“I found a stone house facing the ocean, in a place unknown to everyone called Isla Negra. The owner, an old Spanish socialist, ship captain, Don Eladio Sobrino, was building it for his family, but he wanted to sell it to me… “
Pablo Neruda
Just like “everyone” did not know where the Black Island is and what made it an interesting place. It is located in the coast of Chili where the waves break as they crash against the volcanic rock. Yes, there where the water turns into white foam and adds a tone to the brown of the sand. For its part, the mist and the cold they hide the verses what he wrote Pablo Neruda in his house as long and narrow as the ships and the geography of his country. In that home, oriented from north to south just like Chili and that he shared with Matilde Urrutia, there is no empty space. Every inch speaks of his repeated impulse to collect: boats, piano stands, colored glasses, compasses, figureheads, snails, instruments, globes, insects, hats, butterflies, beetles and even miniature guitars from Paracho Michoacán. His love for Mexico was also evidenced in his book I confess that I have lived: “And there is no country in America, nor perhaps on the planet, with greater human depth than Mexico and its men. Through their luminous successes, as through their gigantic errors, one sees the same chain of grandiose generosity, of profound vitality, of inexhaustible history, of endless germination… Mexico is an infinite field of magueyes with a steel blue tint and a crown of yellow thorns. “All this is provided by the most beautiful markets in the world.” This is how the writer and customer of flea markets and ship cemeteries describes our country, who observed with a spyglass, from his bedroom, the sea next to his dressing room where the tailcoat he wore when he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971 still hangs. His library adds a fact to this conversation: Neruda loved words and the emissaries of that message are the more than five thousand books that he accumulated: poetry, novels, natural and American history and the verses that he created at Kovach, which In Mapuche it means refuge, and it was his most beloved corner. There he wrote, listening to the patter of rain on a tin roof and from a desk, again, looking at the sea. When he got tired he would go with one of his favorite fetishes, a locomotive similar to the ones he saw in Temuco during his childhood.
The visit to Neruda's house is a dialogue through the vestiges that the poet himself accumulated because the sum of these objects tells us about his intense political and social life: he was a friend and collaborator of President Allende and of writers such as Miguel Hernández and Federico García Lorca. As a diplomat, during the Spanish Civil War, while consul in Barcelona, he coordinated the departure of two thousand Spanish refugees from French concentration camps to Chile, embarking them on a cargo ship named Winnipeg. He himself was exiled since his communist ideology led him to live outside of Chile, like when he took refuge on the Island of Capri. The novel Burning Patience by Antonio Skarmeta is based on this event, which in turn is the writing on which the film and opera The Postman (Il Postino) is inspired.
As a culmination, a suggestion, read his best-known work published in 1924: Twenty love poems and a desperate song…
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