Treasure of the World

by Tara Sullivan

  Whoever finds this: it’s yours. I don’t need it anymore.

  Fighting back tears, I shove the notebook into my satchel and wait for the school day to start.

  During geography, when we work on maps, I wonder how Daniel and Victor are finding their way through the maze of underground tunnels. In science, I remember Papi’s comment about physics, and only barely stop myself from trying to calculate the probability that the mountain will fall in on itself today, crushing my brother and my best friend beneath unknown tons of rock. In language class, a square of sunshine slants across my desk, and no matter how I try to focus on the teacher’s words, they float by me like balloons with cut strings. All I can think about is that Victor and Daniel aren’t seeing the sunshine right now—haven’t seen it for hours, won’t see it for hours more. In handwriting, my letters are all jumbled on top of each other like a pile of rubble; in dance, I’m a landslide. By the time math rolls around, I’m desperate to lose myself in the clean, well-behaved lines of numbers, but not even they occupy my mind enough.

  You have to do something, I tell myself. But just as strong as that impulse is the voice that says, You don’t have any good choices. There’s nothing you can do.

  And though I spend the rest of the class turning options over in my head while my pencil scribbles its own way through my math, by the time school is over at noon, neither my plans nor my numbers have added up to anything.

  * * *

  * * *

  At home, I head over to the slag heap to work as a palliri with Mami and Abuelita, like always. Today, though, it feels different than it did yesterday. I don’t comment on the tear tracks through the dust on Mami’s face. Abuelita doesn’t ask me how my day was.

  “Mami,” I say, gathering my courage. I’ve spent the day thinking, but the best I’ve been able to come up with is not something better, it’s just a different shade of bad. “Do you think if I left school and worked with you and Abuelita as a palliri, we could make enough extra money that Papi would let Daniel stop working in the mine sooner?”

  “Ana!” Abuelita gasps. “You can’t leave school! You’ve only got a few years left and then you can make it to secondary school. Hasn’t that always been your dream? To go off to university and get a fancy degree?”

  I look down at the scuffed toes of my sneakers. “Yeah,” I admit, my voice barely above a whisper. “But it seems selfish to chase a dream that may not even happen when Daniel is in the mines. Maybe it would just be for a little bit . . . ?”

  Mami runs a hand over my hair. “It’s always a risk to pause your dreams,” she says. “You might not get the chance to restart them.”

  I look into her eyes and wonder what her dreams were before she married Papi, but the sadness I see in them keeps me from asking.

  “It’s a generous offer,” Mami says, “and it speaks to your kind heart. But if we pull you both out of school, I think it will make it easier for Mauricio to stop thinking about school at all for either of you. We’re trying to get Daniel back into school, not you out of it.”

  I nod, grateful that’s her answer and I can let go of a little of the guilt I’ve been carrying. If I’m going to school to protect it for Daniel, instead of stealing it from him, I don’t feel quite as bad.

  The afternoon stretches on and we break the rocks in silence, each of us lost in our own thoughts. It feels like the clink of our rocks against each other is the ticking of a giant clock, counting down the seconds until we see that Daniel is okay. Finally, at dusk, I see two figures in miners’ coveralls walking toward us.

  “It’s them,” I say, pointing.

  Mami and Abuelita stop immediately. When Papi and Daniel reach us, both equally filthy, twin wads of coca leaves shoved into their cheeks, Mami takes their bags and helmets, fussing over them. Their faces are blackened with rock dust, the whites of their eyes stark against the layer of filth. You can see a straight line across their temples where the helmets rested, keeping the grime off their foreheads. Daniel unzips his coveralls and hangs them on the hook inside the door alongside Papi’s. Then he collapses to the floor, rubbing his chest and wheezing. I’m used to seeing Papi dressed as a miner, coming home from work, but it’s a shock to see Daniel that way. I poke him in the shoulder.

  “You’re gross,” I say, even though that’s not what I meant to say at all. “Go wash.”

  For a moment, Daniel stares at me, and I want to take my words back and tell him I don’t care how dirty he is, I’m just glad he’s safe. But he stands up and walks outside to the blue plastic barrel where we store our water. A moment later I hear him splashing. I pick up a rag and join him.

