This is part of an ongoing series on the writer’s study 

abroad in Chile.

“65. He had no children, but the people loved him. 66. Like 

the Cross, do we have to come back to Neruda with our knees 
bloodied, our lungs full of holes, our eyes full of tears? 67. 
When our names no longer mean anything, his name will keep 
shining, it will keep projecting over an imaginary literature 
called chilean literature.”

—Roberto Bolaño, “Carnet de baile”

I.
I woke up to the sound of heavy footsteps and a 

conversation in Spanish, using everything at my disposal 
to keep out the light beating down on my eyelids. The 
conversation came closer and grew louder. A door slammed 
shut, and I realized there was no point trying. I raised my 
torso from the couch. I was still wearing my coat. It seemed 
that someone had covered me in a blanket after I passed out 
the night before. It fell off my chest into a bundle around 
my waist. Soft white sunlight shone into the room through 
a window in the ceiling, burning my eyes, and there was a 
young woman I’d never seen before sitting on the adjacent 
couch, staring at me.

“Good morning,” she said in Spanish.
She was blurrier than she ought to have been, so I wiped 

my hand across my eyes, trying to find my 
glasses. I grunted at her and patted blindly at 
the blanket covering my legs, the coffee table 
next to me and the floor underneath the couch.

“Wh … gla … gaf … ”
“What are you looking for … your glasses?”
“Yeah … ”
“They’re on top of your head, man.”
I patted the top of my head and, sure enough, 

my glasses were nestled into my hair. I tried to 
pull them down onto my face and felt a sting as 
a few strands tore out of my scalp. I looked back 
at the girl, sure that I’d never seen her before.

“You’re one of Gustavo’s friends, right?” she 

asked.

“Yeah … uh, Gustavo.”
“Ah, OK. Well, he’s in the bathroom.”
It was 10:30 a.m. I stood up, light-headed. 

Gustavo. We were playing Never Have I Ever 
the night before, but with pisco. Nunca nunca. 
Terrible idea. Never again. I took a few steps, 
wandering in a confused circle. She looked 
concerned or uncomfortable.

“Are you OK?” she asked. “Can I get you 

something … Some water? … An egg?”

I patted myself down; wallet, keys, flip 

phone, pen, passport. Everything in order.

“No, no,” I said. “I’m fine, thanks.”
“Mhmm … OK, well, like I said, Gustavo’s in 

the bathroom. He should be done in a minute.”

Something was wrong … I left my goddamn 

bag at the hostel. I looked around the room 
again, making sure it wasn’t just sitting under 
a couch or a coffee table. It wasn’t. I had to go.

She looked up at me incredulously as I 

shuffled out. The light shone brighter as I 
moved closer to the door and I covered my 
eyes with a forearm as I stepped out onto the 
terrace.

The sky over Valparaíso was gray that 

morning, the air heavy, cold and wet. On my 
left, I could see the harbor sandwiched among 
the rows of houses lining the street that runs 
down off Cerro Concepción, one of the steep 
rolling hills on top of which Valparaíso is 
built. To my right I saw thousands of brightly 
colored houses coating the mountains around 
the bay. The city looked like a box of crayons 
gradually fading away into a cloud of fog and 
mist. Even from there, I could smell a bit of 
ocean. A French-sounding melody echoed off 
the facades around the terrace in disjointed 
phrases; oboe, tuba, accordion. I climbed down 
the narrow stone staircase and passed through 
an iron gate into the cobblestone street. As I 
tried to remember how to get back to the hostel, 
an old man in a beret and brown wool jacket 
watched me stumble over a sudden drop in the 
sidewalk. The street was called Papudo and it 
was somewhere on that enormous hilltop. I was 
hoping nobody stole my bag. I needed my books 
— I was going to Pablo Neruda’s house.

II.
For the better part of an hour I wandered 

up and down the streets running along Cerro 
Concepción, one of the hills that dominates 
the Valparaíso landscape. I eventually found 
the hostel and fished my bag out of the wooden 
storage box underneath my bed. Then, I 
descended 
the 
65-degree-angled 
roadway 

that lead back to Valparaíso proper without 
falling or throwing up, and shuffling down 
increasingly busy streets. I wandered between 
an endless procession of smoking street 
barbecues and sopaipilla carts as stray dogs, 
some of them in polyester sweaters, trotted 
between refurbished electronics stores and 
the old, crag-faced men lining the sidewalk, 
smoking cigarettes in their wool beanies and 
rough leather jackets, looking as though their 
entire lives had been a constant shore leave 
that never quite ended, even after they’d 
finished their careers and disembarked for the 
last time.

