Nonetheless, while not debunking that red herring themselves but having other assumptions to fuel the story, the press and others ran with it, sensationalizing the poet’s death the world over. “Pablo Neruda May Have Been Killed by a CIA Double Agent” announced an ABC News/Univision web article as the investigation started. Neruda’s nephew Rodolfo Reyes told a magazine that Neruda’s case was “worthy of crime fiction.”
Neruda’s body was exhumed and his well-preserved bones sent to labs in Chile, in Spain, and at the University of North Carolina. Five thousand X-rays and further microscopic examinations revealed widespread evidence of metastatic prostate cancer in his bones. The remains were checked for more than two thousand chemicals. Nothing was found. In 2013, the panel of examining teams announced that their “results mean that there is no forensic evidence of any unnatural cause of death.”
Still, Neruda’s nephew and the Communist Party demanded more testing, this time for any protein damage caused by chemical agents. The Human Rights Program was of similar sentiment and sent a confidential report to the judge, pressing him to continue the investigation, insisting that “it is clearly possible and highly probable” that Neruda’s death “was caused by third-party intervention.”
The document, though, just consists of presumptions that are not based on fact. As with much of the argument on behalf of the assassination theory, this text describes a true fact and then extrapolates from it, taking cognitive leaps toward one particular possible outcome, namely that Neruda was murdered, while downplaying the ways that same fact could reasonably be construed in other scenarios in which no murder took place.
An example of this is one of the eight “antecedents that seem to indicate a third party was involved in Neruda’s death”: the fact that La Chascona was ransacked by the military following the coup. The raid, which took place while Neruda was at Isla Negra, did show that the regime hated him, that he was an enemy of the state, for which he might be murdered. Many enemies of the state were being murdered. But it is also possible that they hated him, they raided his house, and yet, for various reasons, or no reason at all, they didn’t kill him. In other words, a range of conclusions could be drawn from the facts at hand.
Another example of the reasoning the Human Rights Program and others used to base their claim is that, as the report states, since the forensic tests were done four decades after Neruda died, the fact that the tests came back negative does not “prove or disprove the possibility that hours before the death of the patient he could have been injected with a chemical agent.” And while the report concludes that “if there would have been a third-party intervention, it would have consisted in [an] inoculation, through an injection in the abdomen of the Poet,” it admits, “We don’t know who gave him the injection, what it contained, whether or not it was noted in the medical file.”
Still, the judge agreed to order tests, and the Human Rights Program assembled a panel of experts. Again, the results showed no conclusive evidence of anything that would support the assassination theory. “No Foul Play in Death of Chilean Poet Neruda, Researchers Say,” Reuters reported.
As of this writing, genomics experts in Canada and Denmark have been contracted to examine one last pathogen, and if plausible, to sequence and interpret its genome. But as the lead investigator from Canada’s McMaster University put it, “I have no doubt that if it’s there, we’ll find it. But then the next question becomes ‘Was it deliberately put there?’”
No matter the result of this last investigation, perhaps the most ironic aspect of this drama is that, even if we could imagine for a moment that Neruda had been assassinated in order to be silenced, his death had the opposite effect. Far from erasing his presence, Neruda’s death inflamed the resistance and gave it voice, on the day of his funeral and beyond.*
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In the twenty-first century, Neruda’s works and legacy continue to live and breathe throughout the world. He transcends class and political connotations: he is the public poet, a people’s poet, appearing with increasing frequency in popular culture. We see his presence in art from the streets to the opera stage: Taylor Swift cites Neruda’s Poem XX as the inspiration behind her quadruple-platinum album Red; in an episode of The Simpsons, Lisa tells Bart, “Pablo Neruda said, ‘Laughter is the language of the soul.’”
The wrenchingly beautiful film Il postino (The Postman), based on the 1985 novel by the Chilean writer Antonio Skármeta, is a fictional portrait of the relationship between Neruda, in exile on an Italian island, and Mario, a sensitive young mail carrier. Neruda’s role as the people’s poet is displayed, as the film illustrates him writing for the common person, enabling a poorly educated postman to enjoy the wonders of poetic language. Politics are treated vaguely here, offering what has been called a “safe” version for the mainstream viewer. We know Neruda is a Communist, but we don’t know why he’s in exile. Neruda talks to Mario about politics directly only when he discusses Canto General and, in another scene, asks if there are protests when the island has no running water. In the end, though, after Neruda has left the island, Mario has been so inspired that he reads a poem at a leftist gathering.
Neruda has also shown his aliveness in the halls of “high” culture. In 2010, the renowned Plácido Domingo played Neruda in the Los Angeles Opera’s version of Il postino (Domingo has said that he has “known Neruda’s poetry since childhood”). It is based on a libretto that revived some of the political and sexual intensity of Skármeta’s original novel.
These examples illustrate the enduring reach and resonance of Neruda’s work. Some of these instances might take the work out of context or less than fully represent the poet as a whole. However, Neruda himself would surely have
