Isla Negra, Neruda's sea house

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sla Negra, an hour and a half drive from Santiago de Chile, is neither an island nor is it black. But the whole place has already kept the name that Pablo Neruda -who wasn't called that either- wanted to give to the house he built on this cliff-lined shore. The first impression is purely olfactory -a harsh stench of fermented algae, of iodine and sea salt that is smelled before it is seen. And the first thing one feels, hidden among the eucalyptus trees, is the joyful song of the small thrush in which perhaps the poet's spirit breathes.

Organic, irregular architecture, with a lot of wood and large windows, Neruda's house in Isla Negra is as Mediterranean as Chile's climate and vineyards. It was built by a Catalan refugee, the GATCPAC architect Germán Rodríguez Arias, who in that mythical issue of the magazine D'ací i d'Allà dedicated to the avant-garde -winter of 1934- had illustrated with photographs of Ibizan houses the article by the future famous Josep Lluís Sert, Miró's friend, precisely titled Architecture without style and without architect.

Neruda's house in Isla Negra is not a rationalist house -Le Corbusier type- or anything like that. It is simply a house like a second skin, made without a preconceived plan, by intuition and dreams. Like the shack that Gala and Dalí bought from Lidia in Portlligat.

Neruda and Dalí, in fact, operate in the same way as nature: growing from the inside out, creating structures -paintings, houses, poems- through a certain ordering of the analogy of forms.

This is the principle of sympathetic magic practiced by indigenous people, primitives, and poets: working by associations and by relationships or correspondences, invoking -or creating- what is not there by analogy with what is there. And always in an ascending sense. So it can be said that Neruda develops in a spiral, like the shells embedded in the cement floor of his house in Isla Negra.

The poet lived in this house like a captain on the bridge of his ship. "I need the sea Because it teaches me: / I don't know if I learn music or conscience: / I don't know if it's a wave or a deep being / or just a hoarse voice or a dazzling / supposition of pieces and ships."

Neruda wrote by hand, with green ink. Before and after writing, by hand and with green ink, he washed his hands as if following a strange ritual. Life, as is known, comes from water. And it goes away with water

Neruda wrote by hand, with green ink. Before and after writing, by hand and with green ink, he washed his hands as if following a strange ritual. Life, as is known, comes from water. And it leaves through water. And it is also the water where the poet feels like a fish in the center of an astrolabe, a living nucleus in the midst of primordial energy (as seen drawn in his own ex-libris, today the emblem of his foundation). That is why he seems so much a poet that we could consider a pre-Socratic Greek, a Mediterranean from the foundational era of myths and cosmogonies.

Hölderlin was perhaps right when he said that "All that remains is founded by poets". Every thing in Isla Negra Neruda left charged with meaning: so that it would be more enduring than his very existence.

He baptized everything, with the spell of the word, as if breathing life into each object. To animate the inanimate, isn't this the secret force of the shaman and the Homeric bard who sings of the sea and battles, heroes and the adventures of the human lineage?

Neruda is alive. And it is today, and not yesterday, when he speaks to us through writing: "The old agave of my house drew from the depths of its entrails its suicidal flowering. This plant, blue and yellow, gigantic and fleshy, lasted more than ten years next to my door, growing until it was taller than me. And now it blooms to die."

And now I imagine him ringing the bells as if warning sailors, confused by siren songs, of the reefs. Or in this entirely glassed-in viewpoint, he himself like a ship inside a glass bottle. Neruda watches this fishing boat with its hull painted green and red, working a few meters from the beach. And the men who dive, free-diving, with a simple plastic tube bitten between their teeth. They go down six or seven meters to pull bivalve treasures from the submerged rocks, like limpets or "locos," the Chilean clams...

Between the house and the sea - an impeccable navy blue, gleaming like a mirror - there is a large agave with its tall scape - or "quiote" - already dry and black, an unmistakable sign of death. But Neruda is alive. And it is today, not yesterday, when he speaks to us through writing: "The old agave of my house pulled from the depths of its gut its suicidal flowering. This plant, blue and yellow, gigantic and fleshy, lasted more than ten years next to my door, growing to be taller than me. And now it blooms to die."

Particularly, I have always been fascinated by this spectacular swan song of the agave. It is as much a part of my landscape as it is of 20th-century iconography. Native to America, like the Well-Planted, it sends a spear with clusters from its heart when it knows its life cycle is complete.

In Isla Negra, everything is imbued with Neruda's mischievous and playful spirit. It is a fascinating house-museum because it is the fruit of a great desire: the desire to build a space for poetry in the world. Neruda poeticizes everything. So here too, every object has its meaning and its history. And everything seems to have been placed in its spot with a profound sense of transcendence: the collections of shells and butterflies, the miniature ships and figureheads, the portraits of his friends, poets of all times: Whitman - Whitman above all - and Keats, Pushkin and Mayakovsky, Garcilaso and Miguel Hernández, Edgar Allan Poe, Verlaine...

His name was Neftalí Reyes and he built his own myth. His father was a railway worker (cheminot they say in French). Legend has it that as a child he had been very poor, but family photographs seem to contradict this. Neruda's communism passes, the poetry remains. Didn't the poet himself see it that way when he wrote (in chapter 9 of his memoirs) that "life is stronger and more stubborn than precepts. Revolution is life and precepts seek their own coffin"?