Treasure of the World

by Tara Sullivan

  I like fixing things: I’m always trying to find a way to do things just a little bit better. But I have no control over Victor leaving and you can’t change death, so today my brain spins and spins but doesn’t get anywhere.

  Victor stays quiet for the rest of the day too. When we sit together again for our lunch of watery soup at noon, I try to bring him into the conversation, but he just shakes his head and stays quiet. School lets out for the day right after that, so once we finish eating, it’s time to gather up my satchel and notebook and head home. I’m thinking hard about what I’m going to say to Victor, but when I meet Daniel at the big blue metal door, I don’t see him anywhere.

  “Hey, where’s Victor?” I ask.

  Daniel pokes his head out. “There he is.” He points. “He must have got a head start.”

  I push past him, out the door. “Victor!”

  Victor turns. He’s already twenty meters up the road that leads toward El Rosario. He and his papi live in a little house perched right on the edge of the gully overlooking the entry lot. I wonder what it’s like to wake up every morning and see your future below you.

  We live in the other direction, farther down the mountain, but I jog to catch up to Victor.

  “Victor, I . . .” I trail off when I get to him. What am I going to say? That I’m sorry he has to leave school? That this isn’t fair? He already knows those things.

  “What, Ana?” Victor’s eyes look tired already. I notice he didn’t bring his notebook home with him. He must have left it at school so some other kid could use the empty pages.

  “I’m going to miss you,” I finally manage. “Take care, okay?”

  “Okay, ” he says, but even I can tell he doesn’t believe it.

  I watch until Victor turns the bend, then I retrace my steps to where Daniel is waiting for me and join him for the long walk home.

  The younger kids stay behind because Don Marcelino will give them a ride down the mountain in his truck. They look funny, twenty of them packed into the flat bed of the truck, but it’s a nice thing to do for their little legs. The bigger kids, like Daniel and me, walk.

  For a couple hundred meters, there are other kids our age on the road with us, and Daniel chats and jokes with them. Daniel is cheerful, like he always is when he gets to go to school. Being sick and stuck at home with nothing to do bores him. I bring him work so he doesn’t fall too far behind, but that only fills an hour or so of the day. It’s not the same as being at school all morning, every day, surrounded by friends. It lights him up from the inside.

  It also exhausts him.

  In twos and threes the other kids branch off the road to find their own paths home. We wave at them. Eventually, it’s just us hiking our way up and around the Cerro.

  Walking home is even slower than our trip to school in the morning, when Daniel was fresh. On the steeper slopes we have to stop every ten steps or so for him to lean heavily against my shoulder and take deep, shuddering breaths. In my mind, I try to figure out how much farther we have yet to go and how long it will take us. We don’t have time to dawdle: Mami needs us home to work. Still, I’m afraid to push Daniel. I study his face. He’s pale and his cheeks are shiny with sweat even though we’re going so slowly.

  I walk to a boulder slightly off to the side of the road.

  “Take a rest,” I tell him. “We’ll keep going in a minute.”

  It’s proof of how tired he is that he doesn’t fight me on this. Instead, he collapses against the boulder and closes his eyes, focusing on evening out his breathing.

  The air is thin up here. The Cerro Rico is 4,800 meters above sea level. Whenever tourists visit, or even people from lower down in Bolivia, they gasp like fish and get horrible headaches and nausea. We call it sorroche—altitude sickness. The extreme altitude is why water boils at a temperature so low you can cook a potato for days and it will still be hard in your soup. Even cars and trucks struggle to work up here. I heard Papi grumble once that a car will last three to five times as long at lower altitudes just because there’s more oxygen in the air which lets it burn fuel efficiently without straining the crankshaft. Not that we have a car, but still, he was offended by the thought. Those of us who live here don’t notice it so much, but when I hear Daniel wheeze, it’s all I can think about: whether, if he had air with more oxygen in it and we could get him away from breathing in dust full of arsenic, lead, and other things that weaken your body—if we were somewhere else, anywhere else—he’d be okay, even with his asthma and his constant lung infections.

  I scowl and aim a sharp kick at a rock near where we’re standing.

  Unfortunately, the rock is not loose scree, like I thought it was. Instead, it’s a small spike of the mountain, still very firmly attached.

  I swear loudly, grabbing the toe of my sneaker in both hands.

  Daniel’s eyes pop open at my cussing, and seeing me hopping around on one foot, he starts to laugh.

  “Shut up!” I snap. “It’s not funny.”

  “Sure, sure,” he says, still chuckling, “you’re not funny.”

  It’s only when he winks at me that I realize he’s changed the words around to mean something different, like he always does.

  “Gah!” I take three steps off the path and aim a kick at another, much smaller rock. Satisfyingly, this one goes flying.

  “Take that!” I shout after it.

  “Good work, Ana.” Daniel is gasping for breath again, but this time it’s from laughing so hard. “That rock definitely had it coming.”

  And I want to stay angry, I really do, but no matter how annoying he can be, Daniel has always known how to find the words that poke my mad feelings in the sides until they giggle. I stare at the offending rock, now a good two meters off the path, and can’t help but smile.

  “It did, didn’t it?”