As I dragged myself through the city, the 

weight of 10 years of Spanish classes; 15 years 
of defending my interest in socialism to friends 
and family who considered it somewhere 
between 
naive 
and 
psychotic; 
thousands 

of hours of extracurriculars; four years of 
working two jobs alongside 18-credit course 
loads; 5,500 miles on an American Airlines 
plane; an hour on the Santiago subway; four 
hours trapped in a Pullman bus with “The Big 
Bang Theory” playing at full volume out of the 
overhead speakers and a lifetime of plaintive 
sighing over the novels and books of poetry 
hidden in between my textbooks and inside of 
my instrument cases — the combined weight of 
everything that I had ever considered essential 
to myself. All of that seemed to have crawled 
into the pile of books in the messenger bag 
slung across my shoulders and threatening to 
drag me down into a gutter if I should slacken 
under the weight for even a moment. Chief 
among them: Neruda’s “Twenty Love Poems 
and a Song of Despair.”

Born in 1904, Neruda was a Chilean poet and 

politician. His first book of poems, “Twenty 
Love Poems and a Song of Despair,” was the first 
book in Spanish I ever owned. I have a small, 
red, hardcover with pictures of pomegranate 
seeds arranged in even rows across the front. 
On the back, there’s one of those classic 
portraits of Neruda in his wool jacket and 
tweed golf cap, glancing languorously off to 
his right. His hand — a young man’s hand, 
less grizzled than the rest of him — is pressed 
up against the side of his face in an uncanny 
sort of way, somewhere between resting on 
the thing and propping himself up with it. An 
impossibility dressed like a simple gesture, or 
maybe an everyday motion done so well as to 
appear more than what it is. In any case, it’s 
incredibly Neruda.

I spilled a glass of water on the book the day 

after I bought it and spent the majority of that 
evening airing out the pages with my mom’s 
hair dryer. It spent the next seven years on my 
nightstand, where it slowly grew into a species 
of totem that I used in a sort of ritual that, 
in retrospect, seems pretty much completely 
ass-backward. While the rest of my books 
accumulated copious marginalia and words 
translated in superscript, I’d occasionally 
thumb through my copy of the “Love Poems” 
— pristine except for a dark stain left on the 
back cover by the water incident — and read a 
few lines at random, waiting for the day when 
my Spanish or my literary sensibilities were 
developed enough to be able to read entire 

poems without resorting to Google Translate 
while experiencing sudden, sublime flashes of 
working-class spiritual insight with each turn 
of the page. Something about Neruda’s cap told 
me that that was what was supposed to happen 
when you read one of his poems.

But as with any totem, fetish or otherwise 

meaningful object, the version of Neruda’s 
book I had floating around in my head was, 
I was quite convinced, largely disconnected 
from anyone else’s notion of what that book 
should mean, how it should be read, or how it 
should be contextualized within Neruda’s life 
and larger body of work, within the particular 
moment in Chilean history to which it belonged 
and within some grandiose Weltanschauung 
about the nature of the human spirit.

For that matter, the more I thought about 

it, the more it seemed to me that not only 
my relationship with Neruda but the entire 
scenario in which I found myself wondering 
about 
that 
relationship 
was 
somehow 

fundamentally wrong. Rather than sitting in 
the comfort of a modernist poetry course back 
in Ann Arbor, nursing a Lobster Butter coffee 
and talking with a group of like-minded gringo 
collegiate-types about a bunch of poems that 
were little more than words on a page, I was 
instead taking a book I schlepped from a 
Barnes & Noble 5,000 miles away on an absurd 
pilgrimage halfway up a mountain where 
nothing was waiting for me but an old house 
full of jaded tour guides.

III.
I walked through the sultry streets the 

rest of the way, bearing the rain as it began 
and intensified. But just as I thought I might 
need to duck into a mercadito and wait for the 
rain to pass, I turned a corner and saw two 
uniformed guards standing just inside a large, 
open portico. Behind them was a courtyard full 
of people lifting jackets and magazines over 
their heads, making a collective light jog of an 
exodus toward what looked like a chimerical 
lighthouse that had been called forth out of the 
mountainside by a coven of chanting Nerudas. I 
had made it to the poet’s house: La Sebastiana.

In place of the coven, however, Neruda’s 

house is kept from sinking back into the 
mountain by a cushion of cold, hard cash. I 
bought a ticket to the show in the adjacent 
gift shop and made my way toward the house’s 
front door, which led into a foyer full of 
tourists holding electronic audio guides up to 
their ears. There to greet visitors, the museum 
staff seemed more preoccupied with ensuring 
that the audio guides matched each guest’s 
respective lingua franca.

