The mountain was their mother. She chewed the sunlight and spit it out between her teeth like coca. Her mouths were made of dirt. Her tits were full of silver. She had killed a thousand men, maybe more. The sun looked at her like a man looks at a woman, fierce and hungry. The light was strong on her slopes and it could crisp a man’s scalp where his hair had thinned.
The miners were just beginning to worship the Spanish God in the sunlight, but in the shafts the demon statues still ruled — their dark features cramped, their bald eyes shineless and searching. Their forms were wooden sculptures blackened from the dust, mouths blooming dried leaves in crackling piles. Every day the miners offered what they could: wedges of rot-soft fruit, more coca, pinches of tobacco. The devils’ wooden hands held filthy scraps of cloth covered with drawings of the miners’ dreams: an open pasture full of llamas, a copper pot for meat and rice. The fruit wedges fuzzed with mold, left for months, because the men were scared to take back what they’d offered.
The boy was a boy without parents or a name. He didn’t have a village, as many did, the ones who worked the rock for single seasons at a time. He only had a hole where he was expected each morning. The men knew him simply as the one small enough to crawl where no one else could follow. He chip-chip-chipped until the mountain fell away around him to make passage. He worked on the south slope, at the entrance to the shaft the Spaniards called culo de montaña, ass of the mountain. Arturo was the driver there, in charge of its forty slaves, and he was vigilant about their devil. He was a small man himself, self-conscious about his stature and the long birthmarks that ran like spilled paint along his arms. He knew no one could fear him, so he offered this mute demon to fear instead.
It was Arturo who was most afraid when he found the demon damaged, one morning, showing an empty lap where his pene had thrust up. The boy confessed that he had done it — broken the shaft, snapped it like a twig. It was simply child’s play, a careless tumble, but it gave Arturo a feeling of dread. The devil was a god, but he was a god in the body of a man. What loss could matter more? This would be trouble for the boy, someday, and for the men who worked his rock.
The men took shifts in turn, half-days, and sometimes twice in a row — puffing their cheeks with leaves, blinking their smarting eyes against the dust. But the conquistadores were the ones who took the silver and they were the ones who made the coins and that was what mattered. Sometimes they rode their horses up the steep slopes to watch their wealth extracted, and the men saw glimpses—in silk clothes and knotted saddles—of another world down-mountain in Potosí: pastel houses with wooden doors as thick as hands; halls that held the mountain light in servant-scrubbed windows, clear and cold; wooden floors clicking under the jeweled heels of women, wives and daughters.
The miners never saw any of these women until the day Señora Lucinda Maria Rizocca de Vasco visited the mountain. The slaves were warned: Señora Lucinda was a woman with a foolish heart and a fragile constitution. Arturo made it clear she didn’t want their coughs spraying dust-darkened spit onto her pale blue dress.
There were rumors she was so ugly she was inspecting conditions underground so that she could live the rest of her life in darkness. Some men insisted the opposite was true — that she was so beautiful some of them would die, simply from the thought of never seeing her again. There were rumors she wanted to sculpt tiny silver figurines in their images, hunched men, spines curved over the handles of their trolley carts. Some even claimed she would use these figures for dark arts, that she was simply a beautiful form that the ugly witch Claudia had taken for her sinister purposes. Claudia was known for casting spells that had made men fall in love with mules, women fall in love with their daughters, old women look in the mirror and see themselves young, a cruel trick the rest of the world was not privy to. Claudia was a crone but what did this mean when she could take any body she wanted?
Witch or no, Señora was beautiful when she came. No man died from her beauty, but there was one who wept like a baby, it was said, from the notion that the world contained such women and none of them would ever lie with him.
* * *
The boy was dispatched to reinforce the tunnels before Señora arrived. The wooden beams needed to be strong and they needed to look strong. Once you were inside, the boy knew, it was easy to start thinking about the miles of rock above you, to stop believing they would hold. The boy did not think of these things. It was not that he had faith — he had seen too many people die — but that he had grown impatient with his own fear.
He was often called upon for special tasks like this one. He knew the mine better than most of the adult men, for starters — most of them serving terms under the mita, coming to fill their obligations for a summer or a winter and then returning to their villages. It was only Arturo who showed the boy kindness. Arturo had been giving him Spanish lessons at night, thinking he could use the language to get a position as a yanacona, doing servant work for one of the wealthy families in town. The boy learned lists of words and turned them over in his head as he chipped away the glinting ore: comer, cuerpo, culo. He made sentences like tiny interlocking sculptures in his mind: tengo un cuerpo, la montaña come mi cuerpo, el culo de la montaña come mi cuerpo.
