* * *
Neruda’s father died on May 7. Later in life, Neruda would speak admiringly of his father, whose rigorous objections to his son’s poetry had served to strengthen his resolve. His father’s personality could resemble a rock. But behind that hardness he had truly cared for his son, and Neruda knew it.
In his reflective book Isla Negra, Neruda remembered José del Carmen:
My poor, hard father,
there he was at the axis of existence,
virile in friendship, his glass full.
His life was a running campaign,
and between his early risings and his traveling,
between arriving and rushing off,
one day, rainier than other days,
the railwayman, José del Carmen Reyes,
climbed aboard the train of death, and so far has not come back.
—“The Father”
* * *
For some breathing space during his time in Temuco, Neruda stayed in the house of Dr. Manuel Marín, the Reyeses’ family friend and doctor. Marín noted that the night Neruda’s father died, the poet shut himself in the den. The next morning the doctor found what the poet had written the night before: the first lines of the Canto general de Chile, which would eventually evolve into the larger Canto general. In these lines, Neruda took the seeds of conviction he had discovered in Spain and replanted them in his native Chile. As Spain was “in his heart,” Chile, and Latin America, now took root there as never before. The poem he wrote that night was “Discoverers of Chile,” depicting the violence and oppression unleashed by the conquistadores in their plunder of the New World.
While he had not yet expanded his scope to all of the Americas as he did in the larger work, in this smaller Canto, Neruda applied his political convictions to Chile. Here he found a new audience for his verse, not just in fellow intellectuals, but in el pueblo, the people. Campaigning at Santiago’s great market, La Vega Central, for presidential candidate Pedro Aguirre Cerda, Neruda read almost all of Spain in the Heart to the workers of the porters’ union. It was the first time he had taken his poetry to the streets in such a manner, and they were completely silent while he read. When he ended, many applauded, while others lowered their heads. Then a man who Neruda thought might be the leader of the union said, “Compañero Pablo, we are a much-forgotten people. I can tell you that we have never felt such great emotion. We want to tell you—” According to the poet, the worker then started to cry, as did others.
Neruda said that the workers’ reaction made his throat feel “tied in knots by an irrepressible feeling,” and that this was the most important act in his literary career until that point. While this description may seem exaggerated, it also conveys Neruda’s deepening identification with the working class and the poor. He adopted a new, humble tone, saying his trade as a poet was no greater than that of the baker, the carpenter, the miner; that he was no greater than the righteous of any class.
By the time he was working on Canto General in 1949 and 1950, Neruda had started to write in a voice that aimed to speak for the masses. While he somewhat appointed himself to the role of advocate for the people, the “people’s poet,” the majority seemed to value his representation. His acclaim had earned him tremendous visibility to further his activism for workers and all those suffering from economic injustice. To some degree, his posture was manufactured, and he played up his new image as the poet of the proletariat. But there was also sincerity involved; it was a role that came naturally as part of his personal, political, and poetic trajectory since childhood. It had evolved from his lifelong belief in the role of the poet, answering the poet’s calling, fulfilling his obligation to share with the world and humanity the creative gifts bestowed upon him at birth, which he had worked hard to develop.
* * *
Neruda’s stepmother died three months after the death of his father, on August 18, 1938. Her tenderness and serene strength had been essential to Neruda as a boy. Doña Trinidad Malverde’s peace and equanimity had been constant through the years, a rarity in his family, in the world around him, and in himself.
Neruda had acknowledged her importance in subtle ways. The postcard considered to be his first poem was addressed only to her. While lost in Asia he wrote letters addressed just to her as well. When he wrote his father from Spain to tell him about the birth of his daughter, he explained her full name, Malva Marina Trinidad, was an homage to his stepmother, la mamadre.
Dear more-mother—
I was never able
to say stepmother!—
at this moment
my mouth trembles to define you,
for hardly
had I begun to understand
than I saw goodness in your poor dark clothes,
a practical sanctity—
goodness of water and flower,
that’s what you were . . .
—“The More-Mother”
At the time of Trinidad’s death, Neruda’s half sister, Laura, now thirty-one, was still living in Temuco. With her father and stepmother gone and never having reestablished a relationship with her own mother, she moved to Santiago in 1938 and found work in the public school administration. The bond she shared with Neruda was still firmly intact.
Neruda loved his older half brother, Rodolfo, as well, according to close comrade and biographer Volodia Teitelboim, but they were distant. Rodolfo tried his hand at a variety of entrepreneurial endeavors in Temuco, with little success. He eventually found work with the City of Santiago.
Neruda’s “uncle” Orlando had left Temuco after the Ibáñez regime shut down
