by Héctor Tobar
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FOR THE PEOPLE OF CHILE
It’s as if I’m pushing through massive mountains
through hard veins, like solitary ore;
and I’m so deep that I can see no end
and no distance: everything became nearness
and all the nearness turned to stone.
I’m still a novice in the realm of pain,—
so this enormous darkness makes me small;
But if it’s You—steel yourself, break in:
that your whole hand will grip me
and my whole scream will seize you.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue: Cities in the Desert
PART I: BENEATH THE MOUNTAIN OF THUNDER AND SORROW
1. A Company Man
2. The End of Everything
3. The Dinner Hour
4. “I’m Always Hungry”
5. Red Alert!
6. “We Have Sinned”
7. Blessed Among Women
8. A Flickering Flame
9. Cavern of Dreams
PART II: SEEING THE DEVIL
10. The Speed of Sound
11. Christmas
12. Astronauts
13. Absolute Leader
14. Cowboys
15. Saints, Statues, Satan
16. Independence Day
17. Rebirth
PART III: THE SOUTHERN CROSS
18. In a Better Country
19. The Tallest Tower
20. Underground
21. Under the Stars
Acknowledgments
Also by Héctor Tobar
A Note About the Author
Copyright
TOP ROW, FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: Florencio Avalos, Mario Sepúlveda, Juan Illanes, Carlos Mamani, Jimmy Sánchez; ROW 2: Osman Araya, José Ojeda, Claudio Yáñez, Mario Gómez, Alex Vega, Jorge Galleguillos; ROW 3: Edison Peña, Carlos Barrios, Víctor Zamora, Víctor Segovia, Daniel Herrera, Omar Reygadas; ROW 4: Esteban Rojas, Pablo Rojas, Darío Segovia, Yonni Barrios, Samuel Avalos, Carlos Bugueño; ROW 5: José Henríquez, Renán Avalos, Claudio Acuña, Franklin Lobos, Richard Villarroel, Juan Carlos Aguilar; ROW 6: Raúl Bustos, Pedro Cortez, Ariel Ticona, Luis Urzúa
PROLOGUE: CITIES IN THE DESERT
The San José Mine is located inside a round, rocky, and lifeless mountain in the Atacama Desert in Chile. Wind is slowly eroding the surface of the mountain into a fine, grayish orange powder that flows downhill and gathers in pools and dunes. The sky above the mine is azure and empty, allowing an unimpeded sun to bake the moisture from the soil. Only once every dozen years or so does a storm system worthy of the name sweep across the desert to drop rain on the San José property. The dust is then transformed into mud as thick as freshly poured concrete.
Few sightseers visit this corner of the Atacama, though the naturalist Charles Darwin did pass nearby, briefly, during his nineteenth-century journey around the world on a Royal Navy research vessel. The locals told him scientifically implausible stories that linked the rare rains to earthquakes. The vastness of Atacama and the absence of animal life surprised Darwin, and in his journal he described the desert as “a barrier far worse than the most turbulent ocean.” Even today, birders who pass through this part of Chile note that there are few if any avian species to be found. In the deeper desert, the only conspicuous living presence is of mining men, and the occasional woman, riding in trucks and minibuses to the mountains where there is gold, copper, and iron to be extracted.
The wealth of minerals under the barren hills draws workers to the Atacama mines from the nearby city of Copiapó, and from many other distant corners of Chile. Juan Carlos Aguilar travels the farthest to reach the San José: more than a thousand miles. The shape of Chile on a map is that of a snake, and Aguilar’s trek to work takes him along half the snake’s body. His weekly commute begins in the temperate rain forests of southern Chile. At the mine he supervises a team of three men who repair front loaders and the squat, long-armed, insect-like vehicles known as “jumbos,” during a seven-day shift that begins on Thursday morning. But his ride to work starts thirty-six hours earlier on Tuesday evening in the town of Los Lagos. No local job pays as well as his gig in the desert, so he settles his weary, middle-aged body into a Pullman bus, and watches as the shadows of beech forests, eucalyptus tree farms, and mountain rivers pass by his window. The weather matches his mood: The sky is overcast and raindrops beat on the windows, as they usually do when he sets out for work. The average precipitation in the region of Chile he calls home, at the 40th parallel of the Southern Hemisphere, is 102 inches a year.
