His favorite thing was to play the piano for us.
He would say, “María Luisa is like this,” and he would play some light, buoyant notes.
And he would say, “Pablo is this way,” and the slow, profound chords epitomized Pablo.
Two weeks after they met, on October 28, 1933, the PEN Club of Buenos Aires held a luncheon in honor of Lorca and Neruda: “Spain and America Together.” It was held on the top floor of the elegant Hotel Plaza, with more than a hundred writers in attendance. When it came time to thank their hosts, they stood up and began a tribute to Rubén Darío, who had been a leader of such transformations in Spanish poetry in the decades just before these two poets were born. While Neruda admired him, Lorca revered him—the Nicaraguan had been a major influence on his poetry. They knew that Darío had lived in Buenos Aires at one point and had even written a long “Canto a la Argentina.” But the city seemed devoid of any public recognition of him—no monuments, no parks, no memory of not only one of the greatest Latin American poets, but one who had sung the country’s praises in immortal verse. The two friends did not think this was right. So they decided to deliver their customary toasts, as honorees, in a manner a bit out of the ordinary (though not so extraordinary for those who knew the pair).
Lorca was passionate about bullfighting in his native Spain, and his idea was to divide the talk between himself and Neruda, as he explained to the crowd, “like bullfighting al alimón, in which two toreros, holding one cape between them, outwit the bull together.” The talk would be on “the great poet of America and of Spain.” Lorca called, “Rubén . . .” “. . . Darío!” Neruda responded.
They continued alternating, speaking antiphonally, stressing their debt to tradition as well as their generation’s need to transcend it. In 2004, the legendary author Jim Harrison described the event as a “transcendent poetry slam. That evening both poets stood athwart poetry’s third rail.” Neruda said they spoke as if “linked by an electrical wire,” as each spontaneously continued the other poet’s line of thinking:
NERUDA: Where in Buenos Aires is the Rubén Darío plaza?
LORCA: Where is the statue of Rubén Darío?
NERUDA: He loved parks. Where is the Rubén Darío park?
LORCA: Where is the Rubén Darío flower shop of roses? . . .
NERUDA: Where is the oil, the resin, the swan of Rubén Darío?
LORCA: Rubén Darío sleeps in his natal Nicaragua below his awful marble lion, like those lions that the rich put at the entrances to their houses.
The exchanges grew even longer and more complex, continuing to play off one another, ending in a toast in homage to Darío’s glory, whose “lexical fiesta . . . crashing consonants, flights and forms,” as Lorca put it, had enriched the Spanish language forever.
At literary salons in homes that opened their doors to him or which he hosted at his own apartment; at bars, restaurants, and cafés; and on sidewalks, Neruda was nourished and enlivened by the warmth of his new friends. Unlike his first three postings, this one was certainly no “banishment,” literally or psychologically. In fact, it was the first time outside of Chile that he had experienced such fellowship, with such intellectual and cultured friends, such creators of new thinking and art.
Maruca’s experience of Buenos Aires was considerably different. Bombal couldn’t help at times overhearing the couple’s arguments while they were all in the apartment. Maruca was opposed to his endless nights out in the city and was terribly bored. She had little talent for making friends, at least within Neruda’s circle.
Lorca returned to Spain in March 1934. Right before he left, he was shaken by a haunting premonition of his impending death. “María Luisa, I don’t want to leave. I’m going to die. I feel very strange.”
A few months later, Neruda’s aspirations were realized when he was transferred again to a new post, one eminently suitable for a literary man and friend to Lorca: he would be consul to Spain.
Chapter Eleven
Spain in the Heart
For me, Spain is a great wound and a great love. That period was fundamental in my life. Therefore, almost everything that I have done since (almost everything I have done in my poetry and in my life) has the gravity of my time in Spain.
—Barcelona, June 1970
The Pablo Neruda who entered Spain in the springtime of 1934 was a different person from the Pablo Neruda who fled a bleeding Spain in 1937. A year before he left for Spain, Neruda had written to Héctor Eandi from Santiago:
I don’t feel any distress for the world at this moment.
I still feel myself reintegrating into Western life, I just want to enjoy all the pleasures I’ve been denied for years.
A wave of Marxism seems to be traveling across the world; letters from my friends urge me toward that position. Really, politically right now you can only either be a communist or anticommunist . . .
I still keep that anarchist’s distrust of forms of the state, of impure politics . . .
There’s an invasion of odes to Moscow here, tanks, etc. I continue to write about dreams . . .
Neruda’s experience of the Spanish Civil War would emotionally affect him to the core; its horrors would rekindle his political engagement. Soon he too would write odes to the Soviets and Stalin.* Neruda would become a member of the Chilean Communist Party, joining many of his friends there. Spain ignited in him a lifetime of ardent activism for peace, justice, and the rights of the proletariat.
His three years there forged a new voice. The war compelled him to make a personal commitment to bring injustices to light. It would be some twenty years until Neruda returned to writing again “of dreams, of the leaves, of the great volcanoes of his native land.” Even then, a great deal of that verse had social and political themes. After Spain, Neruda had a new sense of the poet’s calling,
