There was some pragmatism behind José del Carmen’s efforts and design. A purposeful path cut through the rectangular property, directly linking the street to the patio. Other than the particularities of the objects all around, the walls lacked any creative, artistic sensibility. The second floor was built quickly out of the need to expand when all the children came together at once. Its construction was thrifty and basic, yet the windows were large.
Neftalí’s room looked out over the patio, where he’d get lost in the rain raking the leaves of the avocado tree or the coal-colored smoke disappearing into the sky as it rose from the pipe jutting out from the kitchen’s wood-burning stove. Near the window stood the little desk on which he would start to write his first poems in his arithmetic book.
Right across from the house was a no-name bar, just some shack with hitching posts outside where Mapuche would exchange whatever money they made from whatever wares they managed to sell that day for aguardiente—firewater—in Chile made from grapes like a harsh grappa. Not all Mapuche were drunks, but Neftalí saw how Temuco disenfranchised all of them. The injustices they faced made many Mapuche despondent. Witnessing their condition instilled in Neftalí a lifelong empathy for the oppressed. Their downtrodden state mirrored the mental state that was now descending upon him.
Neftalí seemed to embody a natural melancholy, which would slowly begin to slip into serious sorrow as he progressed through childhood. His figure cut thin, a reflection of his weak constitution. His demanding father inflicted a hefty emotional toll, and the relentless rain of Temuco’s long winters made him restless.
The railroad ran through his childhood, as constant as the rain. Charles Mason’s foresight into the new railroad’s potential for bringing development to the country around Temuco proved accurate. Business at his hotel was steady, as people continued to migrate south. José, now integrated into Mason’s family, must have felt he had proven himself to be a steady, mature, and reliable head of household. Whether he got it from pressing Mason or not, José finally got a job with the railroad company.
It was a line of work that allowed José to travel as he labored, satisfying his desire to be on the move. He was quickly promoted to be the conductor in charge of a ballast train, which spread crushed rocks, river stone, and sand to form the foundational bed between the rails, all the while making repairs along the tracks. It was unforgiving work, especially during the winter months, when José had to make sure that the wooden ties wouldn’t be washed away by the torrents of rain that often lasted for hours. José del Carmen had been a reluctant farmer and a mediocre dockworker, but he was good with the trains, which he had ridden so frequently in their nascent development. He soon found that he was a railroader at heart.
By the time he was five years old, young Neftalí would often join his father on the rails, one of the very few places the two could bond. As they steamed through the virgin forests of the south, crossing over emerald rivers flowing down from the Andes and passing by small frontier outposts, impoverished Mapuche villages, freshly cleared pastures, and a variety of volcanoes, the natural world as a wealth of untamed possibilities unfolded before the child’s eyes.
A lifetime later, Neruda opened his memoirs with this impression, highlighting its significance as the origin of his poetic path: “Below the volcanoes, beside the snowcapped mountains, among the great lakes, the fragrant, the silent, the tangled Chilean forest . . . I have come out of that earth, that mud, that silence, to roam, to go singing throughout the world.” The fundamental curiosity that would augur the creation of his poetry stemmed from these early journeys.
“The essential Neruda was a human being,” his translator Alastair Reid once said. “In his eyes he never forgot that he was born naked into a world he didn’t understand, into a world of wonder.”
His father’s train and the laborers aboard it fascinated Neftalí. First was the locomotive engine, then a car or two for the workers, rough from the life they had lived before coming here. They usually wore heavy, thick raincoats provided by the state railroad company. Often their gaits and their hardened faces, many of which were lined, some with scars, were all that distinguished one from the other. Then there was the caboose in which José del Carmen lived during long trips along the rails, which could last a week or more. Finally, an open flatbed car at the rear carried the crushed stones and all the workers’ tools and equipment.
Neftalí would spend hours watching the men shovel the ballast off the end of the train and then work it into the tracks. The stones improved drainage and their sharp edges gave the workers a grip to anchor the rickety wooden ties to—which, in turn, kept the rails in place. The harsh rains wreaked havoc on the railbeds. The rapidly expanding rail network in the south was key to the area’s growth (and, increasingly, the economy of the entire country). José del Carmen and his crew bore the responsibility to keep it functional, and they were committed to making sure their assigned tracks were constantly maintained, no matter the weather or amount of labor involved.
Once the car was empty, they would travel to Boroa, in the wild heart of the frontier, or other quarries in whatever corner of the wild forests, where workers would labor on the “terrestrial core,” the enormous rocks, breaking them down for ballast and loading the train with the finished product. They could be there for over a week. Once they had shoveled the car full of stones, they were on the move again, straightening the rails, spreading the ballast, resetting the iron spikes that held the steel to the wooden rail ties, and repairing the tracks where needed.
It was all fantastic, if not bizarre, Neruda
