My hands tremble as I reach for it, but he doesn’t let go, so I don’t have to support its weight. I sip slowly at the rim, water dribbling over my chin and tracing a freezing finger under my suit. It’s almost painful: the coldness of the water hits my empty belly like a knife and my throat muscles cramp around the unfamiliar work of swallowing, but it tastes like life and I make myself drink it.
My stomach feels like it’s going to explode when I’m only about halfway done with the glass. I pull away and Santiago takes the glass from me.
“Go bring me a basin with water, some soap, and a cloth, then sit facing the wall so I can clean her up,” Yenni whispers.
He makes a face at her for giving orders, but does as she says. While Santiago bustles about getting the things she needs, Yenni smiles down at me.
“I still can’t believe it’s really you,” she says. “Whatever happened?”
I feel so weak that my head is swimming. The water in my belly sloshes uncomfortably, and the edges of the room are starting to fuzz in my vision. I want to start at the beginning, string everything together in a way that makes sense and shows that I’m not crazy. I want to tell her about Papi, and Daniel, and not being able to eat, and Mami, and Abuelita, and César, and the devil. But I only manage “Lost” before I pass out.
* * *
When I come to, I feel wetness against my face. My head lolls and my eyes open sluggishly to see a teenage girl holding a basin and a washcloth standing in front of me in a small, plain room. She has a wide, pretty face with arching eyebrows, and her cheeks dimple when she smiles at me.
Yenni, I remember.
“Well, now that you’re awake again, we can do it right, hmm?” Her eyes sparkle with intelligence. She’s at least five years older than me, so we wouldn’t have gone to school together, but Santiago looks about nine: I would definitely know him from school. Since I don’t recognize either of them, I’m definitely on the far side of the mountain. “Let’s get you out of that disgusting suit and get you clean,” Yenni goes on. Santiago sits across from us, studiously facing the wall. “Do you think you can stand?”
I nod, even though the idea of standing makes my knee scream and my legs tremble. Yenni helps me to my feet and strips me down to my underwear. When she pulls off the suit, Daniel’s angel falls out and clunks to the floor.
Yenni bends over and picks it up.
“What’s this?” she asks with interest.
Their papi rumbles a complaint in his sleep and they both drop their voices.
“What’s what?” whispers Santiago, twitching with curiosity.
I shrug, too tired to talk.
Yenni lowers me onto the bucket and hands the angel to Santiago. He examines it while I sit there shivering, and Yenni scrubs my arms, legs, and torso with her wet cloth and a bar of lye soap. When she’s done, she wraps me in a blanket and tells me to tip my head. She puts the basin on the floor behind me and attacks my filthy hair with energy. My eyes prickle when she hauls on the knots with a comb, but I sit there quietly until she announces she’s done.
Yenni rinses my hair and wrings the water out of it, then braids it, still wet, with practiced hands. She considers me. “I don’t think we’re the same size, but now that I’ve done all that work to get you clean, I’m not going to put you into that suit again.”
A relieved noise slips out of me. I was dreading putting that thing back on. If I have my way, I’m not touching it ever again.
Yenni kicks Papi’s coveralls and the clothes I was wearing under it into a corner and reaches up to the rope slung across the wall behind the bed Santiago is sitting on. She pulls a pair of leggings, a sweater, and some clean underwear from where they were hanging on the rope and brings them over to me. It feels weird to change into someone else’s underwear, but my clothes are all so gross that I slip everything on gratefully. My arms are longer than hers, we discover, but she’s wider around the hips than I am. The clothes fit well enough.
“Thank you,” I mumble up at her. It feels amazing to be clean again. Though I don’t feel anywhere near healthy, I have started to feel human, not like some horrible, scummy creature dragged from a cave.
“You’re welcome,” says Yenni, wiping her hands on her skirt. “Santiago, you can turn around now,” she says to her brother, then throws the basin of wash water out the front door. Santiago hands me Daniel’s angel.
