I turned to Mario Fernández Núñez and asked him what he thought of Neruda. The whole time we had been talking, he had been preparing bundles of cilantro for his market stand. His hands did not pause in their work when he answered, “Well, he’s our national poet. He won the Nobel Prize.”
“And what does that mean to you?” I asked.
“Well, first, it’s pride, an honor. And secondly, for us, Pablo Neruda, beyond all the poetry, was a very good person. Remember that he was practically the ambassador—he brought the Spanish over here when Spain was in a dictatorship.”
These experiences provided breathing insight that could not be found on the printed pages of the books I found at the Stanford Library, the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile, the Library of Congress, or Neruda’s own archives, or in so many key sources I’ve been grateful for in between.
* * *
In 2004, Isabel Allende, the globally renowned Chilean author, provided the narration for my documentary. Isabel lives in Marin County, and on a spectacular day, I drove her over the Golden Gate Bridge to the recording studio in my beat-up, graffiti-tagged old Subaru. My creative collaborator, Tanya Vlach, was in the back seat, and we listened, exhilarated, to Isabel’s enthusiastic account of her young granddaughter’s ability to invent tales of magical realism, and then she switched back to Neruda, to what he meant to her.
Isabel was thirty-one at the time of the coup. President Salvador Allende was her father’s cousin. She was an ambitious young journalist, writing humor articles for Chile’s first feminist magazine. She had met Neruda personally, at his home in Isla Negra, and his suggestion that she write novels rather than articles, as she had a penchant for exaggeration, would one day prove prophetic in her life. When the poet died, Isabel braved the streets for his funeral, though she stayed close to the tall Swedish ambassador, believing if the soldiers were to start firing, they wouldn’t shoot at leading diplomats. She stayed in Chile for another year, but freedom of the press ended the day of the coup. Despite all her efforts, in the new climate of censorship, her attempts to work as a journalist were futile. And eventually the dictatorship became too threatening: “The circle of repression was closing around my neck.”
An opportunity arose where she and her family could flee safely into exile if they acted quickly. They did. Isabel could not take much with her. As she recounted to us, she took with her a small bag with dirt from her garden and just two books. One was Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America, a history of the centuries of exploitation by foreign governments and multinational corporations that left countries like Chile so vulnerable to the horrors that had just occurred. The other was an old edition of Neruda’s poetry, a volume of his odes—not his typical love poems or political verses, but rather these utterly unique, beautiful, and brilliant poems that convey the social utility in everyday objects. “With Neruda’s words,” she has said, “I was taking a part of Chile with me, for Neruda was such a part of the country”—and such a part of the political dreams that had just been destroyed.
She took the soil of the country she loved, and she took Neruda.
Earth and poetry: two powerful, enduring sources of identity, inspiration, and hope, as seen in Isabel’s suitcase, as well as in the continued endurance of Neruda’s work. Earth and poetry: grounding, yet fertile.
Crystallized in Isabel’s story is a sentiment that runs through Neruda’s work and legacy: that poetry serves a purpose. Poetry is not only for the elite or for intellectuals, but for everyone—from the people in the market to Justice Minister Sergio Insunza and Isabel Allende, from Verónica studying feminist literature while working at Neruda’s house to that grief-stricken man with missing teeth, tearfully calling out “¡Presente!” Neruda’s life is nothing less than a testimony to poetry’s power to be so much more than pretty words on paper; it is an essential part of the fabric of human existence, one that mirrors culture and plays a role in shaping it. Yes, it evokes emotions, but it can also shift social consciousness, sparking both individual and collective change.
* * *
I am finishing the writing of this biography just at the end of the first hundred days of Trump’s presidency. Ever since his election, “resistance” has become the operative word in our new political reality, including for poets: on April 21, 2017, for example, the New York Times featured an article—on the front page, the first time the art form had been featured there in decades—titled “American Poets, Refusing to Go Gentle, Rage Against the Right.” What does one of the most iconic and important resistance poets of the past century give us now, both in the utility of his actual words and in his example? How can his words stir people to action, or provide space for reflection, even healing? What might this poet’s tumultuous and influential journey through political upheavals, uprisings, and exiles offer us as we continue to shape the next chapter in our own cultural story? In our current, unprecedented times, what is the relationship between literature and politics, between artists and social change? My hope is that this book will offer readers an opportunity to explore these questions alongside the vivid details of Neruda’s life and work, which find renewed purpose and relevance every day.
Chapter One
To Temuco
A man was born
among many
who were born.
He lived among many men
who also lived,
and that alone is not so much history
as earth itself,
the central part of Chile, where
vines unwind their green tresses,
grapes feed on the light,
wine is born from the feet of the people.
—“The Birth”
Pablo Neruda’s father, José del Carmen Reyes Morales, grew up in the late nineteenth century on a farm outside the town of Parral, two hundred miles south of the Chilean capital, Santiago. The landscape there was picturesque: well-irrigated orchards, flower farms, and vineyards stretching
