When he was two years old, his father moved to Temuco and lived there throughout the boy's adolescence, in a wooden house with a small garden. He learned to read early and began to write timid verses, a point of contention with his father, who would not encourage his "daydreaming," and his schoolmates, who made fun of him. He grew up reading voraciously, as a lonely boy, in spite of the two siblings born of his father's second marriage, Laura and Rodolfo. At the age of sixteen Reyes was introduced to French poetry by the headmistress of Temuco's school for girls, Gabriela Mistral, a poet who in 1945 received the first Nobel Prize in literature awarded to a Latin American author.
His father's remarriage to Doña Trinidad Candia Marverde (whom Neruda fondly recalled in his autobiographical poetry as la mamadre, "the momother") was a blessing for Reyes. As a child he revered his stepmother, a sweet and silent woman of peasant stock who was close to the earth that he wrote of continually as a poet. The Reyes home was modest, but the boy had some privacy for his voracious reading. "En un minuto la noche y la lluvia cubren el mundo.
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