Neruda, p.4
Neruda, page 4
It was a line of work that allowed José to travel as he labored, satisfying his desire to be on the move. He was quickly promoted to be the conductor in charge of a ballast train, which spread crushed rocks, river stone, and sand to form the foundational bed between the rails, all the while making repairs along the tracks. It was unforgiving work, especially during the winter months, when José had to make sure that the wooden ties wouldn’t be washed away by the torrents of rain that often lasted for hours. José del Carmen had been a reluctant farmer and a mediocre dockworker, but he was good with the trains, which he had ridden so frequently in their nascent development. He soon found that he was a railroader at heart.
By the time he was five years old, young Neftalí would often join his father on the rails, one of the very few places the two could bond. As they steamed through the virgin forests of the south, crossing over emerald rivers flowing down from the Andes and passing by small frontier outposts, impoverished Mapuche villages, freshly cleared pastures, and a variety of volcanoes, the natural world as a wealth of untamed possibilities unfolded before the child’s eyes.
A lifetime later, Neruda opened his memoirs with this impression, highlighting its significance as the origin of his poetic path: “Below the volcanoes, beside the snowcapped mountains, among the great lakes, the fragrant, the silent, the tangled Chilean forest . . . I have come out of that earth, that mud, that silence, to roam, to go singing throughout the world.” The fundamental curiosity that would augur the creation of his poetry stemmed from these early journeys.
“The essential Neruda was a human being,” his translator Alastair Reid once said. “In his eyes he never forgot that he was born naked into a world he didn’t understand, into a world of wonder.”
His father’s train and the laborers aboard it fascinated Neftalí. First was the locomotive engine, then a car or two for the workers, rough from the life they had lived before coming here. They usually wore heavy, thick raincoats provided by the state railroad company. Often their gaits and their hardened faces, many of which were lined, some with scars, were all that distinguished one from the other. Then there was the caboose in which José del Carmen lived during long trips along the rails, which could last a week or more. Finally, an open flatbed car at the rear carried the crushed stones and all the workers’ tools and equipment.
Neftalí would spend hours watching the men shovel the ballast off the end of the train and then work it into the tracks. The stones improved drainage and their sharp edges gave the workers a grip to anchor the rickety wooden ties to—which, in turn, kept the rails in place. The harsh rains wreaked havoc on the railbeds. The rapidly expanding rail network in the south was key to the area’s growth (and, increasingly, the economy of the entire country). José del Carmen and his crew bore the responsibility to keep it functional, and they were committed to making sure their assigned tracks were constantly maintained, no matter the weather or amount of labor involved.
Once the car was empty, they would travel to Boroa, in the wild heart of the frontier, or other quarries in whatever corner of the wild forests, where workers would labor on the “terrestrial core,” the enormous rocks, breaking them down for ballast and loading the train with the finished product. They could be there for over a week. Once they had shoveled the car full of stones, they were on the move again, straightening the rails, spreading the ballast, resetting the iron spikes that held the steel to the wooden rail ties, and repairing the tracks where needed.
It was all fantastic, if not bizarre, Neruda wrote later in a 1962 autobiographical article for a Brazilian newspaper. All the action of the train and the rain and the forest and the workers was taking place “in the middle of green and red glass lanterns and lampposts, flags and signals and storm blankets, the smell of oil and rusted iron, and with my father, small sovereign with a blond beard and blue eyes, like the captain of a boat, commanding his crew, commanding the voyage.”
Immersed in these smells and colors, Neftalí witnessed the social aspects of the train as well. He observed the workers shyly, in awe. They seemed like giants to him, muscular men from the tenements of Santiago, from the fields of the Central Valley, from prison, from the recent War of the Pacific. They were children of the elements, often arriving in the south dressed in rags, their faces battered, as Neruda would later lyricize, by the rain or the sand, their foreheads divided by rough scars. The camaraderie and solidarity that Neftalí saw among them, out on the tracks or around the dining room table telling long, unlikely tales, thrilled him.
Most of the crew had come to Temuco looking for something better than their difficult pasts, and now they toiled for subsistence wages. Neftalí was the son of their boss, and the young boy’s particular frailty contrasted sharply with their brute strength. These disparities widened the aperture of his impressionable mind, affecting how he would interpret class and society for the rest of his life, creating the foundation of his sociopolitical convictions. This would become central to his poetry and his politics, identifying with and championing the working class.
My father with the dark dawn
of the earth, towards what lost archipelagos
did he slide in his howling trains?
. . . the grave train crossing the extended winter
over the earth, like a proud caterpillar.
Suddenly the doors trembled.
It’s my father.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The centurions of the road surround him:
rail-workers wrapped in their wet blankets,
the steam and rain with them covered
the house, the dining room was filled with hoarse
tales, glasses were poured,
and even me, of the beings, like a separated
barrier, where the sorrows lived,
and the anguishes and scowling scars,
the men without money,
the mineral claw of poverty,
arrived . . .
