For all its history, Rochester has been for years now a kind of proto–Dickens World. Many of the stores on its High Street have kitschy Dickensian signs: A Taste of Two Cities Indian restaurant, Pips grocery, Little Dorrit’s Piercing Studio. Down an alley you can find Dickens’s actual writing hut: a two-story chalet decorated with Swiss frippery in which Dickens wrote for the last five years of his life. It was moved, years ago, from the yard at Gad’s Hill Place and is now (according to the informational banner in front of it, which also calls it “the most iconic building in British literature”) about to collapse. It’s being held up, inside, by steel props, and the Dickens Fellowship is hoping to raise £100,000 to fix it.
Our last stop was one of Dickens’s last stops: Miss Havisham’s house. My friend, who was skeptical about literary tourism when we started our trip—authors, he insisted, are just ordinary people—was suddenly in ecstasy. “Of course this is Miss Havisham’s house!” he shouted. “Look at that window up top—a perfect window for peeking!” The house is open to visitors during the summer, but today it was closed. My friend was determined to see into its walled back garden, so we walked down an alley, ascended a metal staircase on the side of a church, climbed on top of the stairs’ highest railing—and from there we could see down into it: Miss Havisham’s garden, the Eden of the 19th-century novel, source of all desire, conflict, motion, disturbance, and growth. It was manicured now rather than overgrown, but it still seemed like the right place. Looking into it felt like looking into the nerve center not only of Great Expectations, or of Dickens’s imagination, or of 19th-century literature—but of the entire history of the novel. And we had it all to ourselves.
We left Rochester in an ecstasy of Dickens communion, my friend exclaiming about how, in just a few hours, in one morning, he had come to understand Dickens on a totally new level. This, then, seemed to be the real Dickens World, at least for us, on that day.
MARIE ARANA
Dreaming of El Dorado
FROM Virginia Quarterly Review
FOR AS LONG as Senna Ochochoque can remember, she has worked to support her family. She began at four, helping prepare food that her family would hawk about town, when her father was too sick to pick rock in the gold mines. She would accompany him to market three hours away, bumping down mountain roads in a dilapidated minibus in the freezing penumbra of dawn. She’d haul bags up the slippery inclines, lug water down from the trickling glacier. To earn a few extra cents, she’d drag rocks from the maws of mineshafts, apply her tiny frame to the crushing of stones.
When she turned 10, she was hired to run one of seven public toilets that served the town’s 20,000 inhabitants. There is no sewage system in La Rinconada; no water, no paved roads, no sanitation whatsoever in that wilderness of ice, rock, and gold, perched more than 18,000 feet up in the Peruvian Andes. Senna’s job—from 6 in the morning to 10 at night—was to hand out tiny squares of paper, take a few cents from each customer, and muck out the fecal pits at the end of the day. When she was 12, she took a job that paid a bit more so that she could buy medicine for her dying father. Trudging the steep, fetid roads where the whorehouses and drinking establishments proliferate, she sold water trucked in from contaminated lakes.
Senna has pounded rock; she has ground it to gravel with her feet; she has teetered under heavy bags of crushed stone. But she was never lucky as a child miner; she never found even the faintest glimmer of gold. Today, with her father dead and her mother bordering on desperation, she makes fancy gelatins and sells them to men as they come and go from the mineshafts that pock the unforgiving face of Mount Ananea. When she is asked why she slogs through mud and snow for a few hours of school every day, as few children do, she says she wants to be a poet. She is 14 years old.
Peru is booming these days. Its economy boasts one of the highest growth rates in the world. In the past six years, its annual growth has hovered between 6.2 and 9.8 percent, rivaling the colossal engines of China and India. Peru is the world’s leading producer of silver; it is one of Latin America’s most exuberant founts of gold, copper, zinc, lead, and pewter. It is an up-and-coming producer of natural gas. It harvests and sells more fish than any other country on the planet, save China.
But it is the gold rush that has gripped Peru—the search for El Dorado, that age-old fever that harks back to the time of the Inca. More than 500 years later, it is in full frenzy again, in men’s imaginations as well as on front pages of newspapers.
