But Neruda angered the ministry shortly thereafter, as he worked on yet another literary journal, this one entitled Araucanía, named after the region in southern Chile. It had a picture of a Mapuche woman smiling broadly with large teeth on the cover, and the minister of foreign affairs reprimanded him for his “bad taste” in representing Chile with such a woman, “even though,” Neruda noted in his memoirs, “Don Pedro Aguirre Cerda, whose pleasant and noble face had all the features of our mixed race, was president of the republic.” The journal lasted only one issue.
More serious trouble followed. In or around April 1941, Neruda learned that the Mexican government didn’t want Siqueiros in a public jail. Mexico’s president, Manuel Ávila Camacho, was progressive, and Siqueiros was one of the country’s greatest artists. Mexican government officials hoped Neruda, as an influential consul general and friend of Siqueiros, could arrange a visa for him to go to Chile. Neruda’s relationship with Siqueiros had recently become closer with both of them in Mexico City. With the aid of an officer, Neruda would take him out of jail at night for dinner. Neruda and the Mexicans came up with the idea that the visa would be issued under the pretext that Siqueiros paint a mural in a school in the town of Chillán, which had recently been devastated by an earthquake.
But on April 23, the Chilean Ministry of Foreign Affairs urged Neruda to annul the visa. The poet cabled back his refusal, defending his reasoning. The following day, Neruda received a second cable urging him to annul the visa. This time, Neruda wrote a long letter in Siqueiros’s defense, maintaining that the muralist had received an invitation from the director of the Chilean National Museum of Fine Arts. On April 30, Neruda received a cable saying that the ministry considered his actions “a grave mistake.” Neruda responded by offering to renounce his position. Siqueiros and his wife, Angélica Arenal, were on their way to Chile. They were allowed a two-month stay. The ministry suspended Neruda for a month without pay.
Though the poet had already offered his resignation, he was furious that the government had reprimanded him and docked his pay. Neruda still hadn’t joined the Chilean Communist Party, but these provocations drove him to become even more vocal politically. On June 8, 1941, he sent a letter to the party’s secretary, Senator Carlos Contreras Labarca:
I want to know, dear Carlos, what you think about all this, about whether I should just swallow this new provocation—which would be very difficult, considering the fact that the terms of my suspension are frankly aggressive and disrespectful to me—or whether I should put an end to this matter and return to Chile to accompany you in the struggle.
Neruda was haunted by thoughts of his comrades who had died in Spain and increasingly yearned to take a stand. He could not shake the awareness that his present position was a convenient way for the Chilean government to keep him away from the home front.
* * *
The insult of the suspension notwithstanding, it freed Neruda to travel. The more he saw, the more his experience of Central and South America affected his thinking, his vision, his conscience. The travels also eased his relationship with Delia, which had grown somewhat tense in Mexico City. Delia was growing tired of Neruda’s constant partying and her role as disciplinarian. Neruda’s infantile acts annoyed her, as did his dependence on her as both personal secretary and poetry editor. But life on the road worked well for them both.
They headed to Guatemala by car. They lived with the writer Miguel Ángel Asturias for a week, beginning a deep fraternal friendship. The dictator Jorge Ubico was ruling Guatemala at the time. Among many abuses, freedom of speech was repressed, leading Asturias to withhold the publication of his novel El Señor Presidente (The President), a book about the evils of a despot. Eventually, it would be one of the key works that earned him the 1967 Nobel Prize in Literature. During Neruda’s trip to Guatemala, a group of eager, young poets asked him to give a poetry reading (after requesting Ubico’s permission by telegram). While Neruda read his poems with enthusiasm, hoping to open a window of expression for the students despite the oppression, the chief of police sat conspicuously in the front row. Neruda wrote that he later learned that four machine guns had been aimed at the audience and himself, which would have been fired if the chief had stood up and asked for the reading to stop.
It was on this trip to Central America that Neruda witnessed firsthand the damage that dictatorial rule can do to a country and its people. Ubico’s crimes and Guatemala’s plundering by foreign companies led directly to Neruda’s lyrically searing “The United Fruit Co.” Part of its potency comes from the short lines Neruda uses, which seem intended, as Robert Hass notes, “to carry a sense of contained force.”
When the trumpet sounded, everything
on earth was prepared
and Jehovah distributed the world
to Coca Cola Inc., Anaconda,
Ford Motors, and other entities:
The Fruit Company Inc.
reserved the juiciest for itself,
the central coast of my land,
the sweet waist of America.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The Company disembarks
among the bloodthirsty flies,
brim-filling their boats that slide
with the coffee and fruit treasure
of our submerged lands like trays.
Meanwhile, along the sugared-up
abysms of the ports,
indians fall over, buried
in the morning mist:
a body rolls, a thing
without a name, a fallen number,
a bunch of dead fruit
spills into the pile of rot.
In the poem (which would be included in the Canto General) Neruda claims the United Fruit Co. and other imperialist interests bought their power through “unsheathing jealousy,” “alienating free will,” “founding a comic opera,” and bestowing gifts like “crowns of Caesar.” He
