“Ana . . .” he starts again. His filthy face wears a soft expression under his metal hat, like he’s unsure what to do with me.
I race on before he can make up his mind, trying not to stare at his hands, so big that I can barely fit both of mine around one of his, rough and ridged from years of wrestling metal out of rocks. I force myself to keep going before I can let myself think too long about what kind of work I’m signing myself up for. There is no gentleness in a world that forms hands like those on César Jansasoy Herrera.
“I won’t be any trouble—I learn things really fast, just as fast as Daniel, maybe even faster, and I work as hard as my brother too. Even harder because I have good, strong lungs. I won’t be any trouble at all. Please . . .” I stare up at him imploringly. I have no idea the right way to go about asking for work. I know that César has a young daughter, only six or seven I think. I don’t know if it will help or hurt me that he has a girl too, but I need him to say yes.
César scrubs one giant, filthy hand over his face. Papi says nothing.
“One day,” César finally says. “Then we’ll see.”
“Agradiseyki!” I gasp, finally dropping his hand. “I promise you won’t regret it.”
“We’ll see,” César repeats. Then, to Papi, he says, “I had Daniel scheduled with me again today, and you, Francisco, and Guillermo in zone five. Does that work for you? I’ll stay with her and make sure no harm comes to her.”
Papi waves a hand as if he has absolutely no concerns about the idea of harm coming to me. “Be good.” He points a finger at my face. “If you disgrace me, you’ll regret it.”
I nod shakily. As if I didn’t know that.
Papi trudges into the mine without a backward glance, and I’m left alone with César.
For a moment César stands there, eyes scrunched closed. Then, with a sigh, he says, “Come on, then, follow me,” and starts walking, muttering under his breath. I hear a word that sounds a lot like babysitting and vow to work as hard as I can to not make this kind man’s life any more difficult than I already have.
I scurry to keep up with him, tucking my head down to avoid the curious stares of the other miners.
“César! Who’s that?” shouts one of them, a long string of a man. He’s so skinny his cheeks cave in except for where he has a huge wad of coca leaves shoved in one. It makes his face look bumpy and off-balance.
“Mauricio’s kid,” César answers.
“And you’re taking her in?” Bumpy asks, the shock plain in his voice.
“It’s not permanent,” César grumbles.
I wish I were invisible. It’s clear that Bumpy and his crew aren’t happy to have me here. But César doesn’t waver: his voice is level, his pace is steady. Bumpy doesn’t say anything else, but I hear the sound of spitting. I tell myself that the men are only clearing their mouths of coca to have a new mouthful, but I have the horrible suspicion that they’re cursing me.
Seconds later, my concerns about Bumpy and his crew are replaced by a new fear. Without breaking stride, César enters the mine, the cave darkness swallowing him whole.
I can’t do this! I think. For a heartbeat, I flinch away from the shadow’s edge. I can’t see more than an arm’s length into the tunnel and it doesn’t help that air tubes snake in around the edges, hissing and whistling. It sounds like the mountain is whispering, and it reminds me of my dream.
Daniel, I remind myself. Think of Daniel. He did this sick and with bad lungs. Papi has done it for years. Surely you can do it for one day.
And with that, I take a deep breath to steady myself and plunge into the inky depths of the mine after César.
5
As soon as we enter the mine, César takes me to meet the devil.
“This way,” he grumbles, no more than a dusty hump in the darkness ahead of me. It’s difficult to keep up with him: the tunnel slants and turns, disorienting me, and my feet slither around in the mud and scree underfoot. I’m clumsy in Daniel’s boots. When I put a hand out to catch myself, the rough rock gouges my palm. I curl my fingers into the pain and feel wetness pooling in my nail beds. I ignore the sensation as best I can and scramble after César.
When he stops, I nearly run into him. I throw my hand out to the side to stop myself from falling on my butt and making even more of a fool of myself than I have already. My injured hand smacks into the rock face and I gasp.
