There is a unique perspective given to life when a person leans their head against a bus window. If it is sunny, your cushion of hair absorbs the day through the glass. One of your eyes is inevitably stunted, so that your other has to cock itself up and out to survey the land. I was in this position of the ergonomics of head-against-bus-window contemplation, the wind trailing in faint little bits of seaweed smell from the upper deck, when the conductor abruptly stopped and I slammed my roving eye into the bar in front of said bus window. We were in the middle of nowhere along a rocky coast. Houses facing the ocean looked like sad bits of laundry left waving on the line, connecting this town seemingly to every other nameless, faceless coastal village in Central Chile. There wasn't even a designated bus stop: the driver had whimsically pulled over.
"Isla Negra," he grumbled in our direction. I plopped myself onto the sand-whipped pavement, holding my eye. The bus rumbled off.
Let me repeat that we barely had any clue where we were. Let me state that the lonely beauty of the place made me not really care. I was staring at an endless ice-blue sea on a cloudless day. The wind sounded off the rocks so that all I could hear was a sonic boom of wave after wave and a constant whistling. We bundled up and haphazardly wandered down the road.
I had come on the second installment of my commune with Pablo Neruda, (not even barely arguably) Chile's most famous poet. "I wait for you like a lonely house / till you will see me again and live in me. / Till then my windows ache," he had written once to a lover. Neruda was a natural architect and contractor; his words leave me sure that he viewed life, in part, as a constant construction project. I had come to see one of his favorite places - a "lonely house" built on the raw shore of a rough coast, so close to the edge of the world that the sea could spit at its windows.
Neruda loved the sea, though was famously afraid to ever set foot upon it. The entrance to Isla Negra contains a boat moored safely high up on a rocky outcropping. Neruda would sit in this boat, staring at the sea, and drink red wine - as the slow workings of alcohol had the same effect of being on the waves. His three houses in Santiago, Isla Negra, and Valparaiso all incorporate this nautical love into its archetecture and furnishings. Shipless figureheads find port off of ladder-stepped balconies in Neruda's living rooms; the curve of kitchen ceilings echoes the ribs of a boat's waistline; and knotted wormwood is found in abundance in every inch and corner of his homes.
The houses are as whimsical as I would have imagined Neruda to be, and show that he was a man who enjoyed, above all, the pleasure of enjoyment. He drank out of stained glass cups, saying that water tasted better when in a colored chalice; he placed old toys about the house, saying that "the man who doesn't play has lost forever the child who lived in him and who he will miss terribly"; and the portraits and statues he hangs about his houses all are positioned to be staring at a portrait or statue of the opposite sex, so that they will "not feel lonely."
Most enchanting is how his words come alive as you walk around the house. Every spot, every nook, has been inscribed in his house of poetry, and it is obvious that these houses, in a way, built his poetry, and vice-versa. Just stand at his desk, looking through a porthole, to see his muse - the sweet, forlorn feeling of Home constructed in harmony with nature; the fragile beauty of manmade composition in the unforgiving path of the sweep of the sea.
Neruda was laid to rest after a battle with cancer shortly after the takeover of the country by Pinochet's military coup. His dream of a functional Communist party in Chile died with a gunshot to Allende's head. Flowers grow thickly out of his grave at Isla Negra, facing the sea, the gravestone inscription eroded into a faint echo of his name, once carved deeply into the rock.
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