Neruda: for the love of women

Neruda: For the love of women

He was Pablo Neruda's friend for four decades and a fellow Communist member. Chilean Volodia Teitelboim (2002 National Award for Journalism), author of Neruda, speaks about his Mend Pablo Neruda and the women in his life. On the centennial celebration of Neruda's birth, this interview with Teitelboim gives us a small window into Neruda's most intimate world, allowing us to explore through the eyes of a friend, the soul of the poet and the man.

Their friendship was a long and close one. Today, the writer says with a certain sadness, "His death interrupted our dialogue, our ongoing conversation. He was sick and death awaited him, but that was one thing we never talked about."

According to Teitelboim, Neruda always had a special way with women. Women are "our better half," he says, "but never predictable just because it's the other half." He adds with irony that "one of Neruda's regrets was not to have been able to love all two billion women who existed in his time, though he tried to do it through his poetry."

Neruda spent most of his life with two particularly significant women the Argentine painter Delia del Carril and the Chilean singer Matilde Urrutia. Delia was so constantly active that she had been nicknamed la hormiga, or the ant. Later, the poet would give her another name, "the neighbor." What we know is that she burst into Neruda's life and precipitated the end of his marriage with Maria Antonieta Agenaar Vogelzanz of Holland. Delia and Pablo began to live together, and in 1943 they were married in Mexico. (The marriage was not recognized by Chilean law.) in his book, Teitelboim says of her. "Deep down, she felt like she had to protect Many years alter they separated she continued to say that Pablo was a child ... She had to educate the adult child. Their conversation was primarily political. She opened his eyes."
Matilde Urrutia and the poet had a brief romance in 1946. They met at an outdoor concert in the Forest Park of Santiago. Mutual Mends introduced them. Teitelboim says: "Neruda planned to have a fling with this singer who had such impetuous laughter. And he had one. It didn't last long, though. He had too much work to do. The woman with laughter like birdsong drifted away." Three years later they met again in Mexico. There she had founded a school of music, and Neruda had become bedridden with thrombophlebitis. His friends came to see him and, of course, many women did as well. One of them was Matilde, and though he didn't recognize her at first, she took care of him, gave him his medicines, and fluffed his pillows. Their secret affair began in this state. Always a lever of pseudonyms, Neruda christened her "Rosario." Their relationship was established more openly in 1949 and it lasted twenty-four years, until Neruda's death in September of 1973.

Delia and Matilde--Teitelboim concludes--"were different kinds of muses, each one for a period of twenty years. They are a central part of Neruda's intimate history. Delia was an exquisite queen of literary salons and painting workshops; Matilde was the queen of the kitchen, which her predecessor never visited. But in or outside of the house, some woman always stirred up his hormones. I couldn't say who he loved most. I think he loved them all intensely, one after another. Let each reader come up with his or her own response to this. But the poet said not only 'I will live,' but also 'I will go on loving.' And he will--as long as there is still one man who appropriates his verses to whisper them in the ear of his beloved."

Some women did turn him down, especially in his adolescence and early youth. Neruda himself said that the other guys always got the blondes.

In Neruda, Teitelboim maintains that the poet was loyal to his women, but not faithful. The distinction is not a small one. He explains: "His loyalty was unfailing, but he refrained from promising faithfulness, knowing as he said in 'Farewell,' one his first poems of love and disaffection that 'love can be eternal, it can be fleeting.' So he allowed himself the right to that freedom. He liked women who were mature, like ripe fruit."

Neruda made the best of every liaison, says the author, and he "was enriched humanly and literarily by each one of his women friends, even in the brief encounters. Some of the women found a place in his poems and, so, in history. Both psychiatrists and non-psychiatrists who observed his life concluded that he sought in them the mother he had lost at birth.

Neruda loved intensely. Was he also loved in the same way? Voledia, his friend, doesn't hesitate to say that "he was intense about everything; in life, in poetry, and in action. Being famous does give a sense of erotic power, real or unreal Neruda was the number one poet of love. But like all mortals, he did some things right and he made some mistakes. Painful experiences he pushed inside. He didn't publicize them."

Neruda's relationship with Delia fell into crisis because he had fallen in love with "Rosario." Teitelboim recalls, "I heard him say that he didn't want to divorce Delia. He proposed that they stay married formally, but that proud Basque woman'--that was the expression he used--told him she would never accept such an insulting agreement. The man always sought out vibrant and combative sexual experience, and he fed a large part of his biography that way. There is no lack of poems whose romantic history would be interesting to unveil some day."

Magnet, Odette Translated by Kathy Ogle

Odette Magnet, a Chilean journalist residing in Washington, D.C., is former press attache of the Embassy of Chile. Photograph courtesy Luis Poirot, renowned photographer of Neruda and currently cultural attache of Chile in Brussels, Belgium
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