As the consul general of Chile (and not a diplomatic representative), my duty is to work for the strengthening of cultural and trade relations between Mexico and my country. But as a writer, my duty is to defend freedom as an absolute norm of the civil and human condition, and neither protests nor incidents of any kind will change my actions or my poetry.
It was time. Neruda decided to return to Chile and relieve himself of his consular position. His activism had made it impossible for him to serve any longer.
From the high plateaus of Mexico, from his trip to Central America, and despite the distraction of the European situation, he felt a growing urge to write explicitly against the injustices he was witnessing in an ever-broadening context. Toward the end of his stay, he began to find the lyrical forms and tools with which to reorient himself, away from his European focus, toward an expansion of his Canto general de Chile project. These poems marked the genesis of Neruda’s embrace of using the canvas of the Americas to contextualize his concerns, a canvas he discovered when he looked out from the heights of Machu Picchu. His use of the great liberator of the Americas as the vehicle for “Song for Bolívar” is an early example.
At the beginning of the epic, he must show he is fully integrated into that canvas. He must establish that he has the impassioned heart and poetic skill to transform all that history, the geography, the people, into powerful lyrics of revelation and change. He asserts this in his poem “América, I Don’t Invoke Your Name in Vain.” It first appeared in the Mexican magazine Revista América in July 1943, and it would become a central piece in Canto General. In its poignant lines, he suggests that he has been called upon to assume this role, enabled by his poetic ability and progressive ideals. Neruda writes it as his personal introduction to his new calling. It is his credential, as he reports to duty, committed and empowered to lyricize and vocalize the consciousness of the continent.
América, I don’t invoke your name in vain.
When I fix the sword to my heart,
when I withstand the leaks in the soul, when your new day
penetrates me through the windows,
I’m of and I am in the light that produces me,
I live in the shade that determines me,
I sleep and awaken in your essential dawn,
sweet like grapes and terrible,
conductor of sugar and punishment,
saturated in the sperm of your species,
breast-fed on the blood of your heritage.
Neruda made use of his last weeks in Mexico to celebrate with friends and revive old feuds. He threw a parting jab at Octavio Paz: in an interview with the influential Mexican magazine Hoy, he said that “the agronomists and painters are the best part of Mexico,” and that “there is a really impressive absolute lack of direction and moral civility in [Mexico’s] poetry.”
Paz responded publicly:
Señor Pablo Neruda, Chilean consul and poet, is also a known politician, literary critic, and generous patron of certain hangers-on who call themselves “his friends.” These disparate activities cloud his vision and twist his judgment: his literature is contaminated by politics, his politics are contaminated by literature, and his critiques are often just a matter of friendly complicity . . .
The farewell party was to be thrown on August 27. Posters inviting the public were put up all around Mexico City. Ambassador Óscar Schnake wrote back to Santiago that it turned into a major tribute, with more than a thousand people in attendance:
It was exciting, wonderful, difficult, impossible to describe. The celebration took place at the Mexico jai alai arena, because we had to choose the largest venue in Mexico. And even so, a lot of the attendees could not sit down—that was how excited everyone was at that unforgettable tribute . . . Neruda is today the purest, the human embodiment of the poet of America; the man is firm and serene, fully and generously devoted to his ideals.
The French writer Simone Téry, who knew Neruda both in Paris and Mexico, toasted the poet: “Pablo Neruda is such a boy, as down-to-earth, innocent, and mysterious as a little boy. But he is a gigantic, charismatic child, and everyone who spends time with him—soldiers, statesmen, or professors—is compelled to return to their youth.”
César Martino, former president of the Mexican House of Representatives and then head of the Banco de Crédito Agrícola, addressed Neruda:
Since you arrived in Mexico, you have echoed our country’s past, in which it was unjustly exploited. You have echoed our country’s present, struggling forcefully to take charge of its own destiny and stand with the free people, to bring the fires of freedom to the hearts of those who are not yet free, and look toward a better tomorrow, which will belong to everyone in splendor and justice.
On August 30, 1943, nearly two hundred people gathered at Mexico’s Aeropuerto Central to bid Delia and Neruda good-bye.
* * *
It was not to be a hurried return home. Neruda’s tour down the west side of the Americas on the way to Chile was meant “to awaken the sleeping and encourage the wakeful.” He was celebrated as a folk hero, at least for the Left, throughout the continent. One of his stops was Colombia, whose leftist president, Alfonso López Pumarejo, had invited
