From "The Splendid City"...

A few moments from my novel about Pablo Neruda in great danger in the Andes Mountains....

1: PROLOGUE

Pablo Neruda stood at a podium, having just received the Nobel Prize. He looked down at the gold medallion in his hand, possessed by so few. The likeness was a kindly rendition of the man who had invented dynamite.

The audience’s applause had proven as respectful of Pablo as could be. They had dressed conservatively and well. They represented the world of letters at its best and had just given him the most prestigious award that any person of letters could ever receive. The hall rose up above them grand, august, and formal, lit in such a way as to emphasize the serious congratulation that his work had garnered for him.

Pablo fidgeted nervously about his words. He would speak of his poetry, of course, his cherished verse. And the politics, to be sure, his troublesome Communism. But now in 1971 (so late in life) and here in Stockholm (so far away), he wished really to speak about something else, of which these people knew nothing, and of which he knew…well, everything. I’ll tell them what they’ve come to hear, he thought. But now…just now—

“My speech will be a long journey.” He touched the lapel of his coat, glancing down at the boutonniere, smoothing the lapel a moment as he rehearsed one last time the story he wished to give to them. “A voyage I once took through faraway, antipodean regions, for that reason not much different from the landscape and solitudes here of the North.”

The rhythms were coming to him. Yes. The escape.

“I speak of the extreme south of my country.” The far south, yes, he thought. But even more, the nearer east, the Andes cordillera with its terrifying mountains…loving, ghostly mountains…so brutal…splendid but beyond difficult…merciless.

“We who live in Chile must go so far to touch the South Pole with our boundaries, that it seems to us very like the geography here of Sweden, whose head brushes against the snowy north of the planet.” Pablo smiled, enjoying the playful metaphor he had just made. His breathing began to hurry, though. Suddenly he was in danger, there, again. “Down there, in those far reaches of my country…” He felt his voice grasping for the occasion, his wish to tell the story. “Where events, that are now themselves quite forgotten, once took me, one must cross …” He laid a hand on his chest. “And I had to cross …” He took in a breath, still astonished by his having survived. “The Andes mountains.”

2: PABLO SEALS HIS FATE

Things were looking up. The war in the Pacific was over. The Japanese had been pushed back and defeated. The English and Australians in Malaya, the New Zealanders as well, Indians from the sub-continent, Gurkhas from Nepal—and, yes, Pablo had to admit it—even the United States, had all prevailed. Fascism in Europe had been ground under by Comrade Stalin and the glorious Soviet victors, with a bit of minor help from the English and—here, too, he had to be fair—from the United States.

And now in Chile, the Left led in the election polls, and its leader had summoned Pablo to a meeting. In Pablo’s opinion Gabriel González Videla stood knocking at the door to greatness as a statesman and politician, his hand on the very doorknob itself. The only thing needed was victory in the 1946 election, which was about to take place. Here, now, the man himself gestured to Pablo to sit down in a large leather chair on the other side of an oak desk. The Chilean flag hung from a standard behind Gabriel. He would soon be president of the nation, and he had just made Pablo a remarkable offer.

“I know you’re a Communist.”

“Not yet.”

“Yes.” Gabriel looked aside, clearing his throat. “Good old Uncle Joe…”

Pablo grinned. After the Spanish Civil War and now, after Hitler, he felt that Communism had proven to be the only real defense against Fascism, so why wouldn’t Joseph Stalin deserve congratulation? He had beaten the German back from the gates of Stalingrad. He had taken the fight into Berlin itself, destroyed the place and murdered Hitler in his bunker. Altogether memorable.

“I need the Communists, Pablo. Without them, I don’t have the votes.”

“I know.”

“And having you in our camp, the finest poet on this continent, and a Communist to boot…”

Pablo had grown used to praise. His friend Pablo Picasso had declared that Pablo Neruda was the greatest poet of the 20^th century, in any language. He had been elected to the Chilean Senate two years earlier. He was famous, in and out of his own country.

But this was special.

“I want you to be my head of information and campaign manager…and, of course, to keep your own much-deserved office as senator.” Gabriel sat back, gathered his hands together on his stomach, and studied Pablo’s response. A devoted leftist, Gabriel González Videla was the best man in all of Chile to take the reins of government. He was honest, forthright, and truthful in every respect…and he needed the Communists. “You’ll be one of the most important men in this country.” He placed his hands on the desktop and searched Pablo’s eyes. “I need you, Pablo. The country needs you.”

