Ode to the Mango: My Dinners with Neruda
29 January 2015
The one time I visited Santiago de Chile—it was July 1991, winter in the southern hemisphere, and the days were sunny, cold and crisp—I made the pilgrimage to Pablo Neruda’s house on the coast, in a place called Isla Negra. My reason for this trip to the Cono Sur—I would also visit Buenos Aires—was a conference at the university in Santiago. I was staying at the family home of my friend the poet Cecilia Vicuña and was warmly welcomed by her community of poets. One of the young poets, I don’t remember his name, drove a small group of us to Isla Negra, or Black Island. It was not an island, or even a peninsula, so when I asked why it was called that, someone remarked it was because of the color of the sand. I guess it felt like an island? Anyway, Latin American friends from my New York days had told me stories about visiting the maestro at this rambling wooden shack perched above a wild Pacific, generously decked with oversized toys and careful collections of beetles, the parts of old ships, and other items, some of them curiosities but mostly everyday things, like miniature glass bottles, which took on a magnified dimension in the domestic aura of the bard.