In 2010, Peru extracted a total of 170 tons of gold from its mountains and rain forests, the highest production of that mineral in all of South America. Last year, it produced somewhat less. Every year has seen a drop in the output, which is hardly surprising since there is so little of this precious stuff left to dig out. “In all of history,” National Geographic reports, “only 161,000 tons of gold have been mined, barely enough to fill two Olympic-size swimming pools.” More than half of the world’s supply has been extracted in the last 50 years. Little wonder that the price of gold has soared in the past decade; little wonder that multinational companies have scrambled to wrest it from remote corners of the globe.
La Rinconada’s “informal” mines alone yield as much as 10 tons a year—worth up to $460 million on the open market. Even illegal operations are claiming a place in the boom. The irony is that every niche of this gargantuan industry—from Tiffany’s to the mom-and-pop store—owes Osama bin Laden a debt of gratitude for its rising profits. After the sobering events of 9/11, when financial markets grew jittery and the dollar began to lose ground, gold began its meteoric upward spiral. Everyone seemed to want it, especially in the form of jewelry, and especially in countries whose populations were clawing their way up toward the middle class: India and China accounted for the highest demand for gold, their surging numbers driving the prices ever skyward. One ounce of gold, which sold for $271 on September 11, 2001, now sells for $1,700, a whopping increase of 600 percent. That boom has prompted an equivalent explosion in the population crowding into La Rinconada; it is why the number of inhabitants on that icy, forbidding rock—less than 20,000 in 2007—has doubled and tripled in the course of five years.
Today there are 30,000 miners working the frozen tunnels of Mount Ananea, most of them with families, and all in the service of a buoyant global market. There is no legal oversight, no benevolent employer, no operational government, no functioning police. At least 60,000 souls have pressed into the lawless encampment, building huts on the near-vertical cant of that dizzying promontory—harboring hope that this may be the day they strike a gleaming vein, cleave open a wall to find a fist-sized nugget. They think they’ll stay only as long as it takes to find one. There are just enough stories of random fortune to keep the insanity alive.
The mines at La Rinconada are called “informal,” a euphemism for illegal, a status without which Peru’s economy would screech to a standstill. For 40 years now, the Peruvian government has turned a blind eye to increasingly wretched conditions in this remote community, its government agents unwilling to scale the heights, brave the cold, take control. In the interim, what was once a region of crystalline lakes and leaping fish—replete with alpaca, vicuña, chinchilla—has become a Bosch-like world that beggars the imagination. The scrub is gone. The earth is turned. What you see instead, as you approach that distant glacier, is a lunar landscape, pitted with rust-pink lakes that reek of cyanide. The waterfowl that were once abundant in this corridor of the Andes are gone; no birds flap overhead, save an occasional vulture. The odor is overwhelming; it is the rank stench of the end of things: of burning, of rot, of human excrement. Even the glacial cold, the permafrost, the whipping wind, and driving snows cannot mask the smell. As you ascend the mountain, all about you are heaps of garbage, a choking ruin, and sylphlike figures picking idly through it. Closer in are huts of tin and stone, leaning out at 70-degree angles, and then the ever-present mud, the string of humanity streaming in and out of black holes that scar the cliffs. Along the precipitously
winding road, flocks of women in wide skirts scrabble up inclines to scavenge rocks that spill from the mineshafts; the children they don’t carry in slings—the ones who are old enough to walk—shoulder bags of rock.
A miner lucky enough to find work once he reaches this mountain inferno labors in subzero temperatures, in dank, suffocating tunnels, wielding a primitive pick. In the course of that work, he risks lung disease, toxic poisoning, asphyxiation, nerve damage. He exposes himself to glacial floods, collapsing shafts, wayward dynamite, chemical leaks. The altitude alone is punishing: at 14,000 feet a human body can experience pulmonary edema, blood clots, kidney failure; at 18,000 the injuries can be more severe. To counter them, he chews wads of coca. He carries pocketfuls of the leaf to curb his hunger, prevent exhaustion. If he lives to work another day, he celebrates by drinking himself into a stupor. The ore he extracts, grinds down, leaches with mercury, then purifies in a blazing furnace will make his boss and his boss’s bosses very rich; but for the vast majority who slave in that high circle of hell, gold is as elusive as a glittering fool’s paradise.
