Ode to the Mango: My Dinners with Neruda

By Suzanne Jill Levine

29 January 2015

The one time I visited Santiago de Chile—it was July 1991, winter in the southern hemisphere, and the days were sunny, cold and crisp—I made the pilgrimage to Pablo Neruda’s house on the coast, in a place called Isla Negra. My reason for this trip to the Cono Sur—I would also visit Buenos Aires—was a conference at the university in Santiago.  I was staying at the family home of my friend the poet Cecilia Vicuña and was warmly welcomed by her community of poets.   One of the young poets, I don’t remember his name, drove a small group of us to Isla Negra, or Black Island.  It was not an island, or even a peninsula, so when I asked why it was called that, someone remarked it was because of the color of the sand. I guess it felt like an island? Anyway, Latin American friends from my New York days had told me stories about visiting the maestro at this rambling wooden shack perched above a wild Pacific, generously decked with oversized toys and careful collections of beetles, the parts of old ships, and other items, some of them curiosities but mostly everyday things, like miniature glass bottles, which took on a magnified dimension in the domestic aura of the bard.

During the Cold War, Latin American intellectuals found solace in communist Prague

Brazilian writer Jorge Amado and his son (fourth from left ro right) and Czech journalist and playwright Jan Drda (first from left to right), at Dobříš, a Czech castle that served as a residency for Czech and international writers, in 1950. Photo from the Paloma Amado archive, used with permission.

During the Cold War, Latin American intellectuals found solace in communist Prague

Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Amado, and Pablo Neruda were among the illustrious visitors

Durante la Guerra Fredda, gli intellettuali latinoamericani hanno trovato rifugio nella Praga comunista (Dante)

Durante a Guerra Fria, intelectuais latino-americanos encontraram conforto na comunista Praga (Pessoa)

Historia de cómo intelectuales latinoamericanos encontraron consuelo en la Praga comunista (De otros mundos)

Filip Noubel
21 November 2020

Before COVID-19, Prague was visited every year by millions of tourists looking for cheap beer and spectacular architecture. In the 1950s, on the other hand, the capital of then-Czechoslovakia attracted a very different crowd of travelers: Leftist intellectuals from around the world looking to see what life was like under socialism.

Pablo Neruda / The Art of Poetry

 

Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda

BIOGRAPHY

The Art of Poetry 

No. 14

Interviewed by Rita Guibert

Translated by Ronald Christ

Rita Guibert / Entrevista a Pablo Neruda (De otros mundos)

Spring 1971
The Paris Review No. 51

“I have never thought of my life as divided between poetry and politics,” Pablo Neruda said in his September 30, 1969, acceptance speech as the Chilean Communist Party candidate for the presidency. “I am a Chilean who for decades has known the misfortunes and difficulties of our national existence and who has taken part in each sorrow and joy of the people. I am not a stranger to them, I come from them, I am part of the people. I come from a working-class family . . . I have never been in with those in power and have always felt that my vocation and my duty was to serve the Chilean people in my actions and with my poetry. I have lived singing and defending them.”

The last days of Pablo Neruda, as told by his driver and secretary

Pablo Neruda
Photo by Sara Facio

The last days of Pablo Neruda, 

as told by his driver and secretary

English version by Martin Delfín

BIOGRAPHY

Chilean poet assured Manuel Araya he was injected in the stomach hours before he died

• Chile believes it “highly likely” that poet Neruda was murdered in 1973

Los últimos días de Pablo Neruda, según su chófer

WINSTON MANRIQUE SABOGAL Madrid 10 NOV 2015 - 17:52 CET

Manuel Araya, who was Pablo Neruda's driver, seen this month in Isla Negra, Chile, where he lived with the poet. / SEBASTIÁN UTRERAS (EL PAÍS)

Four hours before Pablo Neruda died, allegedly from prostate cancer, the man who was taking care of him found himself unable to complete one of his last tasks: to buy his boss medicine to “alleviate the poet’s pain.”

The newly installed military dictatorship in Chile prevented him from doing so.

All of Neruda’s collaborators were forced to disappear. I am the only major one left”

Forty-two years later, Manuel Araya Osorio is out to complete his last mission: to help prove that the Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet was poisoned while he stayed at a Santiago hospital, days before he was expected to fly into exile.

