Where Neruda lived & loved

Joyce Maynard heads out to Chile in search of poet Pablo Neruda’s humble abode, and discovers that he had two more homes, where his romance with Matilde Urrutia played out, each an expression of his dreams

The idea of paying a visit to Pablo Neruda’s home in Santiago, Chile, had come as an afterthought. My husband, Jim, and I had been travelling through the country, with a single day to spend in the capital.

Riding the funicular to the top of Parque Metropolitano, the classic tourist activity, seemed like a requirement. When we got to the bottom again, it deposited us a block from La Chascona, the house the poet bought in 1951 (while still married to his second wife, Delia del Carril) for his then-secret lover, Matilde Urrutia. A promising stop, perhaps, but I kept my expectations low.

I’ve taken a fair number of house tours on my travels — often discovering that all the things I’d most like to see (the artist’s paintings, her desk or painting studio) were either sold off or sent to museums.

Take the artist out of the house and what you are likely to have, more often than not, is a collection of rooms and some old furniture. My intention was to pick up a book of Pablo’s poetry at the gift shop. These last few nights on our trip, I suggested to Jim, he and I could read poems out loud to each other and maybe memorise a few. We’d devote some time to our Spanish. That, and romance. Who better to fan the flames than Neruda?

Treasuring it

The moment I stepped into the garden at La Chascona, I revised my plan. “I’m going to need to spend a lot of time here,” I whispered to Jim, checking my watch. I was already concerned that the two hours left before closing time might not be sufficient. Jim knows that I am an incurable collector of the kind of things some people may call junk. I call them treasures.

Now, at the home of Neruda, the Nobel-winning Chilean poet and champion of the left, I had discovered a kindred spirit. I hadn’t even gotten through the front door of this house, but already, just at the sight of the garden, my heart was racing the way it does when I encounter a particularly enticing junk store, or a promising-looking yard sale. And this place possessed qualities of all those.

But something else, too: an element not unrelated to Neruda’s poetry. If his relationship with Matilde was, as he represented it in his poems, the great love of his life, this house was the stage set against which he envisioned the two of them playing it out. “Here are the bread — the wine — the table — the house,” he wrote in One Hundred Love Sonnets.

“A man’s needs, and a woman’s, and a life’s.”What I recognised, even at the entryway — with its ragtag assemblage of wrought-iron garden furniture and mosaic tile inlays, the mural of birds and vines winding around the arched door, the hand-forged circular staircase and glass balls from ships’ buoys and orange trees and sculptures of angels — was that whatever fondness I might feel for Neruda’s poetry, my truest kinship with this man who died more than 40 years ago would be with his sense of interior decoration.

In fact, “interior decoration” is an insufficient phrase. As much as he was a poet, Neruda was a collector of things, a builder of homes and a designer of fantastical spaces. La Chascona (the name refers to the wild tangle of Matilde’s hair, a recurring element in his poems) is the kind of house I love best — the fabulous, wacky, excessive creation of a man for whom objects took on deep emotional meaning — not necessarily for their intrinsic value, and possibly not for their conventional beauty either, but as an expression of the dreams of the person who assembled them.

This place is also — with its never-ending birdsong, the trickling waterfall meandering through the property, the tinkling chimes — the home of a true romantic, filled with symbols and talismans and secret messages to his lover, only a fraction of which (I’m guessing) will any visitor comprehend. Up to the day of my visit, all I knew was that Neruda had written Veinte Poemas de Amor. But this whole house was a love poem.

In the gift shop after our tour, I stocked up on books by Neruda and a Neruda-style cap for my husband. But our visit to La Chascona had left me wanting more — not of the poetry so much as the man and his houses. We had planned to spend the remainder of our trip in Santiago. But upon learning that Neruda had two other homes that he and Matilde occupied — simultaneously — over the last 20 years of his lifetime, I became a woman possessed. I suggested to Jim that we add to our itinerary a pilgrimage to those other houses — one, La Sebastiana, in the city of Valparaíso; the other, Casa de Isla Negra, a couple of hours from there, on the rocky Chilean coast.

It’s one of the things I love best when travelling: those moments your well-made plans and itineraries get tossed aside for a spur-of-the-moment expedition to explore some place you never even knew existed, until you were there. An hour later, we had the whole thing arranged: a rental car to take us to Valparaíso. A hotel room for one night. To be followed, after our visit to La Sebastiana, by a drive to Isla Negra.

La Sebastiana was purchased in 1959 from the estate of an architect, Sebastián Collado, who had died before construction was completed and for whom the house is named. While Neruda bought La Chascona on his own, as a surprise for his lover, he and Matilde (now his third wife) bought La Sebastiana together. They celebrated its opening in 1961 with one of their famous dinner parties, and later with New Year’s celebrations where friends gathered to watch fireworks over the harbour.