The boy could feel the mountain resist his hammer as he carved away the corridors to fit thicker beams of wood. He did not usually mind his work with the pick — it was better than the carriers, surely, who were little better than mules, hauling their burlap sacks through the furnace of the worm-hollowed mountain, toes struggling for purchase in the steepest tunnels, sweat-slicked hands grasping the rungs of rickety ladders. I have a body. The mountain eats my body. His work was easier than this, he knew. Surely. But now he could he feel the muscles of the mountain saying: Stop. Saying: Don’t.
* * *
She did not come as they expected her to come, in silk and lace. She came in cotton pants too large for her narrow waist, cinched with rope, and a dirty work-shirt cupped at the armpits with yellow sweat. “I got these clothes from a man in Carichipampa,” she told the boy. He wondered about this man whose sweat hung in dry half-moons beneath this beautiful woman’s shoulders — what was he wearing now? A swishing golden dress?
“You might be wondering,” she said, “what I gave this man in return?”
“As you please, Señora,” said the boy, as he had been taught to say. “I am sure you were generous.”
But he kept his gaze keen and fixed. He wanted to know. She could see it in his eyes.
“I bought him a suit,” she said. “The first he has ever owned.”
She reached suddenly for the boy, grabbing his arm. “You are the one I was told about, yes?”
The boy started to reply, but Arturo cuffed his ear to silence him. “He is the one,” he said. “Though we do our best to forget.”
“No,” she said, seeming pleased. “It should not be forgotten.”
The boy kept very stiff. Her fingers were tight around his arm, though he could see her looking at the fabric of his shirt — noting its grit. She jerked him. “Did you keep it?”
He had to play the words again in his head. He was used to Arturo’s Spanish, which was spoken cleanly and with care, each word offered like a small morsel of food to an injured animal. This was different, ragged and demanding.
Finally, he asked: “To what are you referring, Señora?”
“What you broke,” she said. “Did you keep the part?”
“It was many years ago. I am afraid—
“So you didn’t?”
He shook his head.
“Lost forever, then. Just as well.”
Close to the entrance, he noticed her flinch at the smell: the stink of every miner who had been there, the ghost of their sweat and shit, which lay fossilized in small heaps down the slope. She tried not to show her disgust. She quickened her pace and ducked into the darkness, Arturo scampering behind her like a dog.
She turned, expectant, and pointed at the boy, who was waiting patiently in the sunlight. “Him,” she said. “I’d like him to come too.”
She carried a walking stick, thinking it might help her navigate the steeper passages, but soon realized it would only hinder her progress. It was beautiful, though — she said it had been her father’s, given to him by the old viceroy, Toledo, who had turned Potosí from a cluster of cramped shacks in this impossible land into a painted heart from which the silver flowed like a pulse. The wooden handle of the stick was carved with the tiny figures of men and horses. Arturo tucked it into a crevice in the rock. They would get it when they returned.
“What would you like to see, Señora?” Arturo asked. “In particular?”
“Just the men,” she replied. “Just the men who work.”
All the men work, the boy thought. They passed an ore-mule every few minutes, their eyes blank and their skin shining with sweat. She reached to touch one of them, but he only jerked away, dull with exhaustion, and continued trudging at the same slow pace. The boy could see anguish in her face, but imagined she also enjoyed these shows of sympathy as a chance to pause and catch her breath. She must be feeling it, the furnace of the mountain and the thin air of higher ground. She was showing it in her face — the flush and pained breathing of dust stuffed like cloth into her throat. The rag tied around her face, to protect her mouth, was already sheeted gray with grime. She blinked against the dark heat.
They watched a man turn away from the rock and stumble — like a drunk, clutching his ribs — to cough bits of blood that shone like sparks of lava in the gloom.
“What is wrong with him?” she whispered.
“Nothing serious,” said Arturo. “He will be better in a moment.”
She frowned.
“In a few days, at least. It is just a passing sickness.”
The boy spoke, for the first time: “We call these men volcanos borachos,” he said. “They cough blood until they die.”
She gasped. She averted her eyes. After a moment, she said: “I am ready to go back.”
