After years of silence imposed by the military, Isla Negra, the fabled home of
poet Pablo Neruda, is once again a blossoming cultural center. The island is an
oasis in a dark and confusing post-coup history of consumerism.
BY MARJORIE AGOSiN
Isla Negra, the fabled home of
Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, is
not really an island, nor is it
black. It is a small fishing cove
about 100 miles west of Santiago,
nestled between Valparaiso and
Vifia del Mar. In the summer, Isla
Negra is inundated by vacationers
seeking to escape the noise and
smog of Santiago. During that care-
free season, many young people fall
in love for the first time, reciting
Neruda’s 20 Poems of Love and
carving hearts into the trees. But in
March, when Chileans take leave of
their summer homes and students
go back to school, Isla Negra recov-
Marjorie Agosin is a Chilean poet and
professor of Spanish literature at
Wellesley College. Her most recent book
is A Cross and a Star: Reminiscences of a
Jewish Girl in Chile (University of New
Mexico Press, 1995).
Translated from the Spanish by NACLA.
ers its own particular rhythm and
spirit. As Neruda recalled in his
memoirs, I Confess that I Have
Lived:
it is in winter when a strange flow-
ering is dressed by the rains and
the green and yellow cold of the
blues and the purples.
Through the years, Chilean intel-
lectuals, poets and sculptors have
been attracted to this enchanting
land. Chilean singer Violeta Parra
built her house on Isla Negra in the
1940s among the wild flowers and
the rocks. Pablo Neruda loved,
above all things, his home on Isla
Negra, a simple house built in early
1938 with stones that grew warmer
or colder according to the changing
seasons. He had several large bells
installed in his backyard to
announce lunch time, and it was
here that he displayed his eclectic
collections of seashells, bottles of
different shapes and colors, butter-
flies, and carousel horses. In this
house, Neruda extolled the agate
stones, the generous expanse of
stones and sand that greet the ocean:
The house… I don’t know when
this was born in me. It was in mid-
afternoon, we were on the way to
those lonely places on horse-
back… Don Eladio was in front,
fording the C6rdoba stream which
had swollen… For the first time, I
felt the pang of this smell of winter
at the sea, a mixture of sweet
herbs and salty sand, seaweed and
thistle.
Much of Neruda’s later poetry
refers to Isla Negra, where fisher-
men and intellectuals, carpenters
and poets have coexisted for
decades. Neruda captured the har-
mony of this coexistence in a poem
about Rafita, a local carpenter who
lives to this day in Isla Negra:
Vol XXX, No 1 JULY/AUG 1996
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11ESSAY / CHILE
Neruda often
invited young poets
to his house near
the sea. He listened
to them with
prudence, aware
that his company
would reveal itself
in their future
writings.
Neruda’s Isla Negra house with its several large bells in the backyard to announce lunch time.
Just as I’ve always thought of myself as a carpenter-poet, I think
of Rafita as the poet of carpentry.
He brings his tools wrapped in
newspaper, under his arm, and
unwraps what looks to me like a
chapter and grasps the worn han-
dles of the hammers and rasps, los-
ing himself in the wood. His work
is perfect.
Neruda often invited young poets
to his house near the sea. He lis-
tened to them with prudence, aware
that the gift of his company would
reveal itself in their future writings.
The poets congregated around the
big round table, surrounded by col-
orfully painted plates and enormous
blue bottles, in the company of
exquisite Chilean wine and living
poetry. For hours on end, they could
be heard speaking of different poets,
and the sighs, laments, and first
loves immortalized in verse.
My family had a home in Isla
Negra, and as a child it was a mag-
ical place for me. My childhood
was filled with long weekends
walking arm-in-arm with my moth-
er along the shores of Isla Negra,
learning the textures of each rock
and the violence of the moss. From
a great distance, I would often
glimpse the enormous figure of
Don Pablo Neruda, wearing a red
Araucanian poncho, furiously writ-
ing with a pencil the color of the
turquoise glaciers. It was then that I
decided that I liked the vocation of
poetry and that few tools were nec-
essary: a green pencil, a piece of
paper, the immense ocean for self-
affirmation, and perpetual astonish-
ment.
This was Chile in the late 1960s
and early 1970s. The country was
swept up in a poetic effervescence
during which the great poets of the
day-Pablo Neruda, Gonzalo
Rojas, Enrique Lihn, Nicanor Parra, Delia Dominguez-created their
most memorable texts. This paral-
leled the effervescence of the
Popular Unity years, when Salvador
Allende (1970-73) tried to bring
socialism to Chile through democ-
ratic means. Allende’s government
founded an editorial house, Quimantu, which published popular
editions of Chilean and Latin
American poetry at prices that
everyone could afford. Poetry
became part of daily life in Chile.
