by Héctor Tobar
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, a fourfold increase in the price of gold (to $1,200 an ounce) and record copper prices sent men deeper into the otherwise-not-so-profitable San José Mine, and into other mines in the Copiapó River valley. Copiapó’s population grew to 150,000, and new and taller buildings were erected, including the tallest in the city, a fifteen-story luxury apartment building on Atacama Street, along with Copiapó’s first resort, the Antay Casino and Hotel, a building whose modernist touches include a crimson, fez-shaped dome. Rising mineral prices also put more money in the pockets of the men who toiled at the San José Mine, and in recent years and months the men of the A shift have celebrated their windfall by adding rooms to their homes and by organizing large parties, often for their children and grandchildren. Sometimes these family gatherings are organized at El Pretil public park, with its watered lawns and pepper and eucalyptus trees and a small zoo with llamas, owls, and two grungy lions in a cage painted lavender.
At the end of their previous seven-day workweek, about two dozen men of the A shift attended a postwork party at the home of Víctor Segovia, a hard-drinking jumbo operator with a musical bent. A large pot was filled with beef, chicken, pork, and fish, and the host cooked up the stew known locally as cocimiento, a dish that itself is a kind of celebration of abundance. A few days later, Víctor’s cousin Darío Segovia was planning a big birthday celebration for his baby girl on August 5, when word came that he would be needed for an overtime shift that same day (a day he was scheduled to be off). The money for this single day of work (90,000 Chilean pesos, or about $180) was too good to pass up, and he told the mother of his daughter, his companion, Jessica Chilla, that they would have to postpone the birthday party. Out of spite, Jessica refused to talk to him or to make him dinner the night before he went to work.
In the predawn hours before the shift begins, the couple have made up. At about 6:30 a.m. Darío kisses Jessica, walks down the steps that lead from his second-story living room to his front door, then stops and walks back up to wrap his arms around the woman he loves. He embraces Jessica for several seconds, a moment of gentleness and need from a brawny, callused forty-eight-year-old man. Holding her might just be his way of saying sorry, but it’s also a break in their domestic routine, and it leaves Jessica anxious after Darío walks out the door.
Luis Urzúa leaves from a middle-class neighborhood in Copiapó. He’s the supervisor of the A shift, and other men in his position are known to drive in their own vehicles to the mine, but Urzúa rides in with his underlings. He gets on the bus not far from another Copiapó bus stop, where he met his wife, Carmen Berríos, more than twenty-five years earlier. Urzúa is from a mining family and began working underground as a teenager, but when he met Carmen he had a prized surface job and would eventually earn a technical degree as a topographer. Carmen is a smart woman with a romantic bent, who writes poetry when the mood strikes her, and over the years she’s made the hardworking Luis Urzúa her project: Among other things, she tries to get him to speak more clearly, because he often mumbles with the diction of an impoverished miner. When he finishes work at 8:00 p.m., she’ll have dinner ready for him, and they’ll sit alongside their two grown children, both of whom are in college.
Outside, a thick morning fog has descended over the darkened city. In a place where it almost never rains, water hovers in the air and floats underneath streetlamps, and climbs up the ravines that cut through the city. The fog is an almost daily occurrence in this part of Chile and thus has a name—la camanchaca. Sometimes the fog is so thick vehicles can’t safely drive the highways that lead to the mine, and the start of work is delayed until it lifts, though today will not be one of those days. On street corners across Copiapó, men wait for the sound of the “hare” buses to emerge from the fog.
Each member of the A shift is, in one way or another, going to the San José this morning for the woman or women in his life: a wife, a girlfriend, a mother, a daughter. Jimmy Sánchez, who is eighteen and thus not legally allowed to work in the mine (you have to be twenty-one) has a girlfriend who is pregnant, a complication that led his relatives to beg the mine managers to give him a job. In the neighborhood named for Arturo Prat, a hero of the War of the Pacific, the smallish and handsome Alex Vega has just said goodbye to his wife, whose name is also Jessica. She’s refused to give him his usual workday kiss goodbye because she’s angry with him, though she will soon forget the reason. Half a mile away, in a neighborhood named for Pope John Paul II, a member of one of the crews that fortifies the mine’s inner passageways leaves the home of his girlfriend. Yonni Barrios is a paunchy, soft-spoken Romeo with scarred cheeks who lives with his latest girlfriend, unless he’s fighting with her, in which case he lives with his wife. Conveniently, the two women live less than a block apart, and as he walks to catch the bus he can see the door of his wife’s home. He took out a loan to pay for the small neighborhood store she runs from her front door, and repaying that loan (along with helping out his girlfriend with her home) is one of the reasons he is up early today, listening for the sound of the coming bus that will take him to work.
There are many superstitions about women and mines that are expressions of the male-dominated culture’s ambivalence about both women and underground labor. One legend has it that the mountain itself is a woman, and in a sense “you’re violating her every time you step inside her,” which explains why the mountain often tries to kill the men who’ve carved passageways from her stone body. Another has it that a woman working belowground is bad luck (although at least one miner has a sister who’s worked for decades in her own small mine), and women are almost never seen inside the caverns of the San José. The separation of the female-centered domestic world of the home and the city from the male-centered mine in the desert is so great, most of the wives and girlfriends of the A shift workers have never been to the San José and are unaware of its exact location.