The boy was disgusted by her surprise. What had she expected? The boy was not such a boy anymore. He was the same height as this woman. They stooped low together, side by side, to keep their heads from hitting rock as they climbed out of the mountain.
* * *
In the sunlight, Señora Lucinda Maria Rizzoca de Vasco realized she had forgotten her walking stick. Her father’s walking stick, she corrected, or else it would not matter. As it was, it had to be retrieved. She turned to Arturo and Arturo turned to the boy. The boy nodded, claro que si.
A few hundred yards in, he encountered a line of men pacing steadily up the passage. He pressed his back against the wall to let them pass. He could see the walking stick — just a bit further, flashing in and out of sight as they paced over it, half-buried in the rubble — and he felt it in his gut, a cold panic he’d never known, at the moment when he saw a foot turn and trip over the wooden handle.
The man went down, toppling the men around him, and the others frothed up the passage — rampling flesh as if it were just another patch of unsteady rubble, shoving each other with the weight of their ore, sacks bearing down on them as they piled. A body rammed into the boy’s left side, knocking him down, and then his face hit stone, and the socket of his shoulder felt the sharp blow of rock, and he felt his fingers crushed by the running weight of men. They screamed like children because they wanted to escape, and there was nowhere to go, too many bodies in the way, and first they cried to God and then they cried to the devil, and then it grew quiet as the boy slipped into darkness.
Part Two
When he woke, he was being dragged into the light. His right arm swelled with heat and hurt like flames, a steady throb that followed the rhythm of his pulse. He glanced right and saw the mess of his own shoulder — bits of bone catching the sunlight, blood sparkling — and when he moved the pain spidered into shocks of electricity. Every time his right side moved — rustling against the gravel, or changing position—it felt like thumbs were digging into the wound. Arturo was stuffing coca leaves into his mouth, telling him to chew. It would numb the pain, he said. But the boy knew better. He’d been chewing coca all his life. He knew it was no match for this. He stared at the sky, its lemon sun, and clenched his teeth against the hurt, and chewed because it was something to focus on. Wet bits of leaf stuck at the corners of his mouth. Arturo’s face appeared in front of the sun. The boy heard certain words but could not fit them together: run, paces, hook, tonic. He wriggled into the ground as if he could tunnel through the dirt, away from the pain. There was a gentle velvet dark pulling across his interior parts. He could see sandals, now, that was all. There were the hems of his pants, caked in dried mud, and two feet floured with dust. The feet were still. And then the feet began to run.
* * *
There was the sudden moon of her face, then the burning of his shoulder once again. He turned his face to look, but her palm cupped his cheek in a moment, turning him back. “Don’t!” Señora said, then softer: “It won’t help.”
Time was hazy and skittering. Moments were not connected to each other. She brought him a bowl of potatoes, salted and mashed, so warm he could feel the steam misting his cheeks. She held out a spoon. He was not hungry. When he thought of eating, or moving any part of his body, the wound began to pulse — as if angered by the thought that something would be demanded of it.
He could not sleep so she gave him her voice during the long hours of the night. He appreciated this, and his appreciation was a subtle prickling beneath the fog of his anger: this was her doing, all of it. It was not her place to care for him. She told him stories about the early days of the mountain, when the Indians knew better than the Spaniards how to melt silver from the rock.
She said melt and he felt the blood oozing into his bandage. She said rock and he thought of the scabbed skin, how rigid the new edge would become.
The Indians placed ovens on the side of the mountain, she said, and let the wind blow through them to drive the heat in angry gusts. At night you could see a thousand tiny fires burning on the mountain, bright as stars.
He nodded when it seemed that she expected him to do so. The pain traveled like a voice through his bones.
When the Spaniards discovered that quicksilver drew silver from the ore, they no longer needed the Indians’ ovens. They moved them to the mercury mines, where they crawled into holes that left them trembling, deformed in skin and mind. Their arms showed small red bumps all over — the imprint of the devil’s tongue, it was said, as if he’d licked them, his newborn cubs, in the darkness. They felt tingling in all their limbs and this was the first sign: they lost speech, they grew angry, they died. Señora said all this in hushed tones. She was thinking of distant pain. She was not in pain. The boy closed his eyes and throbbed. His whole body throbbed. In good moments, it felt as if the pain hovered on the other side of gauze.
