The people of America speak alone in a harsh, deserted world; we believe in, and yet have our doubts about, the solitude of a mysterious territory, with nothing but old sacred stones as witnesses. And we need to gain resistance and hope from this solitude, because tomorrow someone will ask after each and every one of us, knocking on the doors of history.
Neruda was developing a new Pan-American consciousness, rooted in the struggles of the continent, across the centuries, from the Incan slaves who built Machu Picchu to the injustices of his day. In Spain he had fought fascism, and in Latin America the battle was for the rights of indigenous and working people and against imperialism.
Neruda and Delia arrived in Chile at the end of December 1939, once again welcomed home as celebrities, with a huge gathering at Santiago’s Mapocho Station. The magazine Qué hubo reported:
Almost never before had we seen a response as warm and exciting as that of Chilean intellectuals and workers, the people, and Spanish refugees, toward the poet and diplomat Pablo Neruda upon his arrival in Santiago. Writers, politicians, teachers, artists and hundreds of admirers awaited the poet. When Neruda got off the train, moving from hug to hug, you could hear passionate cries:
“¡Viva Pablo Neruda!”
“Long live the people’s poet!”
For Neruda and Delia, it was a bittersweet return. Neruda yearned to continue his work on the part of the refugees. Many of those who remained in Europe died in the camps or were sent back to Franco’s Spain, where they lived in poverty and were often imprisoned. It was hard for Neruda to accept his government’s neutrality and toe its line.
Since he did not have to report to his new post in Mexico immediately, Neruda and Delia spent some time in Isla Negra, a tiny fishing village about seventy-five miles from Santiago. The town was named after an outcropping of rocks just offshore. Neruda had fallen in love with a small house set upon a hill with a magnificent view of the Pacific crashing against the boulders on the rugged beach below. The air smelled of salt and sand, flowering trees and bushes. It was a perfect setting to write his poetry. Neruda and Delia bought the house and land from the owner, a Socialist mariner.
The couple split their time between the coast and Santiago, where they had an energetic social and political life. Delia’s biographer, Fernando Sáez, writes of their relationship at this time:
Delia’s role was to support the poet in his work and toward his future. But that often meant being in an unpleasant position. While she loved the conversation, the arguments and analysis of issues or events, the way things were in Chile with their circle of friends—during that permanent party, with wine flowing in excess, different secrets often came out that she would have preferred not to know and caused her to distance herself. Sometimes she had to call for order, put things in their place, take on the disagreeable role of security guard. They didn’t argue about it: she just expressed her annoyance, her anger, by walking away; he would ignore it because he knew her displeasure wouldn’t come to anything.
This settled domestic period was only temporary. On June 19, Neruda received a communication from President Aguirre Cerda and the new minister of foreign affairs, Cristóbal Sáenz, naming him not secretary, but rather cónsul general de Chile in Mexico. A month later, after send-off parties and homages, Neruda and Delia set sail once again.
On August 21, 1940, several days after they arrived in Mexico City, Neruda officially took his post of consul. The same day, in the same city, Leon Trotsky, Stalin’s archrival, died after being struck with an ice pick by an assassin the afternoon before. Trotsky had appeared to be Lenin’s natural successor until Stalin outmaneuvered him. He and his many supporters had been waiting for Stalin to be overthrown so that Trotsky could return as the nation’s new leader. His assassination was the culmination of an extended effort by Stalin to eliminate him. Trotsky was the primary target of a wider campaign against dissidents abroad who posed ideological threats to Soviet communism during the 1930s and 1940s.
Many have since tried to connect Neruda to the assassination. Suspicion of his involvement was used during the 1960s as a reason why Neruda should not receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. In a 2004 article in the conservative Weekly Standard, entitled “Bad Poet, Bad Man: A Hundred Years of Pablo Neruda,” Stephen Schwartz wrote that Neruda “even participated in an assassination plot.” In a 2006 commentary for the London Times, the writer Oliver Kamm mentioned that Neruda was “so obsequious an admirer of Stalin that, as Chile’s Consul-General in Mexico in 1940, he conspired in the murder of Trotsky.” However, there is no evidence that might prove that the timing of Neruda’s arrival in Mexico City was anything more than coincidence. When Trotsky’s bodyguards ran into the room after they heard his cries, there was only one man present, a Soviet secret police agent. Neruda claimed he never saw Trotsky, “not close-up or from a distance, neither alive nor dead.”*
However, Neruda did receive a letter from the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros. They had first met in Buenos Aires and reconnected a few years later when Siqueiros came to Spain to join the cause against Franco, fighting on the front. After Siqueiros returned to Mexico in 1939, the KGB began putting into motion plans to kill Trotsky, who had been given asylum by Mexico’s president, Lázaro Cárdenas. A Russian whom Siqueiros knew from Spain, now a KGB officer, enlisted him to lead one of at least two different groups ready to kill Trotsky. In May 1940, the internationally acclaimed painter’s group moved first, three months before the ice pick hit its mark. Siqueiros led some twenty Mexican and Spanish Communists, almost all veterans of the civil war, in an