César turns around at my noise. I follow the glow from the acetylene lamp on his helmet and see that I’ve left a bloody handprint on the wall of the tunnel.
“Sorry,” I mumble, and curl my hand into my sleeve to wipe it off.
“Leave it,” he says, stopping me. “Maybe if you give the Tío this taste of your blood, he won’t take any more. Come.” He gestures me forward and I shuffle up until I’m level with him. “Meet the Tío of this mine.”
In a grotto carved out of the side of the tunnel in front of us hunches a life-size statue of the devil. The flickering light from the candles stacked around him glints off the broken glass teeth in his mouth and rims his light-bulb eyes. His clay horns almost reach to the ceiling. His nakedness is nearly hidden by a pile of coca leaves and he’s surrounded by a sloppy ring of open bottles of alcohol and lit cigarettes. I chew the inside of my lip nervously.
César takes a cigarette out of his pocket, lights it in the flame of the acetylene headlamp, and puts it in the devil’s mouth. “Tío, this is Ana Águilar Montaño, sister to Daniel Águilar Montaño, the boy who started two days ago. We want you to know her and not harm her.” He turns to me. “Do you have anything to give the Tío?”
At first, I shake my head. I barely have enough for myself, let alone anything extra to give to some statue in the middle of a mountain. But the Tío’s head is wreathed in smoke from the cigarette and he’s staring down at me out of his light-bulb eyes, and I realize I’m afraid. I reach into my pouch and pull out a handful of coca leaves and hold them out to César. He sprinkles the leaves on top of the pile already there.
“You should bring gifts to the Tío. Outside”—César points up the echoing tunnel toward the exit—“we pray to God. But down here, the devil is in charge and you must follow his rules, or he will kill you. Do you understand?”
I have never been further from understanding anything in my life, but I nod, wanting to get away from here.
“So”—César dusts off his hands and turns from the statue—“let’s go find you something to do for the rest of the day that’s worth your brother’s pay and won’t get you killed, hmm?” With that, he leads me deeper into the mine, farther and farther from the light of day.
By the time César stops again, I feel a creeping panic. Being down here is like being in a nightmare, one of those where I’m trapped in a tight space and can’t get out—but this is worse than any dream because I know there’s no waking.
César turns to say something else to me and his eyes go to my forehead.
“You never lit your helmet,” he says.
When he reaches for my head, my instinct is to pull away, but I stay put. His giant hands close over the edges of my helmet and I feel the sweaty tug against my hair as he lifts it off my head. He reaches over and taps the tank strapped to my hip.
“This is your acetylene,” he says. “The gas travels through here”—his giant finger traces the clear tube that runs from the tank, over the top of the plastic hat, to the beaten-tin disc centered at the front—“and comes out this spigot.” He turns a switch at the base of the beaten-tin reflector plate and touches the spigot to the flame on his forehead. A twin fire springs up on the front of my helmet. “You adjust the flame by turning this valve”—he demonstrates—“but you never turn it off, even if you’re with the main crews and their electric lights.”
“Why?” I ask, settling the helmet on my head, super aware of the live flame only centimeters from my face and hair. C
ésar studies me seriously.
“Because fire only burns when there’s oxygen,” he says. “If your flame ever goes out, it means you’ve come to a place in the mine that is full of other gases . . . arsine or carbon monoxide, for example, and you need to get out as quickly as you can.” He raps on my helmet with a callused knuckle. “If your flame can live, you can. Remember that, Ana. If it dies, it’s only a matter of time before you will too.”
I swallow against a throat gone suddenly dry. A few seconds ago I was only worried about the mountain around the tunnels. Now I’m afraid of the tunnels too. I nod to show I understand, gripping my hands behind me so he won’t see them trembling. César takes off again through the narrow tunnel, his broad shoulders blocking my view of where we’re going. As we pass a gaping black hole in the floor, he pauses and turns to me again.
“This is where Daniel and I were working yesterday,” he says softly. His eyes are sad. My gaze is pulled to the yawning hole in front of us.
