José del Carmen had inherited his mother’s striking blue eyes, but she, Natalia Morales, barely had time to look into them; she died shortly after giving birth, in 1872. He was left to his imposing father, José Angel Reyes Hermosilla. The authoritarian patriarch wanted to instill the fear of God in José del Carmen and the thirteen more children he’d have with a new wife. His booming voice was frightening. He rarely cracked a smile.
Their property had a little more than 250 cultivable acres, which was rather modest compared with other haciendas of that type in Chile at the time. They struggled to eke out a subsistence living farming its soil. The family had little money to invest in crops and animals, or in rich rootstock for vines. With fourteen children, there were simply too many mouths to feed on a farm that didn’t have enough hands of age to successfully work the stubborn soil.
As José del Carmen grew, so did his frustration with farm life. Despite all their acreage, he felt claustrophobic with so many siblings and an overbearing father. In 1891, at the age of twenty, he took his dreams for a different life to the burgeoning salty port town of Talcahuano, 150 miles by steam train to the southwest, where a great public works project had just begun. It was a whole new world, and a stark contrast to the confines of repressive religion back at Belén. Here the future was open and his responsibilities were few, and shortly after he arrived he joined a team building dry docks down by the wharf.
José del Carmen’s home in Talcahuano was a cold pension run by a Catalan widow with three young daughters. The pension was only a few blocks from the port, and it housed a few other dockworkers who had come from the provinces for work. José del Carmen’s sense of possibilities was sparked further by the social interaction within this urban society in an international port—so different from the enclosed, rigid world of Belén and the small, provincial Parral. Meanwhile, he was witnessing a historic period of transformation in southern Chile, with the import of machinery to exploit the land and turn it into an agricultural region, and the export of some of the first products.
His time at the port moved him further away from the influence of his father, allowing him to find his own identity and instilling in him a nonreligious, rational outlook on life. At the pension down by the docks, he came to know the owner’s teenage daughter Aurelia Tolrá, who would become a close confidante. As José wandered between Parral and Talcahuano in search of work, the pension would be an important location to which he’d return often.
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Charles Sumner Mason was born in Portland, Maine, in 1829. He would come to play a fundamental role in Neruda’s life. While many Europeans immigrated to Chile, especially the south, very few North Americans did. Though his exact motivation for traveling to South America isn’t certain, after a supposed stop in Peru, he came to Parral in 1866 at the age of thirty-seven. He arrived with another American (Henry “Enrique” St. Clair), who was enticed by Chile’s rich mineral deposits. At one point the two would formally set up a business venture to explore silver deposits in the hills.
Mason would soon involve himself in many matters in Parral. By 1891, when José del Carmen was starting his adventures and coming and going from the farm outside Parral, Mason marked his twenty-fifth anniversary of living in Chile. He was a well-settled family man, husband to Micaela Candia, the daughter of an important Parral businessman. He was the father of eight. He was so widely respected during his life that people would often ask him to arbitrate disputes. He even represented José del Carmen’s father in a lawsuit in 1889.
Eventually Mason headed to the newly founded pioneer town of Temuco, some two hundred miles to the south. There, he and his family could expand on what they had established in Parral, taking advantage of all the opportunities that the exciting frontier could offer. Temuco and its surroundings were Chile’s “Far West,” as Neruda would describe it in his memoirs. Just two decades earlier, the indigenous Mapuche people of the region—an area of ancient forests, snowcapped volcanoes, and breathtaking volcanic lakes—had finally submitted to the Chilean military. The Mapuche’s three-century-long resistance, dating back to 1535, had constituted the longest continual war of indigenous people defending their native lands and rights against colonial encroachment in the history of the Americas. With the Mapuche defeated, the town of Temuco was formed in 1881 next to a Chilean fort, where the peace accords were finally signed that same year.
The virgin territory now being relatively safe for settlement and exploitation, Mason, among others, wanted to be sure to get in on the opportunity. In 1888, shortly after his father-in-law died (there’s no record of the date of his mother-in-law’s death), Mason began to act in earnest toward his new ambition. That year he placed a small ad in a regional newspaper offering his services as a bookkeeper. Through this work, he was able to provide critical help to all the entrepreneurs setting up new businesses in the south who had little formal business experience. With his skill and integrity, he earned trust and respect among the key players in Temuco. Combining
