A Mystery That Ends In Poetry
After 40 Years, A Tape of Pablo Neruda Is Finally Played Again

By Darragh Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 7, 2006

The Pablo Neruda tape went missing sometime in the past 40 years, and no one even knew until 1999. That's when Felix Angel became "obsessed with lack of memory" -- and with finding a tape he wasn't even sure existed.

The great Chilean poet had given a reading in Washington in 1966, and Angel, curator of the Cultural Center at the Inter-American Development Bank, figured it must have been taped. He tracked down the historian and old friend of Neruda's who had introduced the poet.

But Leopoldo Castedo had just died of a heart attack.

Angel asked around at the IDB, where Neruda had been scheduled to give the reading, but no one could help. He quizzed IDB retirees and former employees. None of them knew a thing about the tape.

His search became, he says, "almost like 'The Da Vinci Code.' "

Last night, at the IDB auditorium, Neruda's voice rang loud and clear. Back at the bank where he was supposed to have spoken 40 years ago, lines for the free reading stretched out the door and down New York Avenue NW, and hundreds people filled the three-level auditorium until it was standing room only.

Angel did find a six-inch reel-to-reel tape on which Neruda's deeply cadenced voice rings like church bells. On the hour-long tape, he reads 15 poems in Spanish.

He speaks of love -- "tonight I can write the saddest lines. / I loved her, and sometimes she loves me too." And loathing -- "Why, why do we hate so much / those who hate us?"

He speaks of his " mamadre" --"Dear more-mother, / I was never able to say stepmother! . . . Life made you into bread, / and there we fed on you." And his "Blunt Father" -- "Captain of his train, of the cold dawn, / And scarcely had the sun / begun to show itself / Than there he was with his beard . . . And his duty to geography."

He speaks of death, then does his "Ode to Socks," this pair of "wild socks" that "were so beautiful that for the first time / My feet seemed to me unacceptable, / Like two decrepit firemen, unworthy of that / Embroidered fire, / Of those shining socks."

It was June 1966, five years before he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Neruda, a member of the Chilean Communist Party, was to speak at the IDB, but it was the height of the Cold War and anticommunist feeling ran deep among the bank's employees. The IDB president was forced to stand "in the doorway of the bank and, despite the protests and sirens, announced through a bullhorn that the ceremony would take place at the Hotel Mayflower." There, Castedo introduced the poet, and the reading was "a colossal success."

All of that, from bullhorn to success, is how the historian described it 33 years later in a speech at the IDB that referred to the Neruda reading. Angel listened intently and decided that a tape of Neruda's reading must have been made.

Thus began five years of obsession. Not until the end of 2004, months after the Cultural Center had celebrated the centennial of Neruda's birth, did Angel's persistence pay off: A retiree was helping the curator when Angel began talking, again, about memory.

Angel, a 57-year-old artist and architect originally from Colombia, traces his obsession with memory to "the fact that I'm a Latin American, and we live in a constant state of forgetfulness. . . . We seem to repeat many mistakes. It's not because we want to, but it's because the present is always the main concern."

He mentioned the Neruda reading to the man in his office.

"You know what? I think I have that tape," the man answered.

"I jumped from my chair," Angel remembers. He was elated, then dubious. "I didn't believe it. Could he show me the tape?"

The man -- whose identity Angel is protecting because he doesn't want him troubled for having taken the tape from someone who'd threatened to throw it out -- seemed almost relieved to know what to do with it.

When Angel finally held it, he saw that it was from "one of those old recording machines at the time, and of course, my first thought was: It's ruined." They sent it to a specialist and were told it was in good shape, except for a hiss. Still, the voice was "very clear," Angel says, "so we decided to remaster the tape."

The result played last night to a thrilled audience.

"He's a hero to all Latin American artists," said Jeffrey Palacios, a project coordinator for Big Brothers Big Sisters, who held a paperback anthology, "55 Latino Poets." He had nearly forgotten about the reading and stopped in on his way to Hecht's to buy his brother a birthday present. "He lived a triumphant and tragic life."

"Pablo Neruda," exhaled Gloria Elliott, the Chilean mental health director of La Clínica del Pueblo in Adams Morgan. "Of course, of course." No other reason was necessary to come hear the great man's poetry and his voice, which she described lovingly as "very slow and melancholic."

Once last night's reading ended, with applause in the auditorium echoing applause on the tape, Georgette Dorn of the Library of Congress stood up to accept the long-sought tape for her collection. She recalled Neruda's giving a reading at the library two days after the Mayflower reading.

But what the poet read at the Library of Congress was quick and almost simple when compared with the rich and long version Neruda presented for the IDB. Holding tight to the IDB tape, Dorn said, "It's much better than what he read at the library."

In the summer of 1966, she was a 20-year-old who had just come to work at the library. That June day, Neruda did his reading, had lunch with poet Stephen Spender, then returned to Dorn's office and asked, she said, "Can I see the papers of Walt Whitman?"

There was a big reception at the Chilean Embassy, Dorn sad. But the poet spent the afternoon, in the library, reading.