The system of cachorreo, used by contractors in La Rinconada and elsewhere, is akin to the Mita, the system of imposed, mandatory servitude that once enslaved Indians to the Spanish crown. Under cachorreo, a worker surrenders his identity card to his employer. He labors for 30 days with no pay. On the 31st day, if he is lucky, he is allowed to mine the shaft for his personal profit. But he can take only what he can carry out on his back. By the time a miner struggles out under his cargo of stones, grinds it, and coaxes the glittering dust free, he may find he has precious little for his efforts. Worse still, because he must sell his gold to the ramshackle, unregulated establishments in town, it will fetch the lowest price possible. On average, a miner in La Rinconada earns $170 a month—$5 for every day of grueling labor. On average, he has more than five mouths to feed. If he has a bad month, he will earn $30. If he does well, he will earn $1,000. In most cases, workers simply go up the hill, spend their hard-won cash on liquor and prostitutes, and count themselves lucky if they make it home without a brawl. Crime and AIDS are rampant in La Rinconada. If work doesn’t kill a man, a knife or a virus will. There are few miners here who have reached 50.
It’s hard to imagine, as we hover over the gleaming counters of jewelry stores in Paris or New York, or even Jakarta and Mumbai, that gold can take such a hallucinatory journey, that the process remains so medieval—that little has progressed in half a millennium of human history. Families like Senna Ochochoque’s, who have spent as many as three generations under the spell of gold’s promise, live in abject poverty, barely able to eke out an evening meal. The world boom in the value of gold has not translated to better lives in La Rinconada. It is the same in the gold mines of Cajamarca in northern Peru (owned by the U.S. giant Newmont Mining Corporation), or in Puerto Maldonado, where anarchic mines carve into the Amazon jungle. In Cajamarca, which has poured $7 billion of gold into the global market in the last 30 years, 74 percent of the population lives in numbing poverty. In the outlying areas of Cuzco, where Australian and U.S. companies are busily ferreting Peru’s gold out into international markets, more than half of the population earns less than $35 a month. Peruvians, in other words, may perch on some of the world’s most valuable mountains, but as the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt is said to have observed 200 years ago, “Peru is a beggar, sitting on a bench of gold.”
Humboldt was quick to see—when he traveled Peru in the early 1800s—that the terrain just south of Lake Titicaca, where the Andes make a stately march south to Potosí, held vast reserves of gold and silver. According to him, Mount Ananea harbored a considerable store of wealth, even though its mines had lain dormant for a hundred years. History books tell us that during the 1700s the glacier atop Ananea had grown heavy with accumulated ice; eventually it collapsed the Spanish mines and flushed them with freezing water, drowning all life within. Spain tried to resuscitate their operation in 1803, but the land was too difficult to govern, its peaks too vertiginous, its cold too lacerating. The winds and snows of Ananea had done what the Inca could not: they had driven the conquistadors away. But, by then, Spain had scores of mines to satisfy its voracious lust for gold and silver. So it was that Ananea remained that mythic titan—remote, frigid, and threaded with gold.
Nevertheless, the myth had preceded Humboldt, preceded conquistadors, proliferated with the Inca, and had the force of immutable truth. According to local lore, a gold block the size of a horse’s head and weighing more than 100 pounds had been found on Mount Ananea. The region’s rivers were said to be strewn with glittering nuggets. Garcilaso de la Vega, a half-Inca, half-Spanish chronicler who lived in the late 1500s, wrote that precisely that stretch of Peru contained gold beyond our imagining. Chunks of coruscating rock as large as a human head—and 24-karat pure—had rolled from cracks in the Andean stone.
It isn’t surprising, given the attendant mythology, that a swarm of enterprising locals, toting little more than picks and hammers, would climb those reaches again. They began to come in the 1960s. Senna Ochochoque’s father arrived in 1980, a strapping young man with wildly ambitious dreams and legs sturdy enough to carry them. In La Rinconada, he met Leonor, a young woman who had been born there 15 years earlier. He built a one-room house of rock, covered it with tin, and invited her to live there with him. They proceeded to have four children, of which Senna was the third. Strangely enough, that inhospitable peak was not a bad place to be during those fateful years of the ’80s and early ’90s. The Shining Path, the Maoist terrorist organization intent on capsizing Peru’s power structure, was slashing its way through the countryside, killing whole villages as it went.
