Nicanor Parra, Chilean ‘anti-poet’ whom many consider – certainly since the death of José Emilio Pacheco earlier this year – the greatest living Spanish-language poet, turned 100 on 5 September. Parra, the Cervantes Prize-winning author of Poemas y antipoemas and translator of King Lear, was a friend of and inspiration to the Beats as well as a mathematician and professor of theoretical physics.

In May I travelled to Argentina and Chile with the Canadian writer John Ralston Saul, current president of PEN International. Our aim was to help revitalise ailing PEN Centres in the region by encouraging leading writers to join, thereby creating a momentum that would enable each Centre to become self-sustaining for the first time in decades. Chilean PEN was founded in 1935 but hasn’t been prominent in the PEN community since Pinochet’s coup in 1973; notoriously, in contravention of the PEN Charter, the Centre put out a statement in support of the military uprising and ended up being expelled as a result (the last time this had happened was in 1933 when German PEN was co-opted by the Nazis).

I’d found documents from the 60s in our archives listing Nicanor Parra as a member of Chilean PEN, followed by plaintive letters and telegrams from the Centre’s executive in the years following the coup when the now dormant Centre was seeking re-entry to PEN. With Parra being a well-known communist, the messages use the fact of his membership as proof of the Centre’s apolitical and inclusive membership policy.

We decided to try to visit Parra in Las Cruces, the small coastal town 70 miles east of the capital Santiago where he’s lived for 25 years, close to where Vicente Huidobro died and south of Pablo Neruda’s house at Isla Negra. We wanted to ask what he remembered of PEN in Chile and to see whether he might accept some kind of honorary position in a rejuvenated Centre. To this end we enlisted the help of Antonio Skármeta, the novelist and playwright whose book Ardiente paciencia became the film Il Postino. We’d managed to call Parra the week before and set up a meeting, but when we phoned to confirm on the day – as requested – we couldn’t get much sense out of his housekeeper Rosa, who didn’t seem to remember speaking to us. We called Antonio for advice and he suggested we risk driving down there and just knock on the door; at worst, the three of us could enjoy a lunch of conger eel stew before Saul’s return flight that evening.

With low expectations, we set off in Antonio’s battered, unsteady Saab. He warned that his long friendship with Parra would in no way guarantee us an audience, that he was known for turning people away or simply not opening the door even to those close to him. He also advised us not to ask Parra questions about his poetry, or to mention the word ‘interview’ – he stopped offering interviews in the conventional sense in the late 80s. Along a meandering route down the various motorways that lead to Las Cruces (and others that do not) including several stops for directions, dead ends and about-turns, Antonio recounted some of his favourite stories about Nicanor that have already passed into legend.

Around the time he gave up talking to journalists, Parra had told him he’d had enough of this figure ‘Nicanor Parra’, and would write from then on under the cover of a nom de guerrre, if he could only think of one… Several months later, Antonio and his German wife were disturbed by a late-night phone call from Nicanor, elated that he’d finally settled on the perfect heteronym: Nefatalí Reyes (in fact the birth name of Neruda, his nemesis in poetry terms)! And last year, famously, asked when he’d finally finish his translation of Hamlet, Parra went on record saying he’d need the support of a patron with a million dollars. Taking him at his word, the eccentric mining magnate Leonardo Farkas turned up at his house with the requested amount, in cash, stuffed inside a holdall; but Parra sent him away, claiming he only said he’d consider publishing the translation for a million dollars…

Nicanor Parra lives in a two-storey house of wood and stone overlooking the Pacific, reached by a short flight of steps leading down from a dust road. The words ‘ANTI POESÍA’ are spray-painted in black across the front door. Parked by the gate was a clapped-out silver Volkswagen Beetle so old I’d first assumed it to be up on blocks, but heard later that Parra still drives it occasionally (much to the terror of local residents). As we got out of our car, someone we’d seen standing in the road recognised Antonio and approached us with expansive gestures and a slightly crazed look. He was a journalist from Brazil’s O Globo, who begged Antonio to make sure Parra knew he was here because he’d been waiting for two days already…  

Although at first she tried to shut the door on us, Rosa the housekeeper – with undisguised mistrust – let us in when she recognised Antonio; she sat us down in the living room overlooking the bay, strewn with papers and books, and then left without a word. Parra soon shuffled in, bent over and using a stick but steady on his feet: after hugging Antonio he sat down between us, asking why we were there with his head lowered. He remained silent, studying the floorboards between his feet, as Antonio introduced us and I talked of Chilean PEN.

