Rudecindo Ortega Mason, the legitimate son of Charles Mason’s daughter Telésfora and Rudecindo Ortega, was the delegate for the FECh in Cautín Province (Temuco was its major town). His role was mainly to relay information from the headquarters in Santiago, keeping the federation in the south current on what was going on in the capital. The local FECh assemblies took place in the Teatro Tepper, the biggest theater in Temuco, which the owners, the Tepper brothers, let the group use free of charge. The group was a significant presence in the quiet social landscape of the region; its gatherings were jubilant cultural soirees in the vein of European salons.
Toward the end of 1920, Ortega had impressed upon some of Claridad’s editors the significance of Neruda’s work, telling them the poet was still at the Liceo de Temuco but would be coming up to Santiago in the next year or so. They were eager to read his work. At their request Ortega soon returned with a whole file of Neruda’s poems and some press clippings about the prizes he had won.
On January 22, 1921, in the magazine’s twelfth issue, Claridad published five of Neruda’s poems, along with a laudatory introduction, which was written by Raúl Silva Castro. It begins:
Through these verses, Pablo Neruda reveals himself as a complex figure, whose writing portrays his fantasies marked by essential, ordinary reality.
His youth is a shield for him. Still an adolescent, he knows the anonymous contortions of human pain, he studies in the founts of the most modern thought, lives what he says, and he heralds the most beautiful lyrical harvests.
The poems that the editors chose from Ortega’s selection were “Campesina,” “Pantheos,” “Railroad Roundhouses at Night,” “The Words of a Blind Man”—all written shortly before Ortega delivered them—and the first of three sonnets that make up “In Praise of Hands,” from 1919.
The chosen poems are especially reflective of Neruda’s inner life. Some of them deal with his internal emotions, such as “The Words of a Blind Man,” another about eyes and vision. Silva Castro quite astutely put forth that the poems reveal a “complex” young poet “tortured by a deep, almost inhuman anxiety.”
Beyond those interior notes, the social concern that stands out through most of the five poems is congruent with Claridad’s roots and mission, and it exemplifies that not all the poems of his teenage years revolve around concerns of his desolate mental state. “Maestranzas de noche” (“Railroad Roundhouses at Night”) is still considered to be one of the most emotionally effective of all the humanitarian-political verse of his career. The poem shows how Neruda already possessed the ability to translate his keen perception of injustice into affecting poetry. Its inspiration is the heroic Monge, the knife-scarred railroad worker who sought treasures in the forests for the young Neftalí, until his fateful fall off the train and down the cliff. In the poem, Neruda imagines a roundhouse—a structure built around a turntable to service and store locomotives—haunted by the souls of dead workers. He seamlessly illustrates the deep effect that the “desperate . . . souls of the dead workers” have on him. The spotlight shines on him to be the witness and act upon what he sees: “Each locomotive has an open pupil / to look at me.” There’s a call for justice: “On the walls hang the interrogations”—questions he is putting to the public through the poem, stirring empathy throughout.
Black iron that sleeps, black tool that groans
an inconsolable cry through every pore.
The burnt ashes over the sad earth,
the broths in which the bronze melted its pain.
Birds from which distant, misfortuned country
cawed in the painful and endless night?
And the cry tenses me like a coiled nerve
or like a violin’s broken string.
Each locomotive has an open pupil
to look at me.
On the walls hang the interrogations,
on the anvils bloom the souls of the bronzes
and there is a tremor of steps in the deserted rooms.
And into the black night—desperate—the souls
of the dead workers run and sob.
Eerily, just a week after Neruda’s words about “the dead workers” were published by the FECh, the San Gregorio massacre took place: sixty-five nitrate miners were killed and thirty-four injured when government troops fired into a crowd organized by the Federación Obrera de Chile (Chilean Workers Federation) to protest conditions at the mine.
The FECh recognized Neruda’s talent as a poet and sympathized with his political leanings. Besides publishing his work in Claridad, where he’d contribute poems, criticisms, and op-ed pieces for years to come, it named him the secretary of the Cautín Province chapter. While Alejandro Serani was the secretary of the ateneo, of which Neruda was president, Serani served as the FECh local chapter’s president. It wouldn’t have been permitted for the same person to be president of both. Serani ended up having to deal with the minutes for both organizations, as well as other menial administrative tasks to which Neruda simply wasn’t disposed, but apparently Serani didn’t mind. Neruda, energized, threw himself into the literature and drama of the movement.
Shortly after the government began to crack down on the “subversive” students in Santiago, one of the leaders of the movement, José Santos González Vera, fled the capital to escape the repression. He ended up in Temuco. After just a couple of days in town, González Vera, seven years older than Neruda, went to meet Temuco’s young star poet:
I waited for him in the liceo’s door, around five o’clock. He was the skinniest kid. His skin had an earthen pallid color,