  “Here,” I say, handing him the rag.

  Daniel rubs his face and hands, but we can both see that there is still grime in the lines of his knuckles and caked deeply under his nails. The mark of a working man, Papi always says whenever he shakes hands with someone who has calluses on his palms and black half-moons under his fingernails.

  “Are you okay?” I ask when I can’t take it anymore. “How was your day?”

  “How do you think?” snaps Daniel. His eyebrows knit and he scrubs harder at his hands, digging the now-filthy cloth into the ridges and running it along the tips of his fingers. When it’s clear that’s worked as much as it ever will, he throws the cloth to one side and tries to scrape out his fingernails using the nails of the other hand. The grime is caked deep. He’s not making much progress.

  Daniel struggles with his nails a moment longer, then he stops and leans against the side of the barrel, staring at his hands. His knuckles tighten on the rim and he closes his eyes. When he opens them, he doesn’t look at his hands anymore, but picks up the rag and gives it to me.

  “Thanks,” he says, and turns to go inside, his voice flat, his narrow shoulders slumped.

  “Daniel!”

  He pauses in the doorway.

  “Everyone missed you at school today.”

  It’s only as the words leave my mouth that I know they’re absolutely the wrong thing to say.

  Daniel tenses as if I’d hit him, and he turns away and walks inside without another word.

  * * *

  Dinner is beyond awful.

  Mami keeps finding excuses to touch Daniel, her fingers flitting out like butterflies to land on his arm or brush across his hair. Papi thumps Daniel on the back so many times you’d think he were choking, telling him he’s a man of the mines now. Abuelita sits in her corner, wrapped in blankets and silence, glaring daggers at Papi. Daniel doesn’t respond to any of them. Guilt burrows through me like a mine tunnel, leaving me feeling hollow and unstable. I don’t even taste the soup.

  After dinner, things don’t improve. Usually, while I cleaned up with Mami and Abuelita, Daniel would do homework. But he doesn’t have any homework today. I was so wrapped up in thinking about our problems I forgot to ask his teachers for his work. I feel like a double failure: once for going to school when he couldn’t, and twice for not remembering to bring school home for him.

  The gap in our routine feels like a missing tooth: you know it’s only a small loss, but it’s so close to you it feels huge and you can’t stop probing it. Finally, after an awkward quarter of an hour, Daniel goes outside. I see him as I wash the dishes, perched on a rock up the slope so he’s higher than our roof, wrapped in a blanket to keep off the chill.

  When Papi reaches into Mami’s apron pocket, takes a handful of the grocery money, and walks out the door, we all know we’re unlikely to see him again before tomorrow. As soon as he’s out of sight, Mami follows Daniel. She settles by him and takes his hand. Dusk blurs their edges until they are no more than two shadows on the rock, one staring down at the unreachable city below, the other staring up at the equally unreachable stars.

  When I move to join them, Abuelita puts a hand on my arm, stopping me.

  “Let them be,” she says softly. “Th
ere’s nothing you can do.”

  I want to believe that I could find the magical words to make Daniel feel better. But I remember math class and the fact that I don’t have another choice to offer him, and I let Abuelita turn me away and distract me.

  “Where’s your homework?” she asks. “Come, do it here next to me.”

  With another pang of guilt at living the life Daniel has left behind, I take out my notebook. Abuelita sits beside me, stitching up the rips in old clothes we’ll be wearing again.

  I stare at the line of numbers marching down the left side of my page; the row of unanswered questions that each have a single right answer if only I can find it. But I can’t make my brain chase them. I stare at the blank page, my fingers frozen.

  “The Inca fortress of Saqsayhuamán was built with some of the largest blocks of stone used in all of the Americas.”

  I glance up from my math. Abuelita’s whole body is curled around the mending in her lap, but even so, I know her focus is on me. I smile and also pretend to be focusing on what’s in front of me.