It was only when I mentioned that I’d travelled from London that he suddenly became animated and turned to me and spoke, in English now, ‘You’re British? Where from?’ When I replied that I come from Yorkshire he rapped his stick on the floor, his eyes quickened, gripping my knee with his hand: ‘I went to Bradford once… it was there that I first fell in love, with little Mary Ashford! Oh Mary, only seven years old! But she rejected me, and broke my heart forever…’ As we listened, confused, he deliberated over his failed relationship with Mary, claiming (in what must be a reference to the character from Poe) that it was Professor Fether’s fault for introducing them at such a young age. Perhaps Parra was referring to Margaret Mary ‘Daisy’ Ashford, who wrote The Young Visiters aged nine, or – given his repeated references to Ophelia later – the infamous drowning case of Mary Ashford in 1817.

He continued in faultless English, hard of hearing, heedless, but glaring at each of us in turn with the aspect of a benevolent R.S. Thomas, ‘Are any of you jig-makers? I used to think being a jig-maker was the solution, alas… Poor, poor Ophelia drowned because Hamlet was a jig-maker, you know…’ He then made a roll-call of his professors from when he was studying cosmology at Oxford in the late 1940s, asked me if I went to Oxford, and before I could answer reeled off the equation for Hubble’s law while banging his stick and shouting for wine and tea to be brought. ‘Shall we take tea, or shoot one another? NO sugar in my tea, Rosita! I’m English.’ None of us could get a word in edgeways as he likened his position as paterfamilias to that of King Lear, haphazardly quoting Hamlet, Polonius and long sections from The Jew of Malta and The Merry Wives of Windsor with his index finger raised and quivering.  

He half-responded to Antonio’s small talk, and answered some questions in a roundabout way, claiming he’d given up reading poetry but at that moment was enjoying the letters of Diego Portales. He’d just sent off a letter of recommendation for his neighbour Diamela Eltit’s candidature for the biannual National Literature Prize (which Antonio went on to win). By this time Saul was looking at his watch because we were running very late and he had to make his plane to Toronto. Attempting to turn the conversation back to the subject at hand, I asked Parra if he’d be willing to join Chilean PEN as honorary vice president. ‘Send me a letter,’ he whispered. ‘I defend myself better in writing’.

Just as the moment came when it would have been reasonable to make our excuses, Parra up-ended his stick, hammering it five or six times on the floor, and barked to Rosa in the kitchen, ‘Música! música!’ She ambled back in, scowling at Parra and rolling her eyes at us, flicking on a large hi-fi at the back of the room which began to blare out traditional cueca music. Rising to his feet, Parra started to hop concentrically round his stick to ‘Puerto de Valparaíso’ before discarding its support completely; he withdrew a handkerchief from the top pocket of his tweed jacket and waved it above his head, beseeching us to join in. Rosa looked on ruefully from the doorway, worried and amused in equal measure.

Halfway into the second song, Nicanor recognised that we really had to leave. He came with us to the door, asking for his car keys – it seemed for a moment he was going to offer us a lift. (Outside, missing his moment, the Brazilian journalist was nowhere to be found.) In what was now a rush to depart, Antonio turned the wrong way out of Calle Lincoln which nearly left us marooned up to our axles in sand on the beach. Parra must have known we’d have to come back past his house, because when we did so ten minutes later he was leaning out of the window of his VW Beetle, manically sounding the horn and screeching ‘Sieg heil! Sieg sieg heil! Heil HITLER!’ – pumping the air with his fist.