that ran at the top of the hill. Matilde pleaded that they go to Mexico, at least for a couple of months until order was restored in Chile. Neruda was silent for hours and then said, “Yes, we’ll go.” Matilde went back to Isla Negra to get some more clothes. She had kept Neruda’s friends at arm’s length, not wanting him to hear about what Pinochet was doing, but when she left, they came to the hospital and told him who had been arrested, who was being tortured, who had been killed.
According to Matilde, when she returned that night she found Neruda in a state of madness, very sick and disturbed. He reproached his wife for not having told him the reality of what was happening to his friends, the atrocities that were occurring daily; that the junta was murdering people. She told him that it wasn’t true, that his friends were exaggerating, that “one should only believe a part of what one hears.”
As Matilde wrote in her memoir, that evening, Neruda began talking to her about their honeymoon, sweetly, more sweetly than he ever had. Then a tremendous despair passed over him again as he slipped into delirium. “They’re shooting them!” he yelled over and over. A nurse gave him an injection to relax. He fell asleep and then into a coma. Pablo Neruda died on September 23, 1973.
Matilde had to face his death along with the reality of the coup. In La Chascona, furniture was overturned, the telephone line cut, books tossed up and down the hill, and flood damage setting in. Everything was in chaos.
They eventually got the coffin to the living room, which was filled with shattered glass. Homero Arce asked Inés Valenzuela, “Inésita, don’t you think it would be best to sweep up some of this?”
“No, under no circumstances” was her proud reply. “Let the ambassadors come and see how all of this is.”
Within a few hours, the Swedish ambassador arrived, carrying with him an immense crown that he placed at Neruda’s feet. Other diplomats came, as well as a camera crew from an East German news television program, who hid from the military under the cover of being from West Germany.
Matilde, Inés, and their friends decided to make the funeral a public event, to march out of the house and take the body to the Santiago cemetery in a procession. “We knew what we could do,” Inés recounts.
Matilde had the procession start at La Chascona on the twenty-sixth so the press would show the world what the military had done to the house. The military junta, realizing Neruda’s international popularity, retroactively declared three official days of mourning for Chile’s great poet, starting on the twenty-third, the day he died, and ending the day of the funeral. Neruda’s friends, as well as some students and workers—people from all walks of life—came to the house where Neruda lay in rest.
And then, in the first open act of resistance by the Left since the coup, Neruda’s pueblo came from all over Santiago. As his coffin was taken from La Chascona, they marched to the Cementerio General de Santiago, with people joining in from all corners of the city, as defiance overcame their fear. They marched in front of soldiers who held their guns at the ready but did nothing, because this was Pablo Neruda; the world was watching.
“We were afraid but we were also defiant, because we were going to have that funeral,” recalled the painter Roser Bru, who as a five-year-old Spanish Civil War refugee escaped Europe on the Winnipeg, thanks to Neruda’s efforts. “This was a way of making our presence felt.”
The marchers were mourning the death of their poet, the deaths of so many compañeros taken by the regime, the death of their democracy. It was terribly cathartic. They tossed red carnations on Neruda’s coffin as it passed through the streets. They solemnly sang the Socialist anthem, “The Internationale.” Then over the tears came the chants. Someone called out, “¡Compañero
