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.
[5] In 1940, after the end of the Spanish Civil War, Neruda returned to Chile and reestablished his contact with the Aguirres, who were then living in Santa Beatriz.
In 1945, Aguirre worked – together with José Miguel Varas, who would later also become a writer – as an announcer (espíquer) on El Mercurio Radio.
Aguirre would later mock this work, clarifying that "it was an honorary title" since, apparently, it was an ad honorem position (never receiving any honor).
[6] Neruda had married his second wife, Delia del Carril [es], an Argentine artist and intellectual twenty years his senior.
Él tenía que viajar a la Unión Soviética como jurado del Premio Lénin de la Paz, de 1952, y como dicha nación no tenía entonces relaciones con la nuestra, Neruda me encargó que le tramitara una visa en Argentina, con el abogado tucumano Rodolfo Aráoz Alfaro (1901–1968), secretario general del Partido Comunista para Latinoamérica.8 Él era «el mejor amigo argentino» del poeta, según sus propias palabras.
He had to travel to the Soviet Union as a juror of the 1952 Lenin Peace Prize, and as that nation had no relations with ours, Neruda commissioned me to process a visa in Argentina, with the Tucuman lawyer Rodolfo Aráoz Alfaro (1901–1968), secretary general of the Communist Party for Latin America.
It was very difficult to organize this trip, because – as they were at the beginning of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union – Neruda had been denied entry into many of the countries of passage, due to their socialist ideas.
[9] Aráoz took Aguirre to live in the arid countryside of Villa del Totoral in Córdoba Province, Argentina.
"[9] Margarita Aguirre achieved a solid literary reputation when she published Cuaderno de una muchacha muda (1951) and El huésped (1958).
[10] In the early 1960s, José Bianco, director of the Genio y Figura collection of the publisher EUDEBA [es], asked Aguirre to write a biography of Pablo Neruda.
Todos los biógrafos nerudianos tendremos que agradecer siempre a Margarita que nos abriera la puerta para explorar en el mundo inacabable del poeta.
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.
[6] 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.
[3] Aguirre suffered from emphysema and spent the last years of her life in a nursing home on California Street in Santiago.
[4] Although she never felt part of any group, she is considered to belong to the literary generation of 1950, along with Claudio Giaconi [es], Enrique Lafourcade, Perico Müller, and Jorge Onfray.
[5][11] 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 Ramón Díaz Eterovic [es].