Nearly a decade had passed since Trinidad Candia Malverde had given birth to Rodolfo. José had kept in touch with her to some extent, keeping tabs on his oldest son, who was being raised in the woods by someone outside the family. He may have been harboring the hope that Mason would help him out if he reunited with Trinidad and also with his being the widowed son of Mason’s old friend José Angel back in Parral. Mason certainly had the connections and influence to get him a job on the railroad or something similar. Plus, José might have believed he’d find the comfort he sought in Trinidad; he would bring Neftalí from Belén and Rodolfo back from the forest to complete their family.
With a plan set at last, José returned to Temuco. He had a long, sincere discussion with Trinidad, now homey and sweet. He expressed his intentions to Mason and received his blessing to marry her. At 7:30 on the evening of November 11, 1905, the two were wed in the home of Mason and Micaela.
The newlyweds made their home next to the Mason-Candia homestead. It belonged to Trinidad, who had received the plot fifteen years prior as a free land grant, quite likely with Mason pulling a few strings. While Mason must have been supportive of José del Carmen, as he was making an honest woman of Mason’s sister-in-law, he wasn’t nearly as involved with him as José del Carmen would have hoped: Mason didn’t pull any strings for him; there was no new job.
Still, Neftalí, now two years old, was brought down from Parral to Temuco as planned. From the beginning, and for the rest of her life, Trinidad treated him with nurturing warmth. In a portrait of him taken at a Temuco studio in 1906, standing with his hand resting on a cushioned chair, wearing his white cambric baby dress and black boots, Neftalí looks poised and angelic. His cheeks are full, and he seems to have the composure of someone very sure of himself.
A few months after settling himself and Neftalí into their new Temuco home, José’s next move was to reclaim Rodolfo, or rather to claim him for the first time. José had never felt any obligation or affection toward his son until now, when he made it his mission to assemble the family together for the good of all. José del Carmen set off on the path of the Toltén River, to Coipúe. The small village where the boy was being raised was a wild place, with a smattering of houses along the riverbank, and surrounded by a thick oak forest and a few small, isolated farms. José, who had come dressed in a formal jacket and vest, must have seemed impossibly foreign to the barefoot eight-year-old. The only resemblance between the two was their blue eyes. When the only mother he had known told “Rodolfito” to greet his father, the barefoot, semiwild son drew back from the stranger. It would take a series of visits for the boy to become accustomed to his father and agree to join him in Temuco, and even then a sense of unease remained between them.
José del Carmen and Trinidad settled into their wood-plank house that was in a continual state of construction. José began to realize that he was just a minor player in Mason’s huge, active world. There would be little special treatment from his wife’s brother-in-law, forty-three years his senior. Meanwhile, he continued to mourn for Rosa Neftalí profoundly and often returned to her grave in Parral. On those trips he would occasionally visit Aurelia Tolrá in Talcahuano. As a man who was accustomed to the freedom of solitude, he quickly found himself straining against the confines of family life. It had been hardly a year since Aurelia had counseled him to return to Trinidad, but now José found himself longing for her instead.
He had known the attractive Aurelia for years now, during which time they had developed a special, intimate friendship. Now in his mid-thirties, José looked and acted more dignified than he had in the past. He had taken on the familial responsibility that Aurelia herself had urged him to. With his solid body, handsome face, and hypnotic, rare blue eyes, José was a charmer. Thus on one of his visits to Talcahuano, after one of their long conversations at the pension over a bottle or two of wine, José del Carmen’s maturity made a deep impression on Aurelia. Their mutual attraction was undeniable. Aurelia was now a grown woman, with an endearing charm and a stern yet striking beauty. With a full moon shining on the water in the port below and everyone else in the pension asleep, the two joined each other in bed. Near the end of that year, 1906, she became pregnant with his child.
To avoid a scandal, Aurelia left the pension to her sisters and moved to San Rosendo, a railroad village at the juncture of two lines. There she gave birth to Neftalí’s half sister, Laura, on August 2, 1907. Aurelia set up a new pension house in San Rosendo and courageously cared for Laura alone, though
