[Neruda] will keep on dying with the movement of our century and with us: a vast and profound death of incalculable significance, dying first here, later there, and then beyond; now in me and then in other men and women, without obvious rhythm, but really with the rhythm of the seasons, of the sea, the stars and the trees, through which he keeps growing, stretching, resting from his life, breathing at last all the atmosphere and all the earth, all of time, the components of his death….

I want to write a few things down about the friend I loved and the poet, who at the end faced up to the fact of his death, clothed as always in a magical complexity and simplicity. To my mind what is significant is how Neruda, dying so quickly, transformed this moment of truth into a fascinating and delicate balancing act of reserve, allusion, boldness, shyness, vertigo and tranquility. My evidence is … the ten poems which Neruda published in Crísis in August, 1973….

The first thing to be noted is the ordering of these ten poems: Neruda begins with "Integraciones," ends with "Una canción de amor" and sends special instructions to the publisher that both poems should be printed in italics. His death testimony is thus supported by two love songs, like a medal where the front and the back, the face and its shadow, sustain an affirmation of life. (p. 42)

[There are two poems] that refer directly to the theme of death, clearly reflecting his secret speculation: "Animal de luz" is a recognition of his solitude, of the closed circle, and of those who can no longer touch him in his innermost being. The poet has retired, followed by his escort of ocean waves and stars, an escort determined by time. What is left is at once small and vast. Terribly weary, cities resting on his shoulders and strings of countries around his neck, he flees, but not from the others who have already said and done all, but from his own interminable inner dialogue. "There is no more deciphering to do." It's clear. "Nothing more to say." Alone, surrounded by silence but also by the sound of the ocean, he concludes simply: That's all. The enormity of this conclusion falls at the end of the poem like a stone curtain. Neruda unhesitatingly turns out the lights. Great doer that he was in life, he prepares himself to work in the great inactivity that will be his death.

"Triste conción para aburrir a cualquiera" is a solitary game, a balancing of achievement against absurdity, of hours against emptiness; the waverings of man divided, the eternal rhythm of life and death. The simple force of the leitmotiv slips through his fingers like the beads of a rosary, a wise and melancholy litany which can nevermore arrive at conclusions.

In "Preguntas" there are four clues to man's initial and ultimate curiosity: the butterfly which doesn't know the signs of its wings, the bee unaware of its path, the ant ignorant of the number of casualties in its army, and the cyclone unable to remember its name while it is quiescent. Neither love nor knowledge offers answers to man who remains "looking at buried time." Only in doubt, at the edge of death, can man sustain certain hope: "Or is it that what I see from afar / Is that which I have yet to live?"

In summing up his poetic experience Neruda becomes aware of the personal dimension he gave to words, but without forgetting what effect words had on him. At first he names things, then he delves beyond into their essences, searching for the sound and the echo, that is, the secret action which reveals the meaning of matter. A virgin sound, a name seemingly chosen at random, "Oregano," is launched as the symbol of his battle against rhetoric, against the irrationality of rationalism, the vehement search for the magic word which will "not speak to anyone," but which will bring him to his destiny, an inner recess, substance in a sown-field, a flower blooming-decaying, oregano-defense, oregano-elation, oregano-revolver, a green and aromatic word brandished like a sword.

We seem to be approaching inescapable ends, affirmations that echo through a world in which old symbols open up and let their fruits fall to the ground. Both "El héroe" and "La situación insostenible" are images which represent the implacable assault of death. The hero is a man who passes through life stripped naked, an intransigent philosopher, unchanging before the claims of society, covered with black scales, civilization's last great nudist, reflecting in his nakedness the passage of history "like an old editorial—in a defunct newspaper," dead on his terrace due to the harshness of winter.

The second poem, "La situación insostenible," refers to a family, a household, a world, methodically appropriated and invaded by its dead, thrown off-kilter by likenesses of man, cheeky and intrusive deceased, who first enter the living room, filling the chairs, the tables, the family larders, break into the bathrooms where they polish skulls, push the kindly and patient Ostrogodos into the farthest reaches of the garden under the shade of an orange tree, there climbing into its branches and diligently proliferating, until the Ostrogodos have no choice but to submit and deliver themselves benignly and complacently to the cemetery. (pp. 44-6)

The eight poems in Crísis dealing with death bear no direct relation to two of Neruda's fundamental books: Residencia en la tierra and Canto general. In the first two volumes of Residencia, Neruda faces a death which is an essential part of the eternal movement of life, an implacable and progressive wearing-down, a seed destroying itself in a vague search, blind, constant, for an atmosphere not to be found again, for a stalk already cut; the image of a world in the present which carries in it the dead burden of a future mirroring past destructions. Neruda sees the world disintegrate before his eyes and knows himself to be part of this ruin that grows and envelops him from without and from within. (p. 48)

What we are dealing with is a mature conception of death, not as a unique, individualized event, but as a process gauged by its material consequences and metaphysical projections: destruction and emptiness. Neruda manages two powerful symbols: the sea and time. He submits them to collective experiences of the phenomenon of alienation and to a personal state of anguish. He will search incessantly the answer to this anguish, drawing himself closer to the peaceful nature of things that remain unconscious of their attrition and their voyage toward death: stones, sacks, trees, mirrors, papers, shackles.

In Canto general Neruda considers death historically, not as boundless history, but a daily chronicle of the deaths in which he is routinely clothed: an autumnal tree, demises which cover him like patches, a collective death speaking to him from the fortress of Macchu Picchu or slowly spanning the abysses of the Great Ocean. His testament is a literary document with political content, the balance sheet of a life's struggle, testimony of his faith in the Communist Party. (p. 49)

I think Neruda confronted the final enigma with total consciousness and solved it in terms of love and surrender to the materialistic dynamic of the world as he conceived it. What I want to emphasize is something very simple: Neruda was, above all, a love poet and, more than anyone, an unwavering, powerful, joyous, conqueror of death. That is why he asked the editor of Crísis to italicize his two love poems. What does he say in them? What didn't Neruda say about love in his poetic works?… Time has not been, nor shall it be, anything but a fragile ring; duration through tenderness has its own will and logic, that of the sea in its wise and constant motion. He will remain in what he calls "integrations," the most important of which is Matilde and all that is within her. "Canción de amor" is a ballad, a tender ritornello, a song to the youthful glory of tenderness, music and possession. (pp. 49-50)