“You all”—he sways slightly on his feet before recovering himself—“you all don’t know how hard I work to feed you. The price of mineral went up! We should celebrate! Mónica! We should . . . celebrate . . .”
It seems to me that maybe Papi has done enough celebrating with his miner friends already. Mami steers him into the house, making soothing noises. Now that Papi is home, she will focus on making dinner. Daniel, Abuelita, and I bend our heads to our task without talking. Talking annoys Papi.
The price of mineral went up! I think, remembering my words to Victor this morning and feeling weirdly like I made it happen. Maybe this will be a good thing. Maybe he really can make some quick money and come back to school.
I pick up a rock from the pile and smash it against another until one of them cracks. I peer carefully at the cross section, rubbing my finger along the rough ridges, squinting for the stripes of color or texture changes that would mean there’s enough of something in it—zinc, aluminum, tin, maybe even a spiderweb thread of silver—to make it worth selling. Nothing: the middle is a uniform, pockmarked reddish rock. I toss the useless halves down the slope and pick up another one. And then another and another and another. Only when we run out of daylight, nearly five hours later, do we stop and head inside.
Abuelita holds her outmost skirt to make a pouch. I pick up the pile of rocks the three of us found that we think are worth trying to sell and set them inside it for her to carry. They fit easily. Even at a higher price, we won’t make much off that. Sighing, I loop Abuelita’s free hand through my elbow and guide her over the uneven ground to our house. She puts the pile of rocks beside the door and we go inside. Daniel, carrying the schoolbags, is a step behind us.
Three of the walls of our one-room house are built from chunks of reject stones loosely mortared together. Once, when Daniel had pneumonia and needed to stay home sick for a month, he complained it was like living in a cave of failure, but I try not to listen to him when he’s crabby. The fourth wall of the room is chipped into the side of the Cerro Rico itself. I’m sure it saved the builders some time and energy to borrow part of the house from the mountain, but the cold radiates off it and there are days when I feel like I can never get warm, even indoors. Winter, summer, it doesn’t matter. Nights are always cold this high up the Andes.
Mami carries in the pot of soup she has made and serves it into bowls, handing Papi his before anyone else. We sit in a circle on the floor since our house is too small to fit a table, chewing on the softened strips of llama jerky and freeze-dried potatoes in the soup. I’m hungry, but I know better than to rush.
We usually eat in silence, so I’m surprised when Papi finishes his bowl of soup and starts talking.
“Mónica, pass me my bag.”
Mami puts down her bowl immediately and fetches it for him. I bite down on the inside of my cheek, annoyed. He could have reached out and picked up his bag, but instead he made her get it for him. Not that she had far to go: our house is tiny. But still. He was finished and she was still eating. I duck my head so that he won’t accidentally read something in my face he doesn’t like. It’s better to let Papi have his little victories. Then he doesn’t feel the need for bigger ones.
Mami hands him the bag without a word.
Papi opens the flap and digs inside. We all stare at him. Though none of us said anything, I guess we were all curious about what was in it.
When Papi pulls out a miner’s zip-front coveralls and helmet, for one second I think that he wasted our money buying himself a spare set of work clothes. There’s no point in spare clothes. They get filthy by the end of any day of mining, so there’s barely a point in even washing them. Mami only cleans the clothes he wears inside the coveralls, his sweaters and slacks and shirts, never the coveralls themselves.
It’s only when he throws the outfit into Daniel’s lap that I realize they’re not full-size coveralls and that he didn’t buy them for himself. My heart stops.
I hear a soft gasp from Mami. Abuelita starts to mutter quietly under her breath. She’s probably praying, but I don’t look over at them. My eyes are glued to Daniel.
He’s frozen, his spoon halfway to his mouth. Then he puts down his spoon and bowl on the ground beside him.
“What’s this?” he manages, his voice slightly choked. His hands hover over the clothes, like he’s afraid to touch them.