“Down there?” My voice is a squeak. When I tip my head toward the hole, the weak light from my lamp glances off the rough sides of the narrow shaft but doesn’t come anywhere close to showing me the bottom.
“Yes, but we’re not going to work there today. I think maybe the air was bad and that set off his lungs. I’ll check it later.”
I stare at the gaping hole in the floor before me. Was that what happened to Daniel? Has the bad air of the mine already started killing him?
César puts his hand on my shoulder. I feel like I might buckle under the weight of it. “Come,” he says, “we’re working somewhere else today.”
The main entry is a long, smooth tunnel, wide enough that people can get out of the way of the ore carts that run along the narrow-gauge track in its center. But once you leave zone one, “tunnel” is no longer really accurate. Instead, the various paths that have been chipped or blasted or eroded from the mountain dip and weave and crisscross each other like the middle of an anthill. There are chimneys you have to climb up and down on spindly ladders; chasms you have to balance across on wobbly planks; passageways you have to slide through on your belly like a snake. You have to look down so you don’t trip on the spikes and ridges of harder rock jabbing up from the floor and so you can make sure not to splash when the standing pools of toxic orange water reach over your ankles. Looking up is a bad idea. There are places where the acid condensation on the ceiling is so strong it stings if it drips on your skin. Plus, if you do look up, you can see how bowed and rotten the support beams are.
We’ve descended steadily for almost forty-five minutes and the idea of hundreds of thousands of pounds of rock over my head, just waiting to collapse and crush me, is making me twitchy. I’m starting to long for daylight and the wide-open spaces of the Cerro Rico like I never have before. The air gets hotter and hotter the deeper we clamber into the guts of the mountain, and as I scramble to keep up with César, I’m sweating freely.
Finally, we arrive at an open chamber César introduces as “zone eight.” The zones are named in the order they were discovered, not in any meaningful, organized way. I wish I had a map since the numbering doesn’t do much to help. I feel completely lost in here. There are three miners chiseling against the far wall of zone eight. César leads me to the end of the line and takes out his spike. I copy him. He shows me how to hold the spike against the wall and pound it with a rock. My split palm screams at me when I do this, but I don’t complain. Instead, I try to match my pace to that of the row of miners. The miner closest to me is a boy about my age, but he’s working with the same deadened determination as the others. It’s only when he turns to glare at me when I can’t match his rhythm that I see who it is.
“Victor!”
His jaw drops in astonishment. “Ana?”
I can’t help my grin. In the middle of the darkness of this terrible place, in the middle of this terrible day, seeing my best friend’s face is as welcome as sunlight.
“Victor, it’s so good to see you!”
“What are you doing down here?” he asks, stunned.
The man beside Victor barks at us to get to work and stop yapping, so we set our spikes and beat them with the rocks in time with the rest of the miners. It takes me a few minutes to learn the weight of the spike and the impact on the rock, but soon I’ve figured out the pattern of the movement and I know what to expect. Once I catch the rhythm, even though my muscles are aching from the repeated motion, I can use my brain for other things. Like answering Victor’s question.
“Daniel got sick. Papi and César are letting me work in his place until he gets better.” At Victor’s horrified face I add, “It’s only temporary.”
“There’s no way they should have let you down here. It’s too dangerous!”
That stings.
“Too dangerous for me but not for you? A falling rock will smush you as easily as it would smush me. We’re basically the same age, Victor! The same size. And Daniel is sick. If it’s too dangerous for me, then he definitely shouldn’t be here.”
“None of us should be here,” mutters Victor. “Kids aren’t even supposed to work in the mines. But it is more dangerous for you. You’re a girl.”
“So?”
“There are no girls . . . I mean, the men down here . . . they won’t like that you’re here, and some of them . . .” Victor trails off, uncomfortable. “Just promise me you’ll never go anywhere without César or someone he has specifically assigned you to.”
