When he returned that afternoon, it was Mistral who opened the door. She was tall and wore a long dress. He bowed to her. “I have fixed myself up to receive you,” Mistral said. “I was sick, but I began to read your poems and I’ve gotten better, because I am sure that here there is indeed a true poet. I have never made a statement like that ever before.”
The two became lifelong friends. Neftalí often ran to her house in the afternoon after classes were finished for the day. The two would drink tea together next to the wood-burning stove in her modest house. “Here, read this,” Mistral would say. She would introduce him to the “terrible vision” of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Chekhov.
Neftalí’s young, colorful French teacher, Ernesto Torrealba, was another important literary influence. A writer and critic himself, he told Neftalí, “If you want to write, don’t just read Spanish and follow its rules, because you’ll never free yourself of the pedagogy.” Instead, he pushed Neftalí to read, among others, Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, and Paul Verlaine; reading French would help him write better Spanish. Like Mistral, Torrealba also promoted the importance of Russian literature and lent him several books by Maksim Gorky.
Neftalí’s special skills with language could be seen in the translations from French to Spanish that he was doing in school, which greatly impressed Torrealba, though none of these survives today.
Neftalí and his classmates were inspired by Torrealba’s persona as well as his intellectual prowess. He was a flamboyant man for the southern frontier who dreamed of Paris; he dressed in an elegant tie and with suede gaiters over his high boots, and he always used an ornamental cane. Torrealba would eventually make it to Paris, where he’d publish a few daring books, including Paris sentimental y pecador (Sinful and Sensual Paris). He died at the age of thirty-five in Santiago from unknown causes. Neruda would dedicate his Nobel Prize in part to him: “my French teacher now up in heaven.”
Neftalí first publicly referred to himself as not just a poet but the poet in a sonnet written on July 30, 1919: “The Poet Who Is Neither Bourgeoisie nor Humble.”
A kid who just turned fifteen,
who writes verses punctuated by bitterness
who tasted the salts of disappointment
when many others know laughter and kindness.
and goes on sadly through life
(The men haven’t discovered that in him exists
the poet who as a child was not childish.)
and he waits proudly with his pains,
unknown and alone, for better days
which he imagines, crazily, are to come.
Notable, along with the date, is the location where it was written: “in Chemistry class.” He was known to his classmates to be a lazy student, and he struggled especially with math and science. His obvious disinterest didn’t help.
While Neftalí thought poetry would be his salvation, José del Carmen certainly did not. He admonished Neftalí about his writing; José didn’t want his child to be a starving artist or bohemian; he wanted him to have a stable middle- or upper-class lifestyle, and unlike his son he was certain that lyrical lines of verse were no source of wealth.
Neftalí’s half brother, Rodolfo, also suffered their father’s scorn of artistic vocation. As Rodolfo would later tell his grandson, one day the liceo called José del Carmen to come to an urgent meeting at the school. Irritated at the disruption, he was surprised when the music teacher came in, beaming. Then Rodolfo entered. The teacher explained that Rodolfo was divinely blessed: he had an extraordinary talent for singing. The teacher insisted that Rodolfo must set forth on a path toward becoming a professional singer. The teacher took a piece of paper from one of his pockets and passed it to José del Carmen: it was a telegram stating that Rodolfo, who had started his life deep in a forest village, had been accepted into the prestigious Conservatorio Nacional de Música de Santiago, with a full scholarship. José del Carmen was quiet, which indicated that the matter would be settled privately at home.
After a few days of silence had passed, Rodolfo timidly approached his father. José del Carmen turned on him, listing Rodolfo’s faults as he saw them: idleness, singing, and a lack of common sense. The coronation of this violent explosion was a kick with sharp-pointed shoes that knocked Rodolfo to the floor. José then whipped his son’s back with his belt. “Damn slackers, the sons I had to have,” Rodolfo later recalled hearing him grunt. “First, one goes around joining anarchists and drunks, and then the other, an overgrown fool, wants to follow the same path.”
Neftalí feared that this violence would be wielded against him as well, and it was not long before those fears came true. One day, José del Carmen burst into Neftalí’s room and kicked over his shelves of books and writings. He threw them out the window, onto the familial patio below. José then went down and burned it all as Neftalí watched, trembling, the rest of the family staring in astonishment.
Neftalí was crestfallen after the incident, falling further into his gloom, until one day when Laura took him to her room without anyone else noticing. She pulled out a few notebooks she had hidden away, filled with poetry that he had written and asked her to write out legibly. He had forgotten about them. To this date they serve as the only record of many of his childhood poems. This tender gesture permanently sealed the bond between the siblings. She would always be his loyal confidante, perhaps his most loyal, because he knew for certain that she would never betray him, even to their father.
Despite his father’s duress,
