The Complete Memoirs by Pablo Neruda

Author:Pablo Neruda
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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At the hotel I ran into Professor Baera and told him of my mishaps. He was a good-natured Hindu. He passed these incidents off lightly. He had a tolerant attitude toward his country, which he considered still in the process of formation. I, on the other hand, saw something perverse in that chaos, something very far from the welcome I had expected from a newly independent country.

Joliot-Curie’s friend, to whom I had brought a letter of introduction, was the director of nuclear-physics studies in India. He invited me to visit their installations, adding that we had been asked to lunch that same day by the Prime Minister’s sister. Such has been my luck, and such it continues to be, all my life: one hand rams me in the ribs with a club, and the other offers me a bouquet of flowers to make up for it.

The Institute for Nuclear Research was one of those clean, bright, luminous places where men and women dressed in gauzy white circulate like running water, crossing corridors, steering their way around instruments, blackboards, and trays. I understood only a small part of the scientific explanations, but the visit was a purifying bath that washed off the stains of humiliation suffered at the hands of the police. I have a dim memory of seeing what looked like a bowl with some mercury in it. Nothing more surprising than this metal, which displays its energy like some form of animal life. Its mobility, its capacity for liquid, spherical, magical transformation, has always caught my imagination. I have forgotten the name of Nehru’s sister, with whom we had lunch that day. My ill humor dissipated in her presence. She was a woman of great beauty, made up and dressed like an exotic actress. Her sari flashed with color. Gold and pearls heightened her air of opulence. I took to her immediately. It was quite a contrast to see such a refined woman eating with her hand, sticking her long, jeweled fingers into the rice and curry sauce. I told her I was on my way to New Delhi to see her brother and the friends of world peace. She replied that, in her opinion, all the people of India should join the movement.

At the hotel that afternoon I was given the packet with my papers. The double-faced police had broken the sealing wax they themselves had affixed to it after packing up the documents in front of me. They must have photographed them all, including my laundry bills. I eventually found out that the people whose addresses were in my book had all been visited and interrogated by the police. Among them was Ricardo Güiraldes’s widow, who was my sister-in-law then. This shallow woman was a theosophist, and her one passion was the Asian philosophies; she lived in a remote Indian village. She was subjected to a good deal of harassment because her name was in my address book.

In New Delhi I met with six or

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