  “Mmm-hmm,” he says, face completely straight even though his eyes are sparkling. “Definitely. That was one bad rock. Good thing it’s gone now. Would have been a disaster if it stayed there.”

  I shuffle my feet in the scree, my bad mood settling onto my shoulders again like a condor perching on a carcass.

  “Yeah,” I grumble.

  Daniel tries to catch my eye. “What’s wrong, Ana?”

  I can’t admit that I wish I could get him better air to breathe, so I say the other thing that’s been weighing on me all day.

  “You heard Victor. He’s not coming back to school.”

  Daniel grimaces. Kids work. Unless you’re rich or something, families can’t get by on what the parents make. In the city you see kids doing lots of jobs. They sit beside kiosks or mantas laid out on the ground with things to sell: coca leaves, hats, used shoes. Some get jobs washing the sidewalks or collecting trash. Kids shine tombstones and shape bricks and carry loads. They wash windshields and collect scrap metal for smelters. They sell their size, their energy, and their time. Crippled or disabled kids beg. Boys and young men dig trenches, work the ore refineries, or shine shoes. Girls work as maids for fancy families or help out in shops and restaurants. Up here, though, there aren’t that many jobs. Boys mine. Girls break rocks.

  “That stinks,” he says.

  “Yeah. I don’t think he wants to work in the mines.”

  “No one wants to work in the mines,” Daniel says flatly.

  There’s no arguing with that, so I don’t. For a few minutes we sit in silence, each leaning against the big red boulder, lost in our own thoughts.

  “Luís and Araceli are gone too,” I muse.

  Daniel quirks a brow at me, but I know he can see where I’m going.

  “And remember? Óscar said that he might need to start working soon too. Alejandra told me later that her parents were starting to talk the same way.”

  “So?” Daniel asks, but he’s not meeting my eyes anymore and his face has smoothed out like a bedshe
et, the way it does when he wants to hide the lumps in his feelings from me.

  “So”—my voice roughens without my permission—“that means, in the whole school, there are only going to be four kids still older than us. And now even our friends are starting to leave.” I scuff my poor abused sneakers into the path, digging through the centimeters of brick-colored dust that cover everything on the Cerro Rico, exposing the hard, cold mountain beneath. I find the courage to say my fear aloud, but even so, it comes out as a whisper. “I think I’m running out of time, Daniel. I’m getting too old. Any day now, I’ll be next.”

  We both know there’s no way that Daniel could ever be a miner, not with how often he’s sick and how weak his lungs are. Since we were little, Mami has always talked about how Daniel will need to finish secondary school down in the city and get a job there. We’ve all known he was too special, too fragile, to stay up here. But me . . . I almost never get sick. They’ve never had those conversations about me. Never mind that I’d like to leave the mountain too—go to the city, maybe even attend university—I’ve always known that my job is to help out my family in whatever way they need. That means that every day I get to go to school feels stolen from an ugly future. One day, though, we all know that I’ll be asked to stop going to school and work full-time as a palliri with Mami and Abuelita. Girls like me don’t get choices like the ones I dream about. All our choices are bad ones: like whether we want to waste a day walking down the mountain and back up carrying heavy cans of clean water, or whether we want to drink the runoff from the mines, which we know will make us sick.

  For a long moment Daniel just sits beside me, face outlined in the harsh afternoon light, staring at the empty sky. Then, like flipping the switch on an air compressor, Daniel turns on a smile.

  “So we’ll run away together,” he says. “Far away from here. Far away from the mountain and the mines. Far away from the rocks and the cold. We’ll run until we find a green valley like Abuelita talks about in her stories, and we’ll sink our toes into the soft black soil and grow so much food that we both die fat.”

  The words are musical and familiar. It’s something we’ve repeated back and forth to each other so many times since we were little that I could recite it in my sleep. I finish it. “Or we’ll find a city that sparkles with electric lights and good jobs and we’ll both make lots of money and be happy forever?”

  Daniel nods. “It’s what we’ve always dreamed, right?”

  “It’s what we’ve always dreamed,” I agree. But with my friends dropping out of school one after the other, the words feel hollow today.

  I pick up his backpack from the ground and loosen the straps so I can wear it over mine.

  “Come on,” I say. “If you’ve caught your breath, let’s get going again. Mami needs us home sometime before next week.”

  Daniel heaves himself off the boulder and starts walking beside me, and I bend double, gripping the four backpack straps, fighting against the steepness of the slope and the darkness of my thoughts.

  2

  Just over two hours later we crest the last rise home. Even before we see them, we can hear the irregular pounding and cracking of Mami and Abuelita checking the refuse pile of rocks in the gully near our house for bits of metal missed by the miners. I dump our schoolbags near the door and pick my way over the uneven pile until I reach them.

  “Puangichi.” I kiss each of them on the cheek and switch into Quechua because Abuelita never went to school and doesn’t speak Spanish.

  “Allyisiami, Ana,” she replies. “How was school today?”

