The house Neruda built in 1953, in Santiago’s Bellavista neighbourhood, was christened “La Chascona” (“the uncombed”) in honour to Matilde Urrutia, his secret lover until 1955 and later his third wife.

In her memoirs, Matilde remembers an afternoon when they were walking around the neighbourhood and found a steep piece of land. The bushes covered its limits with the hillside.

- We were as if charmed by a water sound – Matilde remembers-, it was a real waterfall coming by the canal, on top of the place. Pablo was plethoric with joy. “This is the most beautiful thing I‘ve ever seen”, he told me. Long after, in his poem “La Chascona”, from the 1967 book La Barcarola, Neruda would speak of “the water that runs writing in a language of its own”, and of the bushes “that guarded the place with its bloodthirsty branches”.

When architect Germán Roríguez saw that vertical lot, he affirmed that Matilde and Pablo would remain condemned to spend their lives climbing stairs up and down. He showed them a project with the house oriented towards the sun. Neruda turned it to the other side to leave the house facing the mountains. From that moment on, the poet kept arguing with the architect and changing the blueprints. He ordered cypress logs from the south chose the woods, changed details. In the end, Germán Rodríguez had to acknowledge that the house that had been built was more Neruda’s than his own.

In the beginning, nothing but a living room and a bed room were built. No more was needed. Those were the years when Matilde lived alone in the house. “I worked all day in my garden – she remembers- , there wasn’t a tree or a plant not chosen and grown by my hands”.

A kitchen and a dining room were built from 1953 to 1955. A bar and a library were added later. Because Rodríguez Arias had gone back to Europe, the last additions were made by architect Carlos Martner in 1958.

Martner points out that Neruda didn’t build houses following the classic procedures of beginning with the design of functional, spatial and structural blueprints: “Sometimes he bought windows and some furniture in demolitions. He had these elements before defining the project. I remember once he had a window, a painting and a sofa he liked very much. He wanted to create a space that included all those things, with the half point window facing the mountains. He wanted to adapt the space to the object, the whole to the part. (*1)

Miguel Rojas Mix points out that the distribution of objects in Neruda’s houses didn’t serve ornamental purposes. It was more about creating environments. “Neruda models his spaces in an absolutely personal manner far form the seigniorial and bourgeois tastes. He creates an inner environment of intimacy as opposed to outbound spaces imposed by publicity and prestige criteria”.(*2)

The story of “La Chascona” had a sad end and then a resurrection. On September 23rd, 1973, Neruda died at Santa María clinic in Santiago. Same as “La Sebastiana”, “La Chascona” had been victim of the most brutal vandalism. To make evident what was going on in Chile, Matilde Urrutia insisted on waking the poet in the house they had built together.

Instead of robbing, the purpose of those who attacked “La Chascona” was to destroy. They interrupted the drain running through the yard to flood the house. The same water that ran “writing in a language of its own”, the flow that amazed the poet the first time he saw this piece of land, became a mud hole twenty years later. Wood boards had to be laid over the mud to take Neruda’s body into the house.

But “La Chascona” was reborn and today is a house museum with the purpose of showing the poet’s life by giving access to the private environments where he lived and created.

(*1) In “Pablo Neruda y la arquitectura”, Cuadernos de la Fundación Pablo Neruda, n° 40, Santiago, 2000.