The Mason clan and José del Carmen’s brothers, who visited often from Parral, influenced Neftalí with their traditions, which by turns could be flamboyant, ritualistic, and macho. Big parties and dinners were regularly held at the Masons’, where the blue-eyed Norteamericano with flowing white hair, “looking like Emerson,” presided over the bountiful table: turkeys stuffed with celery, grilled lamb, and, for dessert, floating islands—leche nevada, literally “snowcapped milk”—where white poached meringues float in a creamy custard, decorated with mint leaves. Red wine flowed through the night. An immense Chilean flag with its red and white bands and lone white star set in a block of blue hung behind Mason, to which he had pinned a tiny U.S. flag as well.
One evening when Neftalí was a young adolescent, just as the night train clanged into the wooden station a block away, his uncles called him out to the patio. Neftalí knew what was about to take place: the great ritual slaughtering of the lamb. His uncles and other family friends were all gathered around, strumming guitars and playing with knives underneath a tree, their singing interrupted only by the blowing of the train whistle and the gulps of crude wine. Neftalí was a skinny, innocent-faced presence at these events, with his boyish wave of dark hair swept back from a gentle widow’s peak. He dressed, as he often did in these years, formally in black, already with what he considered to be his necessary “poet’s tie,” a thin, tightly knotted black accent on his narrow frame. He was dressed, as he’d reflect later, “like a man in mourning, mourning for nobody in particular, for the rain, for the universal pain.”
His uncles slit open the throat of the quivering lamb. The blood fell into a basin filled with potent spices. They motioned to Neftalí to come closer and lifted the goblet of hot blood to his lips, gunfire and songs going off. Neruda later explained that he felt as agonized as the lamb itself, but he wanted to become a centaur, like the other men, as barbarian as they seemed just then. So, pale and indecisive, he overcame his fear and drank with them. By drinking the blood, he began his passage to manhood.
From his first verses, blood was a symbol in his poetry, a symbol of the poetry itself. At one of his greatest peaks, in the poem “The Heights of Macchu Picchu,” imploring the Incan slaves to rise up, the final two lines of the poem’s twelve sweeping cantos read:
Come to my veins and my mouth.
Speak through my words and my blood.
* * *
Neftalí from the outset had a close relationship with his half sister, Laura, three years his junior. As they grew older, she would be one of his closest friends, confidantes, and supporters. The bond between them, born in the room the night before her mother gave her away, remained constant throughout their lives. He would always be protective and tremendously tender toward her. Laura was sweet and reserved, simple yet complicated, devoted to her parents and even more so to Neftalí.
Rodolfo, on the other hand, was always off on his own and would never have a close relationship with either of his siblings. Now a teenager, he found it hard to integrate himself within the confining structure of the family after his life in the forest and was mostly silent, except for his singing. Whereas Neftalí would soon seek refuge in his poetry, Rodolfo found his in song. He had an extraordinary voice, but he sang alone behind the closed door of his tiny room.
All three siblings sought Trinidad’s protection to shield them from their father’s impatience. José del Carmen had a stern attitude toward his children, perhaps inherited from his own father’s example. Over Neftalí’s childhood and into his adolescence, José del Carmen had coarsened. Though they weren’t as poor as Neruda would later often portray them as having been, José’s wages from the state-run railroad never led to economic prosperity and comfort, and there was little hope for advancement. But despite these frustrations and his possible yearnings, he never abandoned his responsibilities again. He was never known to have another affair.
Neruda called southern Chile the land “where the rain was born.” During the winter, it rains copiously for days on end, a constant lyric. That melancholic music accompanied Neftalí’s childhood. The Temuco of his memories was of mud streets, worn-out shoes, cold, rain, and a general lack of happiness that hovered over the town.
School for Neftalí was similarly gloomy. It was in a vast house with dilapidated classrooms. Neftalí was always the last in line to enter the school or exit class for the playground. He was not particularly tall for his age, and he was noticeably thin. He wore his sadness like the formal uniform he chose to wear: a long wool-blend dress jacket, matching pants, and boots. Already at this age he had the countenance of a much older person, one who had seen more than he should have, one who understood that life was not just play, but was full of hardship as well.
Compounding his melancholy was the fact that Neftalí’s constitution was fragile. He was constantly ill with something—a cold, the chills, the flu. His classmate Juvencio Valle was one of his first and only true friends at the liceo, the secondary school. Neftalí had drifted to the margins, away from the other kids. But the introspective and thoughtful Juvencio was drawn to Neftalí’s “mysterious inner halo,” and they bonded. The first time Neftalí invited him over to his house, Trinidad gave them coffee, but she served Neftalí’s with milk but not Juvencio’s, leaving it just black. This made Neftalí uncomfortable. “He wanted to give me his cup as a gift, in deference to me, being the guest. But when Doña Trinidad saw, she opposed: ‘No, don’t change the cups.