Araya, now 69, is the only known surviving witness who can recall Neruda’s final days before his death on September 23, 1973. He is convinced that Neruda didn’t die at age 69 from prostate cancer – as the official record states – but had been murdered by the military.

Chile believes it “highly likely” that poet Neruda was murdered in 1973

Chile believes it “highly likely” 

that poet Neruda was murdered in 1973

English version by Martin Delfín.

BIOGRAPHY

Nobel laureate’s death after Pinochet coup had always been attributed to prostate cancer

Un informe oficial ve “altamente probable” que Neruda fuera asesinado
Relatório oficial / “Altamente provável” que Neruda tenha sido assassinado

WINSTON MANRIQUE SABOGAL 6 NOV 2015 - 10:17 CET

Poet Pablo Neruda (r) next to President Salvador Allende in an undated photo. / FUNDACIÓN SALVADOR ALLENDE

The Chilean government has for the first time officially recognized that Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda may have been murdered days after the 1973 bloody coup that toppled President Salvador Allende.

A Chilean Interior Ministry report obtained by EL PAÍS states that Neruda did not die as a “consequence of the prostate cancer he had,” but that “it was clearly possible and highly likely” that he was killed as a result of “the intervention of third parties.”

Neruda may have been killed as a result of “the intervention of third parties” 

Neruda died on Sunday September 23, 1973 at the Santa María Hospital in Santiago after he was taken there by his driver from his home in Isla Negra.

Pablo Neruda

Judge orders exhumation of Chilean poet Neruda’s remains

BIOGRAPHY

Former driver claims Nobel Prize winner was murdered

ROCÍO MONTES Santiago 14 FEB 2013 - 13:48 CET

Chilean poet Pablo Neruda.

The body of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who died on September 23, 1973 - 12 days after the Salvador Allende government was ousted in a bloody coup led by Augusto Pinochet - will be exhumed in the coming weeks.

Judge Mario Carroza, who is trying to clarify the circumstances of the Nobel Prize winner's death, opened an inquiry in 2011 after the Mexican magazine Proceso interviewed Manuel Osorio Araya, the poet's personal driver during the final months of his life. Osorio Araya told Proceso that Neruda was murdered by the military under Pinochet's orders. The official story for decades has been that the Communist intellectual died of prostate cancer shortly after the overthrow of President Allende.

No date has been set as to when the remains of Neruda - who is buried near his home in Isla Negra - will be exhumed, but it could be carried out as early as next month. The Pablo Neruda Foundation, which confirmed the judge's ruling on Friday after the web portal El Mostrador reported it, said it will cooperate with the investigation.

The Foundation has always expressed its willingness to cooperate with the investigation that is to be carried out by Judge Carroza"

"The Foundation has always expressed its willingness to cooperate with the investigation that is to be carried out by Judge Carroza, and trusts that the experts' inquiry will be conducted with the utmost respect and care possible."

After September 11, the poet was heading into exile in Mexico with his wife Matilda. "The plan was to overthrow the tyrant from abroad in less than three months. We were going to ask the world to help oust Pinochet. But before he took the plane after he was admitted to a clinic, they gave him a lethal injection in his stomach," Araya told EL PAÍS in December 2011.

Pablo Neruda

Was poet Pablo Neruda murdered?

BIOGRAPHY

Former driver's testimony has led to court inquiry into allegations that the Chilean Nobel Prize winner was killed while waiting to go into exile

ROCÍO MONTES ROJAS 8 DIC 2011 - 16:04 CET

Pablo Neruda's death certificate says the beloved poet died from prostate cancer on September 23, 1973 - just less than two weeks after his friend and fellow Marxist, President Salvador Allende, was deposed in a bloody coup. But nearly 40 years after his death, and the events that plunged Chile into one of the darkest periods of its modern history, Neruda's former driver has created a commotion by coming forward to charge that the poet was murdered under the orders of dictator Augusto Pinochet.

"After the September 11 coup, he was planning to go into exile with his wife Matilde. The plan was to try to overthrow the dictator within three months from abroad. He was going to ask the world to help overthrow Pinochet but before he could board a plane the plotters took advantage of the fact that he had been admitted to a hospital, and that's where they injected him in his stomach with poison," claims Manuel del Carmen Araya Osorio, a 65-year-old taxi driver.