We spent an afternoon and night exploring Valparaíso. Next morning, we made our way to La Sebastiana. As with La Chascona, this Neruda home features an entryway of tangled greenery and mosaic walkways, hidden gardens, staircases, low doors and ceilings that give a person the feeling of being on a ship — which was precisely Neruda’s idea.

Although he never took an interest in being at the helm of a boat, the nautical themes are everywhere in his houses. Here, too, is a whole room dedicated to a bar, and a dining table set with more coloured glasses, and a dressing table for Matilde and, at the foot of the bed, a toy sheep purchased by Neruda, late in life, to replace one he had loved and lost as a motherless child decades earlier.

There’s a carousel horse and a music box and a collection of wooden ships, and maps (one dating from the 17th century). As always, Neruda has made himself a wonderful writing room, filled with photographs of the poet with his many famous friends (Picasso and Marcel Marceau, among them) and his writer heroes (Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman), along with pictures from the day in 1971 when he received the Nobel Prize.

The route to Isla Negra goes through a series of small towns before reaching the coast. Even when we arrived there, we had a hard time finding the house. No signs announce its presence in this unexceptional little beach town filled with cheap restaurants and souvenir shops. On the advice of a local taxi driver, we made our way down a dirt road a half-mile or so outside of town. Then there it was, on a pile of rocks overlooking a stretch of ocean so wild Jim had to raise his voice for me to hear.

The favourite

Neruda’s favourite house: Isla Negra.This was the house he had purchased for his wife, Delia del Carril (nicknamed La Hormiguita, the Little Ant). He was looking, he said, for a place to write his “Canto General.” But, it could be argued, a person doesn’t need a roomful of ships in bottles and a few hundred glass bottles to write a canto.

Here again are the bar and the great dining table, the vast fireplace and deep soft chairs (overlooking the roiling Pacific this time), the writing room, the romantic bedroom reached by a special flight of steps — two bedrooms actually; when Neruda divorced Delia and married Matilde, the new love required a new room.

At Isla Negra, the landlubber Neruda indulged his love of maritime objects more than in either of the other houses, with a dozen female ships’ figureheads jutting from the walls of the living room. Pablo celebrated the Chilean Independence Day here with his many friends every September 18.

It was here where he received the news of the coup that removed his socialist ally Salvador Allende from power in September 1973, and of Salvador’s suicide that same day. And it was here — just three weeks later — where he spent his last night with Matilde, before being taken to the hospital where he died a few days later. The cause of death was reported as prostate cancer, but the Interior Ministry of Chile recently released a statement saying that it was highly probable that Neruda’s death “was caused by a third-party intervention.”

After his death, Matilde never spent another night at Isla Negra; she returned instead to Santiago to end her days at La Chascona. First, though, she had to rebuild the house, that — like the town — was looted and wrecked by members of the military following the coup.A person visiting the houses now would not guess that so many of Neruda’s carefully assembled treasures and furnishings had been smashed and burned in those first days.

Photographs displayed on the home’s walls from the aftermath tell the story — of the destruction, of the thousands who took to the streets after his death to mourn their beloved poet. There in the photographs, among the mourning masses, is Matilde herself — hair concealed under a black veil. She died of cancer 10 years later and is buried at Isla Negra beside her husband.

On the plane home, I took out the volumes of poetry I had picked up at the gift shop at La Chascona. One was a collection featuring the Twenty Poems of Love I knew so well and the verses Neruda published, anonymously, in celebration of his love for Matilde during the early ‘50s when their relationship was a secret.

The other was a hefty 843-page tome with every one of Neruda’s odes, in Spanish on one side of the page, English on the other (Ode to an Artichoke, Ode to the Dictionary). It’s fitting, for this poet who so loved material objects, less for their value, I think, than for what they represented, that he wrote 225 of these odes.

I’m no poet, and no poetry critic, but I found myself thinking, as I flew north over South America with my backpack full of Neruda, that not all of these poems are so great or memorable. The poet may have been served better writing a little less. Just as it may be said that his wonderful houses could contain one tenth the number of amazing treasures, and they’d still be wonderful places to behold. More so, maybe.

But who am I to criticise a great poet for the excess, as I make my way back to a house filled with ample evidence of my own obsessive collecting? I know as well as the next person that it’s dust to dust in the end. All a person takes with him to the grave are his bones. But in the middle, between birth and death, I’d call it a glorious thing, to raise one’s red Mexican glass at a fine round table set with gilt-edged china, while candles flicker and the music box plays, and the host sports a fez, and his beautiful redheaded wife whispers words of love in his ear.

There’s a string of rare pearls around her neck, and a ship’s figurehead of a woman with her breasts spilling from her bodice, over the assembled guests, while outside, fireworks explode over a roaring sea.