Immersed in these smells and colors, Neftalí witnessed the social aspects of the train as well. He observed the workers shyly, in awe. They seemed like giants to him, muscular men from the tenements of Santiago, from the fields of the Central Valley, from prison, from the recent War of the Pacific. They were children of the elements, often arriving in the south dressed in rags, their faces battered, as Neruda would later lyricize, by the rain or the sand, their foreheads divided by rough scars. The camaraderie and solidarity that Neftalí saw among them, out on the tracks or around the dining room table telling long, unlikely tales, thrilled him.
Most of the crew had come to Temuco looking for something better than their difficult pasts, and now they toiled for subsistence wages. Neftalí was the son of their boss, and the young boy’s particular frailty contrasted sharply with their brute strength. These disparities widened the aperture of his impressionable mind, affecting how he would interpret class and society for the rest of his life, creating the foundation of his sociopolitical convictions. This would become central to his poetry and his politics, identifying with and championing the working class.
My father with the dark dawn
of the earth, towards what lost archipelagos
did he slide in his howling trains?
. . . the grave train crossing the extended winter
over the earth, like a proud caterpillar.
Suddenly the doors trembled.
It’s my father.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The centurions of the road surround him:
rail-workers wrapped in their wet blankets,
the steam and rain with them covered
the house, the dining room was filled with hoarse
tales, glasses were poured,
and even me, of the beings, like a separated
barrier, where the sorrows lived,
and the anguishes and scowling scars,
the men without money,
the mineral claw of poverty,
arrived . . .
—“La Casa”
By the time he was ten years old, when the train would stop somewhere in the middle of the virgin forests, Neftalí would go out and explore, feeling an instant connection to nature. The birds and the beetles fascinated him. Partridge eggs were wonders; he wrote later that it “was miraculous to find them in the nooks and crannies of the forest floor, greasy, dark, gleaming, gunmetal gray.” The insects’ “perfection” amazed him too. Neftalí spent many of his childhood days in the “vertical world” of the forests, “a nation of birds, a mass of leaves,” surrounding Temuco. Rotten logs were full of treasures: fungi, insects, and red parasite plants. As he reflected in a poem he wrote later in life, Neruda felt quite literally “immersed” in the natural world:
I lived with the spiders,
I was damp from the forest,
the beetles knew me
and the tri-colored bees,
I slept with the partridges
immersed in the mint.
—“Where Can Guillermina Be?”*
Neftalí’s explorations piqued the workers’ curiosity; some became interested in his discoveries. Many of the crew took to Neftalí, whose physical characteristics were so completely different from their own, his frailty perhaps inspiring something in them. José del Carmen referred to one of the men, named Monge, as “the most dangerous knife fighter.” A scar from a knife slash ran down the dark skin of Monge’s cheek. A white smile complemented the scar, mischievous yet charming and welcoming. It brightened his toughness. Monge, more than the others, would slip off into the forest to use his strength and size to get to places that Neftalí could not. He brought him back incredible treasures—magnificent mushrooms, moon-colored beetles, brilliant flowers, green snails, birds’ eggs from crevices—all delivered from his gigantic, worn hands to the smooth palms of the child. These materials would become elemental nutrients of Neftalí’s creative experience.
Much later, Neruda would write: “Along endless beaches or thicketed hills, a communication began between my spirit—that is, my poetry—and the loneliest land in the world. This was many years ago, but that communication, that revelation, that pact with the wilderness, has continued to exist throughout my life.”
The treasure for Neftalí, though, wasn’t just the natural objects Monge would bring him, but the fact that the worker did so. It was a gesture not done to please his boss, for José del Carmen wouldn’t stand for one of his employees feeding his son’s imagination at the expense of work. Later, Monge’s death would have a profound impact on Neftalí. Though he did not witness Monge’s fall from a moving train off a cliff, José told Neftalí that the man’s remains were “just a sack of bones.” The toughest man Neftalí knew had been brought down by the dangers inherent in his world.
Neftalí learned to measure the distance between his father and the workers. He realized that he effectively came from a family of modest means, and that his father had once been a vagabond looking for work in the Andes or on the docks. They had a cook, a local lady who would help prepare meals, easing the workload of Doña Trinidad in her five-person household—a service a railroad conductor could afford. José del Carmen consistently pushed—or tried to steer—his sons toward a dignified vocation, life, social class. Secondary school wasn’t mandatory and only a small number of children attended after finishing grammar school around age twelve. Most young men went to trade schools or to work instead, but there was no question that José del Carmen’s sons would attend and study with discipline.
Neftalí was puzzled by his father’s desire to have a good piano for the house, something grand to come home to after traveling on the train for days. It didn’t seem in line with his personality; he punished Rodolfo
