Neruda: for the love of women.

• Author: Magnet, Odette
• Position: Latitudes

He was Pablo Neruda's friend for four decades and a fellow Communist member. Chilean Volodia Teitelboim (2002 National Award for Journalism), author of Neruda, speaks about his Mend Pablo Neruda and the women in his life. On the centennial celebration of Neruda's birth, this interview with Teitelboim gives us a small window into Neruda's most intimate world, allowing us to explore through the eyes of a friend, the soul of the poet and the man.

Their friendship was a long and close one. Today, the writer says with a certain sadness, "His death interrupted our dialogue, our ongoing conversation. He was sick and death awaited him, but that was one thing we never talked about."

According to Teitelboim, Neruda always had a special way with women. Women are "our better half," he says, "but never predictable just because it's the other half." He adds with irony that "one of Neruda's regrets was not to have been able to love all two billion women who existed in his time, though he tried to do it through his poetry."

Neruda spent most of his life with two particularly significant women the Argentine painter Delia del Carril and the Chilean singer Matilde Urrutia. Delia was so constantly active that she had been nicknamed la hormiga, or the ant. Later, the poet would give her another name, "the neighbor." What we know is that she burst into Neruda's life and precipitated the end of his marriage with Maria Antonieta Agenaar Vogelzanz of Holland. Delia and Pablo began to live together, and in 1943 they were married in Mexico. (The marriage was not recognized by Chilean law.) in his book, Teitelboim says of her. "Deep down, she felt like she had to protect Many years alter they separated she continued to say that Pablo was a child ... She had to educate the adult child. Their conversation was primarily political. She opened his eyes."

Matilde Urrutia and the poet had a brief romance in 1946. They met at an outdoor concert in the Forest Park of Santiago. Mutual Mends introduced them. Teitelboim says: "Neruda planned to have a fling with this singer who had such impetuous laughter. And he had one. It didn't last long, though. He had too much work to do. The woman with laughter like birdsong drifted away." Three years later they met again in Mexico. There she had founded a school of music, and Neruda had become bedridden with thrombophlebitis. His friends came to see him and, of course, many women did as well. One of them was Matilde, and though he didn't...