ramp to reach them. Days just to hear a drill. Or maybe just the silence of being forgotten, of having that stone across the Ramp be the closed door of their tomb. When there is nothing left to say, they open their eyes wide in the darkness and think how cruel and how wrong and how unfair it is to find themselves here, among these other sweaty, smelly, and frightened men.
There was comfort in the rushing rhythm of their daily working lives, in the 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. shift going underground and coming out again, and then back into this mountain where the tiniest share of the bounty of copper and gold was theirs to keep. Now there is nothing to do but sit still, listen to the intermittent thunder of falling rock, and wonder if this is all they will know. Maybe all the pleasures of sweat and simple living under the sun, the moon and the Southern Cross in the night sky belong to the past. So many memories left behind, out there in the world of the unburied: filling boxes with picked grapes, seeking out the pretty newcomer at the family gathering, joining friends for hard drinking, walking through doorways and into Copiapó bars where stationary mirror balls awaited. Collecting paychecks and coming home at 9:00 p.m. to the voices of children gathered under the streetlamps in the sloping neighborhoods of Copiapó, under lights tinged amber and emerald. The outside has slipped into the was , because now they live in a present, and perhaps a forever, of darkness. The past was family patios where men gathered to discuss whether La U or Colo-Colo would win the next fútbol championship, and other important and relaxing subjects of male-centered conversation. The past was the open windows leading to their backyards, to grills and the cracked skin of cooked sausage. It was the silhouettes of their pregnant wives and girlfriends, moving about living rooms and kitchens, the mystery of the feminine there in the bellies growing with their progeny.
Two of the miners are awaiting the birth of their children to pregnant girlfriends. There is Ariel Ticona, a spry twenty-nine-year-old, who already has two with the same girlfriend. Richard Villarroel is a tall mechanic. His pregnant polola is called Dana, and he lives with her in Ovalle, several hours to the south of Copiapó, a place that fancies itself as a kind of Eden, a haven of palm trees and flowing waters amid dry, barren hills. Tonight his girlfriend is a pregnant Eve in that oasis while he, her Adam, is stuck in a hole paying for their recent carnal sins. He remembers her swollen belly, and the baby swimming inside, and those first few faint kicks he felt when Dana brought his hand to that hard shell of skin. Those kicks, he now realizes, might be the closest he ever gets to knowing his son. Richard’s own fisherman father died when he was five, in an accident on a lake in Chilean Patagonia, leaving Richard with a lifetime of unsettled thoughts and shifting homes, and finally a teenage rebellion against his widowed mother in which he actually ended up in jail, briefly, angry at the unjust world that would deprive a boy of all but the faintest memory of having a father. It was as if his father’s life had been taken by a lightning bolt, and Richard’s death will feel that way too, to Richard’s son, if he dies here. It’s an act of chance, the absurd hand of fate at work, because Richard wasn’t even supposed to be underground. He signed up to work aboveground, and he knows that his mother will be confused when she sees his name on a list of missing men, because as far as she knows, he doesn’t even work in a mine. The idea that Richard will soon leave his son an identical legacy of absence to the one he knew, a lifetime of suppressed suffering, now looms over him.
That’s the cruelest thing about this August 5, a day whose final minutes are playing out in the Refuge with the sounds of men moving about on their makeshift resting places: the knowledge that they will be
There was comfort in the rushing rhythm of their daily working lives, in the 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. shift going underground and coming out again, and then back into this mountain where the tiniest share of the bounty of copper and gold was theirs to keep. Now there is nothing to do but sit still, listen to the intermittent thunder of falling rock, and wonder if this is all they will know. Maybe all the pleasures of sweat and simple living under the sun, the moon and the Southern Cross in the night sky belong to the past. So many memories left behind, out there in the world of the unburied: filling boxes with picked grapes, seeking out the pretty newcomer at the family gathering, joining friends for hard drinking, walking through doorways and into Copiapó bars where stationary mirror balls awaited. Collecting paychecks and coming home at 9:00 p.m. to the voices of children gathered under the streetlamps in the sloping neighborhoods of Copiapó, under lights tinged amber and emerald. The outside has slipped into the was , because now they live in a present, and perhaps a forever, of darkness. The past was family patios where men gathered to discuss whether La U or Colo-Colo would win the next fútbol championship, and other important and relaxing subjects of male-centered conversation. The past was the open windows leading to their backyards, to grills and the cracked skin of cooked sausage. It was the silhouettes of their pregnant wives and girlfriends, moving about living rooms and kitchens, the mystery of the feminine there in the bellies growing with their progeny.
Two of the miners are awaiting the birth of their children to pregnant girlfriends. There is Ariel Ticona, a spry twenty-nine-year-old, who already has two with the same girlfriend. Richard Villarroel is a tall mechanic. His pregnant polola is called Dana, and he lives with her in Ovalle, several hours to the south of Copiapó, a place that fancies itself as a kind of Eden, a haven of palm trees and flowing waters amid dry, barren hills. Tonight his girlfriend is a pregnant Eve in that oasis while he, her Adam, is stuck in a hole paying for their recent carnal sins. He remembers her swollen belly, and the baby swimming inside, and those first few faint kicks he felt when Dana brought his hand to that hard shell of skin. Those kicks, he now realizes, might be the closest he ever gets to knowing his son. Richard’s own fisherman father died when he was five, in an accident on a lake in Chilean Patagonia, leaving Richard with a lifetime of unsettled thoughts and shifting homes, and finally a teenage rebellion against his widowed mother in which he actually ended up in jail, briefly, angry at the unjust world that would deprive a boy of all but the faintest memory of having a father. It was as if his father’s life had been taken by a lightning bolt, and Richard’s death will feel that way too, to Richard’s son, if he dies here. It’s an act of chance, the absurd hand of fate at work, because Richard wasn’t even supposed to be underground. He signed up to work aboveground, and he knows that his mother will be confused when she sees his name on a list of missing men, because as far as she knows, he doesn’t even work in a mine. The idea that Richard will soon leave his son an identical legacy of absence to the one he knew, a lifetime of suppressed suffering, now looms over him.
That’s the cruelest thing about this August 5, a day whose final minutes are playing out in the Refuge with the sounds of men moving about on their makeshift resting places: the knowledge that they will be
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