The Chilean writer Patricia Cerda (Concepción, 1961) has written about the artists Violeta and Nicanor Parra, the Spanish soldier poet Alonso de Ercilla and the German painter Rugendas, among others. Her latest work is Lucilla (Planeta), a novel based on the last trip of Gabriela Mistral (born Lucila Godoy Alcayaga) to Chile in the mid-1950s, where she intersperses her biography with fiction. The book will be published in July by Ediciones B España.
In a Zoom interview from Germany, where the author with a doctorate in history at the Free University of Berlin resides, she delves into the complex person behind the figure of the poet (Vicuña, 1889-New York, 1957) who has been revalued in the last decade. This week, for example, Congress approved April 7 as “Gabriela Mistral Day,” in honor of her birth.
Ask. She said that she took a while to write about Gabriela Mistral because she needed to be prepared to understand her. Did she do it?
Answer. I think I managed to get close to her. Or bring her closer to me. It took me so long because she is a very respected person in Chile and we have to find the height for this project. She also seemed a little overwhelming to me. I had always had the image of three women in the Elqui Valley: the mother, her sister and her. The central theme was dignity and I always saw a novel there. I started reading her poetry, in which she still seemed hermetic to me, but then I read her messages, her columns, her articles, and she became much closer to me. I saw that behind her there was a political, social project, her feminism. I feel like I discovered things about her that we hadn’t discovered because I respected and loved her so much.
Q. As which?
R. One is that she is an intellectual, an artist, a poet of the 20th century, which was a very difficult century, where everything was marked by ideologies. She lived in Spain before the civil war, in a very polarized society and knew how to maintain her political, social, cultural and intellectual independence. As? Making its own synthesis. She knew what suited her spirit. She never stopped being a Christian, but she discovered other things and she became a free thinker. And that, in the 20th century, is a miracle. I don’t know more, and if there are, they are giants. We could talk about Miguel De Unamuno, but there are very few. The majority, like our own Pablo Neruda, were completely aligned.
Q. A free thinker in the 20th century… woman.
A. I think men didn’t see her as a woman. They saw her without gender, as a very talented person, an excellent poet, and they added her to their circle, but she did not join as women were understood at that time, who arrived dressed up, who sought to please men. They took it as something neutral, which didn’t bother her at all.
Q. Did men not see her as a woman because she broke stereotypes?
R. They were not able to classify it. It was not avant-garde, it was not bourgeois, nor did it want to be. She often said that what she wrote had no importance, nor was it very self-referential. Now in the 21st century, society and culture have developed in such a way that we are ready to accept and recognize people who do not meet our stereotypes, but in the 20th century it was very difficult.
Q. How does that woman raised in a small town in the Elqui Valley forge that character?
R. And a woman only with a basic room. How is it explained? It is a tremendous mystery that I try to reveal in the novel. I think she knew who she was. The Greeks said become who you are. He knew that it also meant having enemies. People who were going to want to stop her because they would not accept that a teacher from the Elqui Valley was, for example, the director of a high school. Like Amanda Labarca, who wanted the same position and had studied at the Sorbonne. That’s the thing: defend herself, know who she is, take care of her dignity. She was ambitious too. A talented person who is not ambitious doesn’t even realize that he has it. Allies also appeared, that helped a lot, like Pedro Aguirre Cerda.
Q. He mentioned the enemies. One of them seems to be Pablo Neruda.
R. That is another of the discoveries of this novel. Everyone thinks they were friends, that they loved each other very much… It wasn’t like that. She at some point wrote about Residence on Earth, but at that time Neruda had not yet made the shift toward complete alignment with the Russian revolution. He went every year to the Soviet Union, he was president of the juries of the Lenin and Stalin prizes. After the Nobel Prize, Mistral had some money, but if not, he lived on a salary that the National Congress paid him for the honorary position of consul, but it was very little. Deep down he lived off of his articles and columns and the cost of that was his independence. On the other hand, he saw that Neruda was not so interested in his independence. There was never a confrontation, but there was a moment when Neruda offered her the Lenin Prize and she rejected it. She later invited her to a Writers’ Congress in 1953 and she also refused to go. He put her on the guest list anyway and she had to complain, but very calmly.