I hear the truth behind Victor’s words. I update my worry list to include not just the rock, the air, the toxins, the devil, and the Pachamama, but also the non-mystical inhabitants of the mountain.
I glance nervously at the man working beside Victor and, with a start, realize that he’s Victor’s papi and that César sent the last man in the spike-driving line away. Victor and his papi are the only ones on my left. César is working to my right. None of these men are a danger to me. César has sandwiched me in safety. I feel a warming in my heart for the quiet supervisor.
“I’ll be careful,” I promise Victor.
We work, repetitively chiseling holes in the rock, long beyond when my arms and shoulders are burning and my eyes are blurry from fatigue and rock dust. Finally, César checks the line and says the holes are deep enough. Deep enough for what? I wonder, but I’m too tired to say anything out loud. I slouch against the far wall, sweat rubbing the suit against me uncomfortably. Black spots are dancing in front of my eyes, whether from the bad light or from working for hours with nothing to eat or drink, I’m not sure. Then César opens a bag at his feet and I’m suddenly at attention again.
“Is that . . . dynamite?” I gasp.
“How did you think we make the tunnels?” Victor laughs. “Or get the rock rubble to sort for ore?”
I swallow and shrug, not sure what to say. I mean, of course I knew that miners used dynamite. How many times have I seen my father walk out the door with sticks strapped to his belt? Too many to count. But standing inside the mine, surrounded on all sides by the rough, dark rock, the idea of blasting away at it is beyond terrifying. How careful is César when he sets the charges? How is he sure he won’t blast a hole that brings the whole mountain down on us? I dig my fingers into the palms of my throbbing hands. The pain takes my mind off the dynamite.
Sort of.
When the last charge is placed, César lights the long fuse and says, “Let’s go!” and we hustle in a dusty line, uphill through the tunnels toward the entrance. I always wondered why ants moved so quickly; now I feel like one, scuttling through the earth, no thought in my mind beyond survival.
César yells, “¡Dinamita!” as we climb back to the surface. Out of crevices and chimneys, other miners appear and join us. What about those who traveled deeper than César’s voice can reach? I wonder. How will they know to get out in time?
By the time we make it to the main tunnel and zo
ne one, our ant line has swollen to almost twenty shuffling men, with one miserable girl in the middle. The noise of our breathing and the clinking of our gear is the only sound.
When we finally break out into the harsh clear light of midday, I want to sob with relief. The sky! The sky stretches above me, no rock pressing down. The air I breathe is thin but pure, and the light comes from the sun, not some miserable gas flame on my forehead. A muffled boom makes me glance over my shoulder, and I feel a rumble under my feet. The miners count the number of explosions aloud, to make sure they all detonate. When they get to ten, the men break into smiles, saying how good a sign it is that the Tío didn’t withhold any this time. About half a minute later, a puff of dust comes out the mouth of the mine, driven through the tunnels by the force of the blast.
I look up at Victor’s house, perched on the edge of the cliff above El Rosario. I wonder if they can feel the blasts through their floor when they’re at home.
The miners share coca, tea, and a cigarette if they have one. I see Papi among them, seeming relaxed, but he doesn’t come over to me and I don’t feel brave enough to go bother him. I sit away from the group and drink some water. Victor crosses the wet silt to join me.
“Enjoy the break while you can,” he says. “We’ll be back at it soon enough.”
I nod, exhausted.
“Chew some coca,” suggests Victor. “It’ll help you feel better.”
“I gave it to the Tío.”
Victor seems uncomfortable when I say that, though whether it’s because he believes in the devil or doesn’t, I’m not sure. Either way, he reaches into his sack and hands me a fistful of dried green leaves. I thank him, shove a few in my cheek, and put the rest in my pouch for later.
“The miners took me to the Tío on my first day too,” Victor says.
“Yeah?” The bitter taste of coca floods my mouth, and though I do get a mild boost of energy, it isn’t nearly enough to combat the fatigue of the work I’ve already done.
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