She asked for his name and he told her he didn’t have one. He had never been called anything but boy or little boy, sometimes you.
“How do you like Hu-ai-na?” she asked.
He shook his head. It was as fine as any other. It was not his. The wound burned.
“Do you know that name? Hauina?”
The fire peaked sharply in the middle, like an audible cry. He felt it in fingers that weren’t there. He shook his head.
“It was the man who discovered silver on this mountain. He was an indio king.”
The boy said nothing.
“What do you think?” she said.
“It is not my name.”
“Nobody has no name.”
“I have no name.”
“This could be your name.”
He felt a tingling begin to grow at his stump, like bubbles of blood bursting against the edge of the wound.
“Well?” she said. “Will you have it?”
He could barely croak any words. His mouth was dry. He needed water badly. He nodded. He would take it. He understood that she could give him what he needed.
“It will help you remember the silver,” she continued, hopeful.
His mouth set grimly. As if he needed help with that.
“The ancient indios called it the sweat of the moon,” she said. “The silver, I mean. What do you make of that?”
“We make nothing,” he said. “We carry it on our backs.”
She had gotten it wrong, and her mistake sent a twinge of pleasure through his broken body. The ancients had called gold the sweat of the sun, and silver the tears of the moon.
“I could never forget the silver,” he said. “It is every day, the same.”
“You cannot work as you are,” she said.
“Arturo promised there would be a job for me.”
She frowned.
“Perhaps I will cook for the other men. There are not many women here.” He closed his eyes and remembered Arturo’s cries on the hill, his feet, the hook’s specter. He said: “Arturo will find something.”
She shook her head. “I plan to take you down the mountain. There is more for you in Potosí.”
He felt a giddy rising in his stomach. He could not tell if it was fear or something else, something better — he did not even know what hope felt like, though he had heard others speak of it. He said: “I couldn’t work. I’m no good at anything but what I have done.”
She said: “I will take of everything.”
He felt a pang of shame to see his old clothes piled in the corner, mangled with blood. He knew their stench of beard and garlic. He thought of her smelling it. He knew how tiny flocks of lice ruffled their folds like a breeze.
She raised a bowl of fluid to his mouth. It was bitter against his lips, and he could see a green mess of leaves, soggy and tangled in a kind of clotted milk. “It will help,” she said. “There is an art to this.” He felt a darkness furring from the corners of his mind, flushed with heat like the dark breathing hide of an animal. He felt himself slipping into it again. He turned to see himself before he sank under completely. It was his right, he felt, to see it: the hook emerging from the gauze like a splinter sticking from wood. It was rusty. They had not been able to spare a new one.
* * *
He woke to the same shack. He waited for the woman’s return. She did not come. No one came. He grew hungry. He drifted back to sleep. He woke again. He waited patiently. He was not hungry anymore. At last the door opened — he felt the blast of chill before he saw the sunlight — but when he turned, slowly, grunting, it was not the woman but Arturo he saw. “You have slept enough,” he said.
The boy said: “She is taking me down the mountain.”
“Perhaps,” Arturo said. “Perhaps not.”
The boy shook his head. “She told me her plans.”
“She told me as well,” Arturo frowned. “It is like I said — perhaps she will; perhaps not.”
Arturo put him in charge of the small yellow birds — pisqo in his tongue, timbrado in theirs. They gave their harshest trills to signal poisonous air. The birds were held in silver cages, a small indulgence — one undertaken, no doubt, to amuse the owners when they visited. The birds lived in a drafty wooden shack. Its crude planks lisped wind between their gaps, chilly and singing, and let the squawking of the birds escape all night. There was one he liked in particular, with black spots so dense he looked like bruised fruit.
In his mind, the boy still thought of himself this way, the boy. He had not taken her name yet. If she wanted him to use it, he thought, she could come give him the life she had promised.
The boy took this bruised-fruit bird into the mines every time. With the cage hanging from his hook, they ventured side by side into the dark. He did not want him to die but he wanted the company. He did not die. He never even shrieked. The boy liked to think it was because of the care he took, or the steadiness of his metal hook — far steadier than a trembling human arm could be. It seemed an auspicious signal: the devil had already taken his due. Now the boy was clear of his debts.
