 Pablo Neruda: The
Captain’s Verses
Por
Omar Pérez Santiago
(Traducción del español: Claudia
Pérez)
Undoubtedly Neruda loved the sea, its
whisper and its waves. There you have his
poems, his conches and houses in Isla
Negra and La Sebastiana in Valparaiso.
There are two more marine houses
important in his life, one in Capri,
Italy and the other in Atlantida,
Uruguay. It is said that everything
happened in 1952, the year of the Dragon.
The facts took place in Capri. I think
they could not occurred elsewhere.
The previous history: In 1945 Neruda
was elected Senator. He was exiled during
Gabriel González Videla´s government.
In 1949 he goes to exile with his wife,
the painter Delia del Carril. In Mexico
he suffered from phlebitis and a woman
from Chillán arrived to his bedside, she
was Matilde Urrutia, to help him and take
care of the house. A secret romance was
born between them. They lived a furtive
romance protected by cohabitation. He
invited his lover to Paris; to Germany he
had invited her as a "singer"
to the World Festival of the Youth. He
invited her also to the Soviet Union as
the lover of Nicolas Guillén. And so on.
If we believe his biographers’
data the profile of the Year of the
Dragon, 1952, should start like this:
From Gothenburg harbour Neruda sent
his wife, Delia del Carril to Chile on
January 30th. This
relationship was clinically death.
Second fact: the Italian Erwin Cerio
offers Neruda his house in the island of
Capri. One night Neruda arrives with
Matilde Urrutia. The fireplace was lit
the table was set. We’d better
listen to the lovers. Matilde is excited:
"Our first dinner in it, our first
night in it. It would be foolish to
describe it; I would never find the words
to give the minimum idea of what it was.
The only thing I will say of that night:
"what a party!" And Neruda:
" All night I have slept with you/
near the sea, in the island / Wild and
sweet you were between pleasure and dream
/ between fire and water.
They open the windows at dawn, they
discover a small terrace, and downwards a
forest, and further the beach, and behind
a forest full of moss. A day of full moon
Neruda gave her a ring were it read
"Capri, May 3rd, 1952,
Your Captain."
Neruda wrote " The Captain
Verses" in the white Bungalow over
the cliffs. Matilde put them in a wooden
box covered with mother-of-pearl. They
travel to Naples and visit Gabriela
Mistral, who was Consul in that moment.
The painter Paolo Ricci, proposed him to
publish "The Captain Verses."
Everything happened swiftly. The Italian
Communist party assumed the costs like
homage for the "exiled, comrade and
poet". Each one of the distinguished
collaborators is mentioned in the last
page of the book: Luchino Visconti,
Giulio Eunaudi, the writer Carlo Lebi,
the famous painter Renato Gattuso, the
poet Salvatore Quasimodo, the novelist
Elsa Morante and the writer Jorge Amado,
among others.
The first edition was printed on July
8th, 1952 in the print house
of Typographic Art of Naples, with ivory
paper made by hand, the Bodoni typography
and illustrations by Ricci. On the cover
Medusa's head.
44 copies were printed, and it was
published anonymously. It was considered
clandestine, in spite of the fact that
half of Italy was involved in the book.
Moreover, the book was celebrated in
Capri with a lot of his friends in
"a flowery table, frutti di mare,
and transparent wine like water."
Furthermore, let us be clear, the
poems did not fool anyone: brewed in a
fascinating fire, they smelled to sex and
sea: "nude you dive/ I wait / Then
in a jump / of fire, blood, teeth / with
one strike I knock / your breasts, your
hip. / I drink your blood, I break / your
limbs one by one."
Anyway.
At the same time, in Santiago, Delia
del Carril received numerous epistles
from Capri: " My ant": here you
have alone your large cicada, under the
cold sun of Capri..."
And that was the end of the exile.
Neruda Arrived to Canes with Matilde
Urrutia to take the ship to Montevideo.
Before that they celebrate with the poet
Paul Eluard and his wife Dominique, the
famous Pablo Picasso, the painter Nemesio
Antúnez and his wife Inés Figueroa.
In Santiago, Chile on Sunday, July 26th,
the communist rebel leader Volodia
Teitelboim, called the commies gathered
in the Caupolican theatre to go receive
Neruda in the Cerrillo´s airport at
14:00 pm. There arrived the disciplined
ones. But Neruda did not show up.
Teitelboim awaits the worst. What has
happened to the poet? Where was Neruda?
In that moment Neruda was not
interested in the communist utopia he had
his own and concrete utopia, Atlantida, a
fascinating spa of Rio de la Plata, 46
kilometres away from Montevideo. One of
his friends, the Uruguayan Alberto
Mántaras, came in the same ship and he
owned a beautiful house in Atlantida,
place with the magic name of the mystic
continent lost centuries before. Neruda
had been invited to stay there.
They arrived to Montevideo. But the
Chilean communist party had sent him a
guard of corps, Astolfo Tapia,
Carlos Vicuña and Sergio Insunza. Neruda
acted carefully to deceive the guard.
Matilde hid and continued up to Buenos
Aires. Matilde had to cross the Rio de la
Plata, and then they were able to meet in
the beautiful, 3-story Liberty style
mansion next to the sea.
Third Station: Atlantida gave him back
" the honey of and its
deliciousness." "Smell and
movement/ of marine pine groves / you
give me back/not only the honey/ of love
and its deliciousness/ but the
circumstances /the purest of the
earth:/ the dry and unsociable /flora of
the sea, of the air /of silence."
With the connivance of the sea and the
pine forests, the lovers relived their
passion. Maybe, holding hands they saw
blinded luxurious sunsets. Some times
they would go out to roam and they
collected herbs to make a delicate
herbarium.
Neruda named the place of his frenzy
Datitla.
"And when / coming back / your
mouth shone under the pine grove /of
Datitla and up there /whistled,
crepitated /and sang / bizarre/
birds/under Montevideo´s moon, then / I
have come back to your love / to the
happiness of your wide eyes;/I went down
and touched the dirt/loving you and
loving/my venturous trip /."
Nowadays Atlantida´s house is a
museum. You can visit the rooms and
imagine how they were when the lovers
lived there. Perhaps in the objects that
are preserved there the perfume of the
love can be smelt.
Mean while the Chilean communists
waited until August 12th of
the Year of the Dragon when Neruda
finally arrived to Chile.
When the militants saw him getting off
the plane they emotionally sang the
national anthem.
Anyway.
Enlaces
a Pablo Neruda
www.uchile.cl/neruda/
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