When the buses arrive, the half-asleep men take seats inside. They putter through the city and the fog, past the mustard-colored buildings of the University of Atacama near the northern edge of the city, where one of the men of the A shift has a daughter studying civil engineering. They reach the northbound stretch of the Pan-American Highway, which leads away from Copiapó toward the bones of the disappeared and the old saltpeter mines of the inner Atacama Desert. The San José is thirty-five miles outside Copiapó, and the last landmark on the drive to the mine is a rocky mountain just beyond the edge of the city known as the “Roaring Hill.” Darwin saw this hill, Cerro Bramador, and wrote about the distinct noise it made. Today the sound is most often compared with that of a Latin American instrument known as a rainstick. One local legend has it that the noise is the roar of a lion guarding a golden treasure inside the mountain; another, that it’s the flow of an undiscovered underground river. The quasi-scientific explanation is that the mountain’s deposits of magnetite are attracting and repelling grains of sand that vibrate in the wind.
Darwin followed this road past the hissing mountain to a nearby port where the HMS Beagle was waiting for him; he then sailed on to the Galápagos Islands, where his observations of the local birdlife would lead him to the theory of natural selection. But the men of the A shift turn right just past the roaring mountain, off the Pan-American Highway, heading northward and inland on a narrow road of battered asphalt. For the first few kilometers, the road runs in a long, straight line across an ugly plain of grayish brown sand covered with broken rocks and windblown plants. The buses pass a cutoff to Cerro Imán, or Magnet Hill, which contains an iron ore mine, and then the road begins to curve as it enters a narrow valley surrounded by barren, rocky hills. The hills rise like reddish islands in a sea of taupe-colored sand, and shrubs the shape and size of sea urchins appear along the roadside. A man entering this landscape today still sees the relentless Atacama emptiness that Darwin saw: There are no wandering or scampering animals, nor are there any gas stations or roadside stores or any other sign of human h
abitation. The mountains turn maroon and orange, and resemble photographs of the surface of Mars. Finally, the buses enter another valley and come upon a blue roadside sign announcing the cutoff for the San Esteban Mining Company and its two brother mines, the San Antonio and the San José. From here, the men inside the buses can begin to see the mine’s corroded and windblown structures of wood, tin, and steel, looking tragic and lonely in the alien landscape. They slowly begin a gentle climb and soon the familiar buildings on the hillside come into sharper focus: the administration bungalows, the locker and shower rooms, the cafeterias. But the men know the mine is like an iceberg city, because these surface structures represent only a small fraction of its underground sprawl.
Below the ground, the mine expands into roads that lead to vast interior spaces carved out by explosives and machinery, pathways to man-made galleries and canyons. The underground city of the San José Mine has a kind of weather, with temperatures that rise and fall, and breezes that shift at different times of day. Its underground byways have traffic signs and traffic rules to keep order, and several generations of surveyors have planned and charted their downward spread. The central road linking all these passageways to the surface is called La Rampa, the Ramp. The San José Mine spirals down nearly as deep as the tallest building on Earth is tall, and the drive along the Ramp from the surface to the deepest part of the mine is about five miles.
The San José Mine, founded in 1889, rests on top of mineral deposits that take the form of two parallel strips of softer rock embedded at a 60-degree angle inside a much harder, gray granitelike stone called diorite. An old wooden building on a mountainside marks the spot where the ore reached closest to the surface. The building once housed a working winch that lifted men and minerals out of the mine, but it hasn’t been used in decades, and today it looks like a relic from an old Western. One hundred and twenty-one years after the San José Mine opened, and two thousand feet below that old building, the night shift is finishing its work during the early morning hours. Men covered in gray soot and drenched in sweat begin to gather in one of the caverns below, at a spot that is like an underground bus stop, waiting for the truck that will take them on the forty-minute drive to the surface. During their twelve-hour shift these men have noted a kind of wailing rumble in the distance. Many tons of rock are falling in forgotten caverns deep inside the mountain. The sounds and vibrations caused by these avalanches are transmitted through the stone structure of the mountain in the same way the blast waves of lightning strikes travel through the air and ground. The mine is “weeping” a lot, the men say to each other. “La mina está llorando mucho.” This thundering wail is not unusual, but its frequency is. To the men in the mine, it’s as if they are listening to a distant storm gathering in intensity. Thankfully their shift is about to end. A few will tell the next group of men to enter the mine, the men of the day A shift, “La mina está llorando mucho,” but it is unlikely the San José will close as a result. The men who work there have heard these gathering storms before. The thunder always recedes and eventually the mountain returns to its steady and quiet state.
