Georgette Dorn, the current head of the Hispanic division, was a young reference librarian at the time of Neruda’s visit. She was a lover of Latin American literature with a PhD, and Neruda was a living legend to her, a figure that towered above other great writers who came to the library. The conversation was just so “jovial and very pleasant.” Neruda was “extremely gregarious,” asking all about the audio archives and who had read there before. His old rival Pablo de Rokha had, and Neruda was very curious about his experience. The library was also making an LP of Gabriela Mistral at the time—she was living in New York—and he talked for a while about her, reminiscing about his childhood mentor.
They also talked about food. Dorn was born in Hungary, but she moved to Argentina when she was nine. Neruda was very disappointed that she couldn’t tell him anything about her birth country’s cuisine. Miguel Ángel Asturias was traveling through Hungary and had started writing Comiendo en Hungría just the year before. The book wasn’t close to being published when Neruda was at the library; it came out in 1969.
*Levine—on this first of the three times she would meet Neruda—could see how his poetry still came to him naturally. Perhaps because she was the youngest person at a long table of some twenty guests and an unknown American female, she wound up seated next to Neruda. When the waiter came to her with the platter of exquisitely prepared fish—presented in full, eye and all—she struggled to transfer it to her plate, an embarrassing undertaking right next to the legendary poet. However, the “challenge par excellence” for her was dessert: a whole mango served with a single small knife, in a time when the tropical fruit was not nearly as familiar in the States as it is today. When Neruda saw her pained hesitation to attempt to take the knife to it, he came to her rescue: “Jill”—pronouncing the soft g correctly, uncommon for Spanish speakers—“I’ll cut it for you.” He proceeded to methodically cut her mango into delicate pieces. As she reflected later, “To me this act of chivalry, a veritable ode to the mango, seemed like the attentions of a lover; I felt both honored and tongue-tied, and, blushing deep red again, managed to thank him. As the coffee was brought in, Matilde announced that Pablo was going to take a siesta, and so the great bearlike man beside me got up and swiftly, as by the wave of a wand, vanished into the intimate labyrinth of that luxuriant home.”
*It wasn’t just global politics Nixon was worried about. Henry Kissinger ordered the CIA and the State and Defense Departments to study the implications for the United States in the event of an Allende win. The report concluded that there would be “tangible economic losses.” “The world military balance of power would not be significantly altered by an Allende government,” but it would threaten hemispheric cohesion. “We do not see, however, any likely threat to the peace of the region.” Yet the victory would have “considerable political and psychological costs”: “a definite psychological setback to the U.S. and a definite psychological advance for the Marxist idea.”
*In a phone call with his press secretary, Nixon acknowledged that the U.S. ambassador in Chile had been instructed to “do all possible short of a Dominican Republic–style action”—assassination—to keep Allende from assuming office. The March 1972 conversation was captured on his secret Oval Office taping system: “But he just failed, the son of a bitch. That was his main problem. He should have kept Allende from getting in.”
*While in London, Parini had dinner with Reid and Neruda, “and it was wonderful: he was so sweet and affecting, and when Alastair told him I was a poet, he gave me a lovely kiss on the forehead: almost a benediction.”
*Reagan disfavored Pinochet for marginalizing the Chilean center. The U.S. ambassador to Chile, Harry Barnes, actually helped Chilean organizations work toward rejecting Pinochet in the 1988 plebiscite; the pro-Pinochet press started calling him “Dirty Harry.”
*There were fears and doubts about how the dictatorship would handle the results. The CIA, for instance, had discovered “a clear sense of Pinochet’s determination to use violence on whatever scale is necessary to retain power.” U.S. officials were to warn regime officials that “such a plan would seriously damage relations” and “utterly destroy Chile’s reputation in the world.”
*See endnotes for additional details on this history.
*The second international panel of experts investigating Neruda’s death convened in Santiago over the week of October 15, 2017. Their announcements generated headlines like “Researchers Raise Doubts Over Cause of Chilean Poet Neruda’s Death” (as seen in the New York Times). This has just occurred while this book is in its final stages of production. There is time to add these notes about the panels’ findings, though the full official report has not yet been released:
While the panel still could not “rule out or prove the nature, natural or violent” of Neruda’s death, they determined that prostate cancer was not the direct cause. They could not rule out that it was a natural death indirectly caused by the cancer—his body may have been so weak and immunocompromised by the cancer that it simply could not overcome an infection, for instance. The panel is in “100% agreement” that Neruda’s official death certificate was “invalid.” “Cachexia, cancer” was listed as the immediate cause. Cachexia is a weakness and wasting of the body due to a chronic illness, a state he was clearly not in, they determined.
The other focus was on the recovery of bacteria from Neruda’s remains. Based on their testing, they do not believe he died from the Staphylococcus aureus. The undamaged