  “There is no mortar holding the stones together,” she goes on, her thick-knuckled fingers working the needle methodically, “and these blocks, though they have rounded corners and are all a jumble of interlocking shapes and different sizes, are so perfectly aligned that even now, hundreds of years and many earthquakes later, you couldn’t slide a sheet of paper between them if you tried.”

  Abuelita finally looks at me. Though her body is frail—her bones birdlike and her knuckles twisted knobs that move slowly and painfully through her daily tasks—her eyes are clear and sharp.

  “How did the Inca manage this, Ana, when the nearest place that these stones could be quarried is across a deep river valley?”

  I blink at her, but she waits for my answer.

  “Um . . .” I chew my eraser. “They . . . put them on carts? Had animals pull them?”

  “The Inca never invented the wheel. They had no horses, no oxen. Their only beasts of burden were llamas.” Her eyes pierce me. “Llamas can’t carry more than thirty-five kilos. The biggest of these blocks weighs over a hundred and seventy tons. The walls are four hundred meters long and sixty meters high.”

  I stare at her, thinking hard. But I don’t come up with any answer to the puzzle.

  “I don’t know,” I finally admit.

  “No one knows,” she says, sniffing like she didn’t expect anyone to know any better. She lets the mystery stand another minute while I chew on my pencil some more, then she goes on. “Modern people like to focus on all the things the Inca didn’t have. No wheel. No oxen or horses. No money system. No written language. But do you know what they did have? What allowed them to build mysterious marvels that baffled the imagination of their conquerors?”

  “What did they have?” I ask, breathless.

  Abuelita raises an eyebrow pointedly at my blank homework page.

  “Our ancestors”—she leans over and pokes me to punctuate every word—“had. Very. Good. Math.”

  I laugh, and Abuelita returns to her sewing without another word.

  Still smiling, I start my sums.

  * * *

  I wake up in the middle of the night, the cool white moonlight icing everything around me like a cake. Daniel is sitting against the wall, wrapped in a blanket. I sit up and rub the sleep crusts from my eyes.

  “Sorry I woke you,” Daniel whispers.

  “That’s okay,” I whisper back. The moon-bright room shows Mami alone in the bed and Abuelita asleep on the floor mat next to me. Papi’s nowhere to be seen, so I scoot over and sit next to Daniel, my shoulder nestled against his, blanket wrapped tight to keep out the cold. “You look like a woolly salteña.”

  He barks a short laugh at the image of himself as a meat-filled pastry, then lapses into silence.

  “Couldn’t sleep?” I finally ask.

  Daniel shakes his head.

  “Is it that bad?” When Daniel was a baby, he learned to walk in order to keep up with me. When we were kids, he trailed my footsteps to school. But now he’s entered a place I’ve never been, and I struggle to imagine his new reality.

  After a long pause, Daniel nods.

  “The work’s hard. It’s obvious I’m no good at it. But the work’s not the really awful part.” He shakes his head slightly. “It’s super hot and humid in the mine and the air smells funny, and you know there’s less oxygen left with each breath. It’s so hard to breathe in there, I have to keep stopping. And then Papi gets upset because I’m not as strong as the other boys . . .” He trails off and his head sinks onto his knees, so his next words are muffled. “I shouldn’t even be there. I hate it.”

  I snake an arm out of my blanket and give his shoulders a squeeze.

  “We’ll find you a way out,” I promise.

  Daniel rocks his head back and forth on his knees, disagreeing with me.

  “We will,” I whisper even more stubbornly. “I spent all day today thinking about it.”

  “Oh?” Daniel lifts his face and raises an eyebrow at me. “And? What did you come up with?” His voice turns sour. “Will we run far away from here? To a green farm with black soil or a city that sparkles with electric lights and good jobs?”

  “Far away from the mountain and the mines,” I agree. “Far away from the rocks and the cold. We’ll both make lots of money and eat until we’re fat and be happy forever.”

  Daniel’s laugh is hollow. “That’s all just a stupid kid’s dream, Ana. Neither one of us is ever going to make it off this mountain.”

  I let the fake smile slip off and really look at him. At his thin shoulders he’s hunching so tightly and his delicate face he’s scrunched into a scowl.

  “You’ve never said that before.”