His version, which was first published in the well-respected Mexican magazine Proceso, provoked the Chilean Communist Party, of which the poet was a member, to demand a judicial investigation into the causes of Neruda's death.

Pablo Neruda will finally have his last word

Pablo Neruda 

will finally have his last word

BIOGRAPHY

A group of forensic experts are to exhume the poet’s body to clear up suspicions over whether the Pinochet government murdered the Nobel Prize winner in 1973

ROCÍO MONTES / EL PAÍS Santiago / Madrid 7 ABR 2013 - 18:09 CET

The poet's driver and secretary, Manuel Araya Osorio visiting Pablo Neruda in the Santa María Hospital.

One of the most long-awaited facets of the ongoing investigation into the 1973 death of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda will get underway on Monday when a judge and 12 forensic experts are set to take part in exhuming his remains from a grave in the small Pacific beach resort of Isla Negra where he lived during his final years.

Officially, the Nobel Prize winner died from cancer at Santiago’s Santa María Hospital on September 23, 1973 – 13 days after Marxist President Salvador Allende committed suicide during a bloody coup.

However in 2011, his former driver, Manuel Araya Osorio, told the Mexican magazine Proceso that he was convinced that the new military regime headed by Augusto Pinochet had ordered a doctor to give Neruda a poisonous injection. "After the September 11 coup, he was planning to go into exile with his wife Matilde. The plan was to try to overthrow the dictator within three months from abroad. He was going to ask the world to help overthrow Pinochet, but before he could board a plane the plotters took advantage of the fact that he had been admitted to a hospital, and that's where they injected him in his stomach with poison," claimed the now 67-year-old Araya Osorio in a subsequent interview with EL PAÍS.

His version compelled the Chilean Communist Party (PCC), of which Neruda was a member, to demand a judicial investigation. Judge Mario Carroza, who also looked into the longstanding claim that Allende had been murdered, opened the inquiry in 2011.

After reviewing more than 500 documents, he decided early this year that an exhumation was warranted.

Was the illness the cause of his death? Did someone inject him with toxic substances?"

Besides the Allende inquiry, Carroza has also looked into the deaths of former President Eduardo Frei and has launched an ongoing investigation into the murder of the father of another ex-president, Michelle Bachelet.

Neruda’s was buried in Santiago’s General Cemetery but was removed in 1992 at the request of his surviving relatives to Isla Negra, the location of his favorite among the several homes he owned in Chile. He is buried inside the patio along with his third wife, Matilde Urrutia, who died in 1985.

Neruda, who was appointed ambassador to France by Allende, had returned to Chile in the early 1970s after he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. In the 1930s, Neruda served as consul and cultural attaché in Barcelona, and lived for a brief time in Madrid with his second wife, the Argentinean artist Delia del Carril.

According to a preliminary investigation, Neruda’s remains are deposited in a small urn inside a coffin some 65 centimeters underground.

“Fortunately, this isn’t a case of someone who was arrested and disappeared so there are photographic and video records that document the moment of the burial. We know his identify,” said Patricio Bustos, director of the Legal Medical Services (SML), which is helping in identifying the remains.

One of the goals is to determine whether Neruda was suffering from cancer when he died at the Santiago hospital. “But we will also try to answer some of the questions that Judge Carroza has asked: Was the illness the only cause of his death? Did someone inject him with any toxic substance or chemicals? This is why we are working with toxicologists, genetic experts, biochemists and doctors,” explained Bustos.

Among the experts who will run tests are three Spaniards: Guillermo Repetto of the University of Pablo de Olavide in Seville; Aurelio Luna from the University of Murcia; and Francisco Etxeberria of the Basque Country University.

“I am not focusing my work on any theory,” said Etxeberria in an interview with Efe.

Besides the judge and the 12 experts, a lawyer from the PC will also be on hand as well as Neruda’s nephew and grand-nephew.

The urn will be taken to the SML lab in Santiago under strict security. Before opening it, they will run X-rays and take photographs and videos. Samples of the remains will be sent to different laboratories in Chile and abroad. One of these samples may be sent to Seville. Carroza has not said when he hopes to have the first indications of the scientific tests.

http://elpais.com/elpais/2013/04/07/inenglish/1365350563_640659.html