Waiting for Pablo and Matilde to come home

In October I visited two of Pablo Neruda's houses in Chile, La Chascona in Santiago and La Sebastiana in Valparaiso. The Nobel Prize winner designed himself both houses. Taking pictures into the houses is forbidden so I took this photo from the window of the top level of La Sebastiana, trying to capture in an image the sense of freedom and tranquillity that grew inside me in this house. 

La Sebastiana is a modest house but has an aura of serenity impossible to describe in any words. Pablo Neruda and Matilde Urrutia (his third wife with whom Neruda seemed to have been in love the most) decorated La Sebastiana with a lot of objects, collected from different parts of the world where they both traveled. In the living room they even had a wood horse bought from an old Parisian carousel. Every single object has its story and I lived one among their things.

Through the photo and Neruda's poem quoted below that I first read in his house, I want to share with you a piece of what I felt. It was like I was a good friend of them, spending a lovely afternoon at their house, waiting for Pablo and Matilde to come home...

"Love, a question

has destroyed you.

I have come back to you

from thorny uncertainty.

I want you straight as

the sword or the road.

But you insist

on keeping a nook

of shadow that I do not want.

My love,

understand me,

I love all of you,

from eyes to feet, to toenails,

inside,

all the brightness, which you kept.

It is I, my love,

who knocks at your door.

It is not the ghost, it is not

the one who once stopped

at your window.

I knock down the door

I enter your life

I come to live in your soul

you cannot cope with me.

You must open door to door,

you must obey me,

you must open your eyes

so that I may search in them,

you must see how I walk

with heavy steps

along all the roads

that, blind, were waiting for me.

Do not fear,

I am yours,

but

I am not the passenger or the beggar,

I am your master,

the one you were waiting for,

and now I enter

your life,

no more to leave it,

love, love, love,

but to stay."