We were all there for Pablo Neruda, but nobody seemed to like Pablo Neruda. The members of the Chilean media had assembled on a rock formation that rose up from the beach, a formation that now bristled with tripods like a sea urchin, a dozen lenses trained on the darkened windows of Neruda’s hillside home. Nothing was happening there; the poet lay still in his grave.
“He wrote all these love poems, but he was a son of a bitch,” said a reporter from a wire service. She poured Nescafé from a thermos into a styrofoam cup and recited…
