Pablo Neruda, a fugitive of justice named Siqueiros writes you to tell you that he greatly regrets not being able to give you a welcome hug, and to plead that you will listen to something that Angélica will ask you . . .
It is unknown what Angélica Arenal, Siqueiros’s second wife, had to say to Neruda. Yet the artist was arrested just a few days later. Without hesitation, Neruda eagerly assisted in his release.
While there’s no factual basis to the claims that Neruda participated in Trotsky’s murder, there is no denying that he was on the path to becoming a die-hard Stalinist. An enduring friendship between Siqueiros and Neruda was born from this incident, one of so many fraternal bonds between Neruda and the great artists and intellectuals of his day that were forged through Stalinism, communism, and leftist causes.
* * *
Neruda and Delia moved the consulate from the previous consul’s house to the wide Avenida Brasil, where they set up a small Chilean library for Chilean and Mexican students. The poet-consul’s reputation quickly brought him new friendships with the artists, intellectuals, and left-wing activists of Mexico. Neruda and Delia were also reacquainted with many of their old friends from Spain who had fled the war and settled in Mexico. The art deco apartment they rented on Calle Revillagigedo became a social hub. The Mexican playwright Wilberto Cantón remembered Neruda there always laughing with his wide smile and the seashell collection that littered the apartment. The only other adornments were a reproduction of an oil painting by Henri Rousseau, a portrait of the great seventeenth-century poet and playwright of the Spanish Golden Age Lope de Vega, and a portrait of Federico García Lorca.
Later they would move into a large villa in Coyoacán. Neruda was happy. Wherever they lived, there were constant fiestas. Sometimes he would dress in costume, as an owl, a fireman, an army general, a train inspector (his friend the Oaxacan novelist Andrés Henestrosa said Neruda did this to “hide his ugliness”). On one occasion he dressed up as a train conductor, cap and all, and went around the party checking everyone’s ticket. The largest fiesta Delia and Neruda threw was actually to celebrate the baptism of Henestrosa’s daughter, Cibeles. Four hundred guests were invited. For two days, people danced, drank, sang, and climbed the trees in Neruda’s garden. It was so loud that their landlord evicted them. They then moved to an apartment next to the grand Paseo de la Reforma.
When Wilberto Cantón first heard Neruda read in public, he was struck by how “the lyrical and subterranean accent of his reading stuck in my mind: syllables that were sung in a somewhat simple and primitive melody, like a medieval priest.”
Neruda was in demand to deliver both discourse and poetry readings throughout Mexico as his Pan-American-themed message became more developed and consistent. In a speech at the National Preparatory School, he assured the audience that there had never been such a close pair of seemingly dissimilar sister nations as Mexico and Chile:
Between blue Acapulco and polar Punta Arenas there is all this land, with its different climates and races and regions . . . Mexicans and Chileans meet each other (so alone) in the roots and it is there we must look for ourselves: in the hunger and in the dissatisfaction of the roots, in the search for bread and truth, in the same needs, the same anguish, yes, in the land, in the origin, and in the terrestrial struggle we confuse ourselves with all of our brothers, with all of the slaves of bread, with all of the poor of the world.
The polarization between Right and Left, those for and against fascism, was becoming more and more volatile even in Mexico. On July 24, 1941, Neruda spoke in the National University’s gorgeous Simón Bolívar Amphitheater—where the back wall of the stage is covered by Diego Rivera’s first major mural—at a tribute to Bolívar (“the liberator of the Americas”) on the 158th anniversary of his birth. After the Spanish philosopher Joaquín Xirau spoke, Neruda walked to the podium, paper in hand, and read his new, rather long “Song for Bolívar,” delivered in his emerging emphatic voice (the poem notably starts out describing Bolívar as “our father who art in the earth”). The audience was silent and excited until Neruda reached the final lines:
I came upon Bolívar, one long morning,
in Madrid, at the entrance to the Fifth Regiment.
Father, I said to him, are you, or are you not, or who are you?
And, looking at the Mountain Barracks, he said:
“I awake every hundred years when the people awake.”
The audience erupted in a hail of applause until a commotion began. Suddenly, from the upper part of the amphitheater, young Fascists began shouting, provoked by the references to Spain in Neruda’s poem. “Death to the Spanish Republic!” “Long live the Generalissimo!” They hurled insults at the “savage” leftists who were damaging the university’s decency.
The dean, Neruda, and other guests hurried out, while those who stayed in the audience confronted the Fascists in a battle royal. The dean wanted to make amends to Neruda for the incident, and the university published Neruda’s poem in a special illustrated edition of five hundred copies.*
* * *
Neruda attended to his consular obligations as well as his poetic and social duties, which seemed like a good combination for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs—at first. Testifying to his diligence, the Chilean ambassador to Mexico, Manuel Hidalgo Plaza, a Communist, registered his high satisfaction with Neruda in his annual review: “Señor Reyes is developing an interesting program of propaganda
