Chilean Poet--and His Legacy--Lives On Amid Renewed Interest in His Works

The poet and the carpenter worked together for 25 years.

The poet was Pablo Neruda, the Nobel Prize winner who championed working people and considered himself just another craftsman. The carpenter was Rafael Plaza, a sturdy man with a leathery face who built Neruda’s beach house.

Their never-ending work-in-progress was a house full of eclectic treasures with a view of the surf dancing on rocks. At night, Plaza would go to Neruda’s study, and the poet would sketch the latest project, such as a desk fashioned by Plaza from a wooden ship’s hatch that Neruda had found on the beach.

“He liked things like that,” Plaza recalls. “In the morning, he would sit nearby. He wrote, and I did my work.”

Neruda died 23 years ago. His house and his memory were neglected during a 17-year dictatorship. But today the house is a museum--a national treasure in which there has been a surge of interest because of the acclaimed movie “Il Postino” (The Postman), which features a portrayal of Neruda. The ensuing Neruda boom has benefited a well-organized effort here to celebrate his legacy.

And in a country where poetry was once inseparable from political conflict, Chileans--along with the rest of the world--have rediscovered Neruda as part of their democratic healing process.

“The clamorous success of the movie has brought attention to Neruda’s works,” says Juan Agustin Figueroa, director of the Pablo Neruda Foundation. “The results have been extraordinary.”

More than 130,000 visitors from Latin America, Europe, the United States and elsewhere trooped through the museum in the fishing village of Isla Negra last year.

Here and in two other Neruda houses, the Neruda Foundation operates veritable cultural centers with a particularly Chilean combination of taste, organization and entrepreneurial verve. The museums sponsor poetry prizes and host concerts, exhibits and literary workshops; they sell books and tapes of Neruda’s poetry along with posters, pens, postcards and artwork.

On the other hand, just as the poet had requested, Chilean copper miners and others of modest means enter free or at reduced rates.

The Isla Negra home was a landmark for readers of Neruda even before the movie, which, although based on a Chilean novel, transplants Neruda’s house to an Italian island. Neruda wrote much of his poetry in his rambling stone-and-wood house.

He was known as a romantic, hospitable, playful man of extremes, and the house has his prodigious personality. It bursts with paintings, sculptures, books, decorations and curiosities acquired during his travels, such as giant figurines from ships’ prows.

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In both his poetry and his will, Neruda said he wanted to open the house to the public after his death. He and his third wife, Matilde, set up a foundation to administrate his writings and his houses. The other two houses are in the capital, Santiago, and the coastal city of Valparaiso.

But the military coup shortly before Neruda’s death in late 1973 shattered the plans. Because Neruda was an ally of the ousted socialist president, Salvador Allende, he was buried hurriedly in a pauper’s grave in Santiago. Soldiers menaced his mourners and looted his house in Santiago.

“They destroyed it,” says Plaza, grimacing at the memory. By coincidence, a green military helicopter circles low over Isla Negra as he talks.

Although the house at Isla Negra was not vandalized, it was closed during most of the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. The return of democracy in 1990 enabled Figueroa, who was Neruda’s family lawyer and a Cabinet minister in the new government, to proceed with his long-delayed task.

At the poet’s behest, the foundation donated Neruda’s books and papers to universities. The houses were restored to the way they looked when Neruda was alive.

And in a ceremony full of emotion and symbolism in 1992, Chile’s president oversaw the belated burial of the remains of Neruda and his wife in a tomb near the beach house. It was the poet’s written wish: “Bury me at Isla Negra/in front of the sea I know, in front of every wrinkled place/of rocks and waves that my lost eyes/will never see again.”

The simple, gentle “Il Postino,” in which the Neruda character teaches a postman about love and poetry, did not cause much of a stir in Chile at first.

Then came Neruda-mania. The film broke box-office records and won awards. There were brisk sales of his poetry and of Antonio Skarmeta’s “Burning Patience,” the novel that inspired the film.

“There is a saying that no one is a prophet in his own land,” Figueroa says. “The resurgence came about because of the success overseas.”

Visitors to the Isla Negra museum find a spot both tranquil and inspiring, even as it withstands hundreds of visitors a day in peak season. Because Neruda stipulated that the museum employ the village craftsmen who worked for him, the visitors also find Rafael Plaza.

The carpenter is 70, but he still walks a mile down the coastal road to work in the morning. For Plaza, every object tells a story, like the rowboat that he set up next to the bar so Neruda and his friends could sit in it, sip drinks and imagine themselves at sea.

Chilean intellectuals engage in debates about what Neruda would think of Chile if he were alive. What would he say about the embrace of free-market orthodoxy that has produced prosperity? Would he sympathize with Chile’s small and hard-line Communist Party or the larger reformist parties of the modern left?

That kind of talk is a bit abstract for Plaza. But he is confident that if Neruda saw his house today, “he would like it, because it is just the way it was before.”