“Pedro Sánchez is bringing his boy to work,” Papi says gruffly, scraping the last of the pot of soup into his bowl and chewing. “I got César to approve a second slot on the shift. Since he was adding one boy, I figured I could get him to add two. You start tomorrow.”
There is a beat where it feels like no one breathes; the only sound, Papi’s slurp and chew as he works his way through his second helping.
Daniel’s hands settle on the coveralls. He doesn’t say anything.
“Mauricio . . .” Mami starts softly, hesitantly.
Papi’s eyes snap to her, the hardness of the mountain in his stare.
“He’s so young,” Mami goes on. I’m biting the inside of my mouth again. She is brave, so brave! With Papi’s attention on me like that, I would never keep talking. “The Sánchez boy, Victor, he’s older. Let Daniel go to school a little bit longer. We have enough to get by, especially if the price of mineral is going up; we’ll be fine. And you know he’s not strong . . .”
Papi slaps his open palm onto the floor beside him. We all flinch. Mami stops talking. Daniel doesn’t say anything, but I can see his fingers tightening in the material in his lap. His knuckles are turning white.
“No one says a son of mine is weak.” Papi slaps the floor again. “No one says he’s only slightly better than an invalid or a girl.”
None of us have said anything like this, so it must be something he overheard at work. My wide eyes dart to Daniel. Papi is a proud man. There’s no way we’ll talk him out of it if he thinks Daniel staying home somehow makes him look bad.
“I say it’s time for him to go,” Papi shouts. “He’s going.”
Mami might be about to say something more, but Daniel gets to his feet. He bunches the material of the suit in his fists.
“It’s fine, Mami,” he says. “I’ll do it.”
Then he turns and goes to our bed and curls up in the blankets like a pill bug that has been poked, his back to us.
“That’s my boy!” says Papi loudly, but none of us answer and the rest of the evening passes in a tense silence.
Even after Papi falls asleep, we don’t say anything, afraid to wake him, but Mami cries quietly as she cleans the dishes. When I’m done with my chores, I go outside, even though it’s cold, and stare up the starlit path. This morning I said the price of mineral would go up and it did. Then, this afternoon, I had worried that we were running out of time. And now Papi is making Daniel leave school and join him at work. I feel like I jinxed us. That, by saying my fears out loud, I brought the attention of the devil of the mines or the Pachamama or whoever upon us and they made Papi make this decision. I bury my head in my arms and try to think of a way out of this. Nothing good has come out of anything I’ve said, but just in case the magic pattern holds, I speak out loud to the stars.
“Papi and Don Sánchez will change their minds, and Victor and Daniel will be allowed to come back to school.” I squeeze my eyes shut and will it to be true, but nothing immediately changes. Eventually, the wind forces me inside. I lie on the pile of blankets I share with Daniel and Abuelita and curl around my brother, hugging him close to give him what heat I can. I drift off to sleep to the rattle of his breathing.
* * *
The next morning, when Mami shakes me awake to make the tea, Papi is already up, brash and happy even through his hangover. Daniel knocks his tea back in three quick gulps the way the miners drink liquor at a funeral. Papi sips his tea and laughs, all smiles again now that he’s gotten his way.
“You’ll do fine,” he’s saying to Daniel, patting his hunched shoulders. “I spoke to César and he’s going to start you on his team. César will take good care of you.”
Daniel doesn’t answer and I can see the tight lines along his face from where he’s holding in his words by sheer force. Usually, when Papi’s sober, Daniel sasses all of us freely. It’s who he is. With him quiet, I’m not sure whether to talk or not.
“We shouldn’t even be on this mountain,” Abuelita breaks in, her voice sounding extra thin this morning. I pour her some more tea to soothe her throat. “Our people.”
“What’s that?” Papi asks her, the smile on his face looking like an afterthought.
“When the Inca ruled this land, the emperor had miners working all over his empire.”
I settle back and sip my tea. When she uses that rolling tone, Abuelita is launching into a story. I’m glad. It’s got to be better than anything else we’d talk about this morning.
