The literary and political figure of Pablo Neruda attracts applause with hardly any discussion around the world, despite the fact that his personal life hides some controversial shadows that have opened a review process in some sectors of his country, particularly among women and the most youths.
Applause that the author received from icons of song such as Julio Iglesias, who at the dawn of his successful career listened to his elaborate rally soflames in favor of communism and in defense of the Popular Unity of President Salvador Allende in the plaza of the coastal city of Viña del Mar, home of the famous international festival that catapulted him to stardom.
And cheers like those given to him by the nearly 2,000 Spaniards who were able to go into exile from France upon the arrival of the ship Winnipeg, which he himself chartered, to the port of Valparaiso and in particular to the Mapocho station in Santiago de Chile, where his compatriots They celebrated their political commitment.
It was envy, or one more episode of the trans-Andean rivalry that Argentina, always more open and successful, and Chile, more pacified and withdrawn, have been fighting for a century, asserts the literary critic Harold Bloom in his work The Western Canon, that Neruda and Jorge Luis Borges "had animosity."
Neruda said that the Argentine did not live in reality. Borges, more ironically, turned the Chilean poet into a despised character in one of his most recognized works, El Aleph.
"The humane Borges was not going to embrace Stalinism and the communist Neruda stated with contempt that Borges did not live in the real world, which was made up of workers, peasants, Mao and Stalin," Bloom writes.
Neruda, moreover, smiled at the interested lottery of favors from the Nobel Prize, and Borges the greatest recognition in world literature eluded him.
Bloom insists that Borges, "a man it was better not to mess with," mocked Neruda by transforming Carlos Argentino Daneri into "an inconceivably bad poet and an obvious imitator of (Walt) Whitman" and thereby criticizing his Canto General, a book celebrated as a Latin American encyclopedic work.
Fifty years after his death, the controversy is still very much alive over whether the poet died of illness or was murdered by the incipient dictatorship, in the orgy of blood and torture that followed the coup d'état carried out twelve days earlier against the democratic government of Allende, as an international study published this year seems to demonstrate.
The truth, in any case, is that the regime led by Augusto Pinochet dropped an iron curtain on Neruda, his works and his legacy.
His homes were abandoned, he was excluded from the study plans and while the world celebrated him, in his country he was a shadow that produced hives in the leaders and indefinition among the young people, who stopped knowing him.
A situation that did not improve with democracy, as Fernando Sáez, director of the Pablo Neruda Foundation and his famous house in Santiago, regrets to Efe.
The Foundation survives thanks to visits - mainly from foreigners - but it hardly has other means of subsistence: few Chileans visit it and its rooms are usually empty, without even school excursions like those seen in monuments such as the Palacio de La Moneda or cultural spaces such as the Gabriela Mistral Cultural Center, the most celebrated poet in Chile.
"We thought that with the arrival of the left-wing government (Boric) the situation could improve and his figure could recover," but so far it has not happened, he points out.
"Neruda was a sexist, who treated women badly," says Marcela, a high school student at an institution in the center of the capital. An opinion shared by Camila Ramos, a university student and activist in the powerful feminist movement in Chile, who assures that the poet "is not liked by the new generations."
The origin is one of the darkest chapters of Neruda's life, which the writer himself comments openly in his autograph I confess that I have lived.
There he describes what is interpreted as the "rape of a young woman" in Ceylon, when he served as consul; From there, she jumped to a sexist interpretation of the renowned verse "I like it when you are silent because you are absent", which the feminist movement turned into "Neruda, shut up", and into a current that promotes stopping reading his works, which Writers like Isabel Allende have opposed it.
"If we made that decision, we would stop reading practically all the Chilean poets. I'm not sure if we are going to get into Neruda's work and leave the rest of the poets unspoiled," the Chilean writer Diamela Eilit wanted to settle years ago, after receiving National Literature Prize.
