half,’’ he says, ‘‘but never predictable just because
it’s the other half.’’ He adds with irony that ‘‘one of
Neruda’s regrets was not to have been able to love
all two billion women who existed in his time,
though he tried to do it through his poetry.’’
Neruda spent most of his life with two partic-
ularly significant women: the Argentine painter
Delia del Carril and the Chilean singer Matilde
Urrutia. Delia was so constantly active that she
had been nicknamedla hormiga, or the ant. Later,
the poet would give her another name, ‘‘the neigh-
bor.’’ What we know is that she burst into Neru-
da’s life and precipitatedthe end of his marriage
with Maria Antonieta Agenaar Vogelzanz of Hol-
land. Delia and Pablo began to live together, and
in 1943 they were married in Mexico. (The mar-
riage was not recognized by Chilean law.) In his
book, Teitelboim says of her: ‘‘Deep down, she felt
like she had to protect him. Many years after they
separatedshecontinuedtosaythatPablowasa
child... She had to educate the adult child. Their
conversation was primarily political. She opened
his eyes.’’
Matilde Urrutia and the poet had a brief
romance in 1946. They met at an outdoor concert
in the Forest Park of Santiago. Mutual friends
introduced them. Teitelboim says: ‘‘Neruda
planned to have a fling with this singer who had
such impetuous laughter. And he had one. It
didn’t last long, though. He had too much work
to do. The woman with laughter like birdsong
drifted away.’’ Three years later they met again
in Mexico. There she had founded a school of
music, and Neruda had become bedridden with
thrombophlebitis. His friends came to see him
and, of course, many women did as well. One of
them was Matilde, and though he didn’t recognize
her at first, she took care of him, gave him his
medicines, and fluffed his pillows. Their secret
affair began in this state. Always a lover of pseu-
donyms, Neruda christened her ‘‘Rosario.’’ Their
relationship was established more openly in 1949
and it lasted twenty-four years, until Neruda’s
death in September of 1973.
Delia and Matilde—Teitelboim concludes—
‘‘were different kinds of muses, each one for a
period of twenty years. They are a central part
of Neruda’s intimate history. Delia was an exqui-
site queen of literary salons and painting work-
shops; Matilde was the queen of the kitchen,
which her predecessor never visited. But in or
outside of the house, some woman always stirred
up his hormones. I couldn’t say who he loved
most. I think he loved them all intensely, one
after another. Let each reader come up with his
or her own response to this. But the poet said not
only ‘I will live,’ but also ‘I will go on loving.’ And
he will—as long as there is still one man who
appropriates his verses to whisper them in the
ear of his beloved.’’
Some women did turn him down, especially
in his adolescence and early youth. Neruda him-
self said that the other guys always got the
blondes.
InNeruda, Teitelboim maintains that the
poet was loyal to his women, but not faithful.
The distinction is not a small one. He explains:
‘‘His loyalty was unfailing, but he refrained from
promising faithfulness, knowing as he said in
‘Farewell,’ one his first poems of love and dis-
affection that ‘love can be eternal, it can be fleet-
ing.’ So he allowed himself the right to that
freedom. He liked women who were mature,
like ripe fruit.’’
Neruda made the best of every liaison, says
the author, and he ‘‘was enriched humanly and
literarily by each one of his women friends, even
in the brief encounters. Some of the women
found a place in his poems and, so, in history.
Both psychiatrists and non-psychiatrists who
observed his life concluded that he sought in
them the mother he had lost at birth.
Neruda loved intensely. Was he also loved in
the same way? Volodia, his friend, doesn’t hesi-
tate to say that ‘‘he was intense about everything;
in life, in poetry, and in action. Being famous
does give a sense of erotic power, real or unreal.
Neruda was the number one poet of love. But
like all mortals, he did some things right and he
made some mistakes. Painful experiences he
pushed inside. He didn’t publicize them.’’
Neruda’s relationship with Delia fell into
crisis because he had fallen in love with
‘‘Rosario.’’ Teitelboim recalls, ‘‘I heard him say
that he didn’t want to divorce Delia. He pro-
posed that they stay married formally, but ‘that
proud Basque woman’—that was the expression
he used—told him she would never accept such
an insulting agreement. The man always sought
out vibrant and combative sexual experience,
and he fed a large part of his biography that
way. There is no lack of poems whose romantic
history would be interesting to unveil some day.’’
Source:Odette Magnet, ‘‘Neruda: For the Love of Women,’’
inAmericas, Vol. 56, No. 4, July–August 2004, p. 64.Sonnet LXXXIX