RTW: Exchange in Chile

Pablo Neruda kicks ass

Let me enlighten you: the dude won a Nobel, wrote some excellent poetry, worked as an embassador for his country but most of all he seemed to have life completely figured out. Doesn't matter that he was a little weird and a communist -nobody's perfect, right?

On my tourist tour through the worthwhile places I took Patricia to Isla Negra, some two hours from Santiago. It is not an island despite the name, and it is mainly known for the fact that one of Neruda's houses is there. Now you ask yourself "how sorry is that?", but you should have seen the house! Unfortunately we were not allowed to take photos inside, but here are some from the outside:




First you see the house. It doesn't seem like much, but he really made everything like he wanted. The house is very long and narrow (he wanted it to remind him of Chile), with different parts. He designed his bedroom so that every day the first rays of sun would hit his head and the last ones his toes. He also had a "small" fixation on the sea and ships, so he included things like round windows, round ceiling and parts of actual ships in it (like a huge, 4-meter anchor in the backyard). And all of course making the most of the place where the house was situated: the second picture is what he would wake up to every day or the last thing he'd see from his bar at night. Get a load of that.

He was also the worst kind of collectionist (but never admittedly, he just said he was cosista, liked nice things) and therefore the house looks like a museum. His favourite things were the statue-like carvings people used to hang in front of old ships (don't know the word in English but you catch my drift, like ship's hood ornament) which were all over the place, but he had virtually everything from African bug collections to seashells, not to mention loads of art from his friends of the art circles around the world, including names like Picasso for example. Everything was done to the last detail, I have seriously never seen something like that (below one example of his "things").


He really knew how to live. Not just the house, but the tales of him living it to the maximum, organizing get-togethers in his house with his friends (he valued friendships a lot and considered his friends even in the house: a separate toilet for men that was covered with erotic pictures) and just basically enjoying life in every way imaginable. Too bad I do not have talent as a writer..

Later we visited also his other house down here in Santiago. It is called La Chascona (meaning someone who's hair is messed up), and it was equally impressing. Neruda built it as a house for his third wife, which at the moment of construction had to be kept a secret since he was still married to his second. There was even more imagination put into that one: he made passages in the yard that connect the three different sides of the house in a semichaotical manner. That gave the impression of his lovers messed-up hair, thus: La Chascona. There he included things from ships as well as in the other one, but he also constructed a river flowing on one side of the dinining room to get the feeling of being afloat. The bad thing was that the house suffered in the military coup as Neruda was a communist, for example 3 original Picassos were burned by the army.. Idiots.

All in all, he really had it all figured out. I don't really like poetry that much but after these eye-openers I'll have to get better acquainted with Neruda's work. He was the man in his time.

posted by Kassu @ 8:45 PM