I don’t see Daniel.
The dust and the acrid smoke that linger over the mountain taste like death. Grit lodges in my molars, and every time I try to swallow, a small avalanche scrapes its way down my throat, raw from screaming.
Where’s Daniel?
I hear nothing but pain, see nothing but confusion, taste nothing but the mountain. I don’t know how long I stay, but I stay after the wounded have been carried away in trucks. I stay after Don Marcelino drives home with my father’s corpse. I stay until the last of the miners leaves for home and a special shift reports for duty, heading into the still-smoking tunnel to start to clean up the mess so that business can go on as usual, exactly like it has every day for nearly five hundred years.
I stay until César forces me to go home, promising me he’ll go in with the next crew and search for my brother.
I walk home without Daniel.
* * *
I stagger into the house after a walk home I don’t remember, sobbing.
“Hush.” Mami places a cool hand to my face. She looks a hundred years old.
For a moment she holds me, and I collapse against her comforting warmth, wishing we could stay like that forever. But eventually she lets me go.
“Go fetch hot water. We need to prepare your father,” she says.
A feeling of unreality settles over me when I realize that Papi is lying in their bed, like usual. But now he’s a corpse and she and Abuelita need to get it ready for burial. I hurry to obey. I don’t want to watch them strip the body.
When I come in again, the pot steaming in my hands, we begin. Mami and Abuelita do most of the work. I wash his hair and try to scrub the rock dust out of the creases of his face with a rag. Pushing on his face is like pushing against cold clay, slowly setting. It doesn’t feel like touching a person. I shiver.
Mami and Abuelita pray aloud as they wash and dress him in his best clothes. He’s heavy and it’s a struggle to get his arms and legs to move. We end up having to cut the back of his shirt and jacket and then re-secure them with a few loose stitches. I take a sharp knife and trim his nails. Lying there on the bed, arms by his sides, he’s cleaner than he ever was in life.
“It’s almost like he’s sleeping,” Mami says around a sob.
I stare at the thing that used to be my father and don’t say anything. Yes, his eyes are closed, but I can’t bring myself to agree with Mami. It doesn’t at all look like he’s sleeping. His face is gray. Rigid. It’s as if the mountain, not content to simply take my father from us, is slowly turning him into stone.
“A woman who loses her husband is called a widow,” Abuelita murmurs. “A child who loses her parent is called an orphan. But there is no word for a parent who has to bury their child. It shouldn’t happen. How can God be so cruel?”
Mami snaps at that. “At least you have a body! I’ve lost a husband and a son in one day! Where is my son’s body for me to mourn?”
“No!”
I realize the shout was mine.
“No,” I repeat, forcing a more reasonable tone of voice. “You haven’t lost a son. Papi is dead, but Daniel’s only missing. He’ll be home soon.”
For a moment they just stare at me.
“Oh, Ana,” Abuelita says finally. “Once the mountain takes someone, you never get them back. Once, there was a man—”
“Daniel’s not dead,” I grind out, cutting off her story. For once I don’t want to hear what Abuelita has to say. My brother’s not dead. He can’t be. Beyond the impossible heartache, it would just be too cruel. If Daniel and Papi were both dead, it would mean that all our lives were truly over. It would leave us with no men in the house, forever. Without a man’s salary we couldn’t make rent. It would mean I definitely would have to quit school to make money. It would mean sooner, rather than later, I would have to get married.
Unable to watch them cry any longer, I turn and walk out the door into the deepening night.
* * *
When I finally lie down, I barely sleep, and when I manage to, I have no clear dreams, only a crushing feeling of fear. Every time I wake, my eyes fall on my father, laid out on the bed, and my mother asleep on the floor beside him, and it feels like the waking world has become its own nightmare.
Around four thirty, even though it barely counts as morning, I force myself to get up, light a fire, and make tea. The ritual of the motions soothes me and gives me a chance to think.
I carry a mug of tea in to Mami. I don’t let myself glance at the bed when I hand it to her.
“I’m going to ask Don Marcelino if we can borrow his truck to take Papi to the cemetery,” I say. I don’t add that I’m also going by the mine to see if they’ve found Daniel.
She nods, but her face has an absent expression on it, and as I close the door behind me, I wonder whether she really heard me.
The path down the mountain to school is a dark wash of a road over the streaked brick and tan rock of the mountain face. As I walk, I pass little entrances to the mine—small mouths that choke quickly on their own darkness. On the edges you can sometimes still see the dried blood from last year’s llama. The miners sacrifice one every year and bathe the lintels of the mine they’re working in with its blood to convince the devil inside not to drink their blood instead. I glare at the rusty brown stains. They didn’t do their job.
An odd feeling wraps around me when I arrive at school. Even though school won’t start until eight, there are already people there at a quarter to seven. Through the blue metal gate I can hear the shrieks of the little kids who arrived early, playing, and the subdued burble of older voices, waiting for their work day to start. It all seems surreal.
How can it be just another day?