Part Three
When Señora finally came, she brought him a mule to ride. She led him down the mountain, on narrow winding trails, and into town, past buildings that were the green of sunlit leaves, the rough yellow of lemons, the blush of old-world cheeks pale enough to show rose. They rode across a bridge, over a river that was brown and clogged with bits of timber. The buildings changed. Now there were squat huts with cracks and unhinged doors, entrances blocked by drunk men sleeping under heavy sunlight. Their alleys yielded up the stench of shit. “Here,” Señora said, “is the town.”
They rode past swordfighting schools — “where mestizos learn to fight,” Señora explained — and down a narrow street where the windows of each building were draped in colored fabrics. “Rainbow alley,” said Señora. “Where women work at night.”
They stopped at a tall pink building, more like the houses on the other side of the river, with a balcony framed by curling metal rails. A ladder connected the balcony to a small window tucked under the triangular roof. The boy craned his head for a better look.
“It leads to your room,” she explained. “The ladder and the window.”
“Whose home is this?” he asked.
“It belongs to Eva,” she said, chuckling. “Eva de la lengua negra.”
He was not sure if this meant Eva of the black tongue or Eva of blackened speech. Señora told him Eva was not a woman like other women. She was a witch. Señora was one of her dedos — one of her assistants, he supposed she meant, one of her fingers.
She looked mestizo when she opened the door, with the face and body of an Indian but the shrewd, calculating eyes of a Spaniard.
“Take him up,” she said. “Get him out of those rags.”
Señora climbed up before him. He waited a few moments to climb so it would not seem he was looking up her skirts.
His room was circular, and so small that the bed stretched awkwardly across its diameter. There was a wooden trunk painted with a landscape that looked nothing like any he’d known: rolling hills and bushy trees, small cottages by still ponds. It showed the old world, he imagined. Señora opened it to show him stacks of garments: black trousers and pale shirts made of blue and green material that felt like cool milk against his skin. It was something called silk. She held one up for him, to show its design: one arm was dangling, the other neatly sewed across a seam at the shoulder.
* * *
Señora had said that Eva would be expecting him for work at dawn. When he rose it was still dark, but it took him ages to descend, gripping with his single arm, pressing his body against the ladder as hard as he could when he ungripped his fingers to find the next rung. By the time he reached the bottom, it had been light for quite some time. Eva was waiting for him in the kitchen, holding a long carrot like a beating stick between her rough brown palms. “You are late,” she said.
He bowed his head in apology.
She said: “What can you do for me, anyway?”
He did not know what to say. He assumed this had been discussed between the women.
“You were in an accident,” she continued. “You are half a help.”
“I can learn anything,” the boy said quickly. “I’m twice as fast.”
She frowned.
He straightened his back. More than anything, he didn’t want to be pitied.
“What is your name, boy?”
“It’s that,” he said. “It’s boy.”
She nodded, as if this wasn’t surprising, but then he found himself saying: “Not anymore.” He was surprised by the pride in his voice. He said: “It’s Huaina.”
When had he become glad to say this name aloud? Perhaps it was riding into town, the buildings rising like paintings all around him, thinking he would not deserve to exist in this place if there were not a proper name he could occupy, even an indio king’s, like a bed on which to lay his head.
* * *
Eva explained she hosted gatherings when the moon was gone and also when it was full. The full moon was coming next. These gatherings were feasts and also more than feasts. Huaina’s job was to help her prepare. Fruits and vegetables and herbs arrived in crates and she showed him what to do with them: which pieces needed to be peeled and which picked apart, boiled until they gave way to the slightest pressure of their fingers. He learned to slice without a second hand to steady the fruit. She had him learn the names and tastes of everything. “You only need to tell me what to do,” he said bitterly, thinking: I am only a servant. Why should I learn the names of what I’ll never have?
“If you don’t know the plants,” she said. “Your motions will be wrong.”
So he learned the tubers of ocha like sturdy insect grubs — pink and rusty brown, with their pale flowers still attached — and green bulbs called lucuma with a yellow fruit it made him shiver, it was so sweet, and laid against his tongue like a quietly sleeping animal. There were large globes the color of dried blood that Eva called Corazon, or sometimes Corazon de gigante — and they did look a bit like the hearts of giants, massive and dirty. Inside they were full of milky white flesh that slipped between his fingers like a fish and tasted like nothing so much as a tongue made of sugar. It made him feel like an animal to eat one-armed. He was a desperate creature, scavenging.
