The fiesta was full of ceremony and revelry. One highlight was the Grand Bacchanalia, a masquerade ball at the federation’s headquarters. Entrance for las señoritas was “absolutely free,” three pesos for the young men. Students got into the bacchanalia fantasy theme by dressing up as demons and angels, Columbuses and Mapuche, Gypsies and Arabs, pirates and Pierrots (after the sad-faced mime pining for love). They promenaded through Santiago, ending up at the dance, where the punch, beer, and wine fueled the sensation of self-expression, sexual passion, and freedom. The students embraced their own identity as the confetti fell like snow, as the alcohol quenched the embers that smoldered in their throats. All of Santiago watched as they rejoiced “in the midst of so much despicable garbage of the world” in which they lived, as Diego Muñoz, a childhood friend of Neruda’s, phrased it.
In the midst of the festivities, Neruda rose above the twenty-five or so other poets involved with the FECh to win the revered poetry competition. The next day, October 15, his “Song of the Fiesta” was published in a beautiful sixteen-page edition by Claridad. It was read aloud in classrooms and bars across Santiago. The poem captured the surging political pulse of the students at the time:
Today as the ripe earth shakes
in a dusty and violent quake
our young souls go forth filled
like the sails of a boat in the wind.
Before the festival, Neruda was little known outside of his artistic, bohemian student circle. With “Song of the Fiesta,” there on the main stage, Neruda was suddenly proclaimed one of the country’s greatest literary talents. “La juventud tenía a su poeta.” This generation had its poet. The prize ceremony was held at the Politeama Theater, two nights after the fiesta, as part of a larger program that included symphonic music and dance. Neruda, though, was simply too shy to read his poem to the huge crowd, and the winner from preceding years had to read it for him.
In the days and weeks that followed, Neruda was asked to read “Song of the Fiesta” all the time, everywhere. The youth were identifying strongly with those verses. But Neruda was not ready to step into the shoes of the celebrity he had become.
Neruda reflected back on it in a poem forty years later:
Song of the fiesta . . . October,
Spring’s
reward:
a full-throated Pierrot unleashes
my poetry above the madness
and I, the fine edge
of a black sword among masks and jasmine
still walking about scowling alone,
cutting through the crowd with the melancholy
of the South wind, beneath the bells
and the unfurling streamers.
—“1921”
Between 1921 and 1926, Claridad published nearly 150 works by Neruda: poems, literary criticism, and political pieces. As it was a student paper, he did not receive payment for his contributions. He got by on a small allowance from his father, who, for now, knew little about his son’s writing.
As a way to differentiate his short essays from his poetry, Neruda published his Claridad literary criticisms under the pseudonym Sachka Yegulev, from the Russian Leonid Andreyev’s novella of the same name, chosen for ideological reasons along with a twinge of romanticism. Sachka leads a bloody rebellion but loses his life in the fight for liberty. The fictional character was a hero to many young Latin Americans. Neruda’s fascination with him would fade, especially as he became more of a pacifist. Other students also assumed Russian pen names as an homage both to that country’s literary heritage and to its revolution.
Neruda’s articles of the early 1920s demonstrate that he was already a highly politicized leftist humanist. On August 27, 1921, Claridad published a gloss by Neruda that epitomizes the activist prose he was producing during these years, this one aimed at the working class, entitled “Employee”:
You don’t know that they exploit you. That they’ve robbed you of happiness, that in return for the dirty money they give you, you gave the portion of beauty that fell over your soul. The cashier who pays your wages is an arm of el patrón [owner-boss]. El patrón is also the arm of a brutal body that keeps killing you just like many other men. But don’t hit the cashier, no, it’s someone else [you should hit], the body, the assassin’s body.
We call it exploitation, capital, abuse. The newspapers that you read, hurried in the streetcar, they call it order, law, patriotism, etc. Perhaps you find yourself weak. No. Here we are, we who now aren’t alone, we who are equal to you and, like you, are exploited and hurt, but we rebel . . .
In a 1922 editorial, he made an early allusion to his sense of a poet’s calling. The text, on the front page of Claridad, runs next to an illustration of what’s evidently a workingman and workingwoman, huddled in the cold, the hardship they’ve endured evident in their postures and facial expressions. The narrator of the piece writes of how he looks at this “miserable and mute” couple, but nothing comes to him; he’s perplexed, wondering, “Why doesn’t the bonfire of my rebellion ignite in my lips? In front of these two beings tied together by the very symbol of my pain, why doesn’t the red word that whips and condemns crack in my heart and mouth?” He keeps looking at the paper, “but nothing!” Until all of a sudden the man in the picture comes to life, grabs the narrator with his hands, looks him in the eyes, and says:
Friend, brother, why do you keep silent? . . . You who know the gift of illuminating the words with your internal flame; you can only sing and sing your small pleasures and forget the abandonment of our hearts, the brutal wound of our lives, the terror of the cold, the scourge of hunger? . . . If you don’t say it and don’t say it in every moment of every hour, you will fill the earth with lying voices that amplify the bad and silence the protest . . .
The