—“La Casa”
By the time he was ten years old, when the train would stop somewhere in the middle of the virgin forests, Neftalí would go out and explore, feeling an instant connection to nature. The birds and the beetles fascinated him. Partridge eggs were wonders; he wrote later that it “was miraculous to find them in the nooks and crannies of the forest floor, greasy, dark, gleaming, gunmetal gray.” The insects’ “perfection” amazed him too. Neftalí spent many of his childhood days in the “vertical world” of the forests, “a nation of birds, a mass of leaves,” surrounding Temuco. Rotten logs were full of treasures: fungi, insects, and red parasite plants. As he reflected in a poem he wrote later in life, Neruda felt quite literally “immersed” in the natural world:
I lived with the spiders,
I was damp from the forest,
the beetles knew me
and the tri-colored bees,
I slept with the partridges
immersed in the mint.
—“Where Can Guillermina Be?”*
Neftalí’s explorations piqued the workers’ curiosity; some became interested in his discoveries. Many of the crew took to Neftalí, whose physical characteristics were so completely different from their own, his frailty perhaps inspiring something in them. José del Carmen referred to one of the men, named Monge, as “the most dangerous knife fighter.” A scar from a knife slash ran down the dark skin of Monge’s cheek. A white smile complemented the scar, mischievous yet charming and welcoming. It brightened his toughness. Monge, more than the others, would slip off into the forest to use his strength and size to get to places that Neftalí could not. He brought him back incredible treasures—magnificent mushrooms, moon-colored beetles, brilliant flowers, green snails, birds’ eggs from crevices—all delivered from his gigantic, worn hands to the smooth palms of the child. These materials would become elemental nutrients of Neftalí’s creative experience.
Much later, Neruda would write: “Along endless beaches or thicketed hills, a communication began between my spirit—that is, my poetry—and the loneliest land in the world. This was many years ago, but that communication, that revelation, that pact with the wilderness, has continued to exist throughout my life.”
The treasure for Neftalí, though, wasn’t just the natural objects Monge would bring him, but the fact that the worker did so. It was a gesture not done to please his boss, for José del Carmen wouldn’t stand for one of his employees feeding his son’s imagination at the expense of work. Later, Monge’s death would have a profound impact on Neftalí. Though he did not witness Monge’s fall from a moving train off a cliff, José told Neftalí that the man’s remains were “just a sack of bones.” The toughest man Neftalí knew had been brought down by the dangers inherent in his world.
Neftalí learned to measure the distance between his father and the workers. He realized that he effectively came from a family of modest means, and that his father had once been a vagabond looking for work in the Andes or on the docks. They had a cook, a local lady who would help prepare meals, easing the workload of Doña Trinidad in her five-person household—a service a railroad conductor could afford. José del Carmen consistently pushed—or tried to steer—his sons toward a dignified vocation, life, social class. Secondary school wasn’t mandatory and only a small number of children attended after finishing grammar school around age twelve. Most young men went to trade schools or to work instead, but there was no question that José del Carmen’s sons would attend and study with discipline.
Neftalí was puzzled by his father’s desire to have a good piano for the house, something grand to come home to after traveling on the train for days. It didn’t seem in line with his personality; he punished Rodolfo for pursuing a musical path. Perhaps more than anything, it had a dignifying presence in the house. It was a status symbol.
The Mason clan and José del Carmen’s brothers, who visited often from Parral, influenced Neftalí with their traditions, which by turns could be flamboyant, ritualistic, and macho. Big parties and dinners were regularly held at the Masons’, where the blue-eyed Norteamericano with flowing white hair, “looking like Emerson,” presided over the bountiful table: turkeys stuffed with celery, grilled lamb, and, for dessert, floating islands—leche nevada, literally “snowcapped milk”—where white poached meringues float in a creamy custard, decorated with mint leaves. Red wine flowed through the night. An immense Chilean flag with its red and white bands and lone white star set in a block of blue hung behind Mason, to which he had pinned a tiny U.S. flag as well.
One evening when Neftalí was a young adolescent, just as the night train clanged into the wooden station a block away, his uncles called him out to the patio. Neftalí knew what was about to take place: the great ritual slaughtering of the lamb. His uncles and other family friends were all gathered around, strumming guitars and playing with knives underneath a tree, their singing interrupted only by the blowing of the train whistle and the gulps of crude wine. Neftalí was a skinny, innocent-faced presence at these events, with his boyish wave of dark hair swept back from a gentle widow’s peak. He dressed, as he often did in these years, formally in black, already with what he considered to be his necessary “poet’s tie,” a thin, tightly knotted black accent on his narrow frame. He was dressed, as he’d reflect later, “like a man in mourning, mourning for nobody in particular, for the rain, for the universal pain.”
His uncles slit open the throat of the quivering lamb. The blood fell into a basin filled with potent spices. They motioned to Neftalí to come closer and lifted the goblet of hot blood to his lips, gunfire and songs going off. Neruda later explained that he felt as agonized as the lamb itself, but he wanted to become a centaur, like the other men, as barbarian as they seemed just then. So, pale and indecisive, he overcame his fear and drank with them. By drinking the blood, he began his passage to manhood.