One of the mechanics in the supervisor’s three-man crew lives somewhat closer to the mine. Raúl Bustos leaves for work from the port city of Talcahuano, near the 37th parallel. A tsunami struck Talcahuano five months earlier, triggered by an 8.8 magnitude earthquake. The disaster killed more than five hundred people, left the city covered with pools of ocean water in which thousands of fish flopped about, and washed out the navy base where he used to work. Bustos is a punctilious father of two and devoted husband. He boards a bus heading northward, then travels along a flat landscape filled with greenhouses, tractors, and the fallow and cultivated fields of Chile’s agricultural heartland. He passes through the town of Chillán, where another member of Aguilar’s crew begins his own journey northward, and then through Talca, where a tall and devoutly Christian jumbo operator boards yet another bus. The men who work inside the San José Mine are divided into two shifts, A and B, each working seven days at a time, and all these men have been assigned to the A shift. The A shift, in turn, is divided into twelve-hour-long night and day shifts that keep the mine working around the clock, from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. to the following 8:00 a.m.
The commuting members of the A shift soon enter Santiago, with its under-construction skyscrapers and elevated roads. For the southerners, it’s early morning as they pull into Santiago, a booming Latin American capital whose most distinguishing feature, the massive and soaring silhouette of the nearby Andes, is often lost in the haze of the city’s notorious smog.
In the intercity bus terminals in the center of Santiago, not far from Chile’s presidential palace, more men set out for the San José Mine. One is Mario Sepúlveda, a frenetic father of two who has a reputation among his coworkers for pushing the front loader he operates too hard (thus forcing the mechanics to repair it repeatedly), and for talking too loud and too much, and for being generally unpredictable. On Wednesday afternoon he sets out on the five-hundred-mile journey from Santiago to the San José Mine later than he should: There is a fair chance he won’t make it to work on time. Mario’s nickname at the San José is “Perri,” which is short for “Perrito,” the diminutive of the word perro, or “dog.” Ask Mario why he’s called Perri and he’ll tell you it’s because he loves dogs (he owns two rescued strays at home), and because “I have the heart of a dog.” Like a dog, Mario is loyal, but if you try to hurt him, “I’ll bite you.” He and his wife, Elvira, have two children, the first conceived in an impassioned encounter “standing up, against a pole.” Now they have a home on the fringes of Santiago where his prized possession is a big meat locker, and where Mario’s favorite place to sit is the small, square-shaped table in his living room. He enjoys a hurried meal at the table with Elvira and
their teenage daughter, Scarlette, and their young son, Francisco, before leaving for the north.
After departing central Santiago, and then passing through the working-class suburbs on the city’s northern fringe, the various buses carrying the men of the A shift enter valleys filled with vineyards and fruit trees, the snow-covered Andes of August winter on their right. The climate is Mediterranean, but the vista loses more of its greenness with each passing hour and with each latitude they cross: 33°, 32°, 31° south. Soon they’re entering the arid region called the Norte Chico, or Near North.
Mining men and other adventurers have traveled this route from the earliest days of Chilean history. The north is Chile’s desert frontier, its Wild West. It’s the place where the dictator Augusto Pinochet preferred to imprison his foes, gathering more than one thousand political dissidents in the living quarters of an abandoned saltpeter mine, where they passed the time studying astronomy underneath the pristine desert sky. Chile’s union movement was born in the north, founded at the beginning of the twentieth century by nitrate miners who were later massacred in the city of Iquique, and in the democratic Chile of today much of the north still votes faithfully for the left. Pinochet also had the men and women he murdered buried in shallow graves in the desert, in the Norte Grande, or Far North, and their bones are still being discovered forty years later by relatives searching for the “disappeared.”
When the men of the A shift reach the port city of Coquimbo, 250 miles from the San José Mine, they join the path that Charles Darwin followed in 1835 on the Chilean leg of his voyage. Chile was then a young country, merely twenty-five years old, and Darwin hopped off his ship, the HMS Beagle, to make observations about its geology and its flora and fauna, his small expedition riding overland with four horses and two mules. The road between Coquimbo and Copiapó passes through the oldest mining region in Chile, and the British naturalist met many miners on his slow trek along this same path.