I stand there, my hands splayed on the door, my forehead resting against the peeling blue paint, waiting for my racing heart to slow. Finally, I’m able to pick up a little rock and knock on the gate. The clanging brings Doña Inés, clutching her belly. I stare at it for a second, wondering how she feels about bringing a child into this world after what happened yesterday.
“Ana!” she says, opening the door for me to come in. “I heard about your father and brother. I’m so sorry. How are you?”
“I’m fine,” I lie. “Where’s Don Marcelino?”
She points to the teachers’ block.
I walk there without thanking her. It hurts to talk.
The doors of the teachers’ block are open to the courtyard: the school psychologist’s room, Don Marcelino’s office, the toilets. I push through the middle door. Don Marcelino is sitting behind his desk. There are papers piled everywhere on it, and a battered ancient laptop is open to one side, but he’s not looking at the papers or the laptop. He’s not preparing his morning speech. Instead, he’s resting his head in his hands, his glasses pushed up into his hair, as if he can’t bear to see the world. I know how he feels. I clear my throat. He startles.
“Ana,” he says. I see him slip a mask of I’m okay over his face. He pulls his glasses onto his nose and runs his fingers through his hair, official once again. “How is your mother?”
“My mother’s fine,” I say, and I wonder, having used the word fine twice in as many minutes, whether it is ever true.
“What can I do for you?” His eyes are kind. I take a deep breath.
“I was wondering if you would help us bring my papi down the mountain to the graveyard?” I pause for a moment. When he doesn’t answer immediately, I rush to clarify. “In your truck. Like yesterday?”
“Ana, I . . .” He trails off. Then he, too, takes a deep breath. “Yes. Tomorrow, before school, I will come by your house. It will be early . . . Will that give your mami enough time to arrange things?”
“Yes,” I say, relieved. “Thank you, Don Marcelino.”
When I turn to leave, he stops me.
“Ana.”
“Yes
?”
“Will you stay?”
I think about a standard school day: saluting the flag, drinking my oatmeal, lessons on the cracked chalkboard, reciting answers, singing, practicing my dance for the upcoming festival. I think of Mami right now, sitting alone beside the lump of clay slowly turning to stone that used to be my father. I think of resting my head against the gate, working up the courage to even be able to knock on the door of normal.
“No,” I say finally. “I don’t think I can.”
Don Marcelino doesn’t say anything. His face is very sad.
I walk out of his office.
It is only when I’m at the fork in the road that I realize he might not have been asking about today, but about me continuing at school at all now that my father is dead. I’m just as glad this hadn’t occurred to me in Don Marcelino’s office.
I don’t know the answer.
* * *
I should go straight home, but instead I turn my feet in the direction of El Rosario. One night with no word was too much: I have to go back to the mine and see if they’ve found Daniel.
They’ll have cleared the debris from the mouth by now and they’ll have dug through to wherever he was trapped, and they’ll have given him water and coca and wrapped him in blankets, and he’ll be waiting for me.
I hurry my steps. When I get to El Rosario, work seems to be going on as usual. I run up to the first miner I see and ask him where César Jansasoy Herrera is. The man points at the shed to the left of the mine.
When I open the door, I see that it’s a toolshed, but with most of the tools having been pulled out to clean up yesterday’s mess, there’s space for a single rickety folding chair. César is slumped in the chair, head resting against the wall, helmet in his lap, sleeping the deep sleep of the exhausted. I hate to wake him, but I need to know. I shake his shoulder gently. César jolts awake.
“Oh! Ana.” He sits up and scrubs his hands over his face.
“Don César. Did you find my brother?”
César’s eyes are sad.
“Not yet,” he says simply. “I’ve had every man searching, but no one’s found him yet.”
“But what if he—” My voice hitches. “What if he’s trapped? What if he lost his way in the mine and couldn’t get out and is stuck down there somewhere, hungry and thirsty and running out of air, and can’t find his way to the surface?”
Spots dance in front of my eyes and I have to sit on the ground, light-headed at the thought. I press my hands against the floor as if I could feel Daniel’s heartbeat through the thousands of tons of rock between us. There’s a creak as César gets out of the chair, and I feel him lift me into it as if I weighed no more than a baby.
“Put your head between your knees.” César’s hands guide my shoulders. “Breathe.”
I follow his murmured instructions, and slowly my vision widens out to normal and I can sit up without feeling like I’m going to fall over.
César is kneeling in front of me, so we’re eye to eye.
“I promise you,” he says softly, “that we will comb through every pile of rock moved by that blast and search every tunnel leading away from the site. We miners take care of our own, Ana. And your brother, even though he had just started, was one of us. Okay? Will you tell your mother that?”
“Okay,” I say shakily. “Thank you, Don César.”
César gets to his feet.
“My condolences to your family,” he says, and heads out of the toolshed and back into the mine with tired steps. Even though he spent the night helping clean up the disaster instead of sleeping, he’s not taking any time off.
For a minute I sit there, not wanting to leave the place where I still have to believe they’ll bring Daniel out at any minute, but eventually thoughts of Mami and Don Marcelino’s message get me to my feet.
I try not to listen to the voices of the miners as I walk across the entry lot, but my ears hear them anyway.
