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