Poetry readings became common in
high schools, universities, and trade-
union meetings. Other artistic forms
also blossomed, such as the colorful
murals that lit up Santiago’s walls.
Neruda was intensely involved in
this unique experiment. His poetry
expressed his preoccupation with
the social history of his country,
and the future of its workers,
women and children. Neruda want-
ed to compose a poetry of simplici-
ty that could be understood by all
Chileans. Exemplary in this regard
is the final stanza from the 1970
poem “Regards to the North”:
Country, liberty is your beauty.
And to defend its pure light
your children are gathered here
together:
he who emerged from the dark
mines
and he who lives near the over-
flowing seas
and the construction worker by his
architecture
and even the farmer from his
plough:
together they surround your figure
because liberty has called us.
NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 12ESSAY / CHILE
fter the military coup in
1973, which brought Augosto
Pinochet to power, Neruda
died-some say of a broken heart–
and his house in Isla Negra was shut
down. For nearly two decades, Chile
was subsumed by the violence of
silence and censorship. Gagged and
dressed in mourning clothes,
Neruda’s abandoned house stood as
a symbol of the fate of Chilean poet-
ry under the military regime. Poetry,
like Neruda’s bells, was forced into
silence. The voice of the poet, like
the voice of the nation, had been
usurped. It is no accident that
Allende’s death, the military coup in
Chile, and the death of Pablo
Neruda coincided, marking the end
of one of the most lyrical and
visionary eras in Chilean culture.
Book prices skyrocketed during
the Pinochet years. Poetry recitals
Neruda at his writing table in 1970.
and theater performances were
heavily censored. Familiar texts of
Latin American poetry could not be
found in any bookstore, with the
occasional exception of selected
works of Gabriela Mistral that rein-
forced the stereotype of her as a
teacher and left out references to
her political activism. To speak of
Neruda was dangerous. Along with
singers Violeta Parra and Victor
Jara, he was considered a traitor in
Pinochet’s Chile.
During the years of the military
dictatorship, Isla Negra became a
deserted and disdainful place,
where hungry dogs and drunkards
singing to themselves roamed the
dark streets together. Neruda’s
house, which once hummed with
the rhythm of love and the seasons,
remained anchored in an uncon-
querable undergrowth of twigs and
briers that could not be removed
even by the most able of gardeners.
A huge sign read “House Closed,
Visits Prohibited.” Many people
disobeyed, however, and made
secret pilgrimages to the island.
When they arrived at Neruda’s
house, they read his poetry out loud
and recited the long list of names of
the disappeared. They lit candles of
hope on Pablo’s birthday and on
that of his wife, Matilde. The
most daring pilgrims scrib-
bled love poems onto the
wooden fence that surrounded
the house. On special occa-
sions, like Pablo and
Matilde’s wedding anniver-
sary, the fences were filled
with red flowers.
ince Chile’s return to
democracy in 1990,
artistic and cultural
activities have been resurrect-
ed from the silence imposed
by the military. Isla Negra has
become once again the coun-
try’s cultural center. It is in
full bloom, like a bride
wrapped in lemon flowers.
Neruda’s house has been
reopened. The red train car rests in
front of the garden, and the huge
bells sound again, harmonizing
with the sea. Visitors are now free to
walk about Neruda’s house and its
grounds. Schoolchildren sit with
their notebooks, learning happily
about the poet’s collection of butter-
flies and snails. If any place in
Chile irradiates the peace of demo-
cracy and the sense of social com-
mitment that characterized the myth
of Pablo Neruda and his poetry, it is
without doubt the poet’s house on
Isla Negra, its key which used to lie
on the sand for its owner to let him-
self inside:
I lost my key, my hat, my head! The
key came from Raidl’s general store
in Temuco. It was outside,
immense, lost, pointing out the gen-
eral store, “The Key,” to the
Indians. When I came north I asked
Ratilfor it, I tore it from him, I stole
it in the midst of fierce and stormy
winds. I carried it off toward
Loncoche on horseback. From
there the key, like a bride dressed in
white, accompanied me on the
night train.
I have come to realize that every-
thing I misplace in the house is car-
ried off by the sea. The sea seeps in
at night through keyholes, under-
neath and over the tops of doors
and windows.
Since by night, in the darkness,
the sea is yellow, I suspected, with-
out verifying, its secret invasion.
On the umbrella stand or on the
gentle ears of (the ship bow) Maria
Celeste, I would discover drops of
metallic sea, atoms of its golden
mask. The sea is dry at night. It
retains its dimension, its power
and it swells, but turns into a great
goblet of sonorous air; into an
ungraspable volume that rids itself
of its waters. It enters my house to
find out what and how much I have.
