Because he was so sickly, Neftalí often stayed home from school. When he was confined to his bed, he’d ask Laura to stick her head out the window and tell him everything that was going on in the street—everything, even the most insignificant detail. “There goes a little Indian selling ponchos,” she’d report from the window, or “There are four little kids playing on the other side of the street.” Neftalí would keep insisting on more detail. He was obsessed with observing the world around him.
Neftalí was fascinated by the school’s dark basement, which felt like a tomb to him. He would often go down alone, sometimes lighting a candle, absorbed in the damp odor of his hidden world. Juvencio Valle, who shared his curiosity, would often join him. Valle, who would become a significant poet himself, would later muse that already in these childhood years he could sense that Neftalí was truly a unique individual, with “an imperceptible vibration, an air that was his alone and made him different. To the ordinary observer it was a nonexistent aura, but to me it was powerfully effective and real.”
While the other kids ran around, jumped, and shouted in a group, Juvencio and Neftalí would spend their days in the forest together, exploring, observing the world’s little things—a leaf, an insect, a path in the woods—trails of exploration forged through curiosity. The other kids didn’t want much to do with them. They took “refuge in [their] own particular territory, that marvelous universe of dreams,” where the two were always the “undisputed champions.”
Sometimes they would walk down to the cold Cautín River that ran through town near the school and dip their feet into its water, then lose themselves simply watching the rippling current from the bank. Often they did not get back to class on time.
Neruda saw those early days as a period of discovery. He began his lifelong friendship with Valle and explored the natural world, but also poetry found him. As Neruda versed in Memorial de Isla Negra:
And it was at that age . . . poetry arrived
in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don’t know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street it called me,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among raging fires
or returning alone,
there it was, without a face,
and it touched me.
—“Poetry”
Two weeks before he turned eleven, some unknown thought, emotion, or experience sparked the kindling that had been developing in him, and Neftalí wrote his “first, faint line” of poetry of which there is a record. Upon writing this original poem, according to his memoirs, he was overcome by emotion, racked by “a kind of anguish and sadness,” emotions that were already familiar to him. The language on the page was revelatory and strange, “different from everyday language.”
When he was finished, he took the poem to his father. Trembling from the experience, he held the paper out to the man, who took it absently, then returned it, saying, “Where did you copy this from?” Then he resumed a conversation with Trinidad.
That poem appears to be hardly a poem at all. It is a dedication to his stepmother, written in a fine, cursive hand on the back of a postcard of an alpine lake surrounded by snowy trees:
From a landscape of aureate
regions
I chose
to give you, dear mamá,
this humble postcard. Neftalí
It is more than just a note. Armed with the basic tools of prosody he was learning in his progressive education, supplemented by his own reading, he had composed a structured, if basic, poem. The nuanced versecraft, with internal rhymes and rhythms and thematic words, is remarkable.* In this humble, tender gift to his stepmother, he has reversed the cold Alpine scene to create a warm, golden place of nature. Neftalí is looking out from himself, the “I”—“I chose”—into this space. Creating such a perspective in prosody at the age of ten, he demonstrates the beginnings of a cosmic vision. A poet was emerging.
Chapter Three
Awkward Adolescence
I was fourteen
and proudly bleak,
thin, taut and brooding,
funereal and formal.
—“Where Can Guillermina Be?”
Neftalí’s adolescence was marked by isolation, unrequited love, sadness, and frequent illness, exacerbated by the confines of his harsh father’s home and the hard weather and poverty of the frontier. Poetry became a way to express his frustrations and angst, as is clear in the aptly titled poem “Desperation,” which he wrote in his notebook as a teenager. The language may not flow as beautifully as in his mature work, but the young man’s yearning is palpable, as is his inherent sense that, as poet-observer, vision is vital:
They have closed my eyes. My God!
and I don’t know the sorrow where I am.
. . . sorrow has cruelly nailed my soul.
Where do I look? My eyes! My eyes!
Who suffocates my voice in my mouth?
I’m alone, Lord, I’m alone
and I don’t feel the beat of my heart.
Who calls for me in the shadows? Who feels
my howls of rage and pain?
Impotence squeezes me. They don’t come!
But black desperation comes.
Who do I call, Lord, who do I call?
It’s useless to call You!
I smash my fingers in vain,
still I know You haven’t come to my soul.
. . . And the wind carries my voices,
and the abyss brings me obscurity!
The narrator seems lost at the bottom of the world, so frustrated as he struggles to use his pen to write himself out of the darkness. Neftalí, however, would encounter several key adults who would support him throughout his teens. He developed relationships with mentors in Temuco and the surrounding area who introduced him to influential literature and convinced him of his potential as a poet. Furthermore, his mentors also encouraged the social awareness and political stance that would mark so much of his verse.
Additionally, during this time Neftalí fell deeply in love, more than once. Poetry became
