I built the house.
I made it first of air.
Then I hoisted the flag in the air
and left it hanging
from the sky, from the star, from
the light and from the darkness . . .
So reads Pablo Neruda’s poem ‘A la Sebastiana’, which muses on his unusual home, perched on a hill in Valparaíso, Chile. Though in fact he did not build the house: it was already there, the modernist folly of a wealthy Spaniard who had envisioned a helicopter landing pad on the second-storey roof, when Neruda and a couple of friends decided to purchase it and move in.
Neruda (the pen name of Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto) and his wife filled the space with their ‘biggest toys’ – music boxes, stuffed birds in glass bubbles, plates decorated with conceptual art, nautical models, books and a dada-style bar, where the poet, often adorned with a fake moustache, would mix up a special champagne-based cocktail for his guests.
Heroes’ houses are often disappointing – a pile-up of the most ordinary bits of their lives, their easy chairs, crockery and napping schedules – but La Sebastiana is an amazing embodiment of a poet’s capacity for play. It’s a heart-warming sight to see that the home of a writer, diplomat, Nobel Prize-winner, Communist charmer and fugitive (Neruda was all of these in his time) was itself more than a concrete frame; it was an amazing work-in-progress and a character, rather than a setting, in its author’s life.