This is where Senna’s story shifts, turns, like a skein waiting to ravel. In 1998, when Senna was born, Peru was, for all its rich history, an emerging chrysalis—a nation that had swung violently between democracy and dictatorship for 174 years under the rule of nearly 100 presidents. Three years later, as the country crawled out from under its long decade of civil war—when Juan Ochochoque was still a robust, fully functional miner in La Rinconada—19 Arab terrorists who had pledged their lives to al-Qaeda flew airplanes into American landmarks and, paradoxically, Juan’s future began to brighten: the value of gold began to grow. But months later, that bullish trajectory would halt altogether for Juan. The shaft in which he was working collapsed. Just as in days of yore, when the glacier had sent torrents of water down the ancient tunnels, a plummeting mass of ice now crushed the mine’s delicate corridors and trapped the workers inside. Juan, who had been pounding a wall of stone, along with his six-year-old son, Jhon, who had been sweeping out the gravel, were caught in a sudden, airless black.
When father and son eventually clawed their way to freedom, they thanked the mountain god for their lives, but they soon found they hadn’t escaped entirely. The boy was plagued by a sickness of the spirit the Indians call susto: he ducked at the slightest sound, could hardly eat or sleep; he was deeply traumatized. Juan, on the other hand, was suffering a very manifest physical deterioration. His legs ballooned to three times their normal size. His arms grew weak. His joints ached, hands shook; he could scarcely bend his knees. Before long, he began to have seizures; and then came the constant, bone-rattling cough. He couldn’t walk more than a few yards, much less climb the path to the mine.
In the course of a fleeting moment, Juan Ochochoque had become a marginal citizen. He had joined the women, the children, the maimed and dispossessed—those relegated to distaff roles in a full-blooded macho society. He was too sick to do women’s work: quimbaleteo, for instance, which requires one to stand on a boulder and rock back and forth, grinding ore with mercury; or pallaqueo, in which a woman crawls up a cliff, scavenging for rock that spills from the mouths of mines, stuffing anything that shines into a backbreaking rucksack. Nor could he do even the simplest work: the chichiqueo, which requires a woman or child to bend over crushed gravel in standing water for hours, picking through stones in
hopes of finding a gold fleck. These were impossible tasks in his condition. But he had to do something: there were bills to pay, mouths to feed. In time, he decided to cook for a living. Hunched over an ethyl alcohol burner on the bare earth of his hut, he produced pot after pot of soups, spaghettis, stews, and sent his family out into the streets to sell them. At night, he drank whatever alcohol was left, to dull the pain of humiliation.
The labors of Juan’s children, which until then had been sporadic and secondary, now became indispensable, primary. His wife, Leonor, and eldest daughter, Mariluz, dedicated themselves to the pallaqueo, scaling escarpments with hundreds of women who worked their way up like an army of ants. It is brutal, exhausting work and, in it, a body suffers a pounding battery—no less from the weight of rocks than from the relentless cold, which can dip to −4 degrees Fahrenheit. The women of La Rinconada are old by the time they are 20. Chances are they have lost their teeth. Before girlhood is out, their faces are cooked by sun, parched by wind; their hands have turned the color of cured meat; their fingers are humped and gnarled. You can feel the toll of the pallaqueo when you see Senna look up and cringe at the bright, blue sky. She squints at a camera flash, shades her eyes. Her black eyes have turned a milky gray.
According to the United Nations, more than 18 million children between 10 and 14 are engaged in hard labor in Latin America. Most are “informal” workers like Senna—underpaid, overworked, and grossly undercounted. More than 2 million are in Peru, which accounts for the highest ratio of child laborers in all of Latin America. To put it more plainly: one out of every four Peruvian children works regularly, and does so in physically dangerous conditions. Perhaps because of ignorance, certainly because of necessity, parents whose children work alongside them in La Rinconada find nothing wrong with this practice. They are repeating an age-old cycle. Their children accompany them to work just as they once accompanied their parents. When a young mother enters a mine with a baby strapped to her back, she does not know that the dynamite fumes and chemical vapors can do lasting damage to her infant’s brain; ditto for the mother whose child pours mercury into the mix while she grinds away on the quimbaleteo; ditto for the father who wades into a cyanide pond side by side with his son. No government official has come around to explain the long-term effects: blindness, brain damage, nerve damage, lung disease, lumbar deterioration, intestinal failure, early death. According to the Institute of Health and Work in Peru, more than 70 percent of all children and adolescents in La Rinconada suffer chronic malnutrition; as many as 95 percent exhibit some form of nervous impairment. But even if the parents of these children were lined up and given this tragic news, they might have no choice but to keep them working anyway. How else could they afford to eat? How else to keep warm? How else to buy the tools to work another day?
The Best American Travel Writing 2013 Page 19