Gabriel was a formal man, not a lot of fun, not really to Pablo’s tastes. He didn’t seem to like cocktail parties much, which to Pablo was a minus. Gabriel’s education had been spotty. He spoke with slovenly diction. He didn’t know a lot about the imagination. Maybe nothing about it, Pablo thought. He dressed dully and stiffly, in gray or black suits and gray or black ties. Pablo had never had a meal with him, but he imagined that, if Gabriel’s eating were anything like his speeches, he had the same things for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day. Toast, no butter, water…

“We’ve come a long way, haven’t we, Gabriel?”

“We have indeed.”

“I remember just a few years ago, up in the desert, when I was running for the Senate.” Pablo’s voice wandered into silence.

“Pretty rough up there, isn’t it?”

“Has been forever.” Pablo looked out the window, suddenly in a reverie of the battle tank that had come to listen to his poetry. “Very good people, though.”

—

Pablo held his hands out to the wood stove. Cold filled the shack, and speaking to these men was difficult. They were attentive, but they seemed impatient, even stolidly disdainful, as though Pablo's voice were just another shovelful of management indifference, the usual sort of shit—they could be heard to mumble—that comes from anyone who runs the show.

That offended him, since he had had to argue loudly with the manager of the mine for the right just to speak with these men.

Pablo admired miners, especially one whom he had met just today...the kid Josecito. An atacameño Indian from the far northern desert, he now sat with the others, wrapped in a wool poncho against the cold, weakened by the crisis through which he had gone several hours earlier.

What miners did was one of the most difficult tasks any worker could be given. Indeed, they often died doing it. Pablo was also, always, mindful of the fact that the United States owned the copper operations in Chile, that companies with names like Braden and Kennecott had paid a few high Chilean officials, the president and such, a couple million dollars each. It was a fortune for them, but essentially nothing for the Chilean people. The companies had then extracted the ore and sent it off—summarily—to the U.S.

Pablo imagined that, in the chambers of government in Santiago, champagne glasses had been raised high. Miners’ rights? What miners?

Working down there could be disaster enough, in such harrowingly dark, claustrophobic tunnels where movement itself was of necessity cramped and painful. Then from time to time miners perished, so thoroughly trapped that even their prayers were choked into black submission.

Here in this northern region, in the Atacama Desert, it rained less than a tenth of an inch a year. So, above ground, it was almost as bad as below ground. There were few people, but those there were—the men working the mines, and their families—were a major voting block. The candidate Pablo, who was on his very first campaign swing for senator, who had almost never traveled in the Atacama and who had never been down a mine, felt that he should be aware of the dangers these men faced. So, he had just this morning descended into the Braden Paraiso #1 mine. The manager, an idiot from Santiago dressed in slacks, a shirt and a tie, whose name Pablo could not remember—he actually did not wish to remember it—had told him that it was against regulations for a non-employee to go down into the mine. Pablo, in front of a group of miners just then walking toward the entrance to begin their shift, had objected.

"Amigo, if I’m to represent these men in Congress, I must understand what they do.” The miners had stopped shuffling toward the entrance, pickaxes and shovels resting on their shoulders. They were watching. "And besides, I checked when I was in Santiago. They said they'd contact the bosses in New York and ask, and that we'd get a response in a couple months, probably...maybe…sometime after the election." A rumble of understanding emerged from the miners. "But in the meantime, I know for a fact that there is no such regulation, since my opponent was here last week paying a visit."

A larger rumble, this one of approval—of laughter actually—came from the miners. As one of them handed Pablo a helmet with a lantern on it, Pablo thanked the manager, clapped the miner on the back, and headed with the group to the entrance.

The mine closed in on Pablo like death. This was his first time ever in such a place, and his blood felt to have been thickened in its progress through his heart by the heat of the mine as they descended. He knew this was just an illusion. But what an illusion! he thought. With the rising temperature in the mine, his blood would slowly turn to hot red sludge, its wet oiliness racing down any passageway. What would that actually feel like? he wondered as he and the miners descended in an iron wagon on a pair of rails. He looked ahead, down the narrow tunnel the walls and ceiling of which were held up by hand-hewn wooden beams. The beams were thick and ruggedly tied to one another by black rope. Yet, as the wagon proceeded down the steep tunnel into the darkness, the beams appeared so fragile that Pablo saw himself and the miners lost forever were they to collapse, as they appeared—to him, at least—ready to do.

