Margarita Aguirre

Margarita Aguirre was the daughter of Sócrates Aguirre and Sofía Flores. Her siblings were named Francisco (Paco) and Perla. She met the poet Pablo Neruda in Buenos Aires in 1933, where her father was Chile's deputy consul. Neruda held a diplomatic post in Argentina at the time. Despite the age difference (she was 8 years old and he was 29), they formed a lifelong friendship. Aguirre would say that Neruda was "the last Santa Claus of my childhood," because to celebrate Christmas the poet disguised himself with a white cotton beard and a red robe and gave presents to her and other children. Aráoz took Aguirre to live in the arid countryside of Villa del Totoral in Córdoba Province, Argentina. Children Neruda spent some time debating whether to be godfather to Aguirre's children since he lived far away, but in the end he decided to do so. When Aguirre had her first son, Gregorio (born 1955), she asked Neruda to be the baby's godfather. Gregorio was "baptized with sea water and Chilean wine". After that, Neruda called her comadre (midwife). When her daughter Susana was born, due to her narrow eyes, Aráoz would tell his friend Crespo, "Felipe, a daughter has been born to me who is like Balbín." ==Literary career==

Margarita Aguirre achieved a solid literary reputation when she published Cuaderno de una muchacha muda (1951) and El huésped (1958). This last work earned her the Emecé Award. At the end of November 1955, Neruda – who had finished separating from his Argentine wife, Delia del Carril – visited them for several months in Villa del Totoral to write. He strongly supported Aguirre in her literary work, and even challenged her when she faltered in her dedication to it. Biography of Neruda In the early 1960s, José Bianco, director of the Genio y Figura collection of the publisher , asked Aguirre to write a biography of Pablo Neruda. Aguirre accepted, with some reluctance: She began an extensive investigation, interviewing the relatives and friends of Neruda, traveling to Temuco with him to unearth his childhood stories, and discovering the remarkable correspondence between Neruda and the Argentine writer (which she would compile and catalog eight years later). In 1964 she published the result of all this effort: Genio y figura de Pablo Neruda (Genius and character of Pablo Neruda) through EUDEBA. In 1972, Margarita Aguirre took charge of the Complete Works of Neruda, published that year by the Losada company of Buenos Aires, and also compiled and cataloged the correspondence of the Chilean author with the Argentine poet Héctor Eandi. In 1969, a few months after the death of her husband Rodolfo Aráoz, Margarita Aguirre lived in an apartment in Buenos Aires with the Argentine publisher Luis María Torres Agüero. After the death of her two children – first Susana, then Goyo – she went to live alone in Chile. In 1999 she received the Medal of Honor of the Pablo Neruda Foundation. Aguirre suffered from emphysema and spent the last years of her life in a nursing home on California Street in Santiago. ==Legacy==

Margarita Aguirre died from emphysema in Santiago, Chile on 15 December 2003, at age 77. She was buried in the cemetery of , a small graveyard built next to a 19th-century church a short distance from Isla Negra, the location in which Neruda lived and was buried along with his wife Matilde Urrutia. According to Guillermo García Corales in his essay on El huésped, Margarita Aguirre, through the desolation and nihilism of her characters, was the precursor of authors several decades later such as Gonzalo Contreras, Diamela Eltit, and . ==Works==

The work of Margarita Aguirre includes novels, short stories, essays, and collections. • 1980: Pablo Neruda Héctor Eandi, correspondencia ==Notes==