Pablo Neruda is the poet who allowed himself everything: El Caldillo de Congrio — a domestic dish that makes your mouth water — and the Canto General, where writing enforces his project that poetry should not separate itself from the commitment to a more just and supportive society. Odes, romances, epigrams, or renewed chronicles of the Indies like Alturas de Macchu Picchu, political histories with the names of dictators, or natural ones with those of flowers, birds, and plants. If Neruda is plural, so are his readers. And there probably isn't a young person who doesn't know at least one verse from Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair written by a wild and raven-dressed — that is, romantic — Neruda at the age of twenty.

Sara Facio, an Argentine photographer, had the privilege of living alongside Matilde and Pablo Neruda on several occasions since 1968. Pleasant meetings in places that looked like taverns, official salons, or rooms where the scent of wine and well-seasoned dishes never failed, in Paris, Buenos Aires, or Santiago, from which books, dozens of publications in magazines, newspapers, and television broadcasts were born. And this book invites you with images of the intimate Neruda — apron and classic little boots — the one who attended the proclamation of Salvador Allende as candidate for president of Chile, the one who lived in Isla Negra, the one who was his country's ambassador in France and poses with a slightly ironic gaze, who spent the money obtained with the Nobel Prize in 1971 buying a house in Normandy, and finally — perhaps the most moving — the one who remains alive on the walls of Santiago, as was evident on July 12, 1988, the day of his 84th birthday.

The beauty of a ship’s figurehead, a collection of sulfides — very much in the style of Colette — the names of friends carved on the beams of a house, the very special tone of humor with which Matilde is viewed make up the story of a man. That is why this is a photographic biography. **It** is also a testimony and a report, the document about a living museum. One of the many that Latin America has, and that the eye of a photographer has visually recreated. If in this case it is Neruda, it is so that "relooking" at this book contributes, as the walls of Santiago say, to his return with the spring.