In the town of Los Hornos, the men of the A shift catch a glimpse of the Pacific Ocean as Route 5, also known as the Pan-American Highway, passes along the beach. There’s something cruel about getting this last look at the ocean and the horizon, with the late afternoon sun casting its warm rays upon the expansive surface of the water: For the next seven days, the men will be spending most of the daylight hours two thousand feet underground, in caverns just wide enough for their vehicles to squeeze through. In these working weeks of Southern Hemisphere winter they will see the sun only briefly, for a few minutes in the morning before their shift begins, and at lunchtime. Not far from the beach at Los Hornos, Darwin saw a hill that was being systematically mined, “drilled with holes, like a great ants’ nest.” He learned that the local miners sometimes earned great sums and then, “like sailors with prize-money,” they found ways to “squander” their bonanza. The miners Darwin met drank and spent excessively, and in a few days returned “penniless” to their miserable jobs, there to work “harder than beasts of burden.”
The men of the A shift do not expect to be penniless anytime soon—in fact, they are well paid compared with most modern Chilean laborers. Even the lowest paid among them earns about $1,200 a month (almost triple Chile’s minimum wage), and with certain under-the-table bonuses thrown in, they earn even more. Rather than squandering their wages, they use them to build the semblance of a middle-class lifestyle, complete with consumer debt, business and property loans, alimony for their ex-wives, and tuition payments for their adult children in college. A few of the men of the A shift are evangelical teetotalers, and the mercurial Mario Sepúlveda is a Jehovah’s Witness who doesn’t drink either. But most allow themselves a sip or two after a day’s work: Whiskey, beer, and red wine are their preferred libations. A few certainly imbibe more than they should: In Copiapó, the final stop on the bus ride of the cross-country commuting southerners, one of their northern Chilean colleagues is currently drinking himself into a stupor that might keep him from going to work the next day. Working underground in modern Chile is still hard, physical labor that can leave men feeling like abused “beasts of burden,” and death haunts subterranean mining today, as it always has. When Darwin rode northward he came upon the funeral of a miner, a man being carried to his grave by four of his colleagues, the pallbearers dressed in strange “costumes” consisting of long, dark-colored woolen shirts, leather aprons, and bright-colored sashes. Mining men no longer wear such dress, but in recent years the men of the San José Mine have mourned the loss of colleagues who work there. They’ve also seen friends maimed by the sudden explosions of seemingly solid rock that are one of the most unpredictable causes of accidents in deep underground mining. Raúl Bustos, the mechanic from the port city of Talcahuano, is a relative newcomer to the San José. But he’s seen the shrine the men have built belowground to the mine’s victims: Now, on the bus, he’s carrying a rosary he will take with him into the mine when the workday begins.
On the last leg of their bus journey, the men enter the southern fringe of the Atacama Desert, a plain where Darwin struggled to find forage for his animals. In the Atacama, which may be the globe’s oldest desert in addition to being its driest, there are weather stations that have never received a drop of rain. From their bus windows, it looks as if God had decided to pull out all the trees, and then most of the bushes and shrubs, leaving only a few hardy plants to dot the pallid brown plain with specks of olive drab. The roadside slowly comes to life again when the buses enter the irrigated, mottled greenness of the valley of the Copiapó River. Pepper trees, ubiquitous in the desert cities of the United States, are native to this corner of Chile, and they begin to appear along the roadside, dripping thin leaves onto the ground as the buses arrive in the city of Copiapó. The last five hundred yards of their bus ride takes the men past Copiapó’s old public cemetery, where many generations of miners rest, including the father of one of the men of the A shift, a retired miner who drank himself to death and was buried a few days ago. After the cemetery the bus grinds quickly past a neighborhood of wood and tin hovels that is one of the poorest in the city, and then over the short bridge that crosses the channel of the Copiapó River.