“But when Huayna Capac, the Incan emperor, came to this mountain, planning to dig for silver,” Abuelita goes on, “the land heaved and rolled beneath his feet, and an echoing voice came from the earth. It said, You shall not mine here! This silver is meant for others.” She throws her arms wide, indicating how big the voice was, and even though her own voice doesn’t get any louder, it’s almost like I can hear the mountain booming its command at the emperor. “And the emperor listened,” she says, settling her hands around her cup of tea again, “and decreed that this hill was never to be mined. And that’s where this whole region got its name—the emperor named the mountain Potoc’xi, a thunderous noise.”
I can’t help myself. “I thought you said the Inca called it Sumaj Orcko, beautiful hill?”
“Beautiful is for emperors who don’t need to work in order to eat,” Papi says flatly. His smile is a dish left out too long that has started to spoil. “The Spaniards called it the Cerro Rico: the rich hill.”
“The miners call it the Mountain That Eats Men.” Daniel’s voice is barely a whisper.
“All names are true,” Abuelita says before Papi can answer Daniel. “The prophecy given to Huayna Capac was fulfilled, because then the Spaniards came and conquered the Inca, and took the silver for themselves. So much silver that, had they wanted to, they could have built a solid silver bridge from Bolivia, across the Atlantic Ocean, all the way to Spain, and still had enough left to carry across it to give to their greedy king.”
“And what exactly does this have to do with anything?” Papi’s definitely not smiling anymore.
“We are descendants of the Inca.” She points a finger at Papi, the way she must have when he was still a small boy and had to mind her. “We were never supposed to mine this mountain. The earth itself decreed it and only sorrow has met those who go against the decrees of la Pachamama.” She meets his eyes. “Leave the boy. Let him go to school.”
Papi’s eyebrows scrunch in a scowl and I want to shrink into myself. None of us ever speaks out against him. Papi glares at his mother. Abuelita holds her chin high and meets his gaze. Daniel, Mami, and I sit like statues, eyes darting between them.
Papi stands up and grabs his helmet. “Legends and nonsense,” he growls, and walks out the door, barking for Daniel to follow him.
Mechanically, Daniel gets to his feet. He picks up his new helmet and buckles the attached acetylene tank to his belt. Mami hands him a satchel with water and coca leaves in it and kisses his forehead. Without a word to any of us, eyes still on the ground, Daniel walks out the door.
With them gone, it feels like a bubble of tension has popped. Abuelita sags where she sits, clutching her teacup. Blinking away tears, Mami grabs a comb and steers me onto the stool in front of her.
“Mami, I can comb my own hair.”
“Hush,” she says, and I leave it at that because, though we both know that I’m able to do this for myself, it feels nice to let her baby me. Plus, I realize I can give her a gift by letting her do my hair. At least then she can feel like she’s been allowed to take care of one of her children this morning.
Pulling out the messy braid I slept in, she starts to drag the comb through my thick black hair, starting at the bottom and working her way up so as not to yank on the snarls.
“He’ll never make it,” says Abuelita softly.
Mami’s hands pause for a second, then keep up their smooth movement. “He’ll be okay for just a few days,” she says. “With any luck, by then Mauricio will see that he’s not made for mining.”
“You really think Papi will change his mind?” I ask her.
“Well, it’s happened before,” she says. “Your father . . . he can be very stubborn, but he can change his mind too. You might not remember—you were only five—but he didn’t want to let you go to school.”
“Really?” This is news to me.
“Mmm-hmm.” Mami dips the comb in water and slicks it through my hair. “Do you remember, Elvira?”
“Oh, do I ever,” says Abuelita. “He went on and on. He said that his mother hadn’t gone to school, and his wife had barely gone to school. He wasn’t about to send his daughter there.” She deepens her voice, imitating Papi: “She could be more useful around the house. Besides, a girl is just going to get married and have babies. What’s the point in wasting time sending them to school when they could be working?”