* * *
As the men of the A shift reach the mine property, they pass a guard shack and then the entrance to the Ramp, a tunnel first blasted from the hard diorite rock of the mountain more than a decade ago. The opening to the San José Mine is an orifice five meters wide and five meters tall, and the edges that face the outside world resemble a series of stone teeth. Trucks filled with men and ore now begin to emerge from this mouth, because the prior shift is finishing its workday. They’ve removed a few hundred tons of ore-bearing rock, with copper sulfide in fingernail-size specks that glimmer with the same marbled pastels of art nouveau paintings: crimson, forest green, maroon, and the brassy yellow, tetragonal crystals of the copper ore known as chalcopyrite. When processed, each metric ton of this rock produces as much as forty pounds of copper (worth about $150), and less than an ounce of gold (worth several hundred dollars). The gold is invisible, though many older men of the A shift grew up listening to their fathers say you could taste it in rock like this.
The men file into changing rooms that are as moldy and cramped as those on an old sea vessel. They put on overalls, attach freshly charged battery packs to their belts, and lamps to their blue, yellow, and red helmets. Luis Urzúa puts on the white helmet that’s a symbol of his managerial status, and also straps a palm-size “self-rescue” oxygen canister to the leather belt on his waist. Urzúa is a relative newcomer to the San José, easygoing for a shift supervisor, and doesn’t know his crew as well as he would like, in part because the crew is always changing from one day to the next. Today, one man will join the A shift and work underground for the first time; and as Urzúa enters the mine he notes that another of the two dozen or so men working for him today hasn’t even made it to work yet.
After his long journey from Santiago, Mario Sepúlveda has arrived in Copiapó too late to catch the minibuses to the mine. He stands on a Copiapó street corner and thinks that this is a good thing. The last time he was in town he talked to a friend who runs another small mine. This friend was well aware that the San José Mine is in a perpetually precarious financial and structural state, and offered Sepúlveda another job. Now it’s 9:00 a.m., the day A shift at the San José started an hour ago, and Sepúlveda thinks that if he’s lucky they’ll fire him at the San José for not showing up today, which will make it easier for his friend to hire him at that other mine. These thoughts are running through his head when the driver of another minibus passes by and spots him.
“Perri!” the driver calls through the window, using Sepúlveda’s nickname. “You missed your bus? I’m going that way. I’ll give you a ride. Jump in.”
The man with the heart of a dog arrives at the San José Mine after 9:30, more than ninety minutes late. The fog has burned off by then, and Sepúlveda stands in the desert sunlight for a final few moments before getting a ride down into the mine and his workplace.
PART I
BENEATH THE MOUNTAIN OF THUNDER AND SORROW
1
A COMPANY MAN
In the San José Mine, sea level is the chief point of reference. The five-by-five-meter tunnel of the Ramp begins at Level 720, which is 720 meters above sea level. The Ramp descends into the mountain as a series of switchbacks, and then farther down becomes a spiral. Dump trucks, front loaders, pickup trucks, and assorted other machines and the men who operate them drive down past Level 200, into the part of the mountain where there are still minerals to be brought to the surface, working in passageways that lead from the Ramp to the veins of ore-bearing rock. On the morning of August 5, the men of the A shift are working as far down as Level 40, some 2,230 vertical feet below the surface, loading freshly blasted ore into a dump truck. Another group of men are at Level 60, working to fortify a passageway near a spot where a man lost a limb in an accident one month earlier. A few have gathered for a moment of rest, or idleness, in or near El Refugio, the Refuge, an enclosed space about the size of a school classroom, carved out of the rock at Level 90. As its name suggests, the Refuge is supposed to be a shelter in the event of an emergency, but it also serves as a kind of break room because fresh air is pumped into it from the surface, offering a respite from the humidity and heat, which often reaches 98 percent and 40° Celsius (104° Fahrenheit) in this part of the mine. The San José is said by the men who work there to be like hell, and this is a description with some basis in scientific fact, since it’s the geothermal heat emanating from the bowels of the Earth that makes the mine hotter the deeper they go.
The mechanics led by Juan Carlos Aguilar find respite from the heat by setting up a workshop at Level 150, in a passageway not far from the vast interior chasm called El Rajo, which translates loosely as “the Pit.” Air circulates through the Pit and the faintest hint of a breeze flows from that dark abyss into the makeshift workshop. The mechanics have decided to start their workweek by asking Mario Sepúlveda to give them a demonstration of
how he operates his front loader. They watch as he uses the clutch to bring the vehicle to a stop, shifting from forward directly to reverse without going into neutral first.
“Who taught you to do that?” the mechanics ask. “That’s wrong. You’re not supposed to do it that way.” He’s mucking up the transmission by doing this, wearing out the differential.
“No one ever showed me,” Sepúlveda answers. “I just learned from watching.” The mechanics work for a company that contracts maintenance services to the mine, and they are not surprised to learn that an employee of the San José is operating an expensive piece of equipment without having received any formal training. The San José is an older, smaller mine known for cutting corners, and for its primitive working conditions and perfunctory safety practices. Among other things, it has vertical escape tunnels that will be useless in an emergency because they lack the ladders necessary for the miners to use them.