Q. A resignification of Gabriela Mistral and a review that has harmed Pablo Neruda is being seen in Chile.
R. That deserves a test. It is very interesting because it has to do with Chilean culture, with how we have changed our vision of these two greats. We had forgotten her throughout the second half of the 20th century. After he died, Pinochet appropriated the rights to his books. President Ricardo Lagos returned them to Doris Danna [la última compañera de vida de la poeta]. But the lack of attention was incredible.
Q. After her research she says that she has no doubts about the poet’s feminism, something that has been questioned.
R. One of her first writings is about women’s education, in 1905, when she still lived in the Elqui Valley. Then there are many messages and articles. In 1928 she opened a conference on women in Madrid and spoke about the importance of women being independent, studying at university, being an academic, and financing their own lives. There she is already with all the Spanish feminists. She is an activist, but she is an intellectual activist. I don’t know if she would really like to be put there with those pants. [como la imagen símbolo de las marchas feministas]. She had a very clear vision of what Latin American and Spanish society had to change in relation to women’s rights. And pioneer. She was also the first to speak about the genocide of the conquest.
Q. Without putting on a label, she was very political.
A. When the female vote came out in parliament, she wrote a message to Chile asking them to vote for women. She was very, very, very attentive to everything that was happening in Chile and to express her opinion. As a teacher, she wanted to give advice. At first she wanted to be the pedagogue of Chilean culture, but they didn’t let her. She went to Mexico and was. Later she became the pedagogue of all of Latin America and then the ambassador of Latin America in Europe. She made Latin American literature known in France and, when she went to Spain, all the Latin Americans sent her her books.
Q. Chile was still very attentive, a country from which it had left with a bitter taste. What is your relationship with your land like?
R. Very conflictive. She left for Mexico in 1922, returned for a few months on the 25th, then went to France and returned for a few weeks on the 38th, in part to support Pedro Aguirre Cerda’s campaign. She later returned on 54 for a few days. That is her relationship with Chile. She had her patriecita girl: the Elqui Valley, her friends, Chilean literature. But not his contemporaries because they were complicated and any mistake he made was going to appear in a newspaper saying it was this and that. He ruled out returning when Yin Yin was born, there is no doubt in my mind. She made up a story [sobre el nacimiento del niño que no reconoció públicamente como suyo] because something had to be told. He was not going to take him to Chile because someone might think of doing an investigation.
Q. The book gives the impression that on her last trip to Chile, already ill, she resigns herself to the fact that she was unable to rebuild the relationship.
R. When Chile goes, Yin Yin’s suicide has already happened. She is very marked by that. On the other hand, she has not yet appeared cancer, but she has several health problems. She went to say goodbye to her and look for the place where she wanted to be buried. She had joys, like going to her valley. She says that after she left there, she was never happy again. She went to rediscover that feeling. But Santiago doesn’t tell him anything, it is an almost obligatory step to collect the Honoris Causa. [otorgado por la Universidad de Chile].
Q. Was she a woman with a rather suffered life?
R. That question is always present when I write the novel. I think he is a very empathetic and sensitive person. A German poet said that the pain of humanity passes through the center of the poet’s heart. He had a little bit of that. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t capable of many moments of happiness. But yes, there is a sad, melancholic tone that is noticeable both in his messages and in his poetry. She tried to elucidate where he came from and she said that it was a bit of the Basque, which is serious, direct, and a bit of the indigenous, melancholic, who suffers the conquest.
Q. Linked to your deep rejection of the conquest, what was your relationship with Spain like?
R. Gabriela was contradictory, that makes her so interesting. On her first trip to Europe she visits France, Italy and Spain. In Spain, her most documented trip, she goes to encounter the language. She visits Mallorca, where Rubén Dario had been 10 years before. She is going to encounter Latin American modernism. She has a very close relationship with Spanish culture, with the language, and a stronger criticism of the empire and the ways in which the colony was carried out, because she sees the consequences in Chile and Mexico. When Franco wins the civil war, there is a demand for the colony, for the empire, and that distances it, it cuts off Spain.
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