I scoot closer to Yenni and we hurry onward, arm in arm.
We trace through the filthy streets of this battered neighborhood for another ten minutes until we come to a squat, ugly building made out of concrete slabs. Men crowd the door and waves of muffled cheering filter onto the street from inside.
“Yenni!” I whisper. “Where are we?”
Yenni takes my hand and pulls me to the door of the horrible building.
“Excuse us,” she says, shouldering her way through the men there.
I suck in a breath, shocked, but though they grumble and growl, the men let us through.
Inside, the press and heat of the crowd is suffocating. The stale air is a choking mix of the smells of sweat and dirt, roasted peanuts and stale alcohol, with a nauseating metallic hint of blood. Yenni pulls me forward. The world closes in around me; my breath comes in pants. My vision blurs and the push of shouting bodies vanishes. Instead, I feel the press of rock, the mine collapsing, suffocating me. You’re not in the mountain, I tell myself sternly. You’re in the city, with Yenni. Stop panicking.
“There,” says Yenni, pushing me up to the edge of the rope in front of us. “Is that your brother?”
My heart sinks into the pit of my stomach and stays there. I shake my head. Because no, the boy in the ring is not Daniel. But he’s not a stranger either.
Victor and another boy about his age are stripped to the waist in a dirt ring; a grimy rope cordon holds off the crowd that surges and roars whenever either one of them lands a hit on the other. They’re drenched in sweat and both are bleeding freely from nose and mouth, but neither stops. I stare at them.
Of all the places and ways I expected to see Victor again, this would never have been one of them. The last time I saw my friend was at our fathers’ funeral last week. With everything that’s been going on in my family, I hadn’t checked on him. I figured he was still working in the mine.
The boys circle each other, searching for an advantage. I stare at the bare back, the sweaty shoulders, the ragged bangs spattered with blood half covering his eyes. Victor is my best friend. And yet the boy in front of me is someone I don’t recognize.
Just then, Victor glances into the crowd and sees me. His hands drop in surprise as he gapes at me and the other boy takes advantage of his inattention and lands a brutal hit to his jaw. I hear the clack of his teeth as his head snaps from the blow, and then the light goes out of my friend’s eyes as he crumples to the ground in a faint.
The crowd hollers and roils around us and I clutch at Yenni’s arm, not wanting to lose her, my one tether to things that make sense in this world. Around me, I see money changing hands and hear men shouting to each other, but somehow I can’t get meaning out of it. I’m used to the quiet, lonely poverty of our little house. This loud, aggressive poverty is new to me, and I find it upsetting. I realize I’m shaking. Yenni points toward the other side of the ring. I see one man is holding up the arms of the winner, calling for cheers, and another is dragging Victor’s body out of the dusty ring. His head lolls over his shoulder and the dirt of the floor sticks to his sweat. The man pulls him out a back door.
I’m walking that way before I even realize I’m doing it. This time Yenni is my shadow as I push through the herd of men. My eyes don’t leave that door. I haven’t managed to find my brother. I’m not about to lose my best friend too.
* * *
When Yenni and I make it to the far side of the room, the man who pulled Victor out of the ring blocks our way. I try not to cringe under his piggy-eyed gaze.
“You can’t come through here,” he says. His face is wide and puffy, and his nose is crooked from having been broken many times. “No one is allowed to see the fighters when they’re not in the ring.”
I can tell he’s not going to change his mind. All of the kindness has been punched out of that face. Turning away, I push my way through the sweaty crush of bodies. They’re cheering again for some other blood match. Shoulders shove me, but I ignore the men and make my way out the door into the startling brightness of the open street beyond.
I stand there for a moment, grappling with the impossibility that this is still Tuesday afternoon; that the sun is still shining. My friend is lying, sweaty and bloody, inside the dark building behind me. My brother is still missing, maybe dead. And out here, the world is going on exactly as it has been, without a change, without noticing the giant black void that has opened up inside me.
“Ana. Ana! Are you okay?” Yenni puts a hand on my arm and peers into my face.
I blink at her. No, I’m not okay. Everything is falling apart and I have no idea what to do about it.
“I’m fine,” I manage to choke out. I take a deep, steadying breath. “Thank you for helping me so much, Yenni. You should go back to the posada now so you don’t get in trouble. I know my way home from here,” I lie. “As soon as I get home, I’ll wash these clothes and get them back to you.”
“You’d better,” says Yenni, swallowing my candy-coated lie without even pausing to taste it. “That ratty old thing is my favorite.” She gives me a quick hug. “Be careful,” she says. “This is not a good part of town. Hurry home.”
With a final squeeze, she leaves me. I watch her until she turns a corner and is lost to sight, then I face the still-crowded door of the fighting den. I can’t just stand, waiting, in the middle of the road in front of the building, so I move up the street a little way and find a shadowed doorway to lean in. It smells like pee, but I ignore it, keeping my eyes fixed on the last place I saw my friend.
That piggy-eyed door guard has no idea how stubborn I can be. He may not let me in to see Victor, but he can’t stop me from meeting him when he comes out.