The sleeping form makes another grunt. Yenni drops her voice again.
“It’s late,” Yenni whispers. “Why don’t you get some sleep and we’ll talk in the morning? Do you think you could drink some more water first? Or maybe you need to go outside and go to the bathroom? My guess is you’re too dehydrated, but if you need to go, there’s a ravine you can use ten steps from the door.”
I know I need to drink, but my stomach still feels stretched with what I already had. And as for going to the bathroom, Yenni’s absolutely right—there’s no way I have enough water in me to be able to pee.
I shake my head.
“Okay. You can share our bed for tonight.” She points to where Santiago had sat while she cleaned me up.
And though there’s much to say, I find that all I have the strength for is to take the two steps across the room and collapse onto the bed, Daniel’s angel clutched to my chest.
* * *
I half wake to the sound of raised voices.
“Santiago!” A man’s voice, gravelly and powerful. Though I don’t open my eyes, I get the feeling that this is not someone I would like to be in trouble with. “Who is that? What’s going on?”
“Um . . .” I hear Santiago, sounding slightly panicked. Then Yenni’s smooth voice cuts in.
“This is Ana, Papi, the girl that went missing from the other side of the Cerro. She was trapped in a cave on the mountain, so we got some rope and pulled her out. She needed a place to rest, so we brought her here.”
“She needs to go back to where she came from.”
“Of course.” Yenni’s voice is soothing. “Don’t even worry about it. She’ll be gone before you get home tonight. Here, I’ve got your things all packed for the day. You’d better hurry. You don’t want to be late first thing on Monday morning, and I have to get going, too, to make it to the city on time.”
There’s a grunt and the sound of the door closing. I drift back to sleep.
When I wake again, it’s to bright midday sun hitting my face. I prop myself up on my elbows. I’m still in Yenni and Santiago’s bed, and I have a blanket wrapped tightly around me. I’m alone in the house.
I untwist myself from the heavy wool and struggle to my feet. When I stand up, my head swims, and I sit down again quickly, light-headed. After a few steadying breaths, I try again, more slowly this time. I shuffle outside, my knee twinging at every step. I find the ravine Yenni had mentioned and am delighted to discover that I’m able to produce a tiny trickle of urine. It’s really dark, but it means that my body has begun to process the water from last night.
Even though it’s only about ten steps back to the door of the house, when I reach it, I’m winded. I take a moment leaning against the doorway to catch my breath before I head in and sit on the bed again. I see someone has left a glass of water near where I was sleeping, and I drink it. I can slowly feel myself coming to life.
Sitting there, drifting in and out of sleep, I lose track of time—my brain is still not working very well—but eventually I hear Santiago in the distance. In minutes, he’s arrived, dusty and smiling and carrying a school satchel.
“You’re awake!” Santiago bounces over to me. “How are you feeling?”
“Better.” I smile at him without even thinking about it. “Thank you again for saving me. If you hadn’t found me in that cave, I’d be dead by now.”
Santiago beams, his wide smile showing off his buckteeth and the impressive gap between them.
“Ca
n you walk?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say, feeling proud of myself.
“Good! Let’s get going.” He slings his satchel into a corner.
I wobble to my feet. “Where?”
A frown pulls Santiago’s eyebrows together. “Yenni said I needed to bring you to her before Papi gets home. She said if you woke up before school, I could walk you home, but that if you didn’t wake up until after school, I needed to help you get to her.”
Between my overall weakness and my hurt knee, I don’t know if I can manage a long walk. Also, it kills me that, if I have to put in the effort of walking, I can’t go home instead of to wherever Yenni is.
“Why can’t you take me home now?”
“Yenni said you live way the other side of the Cerro,” he says. “I wouldn’t be home on time and Papi would be mad at me. Besides, it would be dangerous walking in the dark when neither of us really knows the way.” He looks at me curiously. “Where do you live, exactly?” he asks.