From his first verses, blood was a symbol in his poetry, a symbol of the poetry itself. At one of his greatest peaks, in the poem “The Heights of Macchu Picchu,” imploring the Incan slaves to rise up, the final two lines of the poem’s twelve sweeping cantos read:
Come to my veins and my mouth.
Speak through my words and my blood.
* * *
Neftalí from the outset had a close relationship with his half sister, Laura, three years his junior. As they grew older, she would be one of his closest friends, confidantes, and supporters. The bond between them, born in the room the night before her mother gave her away, remained constant throughout their lives. He would always be protective and tremendously tender toward her. Laura was sweet and reserved, simple yet complicated, devoted to her parents and even more so to Neftalí.
Rodolfo, on the other hand, was always off on his own and would never have a close relationship with either of his siblings. Now a teenager, he found it hard to integrate himself within the confining structure of the family after his life in the forest and was mostly silent, except for his singing. Whereas Neftalí would soon seek refuge in his poetry, Rodolfo found his in song. He had an extraordinary voice, but he sang alone behind the closed door of his tiny room.
All three siblings sought Trinidad’s protection to shield them from their father’s impatience. José del Carmen had a stern attitude toward his children, perhaps inherited from his own father’s example. Over Neftalí’s childhood and into his adolescence, José del Carmen had coarsened. Though they weren’t as poor as Neruda would later often portray them as having been, José’s wages from the state-run railroad never led to economic prosperity and comfort, and there was little hope for advancement. But despite these frustrations and his possible yearnings, he never abandoned his responsibilities again. He was never known to have another affair.
Neruda called southern Chile the land “where the rain was born.” During the winter, it rains copiously for days on end, a constant lyric. That melancholic music accompanied Neftalí’s childhood. The Temuco of his memories was of mud streets, worn-out shoes, cold, rain, and a general lack of happiness that hovered over the town.
School for Neftalí was similarly gloomy. It was in a vast house with dilapidated classrooms. Neftalí was always the last in line to enter the school or exit class for the playground. He was not particularly tall for his age, and he was noticeably thin. He wore his sadness like the formal uniform he chose to wear: a long wool-blend dress jacket, matching pants, and boots. Already at this age he had the countenance of a much older person, one who had seen more than he should have, one who understood that life was not just play, but was full of hardship as well.
Compounding his melancholy was the fact that Neftalí’s constitution was fragile. He was constantly ill with something—a cold, the chills, the flu. His classmate Juvencio Valle was one of his first and only true friends at the liceo, the secondary school. Neftalí had drifted to the margins, away from the other kids. But the introspective and thoughtful Juvencio was drawn to Neftalí’s “mysterious inner halo,” and they bonded. The first time Neftalí invited him over to his house, Trinidad gave them coffee, but she served Neftalí’s with milk but not Juvencio’s, leaving it just black. This made Neftalí uncomfortable. “He wanted to give me his cup as a gift, in deference to me, being the guest. But when Doña Trinidad saw, she opposed: ‘No, don’t change the cups. I don’t have any more milk right now so at this moment the coffee with milk is for Neftalí, because he’s weak.’”
Because he was so sickly, Neftalí often stayed home from school. When he was confined to his bed, he’d ask Laura to stick her head out the window and tell him everything that was going on in the street—everything, even the most insignificant detail. “There goes a little Indian selling ponchos,” she’d report from the window, or “There are four little kids playing on the other side of the street.” Neftalí would keep insisting on more detail. He was obsessed with observing the world around him.
Neftalí was fascinated by the school’s dark basement, which felt like a tomb to him. He would often go down alone, sometimes lighting a candle, absorbed in the damp odor of his hidden world. Juvencio Valle, who shared his curiosity, would often join him. Valle, who would become a significant poet himself, would later muse that already in these childhood years he could sense that Neftalí was truly a unique individual, with “an imperceptible vibration, an air that was his alone and made him different. To the ordinary observer it was a nonexistent aura, but to me it was powerfully effective and real.”
While the other kids ran around, jumped, and shouted in a group, Juvencio and Neftalí would spend their days in the forest together, exploring, observing the world’s little things—a leaf, an insect, a path in the woods—trails of exploration forged through curiosity. The other kids didn’t want much to do with them. They took “refuge in [their] own particular territory, that marvelous universe of dreams,” where the two were always the “undisputed champions.”
Sometimes they would walk down to the cold Cautín River that ran through town near the school and dip their feet into its water, then lose themselves simply watching the rippling current from the bank. Often they did not get back to class on time.
Neruda saw those early days as a period of discovery. He began his lifelong friendship with Valle and explored the natural world, but also poetry found him. As Neruda versed in Memorial de Isla Negra:
And it was at that age . . . poetry arrived
in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don’t know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street it called me,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among raging fires