Well, it can’t have been a dynamite problem, can it? Everyone here knows you have to announce a fuse setting and then count off the detonations once you’re outside.
It must have been a gas explosion. Someone must have burst through the rock to a pocket of gas. When that gas hit his flame, the whole thing would have exploded.
I bet it was that missing kid. If it was his flame that touched off the gas, he would have been vaporized. There wouldn’t be much of him left to find, would there?
I want to cover my ears with my hands and run, but I settle for taking longer steps. I’ve almost made it when the man I spoke to earlier calls out to me.
“Hey, aren’t you that girl who came into the mine? The one that caused all of this?”
That stops me in my tracks.
“Excuse me?”
“Yeah,” says another miner with him. With a sinking heart I recognize Guillermo, my main tormentor during my time working at El Rosario. “That’s her all right.” He spits on the ground between us. “I said you should never have come here, girl. See what you’ve done?”
And with that my courage breaks, and I press my palms to my ears and run as fast as I can away from the mine toward home.
9
When I get home, neither Mami nor Abuelita have moved from where I left them this morning. They’re both still sitting near my father’s bed, hunched over, staring at him. The mugs of tea I left are cold and untouched beside them.
Abuelita glances up when I come in.
“Our people have been mining this mountain for over four hundred and seventy years,” she says dully. “And in all that time, the price of metal has always been blood.”
“Abuelita—” I start, but she cuts me off.
“Overwork killed the men in the mines. Mercury poisoning killed those working in the refineries. And in the Casa de la Moneda, where they turned the silver into coins? They died there too.” For a moment I think she’s done, but then Abuelita goes on. “They had mules, at first, four of them, that would walk in a circle their whole lives, chained to the giant turnstile, creating the power that pressed the metal into coins and bars. But the mules died too quickly—they didn’t last more than four months each. It was too expensive to keep getting new mules. So they replaced the four mules with twenty African slaves. The Spanish crown sent thirty thousand of them here, to Potosí, to work in the mint. But they died too, every one of them. And so the work came back to rest on our people, the Inca, because we could survive hell the longest.” She meets my eyes. “Do you remember I told you they could have built a bridge from here to Spain with the silver they took from this mountain?”
“Yes, Abuelita,” I mumble.
“They could have built a bridge twice as long with the bones of those they killed to get it. Do you know how many have died here, on this mountain, Ana? More than eight million people. Eight. Million.” She reaches out and smooths Papi’s suit across his chest. “So many people. One more shouldn’t feel like such a big difference. But he was my son.”
I give Abuelita a small hug, but I have nothing to say that will make it better, so after a second of holding her, I let go and walk over to Mami.
“Mami, come on, we have to go into town and get things arranged for tomorrow.” I pull on her arm until she stands.
“Tomorrow?” she murmurs.
“Yes, tomorrow. Don Marcelino is coming with his truck to take Papi to the cemetery, but we have to get things set up today.”
Mami blinks as if she can’t quite place where she is. Then her eyes clear and she nods.
“Yes, the cemetery,” she says.
I breathe a sigh of relief. Though Mami never challenged Papi directly, she was always working around him, making things happen: she protected the majority of his pay from waste, she planned carefully for what we needed, and she managed our lives with quiet ability, always looking out for us. It’s been scary having her be
so blank, to have to be the one to plan and look out for her.
Mami grabs her shawl and kneels beside the bed. I think she’s going to pray some more, but instead she pushes her hand under the mattress. The corpse on the bed lurches a little as she fishes around for something, as if it’s about to sit up, then it settles again when she pulls her hand out. I fight the bile climbing up my throat and focus on my mother.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“Money,” she says simply, and tucks it into the deep pockets of her many-layered skirts. My mother, like most of the women on the mountain, dresses like a traditional cholita: blouse, cardigan, eight or ten colorful woolen knee-length skirts, one layered over the other, braids, and, when she wants to dress up, a bowler hat on her head. Today is one of those days. Brown bowler firmly in place, hands knotted in the shawl around her shoulders, she gives me a once-over. I glance at my long-sleeve T-shirt and dirty pink leggings, my too-small sneakers. “Go wash your face,” Mami says firmly, “and change into some clean clothes. Nice ones.” She turns to Abuelita. “Will you come, Elvira?”
Abuelita puts her hand on top of Papi’s.
“No, I’ll stay here with my son.”
Mami nods, and I hustle off to get dressed.
Fifteen minutes later, we’re on our way down the mountain. I didn’t know how nice Mami expected me to dress, so I rounded up. I’m wearing clean black leggings, a sweater that I know Mami likes, and my church shoes, even though they’re not the best suited for the two hours of walking we’ve got ahead of us. I even combed and rebraided my hair. I’m not giving Mami one more thing to worry about.
* * *
When we get to the church in Potosí, we join the other mining families there. I see Victor, his eyes red-rimmed, talking quietly to Padre Julio. I realize his father must have died yesterday too. With his mother dead, there’s no one to do this but him. I catch his eye and give him a weak smile of what I hope is encouragement, but he looks away from me.
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