When I was suddenly left out in the wake of 

a group of Japanese tourists, a young woman 
in a black-and-white uniform noticed me, yet to 
receive an audio guide, and asked in heavily-
accented English, “Where are you from?”

I answered in Spanish, “I’m from the U.S., 

but I speak Spanish.”

Standing behind the reception desk, a man in 

his 30s called out in his own accented English, 
“What does he speak?”

The young woman, again in English said, 

“English, but he speaks Spanish.”

The man behind the counter looked at her, 

then me, and then looked for a moment at the 
air between us, his face suddenly consumed by 
the sort of expression you see pass across flight 
attendants’ faces during boarding procedures, 
just after they’ve greeted one passenger and 
just before the next one comes close enough 
to warrant a verbal address; a brief relaxation 
of the muscles of the face that causes the bags 
under their eyes to suddenly appear, palpably, to 
be unmistakably there, as if they were actually 
shouting at you and not simply hanging above 
the flight attendant’s cheekbones like a bit of 
wallpaper.

He then reached down into the audio-guide 

rack and pulled up one of the units, tossing it 
underhand to the young woman next to me, who 
placed it in my hands and told me, in Spanish, 
to enjoy my visit.

I hit play and held the guide up to my 

ear. A different young woman’s voice came 
through the speaker, welcoming me to the La 
Sebastiana House/Museum Guided Audio Tour 
in yet another gradation of accented English. I 
glanced back at the woman who had greeted me 
at the door. She was busy making hand gestures 
at a middle-aged French couple. C’est la vie.

IV.
La Sebastiana looks like a person of extreme 

rotundity, or, really, like a wedding cake. In any 
case, each floor fans out from a spinal column of 
a central stairwell that leads up to a sort of aerie 
where Neruda wrote poems in his trademark 
green ink under the watchful gaze of a massive 
portrait of Walt Whitman. The other levels of 
the house each have their own aesthetic, and 
the audio guide provides a careful description 
of each room. The audio guide’s description 
is a catalogue of the incoherent collection of 
furniture, artworks and knickknacks Neruda 
had amassed during his lifetime followed by a 
series of references to the poet’s work, politics 
and personality quirks that serve as something 
of an explanation for the otherwise chaotic 
assemblage of material.

But of course, an audio guide really doesn’t 

make sense of all of those knickknacks. I 
wonder, in fact, why they even bother trying. 
Whatever relationship the Pablo 
Neruda 

Foundation — which handles the day-to-day 
operations of the museum — might be able to 
draw between Neruda’s life and the random 
assortment of shit in his house simply doesn’t 
reveal any profound new way of reading 
his work or even add much to the body of 
biographical information amassed in the wake 
of his death in the throes of the Chilean coup-
d’état in 1973. The audio guides almost admit 
as much. They explain that Neruda simply 
had an interest in collecting things, and that 
almost all of the ornaments on display in his 
house came from friends and admirers who 
thought of him while wandering through flea 
markets and antique shops around the world. 
The only thing that explains this place is the 
fact that Neruda lived in it, and at the end of 
the day that’s about all that can be gleaned 
from the entire edifice.

But if the guide does manage to account, 

in however slapdash a manner, for Neruda’s 

approach to interior design, it doesn’t do 
anything to change the fact that the layout of 
the place makes for a terribly uncomfortable 
museum experience in the here-and-now. 
The aforementioned stairwell is only wide 
enough for single-direction traffic and the 
house’s sumptuous furnishings leave roughly 
the same amount of room open for any kind of 
walking tour. As a result, the 50-or-so people 
simultaneously wandering around the place 
with nothing to guide them other than a set 
of plastic wands quickly turn into an anxious 
mob that can’t do much of anything other than 
try to get around itself. The place is a literal 
tourist trap, and the cage walls are made out 
of the other tourists walking around the house.

By the time I reached La Sebastiana’s top 

floor, I had spent the better part of an hour 
watching a series of middle-aged gringos inch 
their way down the house’s staircases and 
seriously regretted the 10,000 pesos I had 
blown getting into the place. As I waited in the 
seven-person line crammed into the hallway 
leading into Neruda’s study, I was already 
dreading the walk back down to the ground 
floor and busied myself trying to calculate 
the number of sopaipillas I could have bought 
(upward of 20) instead of coming here in the 
first place.

