Although Neruda’s Communist associations eventually forced him out of the Chilean foreign service, it was del Carril who was the more dependable comrade. She was also the more serious of the two when it came to left-wing politics. None the less, the relationship worked, largely because she became more than just his lover she was also his counsellor, mother-confessor, editor, secretary and factotum. He, “melancholy, depressive, distracted, twenty years younger, a poet of genius, largely misunderstood”. She, a woman “with an almost glamorous past, enriched by beauty, originality, intelligence, charm, and a world of talents to give”. “Could there be two persons more different?”, asks Sáez. The fascination was mutual, and within weeks the two had set up housekeeping together. Neruda arrived in the company of his friend Federico García Lorca, jostling past the likes of Vicente Aleixandre, Luis Cernuda, Jorge Guillén, Miguel Hernández and Luis Rosales. At one of his soirées, she was introduced to Pablo Neruda, who was then Chilean consul in Barcelona, but was better known as one of the great poets of the Spanish language. Through the good offices of the Argentine poet Rafael Alberti, she was immediately introduced to the city’s dazzling literary and artistic establishment, though it was through an elegant Chilean diplomat, Carlos Morla, that she was to make her most important contact. In 1934, she moved to Madrid, where the Second Republic was becoming the focus of international left-wing sympathy. In this, Aragon seems to have played an important role, not only steering her to the proper literature but sponsoring her entry into the French Communist Party. Shortly thereafter, her family fortunes experienced a sharp decline as a result of the Great Depression, and del Carril underwent a serious conversion to Communism. She mixed with luminaries like Marinetti and Saint-Exupéry, but also with Picasso, Le Corbusier, Eluard and Louis Aragon. In 1929, del Carril returned to Paris, where, as an attractive Argentine divorcee of independent means, she found immediate entrée into avant-garde cultural circles. When she returned to Buenos Aires, she was able to set up her own household, thanks to regular remittances from her father’s estate. When Delia discovered that he was carrying on a love-affair with a well-known Spanish ballerina in 1921, she simply packed her bags and decamped to Paris, without even bothering to arrange a financial settlement. Diehl turned out to be a jealous and pathologically possessive husband, and a hypocritical one as well. The two became firm fixtures of Buenos Aires’s “golden bohemia” in the boom years immediately following the First World War. In 1917, at the relatively advanced age of thirty-two, she married Adán Diehl, son of a wealthy ranching family somewhat similar to her own. For such a woman, however, a singing career, indeed any calling other than marriage, was unthinkable it is not surprising that at her first public recital her voice failed her altogether.
Her father’s suicide while she was still a teenager proved an unexpected liberation, in so far as her mother took her and a sister for extended seasons in Paris, where her vocal talent drew the attention of Gabriel Fauré.
Argentine aristocrat, dilettante, habituée of fashionable expatriate circles in Paris, footloose divorcee, militant and organizer of Communist literary fronts, first lady (and later Queen Mother) of the Chilean cultural Left, and accomplished artist-engraver - small wonder that del Carril needed to live more than 100 years to be all these things and more.īorn to one of the patrician landowning families of Buenos Aires in 1884, del Carril was a rebel from the start, refusing to conform to the narrow puritanical expectations of her family and class. In Todo debe ser demasiado, however, the Chilean playwright and novelist Fernando Sáez ( Allegro ma non troppo, El aire visible) has provided the other side of the story. An expert in airbrushing history, particularly his own, until now Neruda has proved to be quite effective in consigning his first wife to the black hole of memory. In his posthumously published autobiography, Confieso que he vivido (1974), the Chilean poet and Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda refers to Delia del Carril as his “perfect mate for eighteen years”, but only in passing. Reseña del libro «Todo debe ser demasiado, biografía de Delia del Carril» de Fernando Sáez que saldrá en mayo de 2021 con la editorial Fiction Advocate, traducido por Jessica Sequeira.
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