ORTEGA
Under further pressure from the Right, President Aguirre Cerda rescinded the embarkation order. As Delia recalled, Pablo “was fuming at the ambivalence of his president. He wired the president, telling him that if the Winnipeg did not sail he would shoot himself.” He called Minister Ortega and said he would not obey the president’s countermand. The president finally gave in.
At the start of August 1939, 2,004 refugees from concentration camps boarded the Winnipeg: 1,297 males over the age of fourteen, 397 women over the age of fourteen, and 310 children. They were farmers, fishermen, cooks, bakers, blacksmiths, bricklayers, tailors, stokers, shoemakers, electricians, doctors, engineers, and chemists. With so many crammed on a boat not meant for passengers, the conditions during the monthlong voyage were squalid.
The feat received international attention: newspapers across the world described the venture, with Neruda, Chile’s “foremost poet,” as the New York Tribune described him, identified as the director of the operation. With the headline “2,078 Spanish Refugees on a 93-Passenger Ship,” the New York Times reported that the Winnipeg passed through the Panama Canal on August 21. The ship arrived in Valparaíso on September 3 to a grand welcome and Spanish Civil War songs. Among those who came to administer medical attention to the refugees was a young Dr. Salvador Allende.
Once in Chile, the process of finding living arrangements and jobs for the refugees went relatively smoothly. Their respectable appearance, considering what they had been through, along with their good conduct and strong work ethic garnered sympathy and support from the Chilean people. They made such a favorable impression that the Right found it difficult to disparage them and denounce their arrival, as it had planned to do. “Unexpectedly, the arrival of the Winnipeg didn’t cause any unpleasant repercussions,” President Aguirre Cerda wrote to Neruda in France, congratulating and thanking him for his successful mission.
“With marks of joy and honor they greeted us,” one immigrant said to Nancy Cunard. “Praise be to Pablo Neruda,” Cunard wrote, “for having exchanged for them the wretched epithet of ‘refugee’ against that virile word that has made the two Americas what they are, the word ‘immigrant.’”
One of the immigrants remembered, “The change could not have been more striking. We, the damnable reds, the humiliated, the dangerous, the murderers, transformed into heroes of democracy, treated marvelously, praised, cheered by crowds at the Mapocho Station.”
* * *
On the same day the Winnipeg landed in Valparaíso, World War II began. England and France declared war on Germany in response to the Nazi invasion of Poland. Chile was determined to remain neutral.
Neruda continued to try to get more Spanish refugees across the Atlantic, but he could not come up with the money that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had requested for each refugee as a “guarantee” that the government would not be financially liable. On October 20, Minister Ortega cabled Neruda that the “media reports embarkment of 270 Spanish refugees. I reiterate previous instructions to absolutely suspend embarking period. Very urgent to send [refugees’] money because situation very critical.”
Neruda was defying orders and trying the patience of his government, which was loath to be seen as an open port freely welcoming refugees—especially communists—not just from Spain but from anywhere in the world. Two weeks later, to create distance between Neruda and the Spanish refugees in France and rein in the rescue efforts, Ortega appointed Neruda secretary of the Chilean embassy in Mexico.
* * *
While he was being lauded as a humanitarian poet, Neruda, meanwhile, seemed eager to disown Maruca and his daughter. They were still in Holland, not too far away. While he brought so many people he never knew across the seas to Chile, he didn’t do the same for his daughter and wife. He continued to overlook Maruca’s desperate pleas for money to take care of Malva Marina. Destitute, Maruca had placed her daughter into foster care with an electrician’s family in Gouda, Holland.
On November 18, 1939, she wrote a remarkable letter to Neruda (notably in English) from The Hague. It reveals her struggle with intense feelings of entrapment, longing, and despair:
My dear Pig,
It is really incredible how you are neglecting us; especially your baby. It is today the 18th of the month, I haven’t received the money yet from you. On the first of this month I had to pay the board and lodging of Malva Marina for the month of October. With my salary I could only pay a part of it; now the poor people are still waiting desperately for the rest of it. What a shame really! . . . I think you are awful, awful. I can’t find words for it! It can’t be because you haven’t got the money, as your position now is far better than ever before in Chile . . .
Well, Pig [illegible] dear, send me soon the money, please don’t put me any more before difficulties. There is already so much sorrow in the world I’m so upset about everything that I’m losing all my hair again, the hairdresser was frightened about it, and says that nothing can be done for it . . .
Malvina sends many kisses to her daddy and love. And so do I. yours,
Pig.
Chapter Fourteen
América
And then on the ladder of the earth I climbed
through the atrocious thicket of the lost jungles
up to you, Macchu Picchu.
High city of scaled stones,
at last a dwelling where the terrestrial
did not hide in its sleeping clothes.
In you, like two parallel lines,
the cradle of the lightning-bolt and man
rocked together in a thorny wind.
—“The Heights of Macchu Picchu”
Returning from France for the second time, Neruda and Delia passed through the Panama Canal, then disembarked in Lima so the poet could give a speech at a banquet. His words that night are intriguing evidence that he was now turning his focus away from Europe and back
