A few weeks after his "Yo acuso" speech in 1948, finding himself threatened with arrest, Neruda went into hiding. He and his wife were smuggled from house to house, hidden by supporters and admirers for the next 13 months.[42] While in hiding, Senator Neruda was removed from office, and in September 1948, the Communist Party was banned altogether under the Ley de Defensa Permanente de la Democracia, called by critics the Ley Maldita (Accursed Law), which eliminated over 26,000 people from the electoral registers, thus stripping them of their right to vote. Neruda later moved to Valdivia in southern Chile. From Valdivia, he moved to Fundo Huishue, a forestry estate in the vicinity of Huishue Lake. Neruda's life underground ended in March 1949 when he fled over the Lilpela Pass in the Andes Mountains to Argentina on horseback. He would dramatically recount his escape from Chile in his Nobel Prize lecture.
Once out of Chile, he spent the next three years in exile.[42] In Buenos Aires, Neruda took advantage of the slight resemblance between him and his friend, the future Nobel Prize-winning novelist and cultural attaché to the Guatemalan embassy, Miguel Ángel Asturias, to travel to Europe using Asturias' passport.[57] Pablo Picasso arranged his entrance into Paris, and Neruda made a surprise appearance there to a stunned World Congress of Peace Forces, while the Chilean government denied that the poet could have escaped the country.[57] Neruda spent those three years traveling extensively throughout Europe as well as taking trips to India, China, Sri Lanka, and the Soviet Union. His trip to Mexico in late 1949 was lengthened due to a serious bout of phlebitis.[58] A Chilean singer named Matilde Urrutia was hired to care for him, and they began an affair that would, years later, culminate in marriage.[58] During his exile, Urrutia would travel from country to country, shadowing him, and they would arrange meetings whenever they could. Matilde Urrutia was the muse for Los versos del capitán, a book of poetry that Neruda later published anonymously in 1952.
from "Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon" Full woman, fleshly apple, hot moon, thick smell of seaweed, crushed mud and light, what obscure brilliance opens between your columns? What ancient night does a man touch with his senses? Loving is a journey with water and with stars, with smothered air and abrupt storms of flour: loving is a clash of lightning-bolts and two bodies defeated by a single drop of honey.
From "Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon", Selected Poems translated by Stephen Mitchell (1997) [59]
While in Mexico, Neruda also published his lengthy epic poem Canto General, a Whitmanesque catalog of the history, geography, and flora and fauna of South America, accompanied by Neruda's observations and experiences. Many of them dealt with his time underground in Chile, during which he composed much of the poem. In fact, he had carried the manuscript with him during his escape on horseback. A month later, a different edition of 5,000 copies was boldly published in Chile by the outlawed Communist Party, based on a manuscript Neruda had left behind. In Mexico, he was granted honorary Mexican citizenship.[60] Neruda's 1952 stay in a villa owned by Italian historian Edwin Cerio on the island of Capri was fictionalized in Antonio Skarmeta's 1985 novel Ardiente Paciencia (Ardent Patience, later known as El cartero de Neruda, or Neruda's Postman), which inspired the popular film Il Postino (1994).[61]
