PABLO NERUDA AT MACHU PICCHU 197among roughcut tables and the luckless trees
that bob and tumble turning up bare root.You’d think nature impartial, but no. Gentlemen’s “snowy collars flutter on
the line,” pristine privileged collars, while “on low ground” the poor undergo
forces of rain and river—their “roughcut tables” rolling past at flood level and
“the luckless trees.” These “bob and tumble,” which sounds playful for only a
moment. Luckless like the trees, and “turning up bare root,” the poor are basic,
vital, exposed.
Binding history to nature, Neruda was ready for Machu Picchu and his
twelve-canto poem evoking not Peru’s Inca princes but the Quechua slaves
who built that city of stone. Though the Indians of his own childhood had
“lived totally apart,” he came to merge Araucania’s demise with his own genesis,
declaring himself a poet of “those somber woods” and “obscure fallen lives.”
Chile ’s native people resisted for centuries. Finally in 1881 a treaty was signed
on Ñielol Hill, where a generation later a boy went catching spiders and dodging
doves. At Cuzco, Peru, in 1943, embedded between Andean peaks high in the
cordillera, the Quechua poet Kilko Warak’a told Neruda the very stones
Awoke from their centuries’ sleep
And opened their frozen breasts
When they knew you had arrived.The next day he went north along the Urubamba River and climbed on horse-
back to Machu Picchu, perched on a saddle two thousand feet above the river.
Begun around 1440, this remote outpost of the Inca empire escaped Spanish
conquest. Back in Cuzco you’re hardly aware of the smooth, slow-curving,
yellowish-gray stones of the ancient Temple of the Sun, because they’ve long
formed the foundation of a Dominican monastery. But Machu Picchu appears
pure, arrested in time, a people latent within it. In 1911 a Yale archaeologist
discovered the finest stonework he ’d ever seen, “partly covered with trees
and moss, the growth of centuries, but in the dense shadow, hiding in bam-
boo thickets and tangled vines, appeared here and there walls of white granite
ashlars carefully cut and exquisitely fitted together.” When Neruda went there
the ruins were only half cleared, as in the Quechuan Martín Chambi’s 1928
photograph.
Welcomed home as a poet of the people, Neruda composed Alturas de Mac-
chu Picchu in autumn 1945 at his home on the Pacific, Isla Negra. Bombs had
dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In a hemisphere dominated by the super-
power to the north, a radical voice would have to call on deep resources for
Latin America to speak through him.