I feel a twist of anxiety when I hear her say that. It’s not something we talk about, but I know, along with leaving school to work, that it’s expected I will get married and leave the house. It makes me sick to my stomach to think about it. Marriage is a cave-in you can’t dig out from under.
“So what happened?” I ask, to move the conversation away from my future marriage. “How did you change his mind?”
Mami’s fingers gather the hair at my crown and start weaving it into a tight braid. “Little by little, over time. Your grandmother would lament the things she wasn’t able to do because she never got an education, and I’d tell him how much I wanted you to be smarter than I was, how important it was for me. We’d talk about the possibilities it would open up for you. I think we even started to complain about how you were always underfoot and how much more work we’d get done if we could just get you out of the house for a few hours each day.” I can hear the smile in her voice even though I can’t see it.
“Eventually,” says Abuelita, “he came around. And, once you were going, it was easier to just let you go and keep everyone happy.”
“So, you see”—Mami ties off the end of the braid and lays her hands on my shoulders, dropping a quick kiss on my cheek—“there is hope, mi hija. We’ll work on changing your father’s mind. Until then, we just need to keep Daniel encouraged and try not to anger your Papi too much, okay?”
“I’ll try,” I say.
Half an hour later, hair scraped into a braid so tight and perfect that the skin on my face feels stretched and my eyes pull at the corners, I leave for school, retracing the steps I took yesterday with Daniel.
Even though Mami and Abuelita assured me that this won’t be forever, I still worry. Is Papi walking slowly enough that Daniel won’t start coughing? With any luck, they won’t be walking at all if he and Papi managed to catch a ride to the mine on one of the ore trucks. If they did catch a ride, is Daniel even now reporting to Don César and being told the schedule for the day? Is he walking into the main entry tunnel at El Rosario, the big mine, or will he be assigned to a smaller branch? Can he still see daylight or is he lighting the open flame of his acetylene headlamp to fight away the darkness? How is he feeling? Is he scared of what might happen to him? Angry at Papi for making him go? Jealous of me for staying behind even though I’m older and not sick?
As I walk, I pass the used-up mouth of a mine from long ago. I wish I had something with me to sacrifice to beg for Daniel’s safety. And Papi’s too, I guess. But I don’t have anything in my bag other than my
notebook and a pencil. I’m not a miner and I will get food at school, so Mami doesn’t let me pack anything from home.
I pause for a moment, staring into the half circle of blackness in front of me. I pull off my bag and rip out a piece of paper, folding it. On one half, I write out the twelve times table, as neatly as I can manage, for Papi. On the other side I write:
We will run away together. 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’ll both die fat. 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.
And then, because it feels like it fits, I add the word Amen.
With Abuelita’s warnings about the jealous Pachamama ringing in my mind, I don’t go near the mouth of the tunnel. Instead, I fold the paper around a rock and throw it as far as I can into the mountain. It lands in the darkness beyond what I can see. Closing my eyes, I say a quick prayer to whoever might be listening that my father and brother will be safe.
With one final whispered, “Please,” I turn away from the darkness and hurry to school.
3
At school, I can’t focus. All day long I’m haunted by thoughts of Daniel and Victor, both on their first day in the mines.
“Where’s Daniel?” Susana asks when we sit down for our morning oatmeal. “Is he sick again?”
That’s usually the answer for why Daniel isn’t with us, and oddly, today I wish it were the reason. I shake my head. “Papi took him to work,” I whisper.
“Oh no,” says Alejandra.
I nod.
Susana pulls me into a one-armed hug and leaves it at that. There really isn’t anything to say. But while we sit there and sip our breakfasts, the twin losses of Victor and Daniel make it impossible to smile. It’s only as I’m getting up to return my cup that I see a notebook tucked under the bench. I pick it up and flip through it. Victor’s messy handwriting covers every centimeter of every page of the first two-thirds, even the margins. When I get to the last page with writing on it, I see the note:
Treasure of the World Page 3