In Chile, Where Pablo Neruda Lived and Loved

Joyce Maynard

The idea of paying a visit to Pablo Neruda’s home in Santiago had come as an afterthought. My husband, Jim, and I had been traveling through Chile, 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 away 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 Neruda’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 memorize a few. We’d devote some time to our Spanish. That, and romance. Who better to fan the flames than Neruda?

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.

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 salvage yard, 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 recognized, 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 over forty 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) any visitor will 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.

La Chascona bears no resemblance to places like Monticello, in Virginia, or Versailles, or—a personal favorite—the Isabella Stewart Gardner home in Boston. Unlike those places, you won’t find the rooms designed by Neruda in books of great interior design—no Louis XVI chairs, or tasteful but predictable furniture groupings. In a Neruda house, you may find a taxidermied flamingo overhead, or a life-size bronze horse, or a fifty-times-larger-than-life-size man’s shoe.

And that’s what I found myself loving. Those houses out of Architectural Digest may be lovely, but give me a room that tells something about the person who lived there—a room that displays a sense of humor, a sense of drama, and, most important, a passionate soul.

Neruda was a sensualist. You can see it in his poetry: “I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair. Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets. Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps…”

But you can also see it in his living spaces. One step through the low, narrow entry to the dining room and we knew: the man who lived here loved to eat. The dining table is long, and set with English china and Mexican glassware, wonderful odd serving dishes, chairs arranged surprisingly close, in a way that suggests warmth and conviviality.

It’s clear where Neruda must have presided: at the head. From my audio tour, I learned that he favored dressing up for parties. He kept a collection of hats for these occasions, and sometimes he might paint on a mustache. He liked to make an entrance, through a small special door opening into the room. The kitchen remained strictly off-limits. A magician does not display how the magic is made to happen if he wants to maintain the fantasy.

I can list here only a fraction of the furnishings and objects that stood out. By themselves, some might appear ugly—even tacky. But as the collage artist Joseph Cornell could have told us, art happens in the assemblage.

At La Chascona we found cheaply framed Caravaggio reproductions, stuffed animals, 1960s-style Formica, and a mobile (also pure 1960s) featuring staring eyes, mounted alongside African masks. There was also a leather couch from France, an original ceramic head by Léger, and a portrait of Matilde by Neruda’s friend Diego Rivera, commemorating the Medusa-like red hair that gave La Chascona its name.

When we got to the bedroom, I had the sense that I shouldn’t be in this place. The passion of the man for this particular woman seemed too great for a parade of tourists to pass through with headsets. (“Two happy lovers make one bread, a single moon drop in the grass,” he wrote. “Walking they cast two shadows that flow together; waking, they leave one sun empty in their bed.”)

The bed is covered with a simple white cloth. On the dressing table: a bottle of Chanel No. 5 and a hand mirror, not a lot more. Still, a scent of passion emanates.

In the gift shop after our tour, I stocked up on books by Neruda and purchased 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 the day in Santiago. But upon learning that Neruda had two other homes that he and Matilde occupied—simultaneously—over the last twenty years of his lifetime, I became a woman possessed. I suggested to Jim (no, there was more urgency than that) 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 traveling: 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.

We were hot on the Neruda trail now, or at least I was, with Jim at the wheel of our rented BMW convertible. It was a romantic quest, in a way (Two for the Road, minus Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn). I wanted to see all three of the houses where the relationship between Pablo and Matilde had played out. But really what I wanted to know were the stories of the two who had inhabited them.

The drive to Valparaíso took us through gorgeous countryside, including many Chilean wineries. Twenty miles down the highway, with the sky threatening rain, we gave up on our top-down experience, but even so, I liked to imagine how it must have been for Pablo and Matilde, leaving behind their beloved home in the capital for the new place high on a hill known as Florida, overlooking the crazy port city of Valparaíso where no streets seem to run parallel to each other and many are one-way, though lacking the signs to tell you this.

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 harbor.

We spent an afternoon and night exploring Valparaíso—enough time for Jim to characterize the place as an intoxicating mix of New Orleans and San Francisco’s Mission District, combined with a little of the Latin Quarter in Paris: pisco sours in a dive bar playing ’30s jazz; cobbled streets winding down to the water; murals and funiculars and pots spilling over with flowers; dogs in the road.

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. Though 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 colored 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 seventeenth century). As always, Neruda had 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.

As in his other houses, the office features a collection of bronze hands, and a sink beside the desk so he could indulge his habit of washing his hands before getting to work on his day’s writing. His houses make plain: if the poet had an insatiable appetite for food, and love, and ships’ models, and wine, he also possessed a strong work ethic.

He wrote in the early hours. The afternoons were reserved for seeing friends and hunting down treasures, a fact that left me imagining what a collector like Neruda would have done had eBay existed in his time. More bronze hands and ship paintings, perhaps. Fewer poems.

With little time left before our flight home, we got back in the BMW, tearing off to the last Neruda house, with the plan of touring it that afternoon, then racing back to the city to board our plane. We were cutting it close, but compulsion had taken over now.

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. Neruda’s favorite house: Isla Negra.

This was the house he had purchased for his second wife, Delia del Carril (nicknamed La Hormiguita, 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.

“I write for a land recently dried, recently fresh with flowers, pollen, mortar,” he wrote in Canto General. “I write for some craters whose chalk cupolas repeat the round void beside the pure snow…”

Here again is 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 Pablo 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.

Neruda celebrated Chile’s 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 Allende’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 initially reported as prostate cancer, but the Interior Ministry of Chile later 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, which—like the town—had been 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 ten 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 Veinte Poemas de Amor. I knew it 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.” “Ode to Walt Whitman.” “Ode to My Suit”: “Every morning, suit, / you are waiting on a chair / to be filled / by my vanity, my love, / my hope, my body.”) 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 better served 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 criticize 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.

Originally published in December 2015.

Joyce Maynard is the author of a number of novels, including Labor Day and, most recently, Under the Influence.