“A little house off by itself. I’m about forty-five minutes downhill and an hour west of the El Rosario mine.”
Santiago’s face falls. He shakes his head. “That really is too far. It would take at least five hours to walk around the mountain to get you there.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I say. Even though I really wish things were different, I owe Santiago my life. I’m not going to ask him to do ten hours of walking and get him in trouble. I take a few more swallows of water to fuel me for what’s ahead. “Take me to Yenni. If you’re sure I can stay with her, I’ll find my way home from Potosí tomorrow morning when I can walk in daylight.”
“Great!” He grabs my hand and starts towing me toward the door.
I smile. I really do like Santiago. He’s so cheerful. So different from his dour father. I wonder what his mother is like.
“How far away is her work?” I grit my teeth against the discomfort of making my tired body move.
“Not too far,” says Santiago, pulling me forward with a smile, “and it’s all downhill. Come on!”
With a sigh, I follow him out the door.
12
Holding tight to Santiago’s hand, I descend the scree-lined slope, my knee complaining the whole way. It was so strange to look out of Santiago and Yenni’s house and see the crumpled brown rock blanket of the mountains stretching away into the distance instead of being able to see the city. We pick our way around the eastern face of the mountain and slowly, little by little, the city of Potosí fills our view again. It’s the better part of three hours later when we’re finally walking along the cobbled streets of the city. But to Santiago’s credit, it is downhill to where Yenni works. Mostly.
We stop beside tall walls with a decorative wrought-iron gate. Through the gate there is a carefully tended garden courtyard and an imposing three-story house with big stone arches. My mouth goes dry. This is not the kind of place people like me are allowed.
“Come on,” says Santiago, tugging on my hand. “The servants’ entrance is this way.”
The servants’ gate is a heavy metal door set into the tall concrete wall. Santiago raps on it with his knuckles. “It’s me—Santiago Quispe. Open up!”
I hear noise from within and then the door swings open. I stare and stare at the tended gardens. Potosí is so high up the Andes mountains that very little grows naturally there. This vibrant green is alien to my world of gray and brown and rusty red clay. I can only imagine how much work it must take the gardeners to create this little oasis.
Santiago points across the cobbled patio to a low, detached building.
“Servants’ quarters,” he explains over his shoulder. “This is where Yenni sleeps during the week. She comes home on the weekends. Today’s Monday, so she’ll be here until Friday night.”
I blink to absorb this information. Yenni, the daughter of a miner, has landed herself a job as a maid in the city. I wonder how she did it.
“Let’s try the kitchen first,” he says.
I hope the kitchen isn’t too far away. I need to sit down before I fall down.
The kitchen is in the main house and it is enormous, at least four times the size of my entire home. Its walls and floor are stone; the ceiling is white plaster. There are large surfaces for preparing foods, fancy metal appliances that I have only seen through shop windows on my walks to church and on TVs in public places, and two different sinks. An enormous fireplace takes up a third of one wall, and a huge black stove hunches in the far corner. Pots and pans of all sizes hang from the ceiling, and a heavy wooden table takes up the middle of the room. Three women wearing identical dresses are bustling around, cooking, cleaning, clattering.
If Santiago hadn’t been steering me, I would have stopped in my tracks and stared. Instead, I’m plunked on one of the wooden benches at the table while Santiago goes over to one of the other girls and collects a bowl of soup and a spoon. He hands it to me.
“Eat this,” he says. “I’ll go find Yenni.”
I take a sip, and flavor explodes in my mouth. After not eating for two days in the mine, this soup is something from another world. It’s a salty broth with rice and potato and chicken and carrots. I find the cook, a woman twice as wide as any of the others, with my eyes.
“Thank you,” I say. “This is delicious.”
She grunts at me, and I sit and watch the workings of the kitchen while Santiago looks for Yenni. Honestly, I’m so happy to be off my feet, I don’t even care how long it takes him. While I wait, I run my finger over the smooth grain of the wooden bench and table, marveling at them. Whoever owns this house must be really wealthy: a huge house, an impossible garden, and things made from wood even in the servants’ areas.