He imagined that he was a single drop of blood, the vital molecules of which grew more and more slippery as the temperature moved higher and higher. Finally, in his last living movement, his entire body decomposed and burbled into separate puddles and blurts, a tropic mess, quite dead.

"Don't be scared, amigo," one of the miners said, touching his shoulder.

"I am.”

"That's all right. We all are."

They went down and farther down, finally passing the point at which Pablo felt he was as frightened as he could ever be. But he became even more frightened. He sensed his heart, the only thing that by now he could really feel, banging in him as though it were being struck by a hammer. The car continued descending. The air was so close that it could hardly be breathed, as, finally, the car arrived at the end of the rail line. Sweat careened from Pablo everywhere. An air hammer, manned by a very small person bent over by the closeness of the conical chamber in which he was working beyond the end of the rail tracks, was battering the stone. As Pablo stepped from the car, a cloud of rock dust burst from the hole, and he fainted.

A few miners gathered around him, and as he came to, he fought them off. "I'm all right. Leave me alone."

"But don Pablo—"

"I want to see this. Leave me be!"

After a moment, Pablo crawled up the hole a few feet, to get as close as he could to the air hammer, despite the thickness and smell of the dust that was blowing from the hole. Like all the others so close to the actual mining, he had placed a folded cloth mask over his nose and mouth. One of the miners had handed him a pair of goggles, like those the American fighter pilots wore in World War II movies, of which Pablo was a fan. He could barely see through them.

The hammer-operator's entire body shook with the force of the machine. His clothing was as black as the dust swirling from the hole in the rock. His hands, the back of his neck, the helmet he wore...all black, as, Pablo imagined, he himself must now be. Wet blackness clung to him like glue. The noise of the hammer buffeted the very center of the poet's hearing. He placed his hands over his ears and attempted looking over the miner's shoulder. The hammer's bit slashed at the rock, and the miner worked it in and out of the crevices in the wall. After another few moments of ratcheting noise and distress, the miner turned off the hammer, motioned to Pablo and the others that he was coming out of the hole, and backed away from the wall.

The fellow had panicked. He coughed, choking, although when others tried helping him, he pushed them away, grasping at the cloth over his mouth and nose. He pulled it from his face, and black spittle, then hot black vomit, tumbled from his mouth. He threw his own goggles to the dirt, and then went down to his knees. Two other miners knelt next to him, pounding him on the back. His coughing came in liquid growling hacks, a dog drowning. He suddenly collapsed, writhing, until the others were able to roll him over on his back and minister to him.

"Josecito," one of them shouted. "José!"

Josecito held his hands over his chest, his legs kicking back and forth as he tried to get control of his breathing. Finally, after several minutes, he calmed, acquiescing to the embrace of the other miner, like a child in the arms of his father.

The hammer remained behind in the hole. Pablo looked back at it, the rubber hose connected to its stock, leading back up the tunnel to some source of forced, cool air. It was constant air, too, of the sort that had not been given to José. The machine lay on its side, as covered with dust as José had been. Black and gray, of a seemingly angry, metallic imperviousness, the hammer appeared wounded. More accurately, it had died. The steel protuberances, the trigger and the aggressive, pointed bit seemed to Pablo to have lost their souls. Without the miner to give it breath, it was just a lot of metal, organized for force that had now been angrily abandoned. The machine had served as a slave to indentured servants, therefore, as a slave's slave.

Pablo discovered that Josecito was a child.

"Gracias, tio Mateo," he said to the miner holding him. His high voice had not yet changed. "Don't tell my mother...."

——

Reviews of The Splendid City

"Terence Clarke (The Notorious Dream of Jesus Lazaro, New York and others) writes with clarity and precision, and at its best, his prose captures the lyricism of Neruda's poetry itself. —Kirkus Reviews

--"In this beautiful novel, Terence Clarke recounts the gripping episode in which Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda, running for his life, escaped on horseback from Chile to Argentina, across the Andes Mountains at the beginning of the treacherous winter of 1949." — LatinoBooks.Net

"The Splendid City is a splendid book." —Alev Lytle Croutier, author of The World Behind the Veil, Taking the Waters, and Seven Houses.

“If you crave high-intensity thrillers with a streak of poetic passion, this is your novel!—Beatrice Bowles, author of A Ring of Riddles and Spider Grandmother's Web of Wonders; Grammys voting member.

Copyright © 2019 Terence Clarke. All rights reserved. This novel is available on order everywhere.

Note: No Plagiarism Software, also known as Artificial Intelligence, was used in the composition of this piece.

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