It enters by night, before dawn:
everything in the house is still and
salty, the plates, the knives, the
things scrubbed by contact with its
wildness lose nothing, but become
frightened when the sea enters with
its cat-yellow eyes.
That is how I lost my key, my hat,
my head.
They were carried off by the
ocean in its swaying motion. I
found them on a new morning.
They are returned to me by the har-
binger wave that deposits lost
things at my door
In this way, by a trick of the sea,
the morning has returned to me my
white key, my sand-covered hat, my
head-the head of a shipwrecked
sailor
Vol XXX, No 1 JULY/AUG 1996 13ESSAY / CHILE
Book presenta-
tions are celebrated
in Neruda’s home
before enthusiastic
audiences, and the
house itself has
become one of the
country’s most
popular museums.
Psychiatrist Luis
Weinstein and poet
Paz Molina are
promoting poetry
workshops that
bring together art-
ists and local resi-
dents to talk and to
write poems about
the environment.
Children from Isla
Negra and neigh- One of Neruda’s
boring areas also carousel horses.
meet weekly for these poetry work-
shops, which have a true communi-
tarian spirit.
Two recently formed foundations
support these and other cultural
activities. The Cultural Corp-
oration, which includes intellectu-
als, teachers and fishermen from
Isla Negra, was established in 1990
to promote artistic activity. The
Neruda Foundation was founded in
1989 by personal friends of Pablo
Neruda who wanted to preserve the
poet’s artistic legacy, his manu-
scripts, and his homes. The Neruda
Foundation sponsors a biannual
cultural magazine, appropriately
named Isla Negra, that publishes
diverse genres of writing, from
essays on the environment to love
poems. The first issue of the maga-
zine was published in the summer
of 1994, and was presented at the
well-known Poet’s Caf&. With
Chilean wine flowing and Neruda’s
spirit present, someone at the gath-
ering recited Neruda’s moving
poem, “The Sea”:
The sea tumbles down like an
ancient fighter
What is happening there below?
tomatoes, tunnels, tons of light-
ning, towers and drums.
eclectic collection of
community.
The place’s
cultural activi-
ties have blos-
somed in a wel-
come challenge
to the blind
consumerism
that took hold
during the dic-
tatorship and
has prospered
under Chile’s
new democra-
cy. Poetry writ-
ing has gained
new adherents
among young
people in the
area, even
though the liter-
ary critics only
For me, returning
to Isla Negra
means returning to
the places that
Neruda loved so
much, such as the
sculptured masks
from ships’ bows
that he collected,
especially one from
the Maria Celeste
that “was made of
dark and perfectly
sweet wood.”
Visiting Isla Negra
means encounters
with the seaweed,
with the delirious
ocean, and with
men and women
who are interested
in preserving their
It is no accic
Allende’s d
military couj
and the d
Pablo N
coincided,
the end of o
most ly
and vision
in Chilean
comment on religious poetry or the classics or the poets currently in fashion. Isla Negra continues to cel- ebrate poetry, even though books are extravagantly expensive and poetry collections are only pub- lished on commission. Literature in Chile today is mea- sured not by its quality but by its market potential. Book publishers prefer facile texts, flighty tales of
rumor and intrigue, and other such precarious and fragile material.
Dialogue about literature and poli-
tics, about eroticism and women,
about history and national identity,
remain buried in the annals of
silenced memory. The enriched life
of the Popular Unity years-that
sometimes bordered on euphoria-
has been forgotten. In Chile today,
people don’t talk to each other very
much and they visit each other even
less, allowing the hospitality that
characterized Chileans to slip into
history. Chile’s democracy is com-
promised by the continuing power
of the military. Solidarity is a rare
occurrence, and “marketing” is the
catchword of the day.
Isla Negra is an oasis in a dark
and confusing post-coup history of
consumerism, cellular telephones
and huge shop-
ping malls. The
consumerist fren-
lent that zy has propagated an image of Chile death, the as an economic
) in Chile, miracle, designed to attract foreign
eath of investors. But it is
a Chile that exists eruda under the prism of
marking the diluted colors
of abundance, a
ne of the Chile that during
rical the military re- gime lost its iden-
ary eras tity, its character, its culture. Some culture. of that identity is
being recreated to-
day on Isla Negra,
where after years
of exile, the presence of Pablo
Neruda has returned to occupy the
central place that it deserves. The
cove’s residents-its poets, its fish-
ermen, its students-celebrate the
right to sing, to speak, to reclaim
their roots, and to remember
Neruda. On Isla Negra, the island
of poets, a spirit of future and of
new beginnings permeates the crisp
ocean air.
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