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From: felipe%U.WASHINGTON.EDU@uchcecvm.cec.uchile.cl (        Felipe Berho)
Subject: Neruda, bueno pa'l diente
Original-To: Multiple recipients of list CHILE-L <CHILE-L@USACHVM1.BITNET>
Newsgroups: chile.chile-l
Distribution: chile
Date: Wed, 23 Dec 1992 16:17:44 CST

   Neruda, para mi, no solo fue/es El Poeta pero tambien un gran profeta
de los goces terrenales. Bien podriamos decir que Pablo Neruda hizo suyo
el motto de Marx de 'nothing human is alien to me...'. Bueno para los abrazos,
siempre acompa~nado de amigos, patiperro que recorrio medio mundo, su casa y
su mesa siempre abiertas...Siempre dispuesto a un buen vino y sobretodo a una
buena mesa. Su notoria aficion a la buena cocina puede, en parte, tener rela-
cion con una ninez y juventud con muchas privaciones materiales y especialmente
con sus vivencias, en la capital, de estudiante pobre de provincia viviendo
en pensiones de mala muerte y comiendo, a veces por semanas, solo papas y/o
cebollas y te.

 En el ultimo GRANTA (#41) llegado aqui a la U, aparece un breve relato de
Garcia Marquez en el que aparece Neruda. Les mando solo algunas lineas...
Me imagino que el original, en espa~nol, debe ser mejor pero espero les
guste anyway...

 Before the incident in Havana I met up with Frau Frida once more, in Barcelona,
in an encounter so unexpected that it seemed to me especially mysterious. It
was the day that Pablo Neruda set foot on Spanish soil for the first time since
the Civil War, during a stopover on a long sea journey to Valparaiso in Chile.
He spent the morning with us, big game hunting in the antiquarian bookshops,
buying eventually a faded book with torn covers for which he paid what must have
been the equivalent of two month's salary for the Chilean consulate in Rangoon.
He lumbered along like a rheumatic elephant, showing a childlike interest in the
internal workings of every object he came across. The world always appeared to
him as a giant clockwork toy.
  I have never known anyone who approximated so closely the received idea of a
Renaissance Pope--that mixture of gluttony and refinement--who even against his
will, would dominate and preside over any table. Matilde, his wife, wrapped him
in a bib which looked more like an apron from a barber-shop than a napkin from
a restaurant, but it was the only way to prevent him from being bathed in sauces
That day Neruda ate three lobsters in their entirety, dismembering them with the
precision of a surgeon, while concurrently devouring everyone else's dishes with
his eyes, until
 he was unable to resist picking from each plate, with a relish
and an appetite that everyone found contagious: clams from Galicia, barnacle
geese from Cantabria, prawns from Alicante, swordfish from the Costa Brava. All
the while he was talking, just like the French, about other culinary delights,
especially the prehistoric shellfish of Chile that were his heart's favourite.
And then suddenly he stopped eating, pricked up his ears like the antennae of a
lobster, and whispered to me: 'There's someone behind me who keeps staring at
me.'
  I looked over his shoulder. It was true. Behind him, three tables back, a
woman, unabashed in an old-fashioned felt hat and a purple scarf, was slowly
chewing her food with her eyes fixed on Neruda. I recognized her at once. She
was older and bigger, but it was her, with the ring made in the form of a
serpent on her first finger.
  She had travelled from Naples on the same boat as the Nerudas, but they had
not met on board. We asked her to join us for coffee, and I invited her to talk
about her dreams, if only to entertain the poet. But the poet would have none
of it, declaring outright that he did not believe in the divinations of dreams.
  'Only poetry is clairvoyant,' he said.