After flattening myself up against a wall to 

allow an old German woman with a walker to 
shimmy past, there was finally enough space 
in the room for me to step in. A four-foot-tall 
portrait of Walt Whitman stared out at me from 
one side of the room. Next to the portrait, there 
was a copy of a map of the Americas drawn 
up by a Dutchman in the 16th or 17th century, 
complete with caricatures of the indigenous 
peoples populating Chile and Argentina and a 
couple of sea monsters floating around in the 
Pacific. I didn’t bother turning on the audio 
guide.

I shuffled past Neruda’s writing desk and 

stood next to the window, looking down over 
the hills of Valparaiso and out to the harbor 
and the Pacific Ocean stretching out into the 
distance. The four or five people crowded next 
to me were all looking through the window 
with the same sort of exhausted expression 
on their faces. They had given up on the audio 
guides, too.

As I looked over at the them, I wondered 

whether they had come to Neruda’s house 
looking for the same sort of things I had come 
there for. In all honesty, though, my reasons 
for going there were making less and less sense 
with each passing moment. I figured that 
people go on a pilgrimage — even a made-up 
pilgrimage like the one I was on — to remind 
themselves why they continue to believe the 
things they do; to renew their sense of right 
and wrong and remind themselves why they 
keep observing the rites and rituals prescribed 
by their holy books, no matter how out of touch 
with reality those ideas seem. If a holy site were 
anything, it seemed to me, it ought to be a place 
where those beliefs still made something like 
rational sense. A place without compromises 
and without hypocrites, where nobody cuts 
corners and nobody has to cut corners to keep 
true to their dreams and ideals.

I looked back at Walt Whitman. I suppose 

I wanted him to be crying, or something 
miraculous like that. He wasn’t. And this wasn’t 
any kind of shrine. I had gone on pilgrimage to 
a goddamn gift shop.

V.
As I sidled back down the stairs toward 

the rainstorm waiting outside, I wondered to 
myself why I thought I’d find anything other 
than I did here.

Before coming to Valparaiso, I had, on a few 

different occasions, talked about Neruda with 
my host family and Chilean friends. As I should 
have expected, none of them read Neruda with 
any kind of regularity. After all, nobody reads. 
Period. And even fewer people read poetry, even 
when it’s poetry by a Nobel-winner. Even in 
asking people what they thought about Neruda, 
I got the vibe that I was coming across as a bit 
of an ass. I mean, shit, imagine a tourist coming 
up to you off the street and expecting you to 
have an opinion about Walt Whitman. Even if 
you did have one, chances are you’d probably 
be on your way to work and want nothing more 
than for that guy to get out of your face so 
you could get back to your Facebook feed and 
the Drake pouring out of your earbuds for the 
hundred millionth time, slowly demolishing 
your ear drums.

The few Chileans I met who did have a 

serious opinion about Neruda pretty much 
invariably hated him. They thought he was a 
self-aggrandizing cornball at best and, if you 
really wanted to get into it, they thought he was 
a chauvinist who served as a mouthpiece for 
precisely the sort of machista, heteronormative 
Marxism that the Latin American Left has 
been trying to disassemble for the last 20-some 
years.

In other words, they saw Neruda for what he 

was: an old man from a bygone era, a latter-day 
Romantic whose utopias were an escape from 
an antiquated set of problems. A quaint sort of 
antique, maybe, like the ships in bottles and 
imported silk screens and Coptic tapestries 
lining the walls of his house. But, in any case, 
an antique that’s better off left hanging on the 
wall.

When I finally made it back down to the 

ground floor, the guy standing at the front 
desk had his forehead in his hands. He was 
massaging his temples and sweating around his 
collar. I left my audio guide on the counter and 
stepped out the door back into the rain.

I stood outside the gift shop for a moment and 

watched the steady stream of tourists flowing 
through the door. The guards over by the front 
gate were smoking cigarettes under their 
umbrellas. Over to my left, a few more tourists 
had gathered at the edge of a concrete overlook. 
They were speaking Portuguese and trying to 
figure out how their knock-off selfie stick was 
going to work with one of their iPhones.

I took my glasses in my hand and did my best 

to dry off the rainwater with the hem of my 
coat. I looked down toward the harbor, which 
seemed just as far away as when I arrived. I 
glanced at my watch. There was a bus back to 
Santiago in 45 minutes. But I didn’t need to 
rush. The busses left every two hours.

Wednesday, November 2, 2016 // The Statement
4B
Wednesday, November 2, 2016 // The Statement 
5B

THE HOUSE OF 
PABLO: A Journey 

to the Home of 
Pablo Neruda

By Adam DePollo, Daily Arts Writer