A few minutes later, Santiago pops back into the kitchen, Yenni at his heels. She’s wearing a neat black dress with a white apron just like everyone else in the kitchen. The fabric is even and heavy, better than either of us could afford. Clearly it’s the uniform for the women who work here. Her kind face lights up with a smile when she sees me.
“Ana! You made it.”
“Here I am,” I agree.
“Thanks for bringing her,” she says to her brother. “You’d better go now. You’ll need to have dinner ready by the time Papi gets home.”
“You cook?” I ask Santiago.
“Almost as well as Carmencita,” he says, puffing up his chest and waggling his eyebrows at the dour cook.
She grunts at him, and I think she might be mad, but when he flits over to her, she swats his behind with a dish towel and hands him a small wrapped bundle. “That’s because it is my cooking,” she says. Santiago laughs and gives the big woman a peck on the cheek and a thank-you for the food and, with a wave to me and Yenni, heads out the door.
Yenni rolls her eyes.
“That boy,” she says with enough feeling to make it a full sentence all by itself. Then she looks at me. “Go ahead and finish your supper. I’ve told Doña Arenal, the owner, that you’re here. If she wants to talk to you, you should do all the getting better you can before she does.” She winks at me and then leaves to help the other maids with their work.
I’m surprised to see so many of them working in the same place at the same time, but as I sit there and sip the salty broth, I can see that they’re all busy. One of the cooks is making bread dough; another is washing and drying a massive stack of dirty dishes and pots. Yenni and the other young girl keep ducking in and out of the kitchen, taking folded cloths and clean dishes and glasses out, and bringing dirty ones in, adding them to the stack. The cook and the dishwasher work quietly, but the others chat as they work.
I find myself lulled by the heat and safety of the kitchen, and soon I’m struggling not to doze off over my soup. The brusque clop of heeled shoes on the stone floor and the sudden hush they bring with them makes me snap my head up. Doña Arenal has entered the kitchen and is staring s
traight at me.
Doña Arenal is a tall woman with a serious face. She wears modern clothes, and her silver-streaked hair is styled expensively around her face. Her eyes are piercing.
Nervously, I wipe my hands down the front of my borrowed clothes and stand up.
“Sit down,” she snaps. “You look as if you’re going to tip over in the first breeze.” Part of me feels like I shouldn’t be sitting in front of her, but I can tell she’s not used to being contradicted. I sit.
“Thank you, Doña,” I manage, though I’m not really sure what I’m thanking her for. For letting me come in the door, though I’m a dirty miner’s kid? For letting me have some soup? I leave it at a simple thank-you and stick with a safe “God will bless you for your kindness.”
Doña Arenal humphs and waves her hand dismissively as if God’s blessing is no concern of hers.
“Now, tell me where you come from and how you came to be in my kitchen.”
“My name is Ana Águilar Montaño,” I say. Doña Arenal watches me with bright eyes. In the background, I can hear the rhythm of the dishwashing change, and I know that the maids are curious to hear my story too. “I lived with my mother, father, brother, and grandmother on the Mountain That Eats Men.” There’s a pause in the kitchen noise when I say this, quickly covered up by a fresh wash of activity. I try not to let their judgment sting. I know how cruel the city kids are to mining kids. “Dust-suckers,” they call the boys whenever we come into town for church or the market, and “rocks for brains.” I meet Yenni’s eyes and she gives me a small, encouraging smile. I’m glad Yenni, at least, doesn’t think less of me. She’s a mountain girl too. “There was a mine disaster about a week ago. My father died and my brother disappeared.” I wish I knew what was going on inside Doña Arenal’s head, but I have no idea how the rich think. If she doesn’t believe me, will she kick me out? I know I’m not strong enough to walk up the mountain now. I need her to let me stay the night with Yenni.
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