I watch the sun creep its way across the spit-colored sky. I ignore my body asking for food, for water, for the chance to sit down, to doze, to pee. I ignore the leering men, stinking of alcohol, my heart pounding in my chest but my face flat. Through it all, I watch that door, carefully examining anyone who goes in or out.
It’s almost full dark and I’m starting to worry about safety when I finally recognize the hunched shadow of Victor leaving the building. He turns and starts limping up the street away from me.
“Victor!” I call.
“Ana!” He laughs disbelievingly, rubbing the back of his neck with a split-knuckled hand. “I thought that was you I saw earlier. How do you always manage to show up in the worst places?”
I jog up to him.
“You’re one to talk,” I say, forcing a smile. “You’re always in the worst places first.”
Victor huffs another laugh. “I suppose you’re right about that. Seriously, though, what are you doing in this part of town?”
“It’s a long story,” I dodge. “What about you? Why are you here, doing this?”
Night is falling fast, and Victor’s features blur in the dim light, so I can’t see his expression when he answers.
“You know what happened, Ana. Your papi died too.”
“Yeah, but . . . you just, what? Ditched home and came to the city?”
“What was left for me up there? The mines?” Victor’s eyes are hollowed out by the lengthening shadows. “I don’t have anyone else, like you do. I had to leave.”
“But fighting . . . ?”
Victor’s shoulders stiffen. “What else am I good for? The only thing I know how to do is mining, and I’m never going back to that. There’s no way out of the mines unless you leave them in a pine box, just like my papi.” He turns his face away again. “Fighting’s not so bad, compared to that.”
He’s not wrong. If he had stayed on the mountain, his fate would have been to live and die in the mines. But I can’t believe that the best choice that’s left for him is to let himself get beaten up for money. Still, I shouldn’t judge him.
“Sorry,” I say. “Forgive me?”
“Of cours
e.” His tired smile reopens his split lip and blood trickles down his chin. “What are friends for?”
For a moment we stand there looking at each other, noticing the differences the last week has brought about in each of us. Then the wind whistles over us and I shiver. That breaks Victor out of his thoughts.
“You should get out of the cold,” he says. “Do you have somewhere in town where you’re staying that I can walk you to?”
For a second I think about the posada with its clean sheets and good food. But Doña Arenal was very specific about me only being allowed to stay the one night. I know I can’t go back there, especially with a bloodied boy at my heels. I’d get Yenni fired for sure. I also can’t go home: it’s dusk now and I’d never find my way safely up the mountain in the dark, even if I had the energy to attempt it. I shake my head. Victor reaches a battered hand to my face and wipes a tear from it with one grubby finger. I didn’t know I was crying.
“Can I stay with you?” The words leave my mouth without my permission.
Victor bites his lower lip. “That’s not . . . the best idea . . .”
“Please?” I feel more tears tracing their way down my face, but I don’t make a move to stop them. I’m tired and overwhelmed and heartsick over not finding Daniel. I feel like I can’t take any more right now. “I don’t know anyone else in the city. I don’t have anywhere else to go tonight. I’ll go home first thing tomorrow, I promise.”
Victor sighs, clearly not happy about the idea.
“Come on,” he says.
I walk at his elbow as he heads into the darkening alley and down a warren of twisting streets. Victor stops in front of a stained door in a filthy, stucco-walled building.
“This is it,” he mumbles, so quietly I can barely hear even though I’m standing practically on top of him. “This is where I live now.”
Victor’s split-knuckled hand rests on the peeling paint of the door. He pauses, giving me one last chance to change my mind. The dark buildings loom over us. I glance up the alley and decide that whatever it is that’s waiting inside the building in front of us, it can’t be as bad as walking through this neighborhood by myself after dark, leaving him alone.
“Great,” I say. “Let’s go in.”
Victor pushes the door open and I follow him into the building. When the door shuts behind us, the darkness of the interior takes over and I stumble blindly in his wake. I can tell where he is less by sight than by the warmth of his body, as the inky hallway we’re in is just as cold as outside. The hallway reeks of old sweat, dried vomit, and urine, and I try not to identify the trash on the floor and piled against the walls as I stumble over it to keep up with Victor.
At the end of the hallway, he turns left, into a windowless room. It’s not large, but there are already five other young men and boys in it. One of them has a flashlight and is staring at a photo in his hands. In the darkness, his face glows like a moon.
Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea, I think. But it’s too late to make a different choice now. You have no good choices, I remind myself.
Victor walks to the back corner, but says to the room as a whole, “This is my friend Ana. Everyone leave her alone.”
One by one, the boys peel their dark gazes off me. Victor collapses to the floor and lets his head fall against the wall. I lower myself gingerly down the other wall, our feet and the corner of the room making a rough square around a small, filthy pile of belongings I assume are his.
“Sorry,” he says in a low voice. “This is all there is.”
I stare around at the grimy walls, at the other hungry-looking boys and their miserable piles of stuff.
I find him studying me.
“This is where you live now?” I ask.
He nods.
“What happened to your house?”
“I couldn’t make rent on kid’s pay.”
