Appointed Ambassador to France, the move to Paris was his salvation.
The relationship wreaked havoc on his marriage, solved only by leaving town. Out of her sight during a brief trip abroad for a facelift, Neruda fell in love with Alicia Urrutia, Matilde’s thirty-year old niece, who had come to stay at Isla Negra. Neruda received an annulment of his marriage to del Carril on a technicality and married Matilde in 1966. On his return to Chile, Neruda separated from del Carril when his relationship with Matilde came out in the open. Since divorce was still illegal in Chile, he and his muse hid their relationship for more than a decade, spending time in idyllic, out of the way places such as Capri where they unofficially exchanged vows. They became serious at the start of Neruda’s years of exile in Europe. Eight years his junior, Matilde had left her provincial home to become a singer and actress, career ambitions that ended when she entered Neruda’s realm. Born in the same region of Chile, she shared common roots though not his interest in politics or literature. Matilde Urrutia was the love of Pablo Neruda’s life. He remained married to her, though not faithful, for two decades. Haagenaar returned to the Netherlands with their daughter who died in 1942 at age eight in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands. By then, he had already begun seeing Delia del Carril, an Argentine painter twenty years his senior who shared his Marxist beliefs. They separated in 1936, after the birth of their daughter, born prematurely with Down’s syndrome. They returned to Chile when the consulate shut down and moved to Argentina when he took up a new diplomatic post there. They met during a lonely time in Neruda’s life while serving as consul in Java. Complicating matters, she was part Dutch, part Indonesian, so they did not share a language. Neruda married three times, first in 1930 to the attractive Maria Antonieta Haagenaar whom he called Maruca, a bank employee with whom he had little in common. Then there was Albertina who married another of Neruda’s friends and with whom Neruda unsuccessfully attempted to rekindle a relationship as his first marriage was disintegrating. Early on, after some years of learning about love, but mostly lust, he met Laura who married his friend while Neruda was serving as a diplomat in the Far East. Pablo Neruda loved many times in his life, emotions and experiences he poured into his poetry.
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