* * *
Maruca wrote a letter to Trinidad, her mother-in-law or, as she put it, “my dear mother,” from The Hague on September 2, 1937, announcing that “Neftalí” was traveling back to Chile. “He’ll tell all.” Maruca told Trinidad that she always thought of her with great affection but hadn’t written in several months because “we’ve lived through a horrible time of wars and travels and great misery with a sick little child.” She ends it by sending affection to all and a strong hug to Trinidad, from “your daughter Maruca.”
Neruda and Delia had boarded the French steamship Arica a week earlier and arrived in Valparaíso a little over a month later. Neruda’s friends and many fans were there to meet them at Santiago’s Mapocho Station. Delia stepped off the train in a blue two-piece suit and a small pink hat. To the crowd, it seemed as if a famous actress had just appeared, such was her glamorous appearance. “This is la Hormiga,” Neruda announced. “Say hi to her.” Diego Muñoz and others immediately became friends with Delia. They had already heard many good things about her. “She was a charming, cultured woman,” Muñoz wrote in his memoirs. However, Neruda looked heavier, a bit older than his thirty-three years. His experience in Spain had aged him, physically and mentally. There was a huge fiesta in their honor that night at the City Hotel. Neruda was now an important figure in his country, a poet acclaimed on the international stage.
Though he had announced that he was not a communist, his ideology and alliances were leading him in that direction. His friends, including Diego Muñoz, Tomás Lago, and Rubén Azócar, were now very active in the Communist Party, adding an intellectual and artistic component to the proletariat base. Neruda joined them in organizing Spanish solidarity events, but he would have risked expulsion from the diplomatic service if he had joined the Communist Party himself.
Neruda and his friends organized a Chilean chapter of the Alliance of Intellectuals for the Defense of Culture. In its first meeting that November, Neruda was elected president and gave a discourse entitled “Writers of Every Country, United with the People of Every Country.” It was a rallying cry:
From this moment the Alliance of Intellectuals, a group of men from different creeds and disciplines, will stand at the front of the battle for freedom and democracy, for the dignity of culture, with deeds and words, now that words are our arms, arms that can be and must be feared by the dark forces of reactionaries.
In the subsequent weeks, Neruda gave several readings of his poetry from Spain in the Heart in Santiago and Valparaíso. Over the months that followed, he was involved in various conferences and acts on the part of the Alliance of Intellectuals and other groups, speaking out about Spain and the threat of fascism to Chile.
At its convention in April, the Chilean Popular Front (with the Chilean Confederation of Workers added to its ranks) nominated Pedro Aguirre Cerda as its presidential candidate for the elections that October, running against the archconservative Gustavo Ross. Neruda and the Alliance of Intellectuals went to work campaigning for Aguirre Cerda.
* * *
Meanwhile, Neruda and Delia settled into their relationship. They rented a comfortable house in the tranquil neighborhood of Providencia, outside the city’s noisy center, such a contrast to the stifling small gray apartment he had lived in with Maruca before Buenos Aires and Spain. They opened their home to friends, as Neruda would for the rest of his years.
Fernando Sáez, executive director of the Pablo Neruda Foundation at the time of this writing, wrote in his biography on Delia that for her,
the open house is yet another subtle way of keeping an eye on Pablo . . . La Hormiga is inflexible, and she can be tough. “No, Pablo, you are mentally retarded” is her battle cry. And he would conspire to give her a hard time, obliging some friend to tell a dirty joke or use a word with a vulgar meaning that would rattle her. But that is just one part. What you see is an affectionate, inseparable, united couple. He is much more spontaneous, loving, affectionate, and concerned. Taught in such a way as to not show her feelings, Delia seems cold, but her love is unconditional, expressed in her unrestricted support and total admiration.
Book royalties still largely nonexistent, they bought the house primarily with funds from his Ministry of Foreign Affairs pension, which he had started to accumulate when he left for Burma in 1927. It was a modest sum he had never really dipped into. Most of his housing in recent years had been paid for by the ministry, and while he’d drink and eat well, his tastes were not excessively expensive.
Shortly after their return to Chile, Delia made a trip back to Buenos Aires, primarily to attend to her financial affairs. She had been away for seven years. Her family froze her out because of her politics, effectively cutting her off from any family assets to which she may have thought she was entitled.
When Neruda’s father fell ill that April, most likely from a stroke, the poet went to Temuco to be with the family. He wrote to “my dear Hormiga of my soul” that while his father had the endurance of an ox, he was still in agony. And his half sister, Laura, was “useless in this situation,” so everything was falling to him. Ever since he arrived, Neruda said, his father spent hours unconscious and then, in moments of dazed wakefulness, would criticize him: “Why are you so twisted? Straighten up.”
Still with his family in Temuco on May Day 1938, Neruda, representing the Alliance
