Mason was still going back and forth between Temuco and Parral when his seventh child, Laura, was born in 1889. By 1891, the whole family had moved to Temuco for good. Nearly all of his wife Micaela’s seven siblings moved there with him.
The national railroad arrived in Temuco in 1893, a seminal event in a burgeoning frontier town. In 1897, Mason built the Hotel de la Estación right in front of the station—fifty meters from the ticket window, to be exact—on land he had managed to obtain at a significant discount or perhaps even through a free land grant. It advertised itself with the English title THE PASSENGER’S HOME, and noted SE HABLA INGLÉS, ALEMÁN Y FRANCÉS. The hotel allowed Mason to further strengthen his social and political influence in up-and-coming Temuco, as government functionaries, businessmen, important members of the state railroad company, political candidates on their campaigns, and tourists all would either stay or at least eat at the hotel. It also became a meeting place for local politicians.
Not long after he turned twenty-one, José del Carmen traveled by train to Temuco. Its population had just passed ten thousand, with some twenty-five thousand people pioneering the countryside around it. The town was dominated by a recent wave of mostly Swiss German immigrants. The Chilean government wanted to set up an agricultural economy, particularly to help meet the growing food demands of miners in the arid north, where the mining industry was booming. In order to attract people who had enough capital and capability to exploit the virgin frontier, the Chilean government enacted the Law of Selective Immigration—“selective” as in only upstanding European citizens looking for new opportunities and of a sufficient socioeconomic level who would be able to colonize and enrich the area. Toward this end, these immigrants were granted swaths of land, tax exemptions, and other incentives. They would form a broad society, founding new towns and cities and dominating local politics, while establishing ties between the region and the national political scene as never before. They would dominate the social and class structure of the region for decades.
José del Carmen would also witness the domestic migration of adventurous Chileans of all economic stripes to the incipient town, people looking for the excitement of uncharted territory and the opportunities that come from expansion, as Mason and his relatives had done. The remainder of the population was mostly former soldiers who settled down after the war against the Mapuche and the War of the Pacific, hoping to find jobs, and people teetering on the edge of tenement life in Santiago who had enough to head south to try their luck. These latter groups offered a striking contrast to the European colonials and other more “dignified” citizenry. The recently incarcerated, the desperate and jobless, and the former soldiers often drank excessively, which frequently led to fist and knife fights. Newcomers dealt with a variety of new challenges, including the need to fortify themselves against the cold of seemingly endless winters drenched in rain, now being so close to the southern tip of South America.
Temuco was colorful and studded with diverse characters both within its borders and outside of town, such as the huasos, the gentlemen of the countryside who would ride their white horses into town for supplies and drink. These men were extremely skilled horsemen, often landowners, and they distinguished themselves with their short, colorful ponchos decorated in broad primary-color stripes and their flat-brimmed black straw hats rimmed with ribbon, called chupallas. Even the stirrups of their saddles were carved by hand. They had maintained this artisan craft as they migrated from the north over the previous decades.
When José del Carmen first stepped off the train onto the muddy platform, he saw a station crowded with women wearing floor-length dresses and ornate bonnets escorted by men in suits, the local gentry. There were also people in simpler clothes, those in laborers’ threads, and a few vendors in well-worn sombreros selling bread and cheese for those about to take the train north.
José would have been amazed to see another kind of people: the Mapuche. These indigenous people were so low on the social scale that they weren’t considered part of the town’s population and were forbidden to live within its confines. The women wore beautiful, distinctive silver jewelry over their wide black ponchos; the men wore ponchos of many colors. The majority of Chilean citizens, including those in power, treated the Mapuche as outcasts.
Because they were not allowed to live within the boundaries of Temuco itself, the Mapuche came into town from the fields and forests to trade and left at night, the men on horseback, the women on foot. Most of the Mapuche couldn’t read Spanish, and their native language, Mapudungun, had no written form. Thus, as José walked the streets that first day, he kept looking up at the enormous representations of objects hanging outside stores to convey what goods they sold: “an enormous cooking pot, a gigantic padlock, an Antarctic spoon,” as Neruda would later recount in his memoirs. “Farther along the street, shoe stores, a colossal boot.”
Mason knew of José del Carmen from José’s father, but José del Carmen was just one of his friend’s fourteen children. José may have spent a few nights in Temuco, but he wouldn’t have been able to just stay for free at the hotel, nor would Mason have had a job waiting for him. So José continued his travels back and forth between Talcahuano and Parral, scraping together work as he found it. It was an austere but free life. But then, on a visit to Temuco in 1895, José had an intimate encounter with Trinidad, Mason’s sister-in-law. He had a wanderer’s charm, and the twenty-six-year-old Trinidad, whose long, angular face was more interesting than beautiful, had little to entertain her in Mason’s frontier compound.
It was a short-lived passion, but