The largest group of men who work at the San José live in Copiapó, the city closest to the mine. Many are veteran miners in their late forties, fifties, and early sixties, and they have pleasant memories of this riverbed. The Copiapó River was alive when they were boys, and they ran through its cooling, ankle-deep waters. Clover grew then in pools at the spot where Route 5 crosses the river, as it did when Darwin reached Copiapó and noted in his journal the pleasant aroma. A generation ago the Copiapó River began to die, and today it’s become a khaki-colored eyesore garnished with trash and prickly shrubs. The average annual rainfall in Copiapó is less than half an inch and water has not flowed inside the channel since the last big storm hit the city, thirteen years ago.
When the bus pulls into the terminal, the commuting men of the A shift step out into bus bays and unload their bags. They take a short ride across Copiapó in the city’s communal taxis to one of the two rooming houses where they will sleep for the next seven nights. In the last few hours before the workday begins on August 5, all the men of the A shift but one are in Copiapó or in its nearby working-class suburbs.
* * *
Geology was in its infancy when Darwin visited Chile in 1835: On his sailing journey to South America he had read one of the foundational texts of the new science, Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology. Once he reached Chile, Darwin witnessed a volcanic eruption in the Andes and noted the presence of seashells on ground a few hundred feet above sea level. He also lived through a two-minute-long earthquake while resting in a forest near the port of Valdivia. These experiences and observations led Darwin to deduce, more than a century before the theory of plate tectonics was formalized, that the ground upon which he was standing was gradually being pushed upward by the same forces that caused volcanic explosions. “We may confidently come to the conclusion that the forces which slow
ly and by little starts uplift continents, and those which at successive periods pour forth volcanic matter from open orifices, are identical,” he wrote. Today geologists say that Chile sits on the “Ring of Fire,” that vast seam in the Earth where continent-size chunks of the planet’s crust meet. The Nazca Plate pushes underneath the South American Plate. Like a child squeezing into his bed and raising the covers into a lump, the Nazca lifted up South America to create the 20,000-foot peaks of the Andes, a process geologists call orogenesis.
The stone inside the mountains north of Copiapó was born of the magma deep inside the Earth, and is intersected with vast networks of speckled, mineral-bearing deposits. These veins were first created more than 140 million years ago, during the age of reptiles, about twenty million years after flowering plants first appeared on the planet but before the arrival of bees, and forty million years before the largest of the dinosaurs, Argentinosaurus, roamed the continent. A mineral-rich broth rose up through the Earth’s crust, squeezing through the fissures of the Atacama Fault System for more than 100 million years, from the end of the Jurassic period to the beginning of the Paleogene. Eventually, the broth took solid form as the 200-meter-tall (656-foot-tall) cylinders of ore-bearing rock known as “breccia pipes,” and also as the thin layers of interlocking veins that geologists call “stockwork.” These buried deposits of quartz, chalcopyrite, and other minerals run through the hills from the southwest to the northeast, leaving lines on a prospector’s map that are like an echo of the gigantic continental plates many miles farther below.
* * *
In Copiapó, two company minibuses known as liebres (hares) begin to pick up the men of the A shift from the two rooming houses, and from assorted stops in the city’s working-class neighborhoods. There are many such buses shuttling back and forth across Copiapó this morning because these are boom times in the city, the latest in a cycle of booms and busts dating back three hundred years. A gold rush and bust in the Copiapó of the 1700s was followed by a silver rush three years before Darwin arrived. By the end of the nineteenth century the silver had run out, but the invention of nitrate-based explosives led to a saltpeter mining boom farther north in the Atacama Desert. Chilean miners provided the essential ingredient by which Europeans waged war and killed themselves in large numbers: This bonanza, in turn, led Chile to invade the neighboring nitrate-rich lands of Bolivia and Peru, with Copiapó as a base of military operations. But victory in the War of the Pacific caused yet another decline in Copiapó’s economy when investment money flowed away from Copiapó into Chile’s newly conquered territories. The growing global demand for copper in the twentieth century led to a new boom, however, and the building of a local copper smelter in 1951. A series of Asian economic “miracles” in the late twentieth century brought more demand for Chilean minerals and more miners to Copiapó, especially after the opening of the Candelaria open-pit copper mine in 1994. This latest boom helped to drain and finally kill the Copiapó River, because both the growing city and modern mining methods required the use of voluminous amounts of water.