Poet's body exhumed: Was Pablo Neruda poisoned?
A judge ordered a poet's body exhumed to look for evidence that Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda was killed by agents of Gen. Augusto Pinochet's brutal dictatorship.
Forensic anthropologists dig at the grave of Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda as they prepare for the exhumation of the poet's remains in Isla Negra, Chile, April 7. The poet's body was exhumed today in an effort to clear up four decades of suspicion about how the poet died in the days after Chile's military coup.
Chilean forensic experts exhumed the body of Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda on Monday, trying to solve a four-decade mystery about the death of one the greatest poets of the 20th century.
The official version is that that the poet died from prostate cancer and the trauma of witnessing the 1973 military coup that led to the persecution and killing of many of his friends. But his driver and many other Chileans say Neruda was murdered by agents of Gen. Augusto Pinochet's brutal dictatorship.
Experts were concerned that high salinity and humidity could affect the exhumation at Neruda's home in Isla Negra, a rocky outcropping overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
But Patricio Bustos, head of Chile's medical legal service, said Neruda's casket is in good shape after the one-hour exhumation. After draping Neruda's coffin in the Chilean national flag, forensics workers took his remains to the capital for tests. They could also be analyzed abroad and Bustos said they have offers from labs in the United States and Europe.
"After we take a look at our lab, following the biomedical safety measures and with total vigilance, we will be able to set a timeline for the process," Bustos told reporters.
"The most complex part will be searching for toxic substances that could not only be classic poisons, but also, according to testimonies, could be medical substances at very high doses to harm the poet."
Neruda, who won the Nobel prize for literature in 1971, was best known for romantic verses, especially the collection "Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair." He was also a leftist diplomat and close friend of socialist President Santiago Allende, who committed suicide rather than surrender to troops during the Sept. 11, 1973 coup led by Pinochet.
Neruda planned to go into exile, where he would have been an influential voice against the dictatorship. Just a day before he was scheduled to leave, he was taken by ambulance to the Santa Maria hospital in Santiago to keep him safe from political persecution.
Officially, Neruda died there on Sept. 23 from natural causes related to the emotional trauma of the coup.
For years, his driver and bodyguard, Manuel Araya has said that the poet was murdered when agents of the dictatorship injected poison into his stomach at the clinic.
"If it hadn't been for that shot Neruda wouldn't have died," Araya said.
"After seeing him being removed from the site, I felt a huge amount of pain because I lived the 24 hours with Neruda before his death. It took a long time, but justice has been served."
Former President Eduardo Frei Montalva died at the same clinic nine years later. Although doctors listed the cause of his 1982 death as septic shock from stomach hernia surgery, an investigation almost three decades later showed that the vocal opponent of the Pinochet regime had been slowly poisoned to death.
The exhumation was approved by Judge Mario Carroza on a request by Chile's Communist Party. It was attended by the driver and one of Neruda's four nephews.
"It was an emotional moment that reached our very fibers," said Rodolfo Reyes, one of Neruda's nephews.
"It's very important that the truth is known and the eyes of the world are set on this new investigation."
If You Forget Me
I want you to know
one thing.
You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.
Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you, little by little.
If suddenly
you forget me,
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.
If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.
But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.
I do not love you...
I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way than this:
where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.
I Like for You to be Still
I like for you to be still:
it is as though you were absent,
and you hear me from far away
and my voice does not touch you.
It seems as though your eyes had flown away
and it seems that a kiss had sealed your mouth.
As all things are filled with my soul
you emerge from the things,
filled with my soul.
You are like my soul,
a butterfly of dream,
and you are like the word Melancholy.
I like for you to be still
and you seem far away.
It sounds as though you were lamenting,
a butterly cooing like a dove.
And you hear me from far away, and my voice does not reach you:
Let me come down to be still in your silence.
And let me talk to you with your silence
that is bright as a lamp, simple as a ring.
You are like the night,
with its stillness and constellations.
Your silence is that of a star,
as remote and candid.
I like for you to be still:
it is as though you were absent,
distant and full of sorrow as though you had died.
One word then, one smile, is enough.
And I am happy,
happy that it's not true.
Tonight I Can Write...
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
Write for example, "The night is shattered
and the blue stars shiver in the distance."
The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her,
and sometimes she loved me too.
Through nights like this one, I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.
She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her.
To feel that I have lost her.
To hear the immense night,
still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.
What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is shattered
and she is not with me.
This is all.
In the distance someone is singing.
In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
My sight searches for her as though to go to her.
My heart looks for her,
and she is not with me.
The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.
I no longer love her, that's certain,
but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.
Another's. She will be another's.
Like my kisses before.
Her bright body.
Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her, that's certain,
but maybe I love her.
Love is so short,
forgetting is so long.
Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
Thought this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.
Love
Because of you, in gardens of blossoming flowers
I ache from the perfumes of spring.
I have forgotten your face,
I no longer remember your hands;
how did your lips feel on mine?
Because of you, I love the white statues drowsing in the parks
the white statues that have neither voice nor sight.
I have forgotten your voice, your happy voice;
I have forgotten your eyes.
Like a flower to its perfume,
I am bound to my vague memory of you.
I live with pain that is like a wound;
if you touch me, you will do me irreparable harm.
Your caresses enfold me,
like climbing vines on melancholy walls.
I have forgotten your love,
yet I seem to glimpse you in every window.
Because of you, the heady perfumes of summer pain me;
because of you, I again seek out the signs that precipitates desires:
shooting stars and falling objects.
I crave your mouth...
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.
I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.
I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,
and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
Like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.
Don't go far off...
Don't go far off, not even for a day, because --
because -- I don't know how to say it:
a day is long and I will be waiting for you,
as in an empty station when the trains are parked off somewhere else,
asleep.
Don't leave me, even for an hour, because
then the little drops of anguish will all run together,
the smoke that roams looking for a home
will drift into me, choking my lost heart.
Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach;
may your eyelids never flutter into the empty distance.
Don't leave me for a second, my dearest,
because in that moment you'll have gone so far
I'll wander mazily over all the earth, asking,
Will you come back? Will you leave me here, dying?
Maybe you'll remember...
Maybe you'll remember that razor-faced man
who slipped out from the dark like a blade
and -- before we realized -- knew what was there:
he saw the smoke and concluded fire.
The pallid woman with black hair
rose like a fish from the abyss,
and the two of them built up a contraption,
armed to the teeth, against love.
Man and woman, they felled mountains and gardens,
they went down to the river, they scaled the walls,
they hoisted their atrocious artillery up the hill.
Then love knew it was called love.
And when I lifted my eyes to your name,
suddenly your heart showed me my way.
You will remember...
You will remember that leaping stream
where sweet aromas rose and trembled,
and sometimes a bird, wearing water
and slowness, its winter feathers.
You will remember those gifts from the earth:
indelible scents, gold clay,
weeds in the thicket and crazy roots,
magical thorns like swords.
You'll remember the bouquet you picked,
shadows and silent water,
bouquet like a foam-covered stone.
That time was like never, and like always.
So we go there, where nothing is waiting;
we find everything waiting there.
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