“No one could help you?” I ask. Though, given that he’s here, I already know the answer to that. Victor’s papi had come to the Cerro from the lowlands when the price of aluminum went up only five years ago. I remember Victor standing alone at the funeral. With his mami dead too and no family around here, he really is all alone.
“It’s not so bad, really.” It sounds like he’s trying to convince himself. “Not as bad as being in the mines.”
“It’s so dark.” My voice is almost a whisper.
He shrugs. “It’s not as dark as the mines either.”
I shudder, remembering my days stumbling through the bowels of the Cerro Rico. As if on cue, the boy with the flashlight turns it off and the darkness closes over us like a fist. I find my breathing coming faster and try to control my panic, but it’s like I can feel the mountain around me again, the devil’s hot breath at the nape of my neck. A tiny sob escapes me.
Next to me I hear a small rasp. A match whooshes to life in Victor’s fingers. He digs through the pile between us with his other hand and comes out with a filthy stub of a candle. He holds the match to it, then sets the tiny flame on the ground, shaking the match out. I heave a shuddering breath.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
“Not the end of the world to be afraid of the dark,” he says without judgment.
I feel like I owe him a better answer.
“After the funerals, I went into the mountain to see if I could find Daniel,” I say. “The tunnel collapsed. I spent two days trying to find my way out.”
“God, Ana!” He sounds horrified.
My eyes pull to the candle as if drawn by magnets. I realize I’m shaking and curl my hands into fists so he won’t see them. “When I was a baby, I was scared of the dark because I imagined it was full of monsters. But now I’ve lived and almost died in the dark, and I know that it’s not full; it’s empty. Completely empty. And I’m more afraid of it than ever.”
I examine the tiny candle and try to calculate how long the stub will last before it gutters.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers.
“Not your fault,” I say with a shrug.
“Actually”—Victor’s voice is strained—“it is.”
That’s enough to pull my eyes from the candle to his face. “What? Don’t be ridiculous.”
Victor won’t meet my eyes. He’s staring at the candle flame so intently it’s like the world might end if he blinks. Even in the flickering light I can see stress lines on his face that weren’t there before.
“Victor . . . ?”
For a long moment Victor is quiet. Then, in a voice almost too low to hear, he starts talking.
“I . . . I was there,” Victor starts, “the day of the disaster. I know everyone is calling it a cave-in, but I was working in an old section of zone two, laying dynamite. I was”—he pauses, searching for the right word—“sloppy. I laid them badly.” He shuts his eyes against the pain of the memory. “I only had the fuse partially out of the mine when they started going off.” He lifts his eyes to mine, begging me to understand. “I made it out okay, but then I saw my papi’s body and all the others. It was my fault, Ana. That’s why I can’t go back. The miners that died there that day, Daniel . . . I killed them.” Victor starts to cry. “I’m sorry, Ana. I’m so, so sorry.”
I sit, stunned, struggling to imagine the guilt he’s been carrying. Victor has always had a tender heart, shooing stray dogs away gently when other boys would have hit them with sticks. I can’t imagine how he must feel, thinking he was responsible for the deaths of multiple men. I remember how he wouldn’t meet my eyes the day of the funerals. Now I know why.
“The mines are dangerous,” I say, my voice as soft as I can make it. “Things go wrong there all the time. It’s not easy to lay dynamite right, and even when you do, you risk the mountain coming down on your head because of hundreds of years of people digging tunnels without a plan. It happens. No one would have blamed you. No one does blame you.” My gaze dr
ops to my hands in my lap and I admit the truth that has been eating holes through me like acid rain boring slowly through rock. “They blame me.”
“You?” That startles Victor into looking at me again. “But you weren’t even working there the day of the disaster.”
I shrug. “I’m a girl. They say I should never have gone into the mine. That I called down the anger of the Pachamama . . . or the devil . . . whoever.”
Victor snorts. “Seriously?”
“Seriously. When I went there to ask questions about Daniel, they spat at me and told me to stay away.”
Victor shakes his head. “It’s not your fault. That’s just silly.”
I reach over and take his hand, careful not to press on his split knuckles.
“It’s not your fault either. Those deaths,” I say, and it breaks my heart inside to realize I’ve finally added Daniel to that number, “were accidents.”
Victor looks at our hands and doesn’t say anything. The candle stub flickers between us, throwing our faces into light and then shadow and then light again.
Then my stomach growls loudly, breaking the moment.
“Hungry?” Victor asks, a sideways smile on his face.
“I guess,” I say, embarrassed.
“Well, then, sorry again,” he says. “I lost today, so I didn’t get paid. I don’t have any food on days I don’t win.”
Suddenly I remember the bundle that Carmencita gave me. I had tied my manta into a quick sling and pulled it over my shoulder. Now I rummage through it and find she packed me a few loaves of flat sweet bread and some cheese.
Smiling, I hold up the feast so Victor can see it.
He’s stunned for a moment, then he breaks into a huge grin.
“Anyone who says you’re unlucky is an idiot.”
I laugh and hand him half the food.
Treasure of the World Page 16