  “Well, it’s true,” he says softly. “Dreams are for little kids. I’m not a little kid anymore. Didn’t you hear Papi at dinner? I’m a man of the mines now.”

  I don’t like thinking of my brother as a man. Men are big and scary. They drink beer and liquor and hit their wives when they’re angry. I don’t want Daniel to have to be anything other than Daniel: a bit annoying, a bit of a mischief-maker, but still my brother.

  “Daniel,” I ask, trying to move away from whatever has put that emptiness in his voice, “what makes those kid dreams?”

  “Huh?”

  I bump him with my shoulder. He turns to face me.

  “What makes those kid dreams?” I ask again.

  He considers my question.

  “I guess . . . I mean, I’m nearly twelve now, like you. When we were like seven or five or whatever, we used to think that things would get better—poof! But now . . . now we know that’s not going to happen, right? They’re kid dreams because we just imagined ourselves into a city or onto a farm. But we have no way of actually getting there. That’s what makes them fake.”

  “You’re right,” I nod. “What we need isn’t a dream, it’s a plan.”

  “A plan,” he repeats. Tasting the idea; trying it on.

  “Yes,” I say firmly. “A plan with actual steps that will get us off this stupid mountain for good.”

  A yawn cracks Daniel’s face. “Okay, Ana,” he says. “You let me know when you come up with one.”

  “You should lie down again and try to sleep,” I tell him.

  “Whatever, Mami,” Daniel teases. But he does what I suggest anyway.

  As I roll into my blankets beside him, I even out my breathing to encourage him to do the same. I know he’ll need his sleep if he’s to face another day in the mines tomorrow. But long after Daniel finds an uneasy sleep, I lie awake, trying to come up with a plan to buy my brother back the life he should never have had to give up.

  * * *

  The next day starts the same as the one before it: Papi and Daniel head off to the mines, I head off to school, Mami a
nd Abuelita hunker down to break rocks. Again, I struggle to focus on my work at school, though at least I do remember to get an assignment for Daniel from the teacher this time. Given how tired he was last night, I don’t know that he’ll have the energy to learn after a day spent in the mines, but I get it for him anyway.

  The afternoon breaking rocks with Mami and Abuelita stretches for what feels like forever, especially when the end of shift comes and goes and there is no sign of Papi or Daniel. The three of us work quietly, side by side, waiting. But as dusk draws closer and closer and they’re still not home, Mami gives up pretending to work and starts down the road to find out what happened to them, leaving us without a word.

  Abuelita and I glance at each other.

  “I guess I’ll go start dinner,” I say.

  Grabbing the beaten metal pot on my way out of the house, I fill it from the blue plastic barrel of water beside the door and walk over to our little clay stove. As I struggle to light it, I wrinkle my nose at the metallic tang of the water and the smell of the animal dung. We get the water from a little stream a short walk away, but it mixes with the runoff from the mines and always smells strange. If we go down to the city of Potosí, we can get clean water from taps, but then we have to carry the heavy cans back up the mountain. That water doesn’t last very long.

  Mami told me that when she was a little girl, before her father moved their family up to the Cerro, chasing a mineral boom, she lived in the valley. There, fires were made from wood and twigs and had the most wonderful-smelling smoke. Her family’s farm was small but full of color. She would get all dreamy-eyed remembering it and wave her hands around as if she could paint a picture of it in the air for us. In some ways, Mami loves stories as much as Abuelita does; she just likes to talk about the way things are, not the way they were hundreds of years ago. Green waves would turn into silvery sheets of barley at harvest time, she would tell us as she tucked us in at night. The dark earth tumbled out piles of brown and yellow potatoes, and the tall quinoa stalks wore tufts of purple, and red, and gold, each crowned like a king. I always wished I could see it. Our mountain is only painted in bands of black and brown and rusty red, and I’ve never smelled woodsmoke. The Cerro Rico is high, high above the tree line, so there are no trees or bushes to burn. I feel the old anger against this mountain well up in me and it makes my fingers clumsy. I push too hard on my match and not only does it break, but the rest of the packet falls into the pot of water at my feet.