Valparaiso: a labyrinth of colour

Pablo Neruda believed that drink tasted better from coloured glass. He filled his houses with glass of all colours and shapes, and walking through his old rooms, passing through the fields of colour cut by each glass, it’s hard not to feel a kind of wonder and contentment. Walking around Valparaiso is very similar; the colour Neruda applied strategically to his house overlooking the city has exploded and run in all directions, and then faded and chipped and washed back over itself all over again, and all this conflicting colour gives the city a sense of fun, of vivacity and wonder.

The open air museum in Valparaiso is a collection of murals scattered over one of the city’s hills. They are grand and mostly abstracted; they look like old socialist monuments. Nowadays though they are looking awfully faded and abstract and sombre. They have been eclipsed by the vibrant flourishes of more recent artists, who with or without permission have been turning the entire city into an open air museum of clashing colours and forms.

It is not only the artists that contribute to the mad vibrancy of the city though. Geography plays its part; Valparaiso is a port city, built into a fingernail of land between ocean and steep hills. As it expanded the only place to go was up and over the hills. Impossibly steep and crooked streets loop over these. They run into each other or flirt without every meeting. Getting from A to B in Valparaiso usually involves a lot of unexpected ascents, descents, hair pin bends and doublings-back. It is not a city for people in a hurry, or for people who like to walk in straight lines.

Valparaiso isn’t for everyone, and for those who do prefer straight lines, as well as proper beaches, hotels and malls, nearby Vina del Mar would no doubt seem like a lot more fun. Valparaiso advertises itself as the Bohemian heart of South America, and with that comes a certain atmosphere. When it rains the tortuous streets become steep torrents of water; drains flood and turds float themselves down towards the port; the many street dogs get soggy and share awnings with stranded students; the city’s cats clamour and yowl their misery. The prettiness of the city is of a dingy, scruffy kind. Spray paint on corrugated iron and concrete.

I returned to Valparaiso, squeezing in a few more days there before I flew out of South America. I did nothing appreciably different from what I had done on my first visit. If anything I explored less and stuck to the known areas. Even so I found new streets, new art, new houses clinging to the precipitous hills, new street dogs. Every little wander brought new corners to explore, new cafes and bars to be frequented, new people to know. Two trips to Valparaiso proved as inadequate as one; the many twists and quirks of this labyrinth need serious time to explore in detail. New murals and characters appear, old ones fade and are worn away. The colours shift, glow and dim like the ordered rows of glass in Neruda’s house. Always there is colour in the labyrinth though, and after two jaunts through the city it really does feel as though brightly painted streets, like tinted glass, produce stronger human responses. Valparaiso, for all its ongoing change and permutation, remains a city of constant wonder and fascination.

The houses that Pablo built

When Pablo Neruda’s heart stopped in 1973 it could have signified the death of poetry in Chile. Augusto Pinochet’s coup was smothering the country in fear, silencing voices of dissent, ushering in a terrified philistinism. Neruda was the country’s most beloved poet, their recently-crowned Nobel Laureate, who had survived past proscription to captivate his country with fifty years worth of poems. Then Pinochet broke his heart. 

The country’s love for their poet, however, could not be snuffed out by the dictator. At the poet’s funeral mourning mixed with protest. Although his works were banned they were smuggled into the country from Argentina. His three houses – in Isla Negra, Valparaiso and Santiago – were shut up with their treasures until the reign of the dictator ended and it was safe to adore the poet again.

Once the dictatorship had ended these three houses were restored and eventually opened to the public. When they were, the wealth and vibrancy of the poet’s life was put on display for all to enjoy; poetry, if it ever had really been run out of Chile, was returning in triumph.

Neruda’s houses – La Sebastiana in Valparaiso, La Chascona in Santiago, and his favourite Isla Negra house – share similar stories. The tours that wind constantly through all three of them point out the same traits. Neruda loved the ocean but was scared of sailing. Instead he designed his houses to resemble ships, with low narrow doorways and pegged wooden floors. He decorated the houses with ships in bottles, maps, and ships’ figureheads. An enthusiastic antiquarian, Neruda’s houses are filled with knickknacks and curiosities: African and Asian masks, Easter Island heads, stuffed animals, a narwal horn, shells and coloured glass, figurines, hats, shoes, erotic postcards, giant shoes, lanterns, bells, indigenous and colonial art from all over Latin America, a full-sized model horse in a full-sized stable, ship’s furniture, anchors, hats, pipes, photographs and paintings of himself and his third wife (I don’t remember seeing any of his earlier wives), traditional musical instruments from Asia and the Americas, photographs of other poets (Whitman, Rimbaud, Baudelaire featuring prominently), his awards and of course many, many books.

The size of Neruda’s collections and the anecdotes attached to them – how he thought drink tasted better out of coloured glasses, how he loved entertaining but prohibited his guests from entering his kitchens, how he wanted to always feel himself to be at sea on dry land, how he would ring the bells to inform the neighbours when he arrived back in town, how he would decorate rooms to look like scenes from his childhood, how he would buy up favourite objects (such as the full-sized model horse) from his childhood – testify to the vivacity and exuberance of the man, to the passion and sense of fun that come through in his poems.  

And beyond their coloured walls and dense gardens, these houses testify to influence of the poet over his country. Out from these repositories of life and art have spread Chile’s most colourful communities. The grey shores of Isla Negra are scattered with pretty, colourful beach houses, the trendy village scattered with sculptures and artistic flourishes. Below the Valparaiso house spreads the city’s bohemian labyrinth. Around the Santiago house has sprouted one of the hippest and liveliest neighbourhoods in the metropolis.

In his houses the spirit of Neruda survived the oppressions of the dictator, and emerged to continue to inspire the country he loved. Today Chile is Neruda’s house, filled with his friends and admirers, his quirks and idiosyncracies, with colour and poetry; just as he always wanted his houses to be.