  I don’t like questions like this. I like Three-fifths added to four-thirds is how many fifteenths? And Describe the way the Bolivian government is divided between our two capital cities. Those types of questions have one right answer and you can learn them or figure them out. How was school? is one of those questions that you have to answer differently depending on who’s asking you. If a teacher is asking, I have to say Good, no matter what I’m really feeling, so as not to be rude to a community leader. If a friend is asking, I’m supposed to complain so they have the chance to complain too if they want to. If Mami or Papi is asking, I have to tell them something impressive I’ve learned, to give them a reason to let me go again tomorrow. Papi likes to see numbers. He’ll check my math notebook and, if I’ve gotten a problem wrong, will make me copy it over ten or twenty times until I have it memorized. Mami likes to see my writing. Sometimes, when no one else is around, we’ll take out my notebook and read through what I’ve written together. She’ll trace the curves of the letters with her fingers and I’ll help her sound out the words. Mami had to start working when she was nine, so she only got two and a half years of school. I’ve already been in school more than twice as long as my mother.

  With Abuelita, it’s a little different. Abuelita loves stories. She doesn’t want to see a row of neat, correct numbers, or a well-lettered sentence that someone else dictated. She wants something to think about while she works as a palliri with Mami. It’s hard, boring work sifting through rock chunks all day long, and she’s been doing it every day for longer than I’ve been alive, so I try to give her a good story. It doesn’t matter if it’s happy or sad, gossip or fact; she’ll treasure any story like a new shirt and spend the day folding and refolding it into her memory. Sometimes, months later, she’ll pull out a story I told her, but it will have all kinds of additions and changes from the original. That’s how I know she spends her days embroidering them.

  Today, though, the only stories I focused on all day long are the ones about Victor leaving school, Daniel needing better air, and the tragedy of Mariángela. None of those is something I want to bring up now. I’m also not about to admit my worries about my own future. I like to believe that, if I never talk in front of my family about the fact that I’ll one day have to start working full-time, then it will never occur to them and I’ll get to stay in school forever.

  I shoot Daniel a panicked glance. He rolls his eyes. Daniel thinks I’m stupid for believing this. Just because you don’t talk about the wind doesn’t mean it won’t blow you over the cliff, he says. But even so, he comes to my rescue.

  “Did you hear? They found that girl’s body.”

  “What girl?” asks Mami, her hands stilling. “The missing guarda? Mariángela?”

  “Yeah. A group of miners found her body yesterday in a ditch on the far side of the Cerro.”

  “¡Ay, Dios!” What few phrases Abuelita has in Spanish are all religious.

  This tidbit is interesting enough to keep Abuelita and Mami asking Daniel questions for a while. And though I’m grateful he saved me from having to answer Abuelita, I hate that this is what he distracted them with. It was bad enough when she disappeared . . . at least then I could pretend that maybe she just decided to run away to a better life. I could imagine her, with her shy smile and ready laugh, in a green field or a sparkling city. But now, knowing she’s dead, knowing the Cerro Rico has taken another person I knew . . . it makes me feel sick to my stomach.

  “. . . and she was only fifteen! Such a pity.”

  I can’t stand it anymore. “Can we talk about something else, please?”

  Mami and Abuelita stare at me. Daniel raises an eyebrow in my direction. It clearly says, You asked for a distraction and now you’re complaining?

  “It’s . . .” I mumble. “I knew her. I . . . I don’t want to talk about her anymore like this.”

  “Of course, mi hija,” Mami says gently.

  Abuelita sucks on her teeth. I can tell she’s disappointed but also doesn’t want to upset me. “Girls shouldn’t be working so close to the mine anyway,” she says loftily. “La Pachamama gets jealous.”

  “I thought you said Mother Earth gets jealous if women or girls go into the mountain?” I ask, scrunching up my face, trying to remember, sure that’s what she said last time. Trying to figure out if this is a real t
hing or another story she’s embroidered.

  Abuelita snorts. “In, on, near. It makes no difference. You shouldn’t take chances with la Pachamama like that. If Mother Earth gets jealous, she will collapse the mining shafts to keep her men to herself. You remember when that whole section of the top of the mountain collapsed five years ago?” She nods emphatically. “La Pachamama was angry. No one should challenge a power that strong.”

  A cold, slightly slurred voice speaks over my shoulder before any of us has the chance to respond.

  “The 2011 cone collapse happened because the tunnels underneath were empty and unstable, and no one had shored them up before moving on. There was nothing mystical about it, Mamá. It’s physics.”

  Abuelita closes her mouth and the rest of us stiffen slightly. None of us contradicts Papi. Mami gets to her feet and walks over to him.

  “How was your day?” she asks, taking his helmet and satchel from him. The satchel is oddly stuffed. It should be empty. He would have chewed the coca leaves and drunk the alcohol that was in it this morning while he was working. From how unsteady he is on his feet right now, I know he drank more than what was in the bag. I’m curious what might be in there and why he’s home so much earlier than usual, but I know better than to ask questions when I don’t know how drunk he is.

  “It was a good day,” he slurs. Papi’s face, usually all angles and hard lines, is softened around the edges by the drink. “A very good day! They came . . . the news came . . . from the city. The prices of zinc and tin are up. There’s money to be made in mining again!”

  We all make appreciative noises, but they’re not enough for Papi.