From the herbs they made knotted braids of grass and leaves; from the mashed guts of lacayote they made a pudding full of dark black seeds like insect eggs quivering in the crystal jelly. They cut the ocha into strips and laid them on the steps of his ladder until they dried in the hard cold sun and curled into sweet fists of dried leathery fruit that you could gnaw like a meaty bone. They saved the pale flowers in a special bowl because Eva enjoyed a salad made entirely of their petals. Good for memories, she explained. Not to help her remember the good ones but to help her forget the rest.
Her home was a mansion and her furniture was fine: dark wooden trunks, velvet upholstered chairs, a chandelier with four stuffed llamas’ heads, each one sprouting a candle like a stiff tongue made of wax. The salon — into which he was only granted access once, to fetch a teapot that had been left there, its dark brew nearly frozen overnight — was arranged around a single chair, twice the height of a man, that seemed a kind of throne — for whom, or what, he didn’t know. For all its finery, Huaina noticed, her home contained no object made of silver.
* * *
Huaina did not tell her about the difficulty of the ladder. He just rose earlier the next morning. And after a few days, though he had not said anything, he found a crude set of wooden stairs had been installed.
His cutting remained slippery and unsteady. He cubed the fruits into rough squares with slanted lines and ragged edges. Sometimes when he had been standing for too long, making the same motions over and over again, he felt the dizziness again — a sense that he was standing on a hillside, one side heavier than the other.
One morning they were chopping lacayote and he sliced his thumb diagonal across the pad. The blood bloomed with steady pulses and made a shape like a red cloud into the fruit flesh. Eva glanced at him, slit-eyed and prying: “You care for her, is that it?” she said.
“No,” he said. Care for. It was not that.
Every night he saw her lying in the collapsed tunnel, her body bruised and rubbled, stripped naked by the strange logic of dreaming. It was a startlingly beautiful sight. Her breasts were like small white hills under the crumbled rock, her limbs long and sinuous, her mouth opened to an “O” and moaning.
Each morning he woke aroused and angry. She had stolen his life and given birth to it all over again. He wanted his dreams, at least, to be his own.
* * *
She visited him every evening. Despite himself, he yearned toward these visits — chopping potatoes into neat squares and thinking: how much longer till the sun begins to set? The two of them sat together on his hard bed. Their knees touched. Even when she spoke to him like a child he thrilled to her voice. She taught him how the sky was arranged — spheres that cloaked the earth like frost around berries after a storm, in thick clear globes of ice. Señora tried to explain: these spheres were made of a substance he could not understand. Halfway between air and water. Huaina wondered if he’d ever seen it. She laughed. She said: “I suppose that depends on where you have been.” She drew circles on the blanket with her finger. The sun and planets were stuck in these spheres, she continued, lodged like flies in candle wax, forced to orbit without pause. Her voice thrilled him. There were worlds that only she could see, and her voice cloaked them around him.
She didn’t like to speak of her family. “They disgust me,” she said. “Everything they have created.”
Her father was in charge of La Casa de Moneda, she explained, where the silver went to become coins that would be passed between the palms of men. Señor de Vasco had built a massive machine powered by horses, its parts carried by mules all the way from the port at Buenos Aires, and then reassembled in Potosí into a contraption larger than a house. She said it was the largest instrument of torture she had ever seen. Huaina asked her what it did: he pictured men stretched across racks, pierced by spears, bleeding into the melt of metal to stain the currency for good.
“It hurts men?” he asked.
She said: “It makes the money.”
He told her she had been wrong about the indios and their sweat of the moon. It was tears instead. He got a thrill from saying this. She had been false in this. She thought she knew so much.
“Oh,” she said, hurt. “I suppose I must have misremembered.”
He found himself, despite his best intentions, slipping toward consolation like water down a slope. He said: “Sweat is closer to the truth.”
She laughed. “You know me so well, already? What I’d like to hear?”
“We don’t cry on the mountain. We only work.”
She nodded, brow furrowed, trying not to show her pleasure. It was a relief that this had not required any lies, as so many acts of kindness seemed to.
She left at night and he was helpless and alone — thinking of her madly, and the question, always, of whether she was thinking of him.
Part Four
He woke and knew he needed to find a place she had not given him. He knew this upon waking as clearly as he knew the world he’d woken to wasn’t the one he’d dreamed. He found a job as a servant boy at one of the swordfighting schools that speckled his side of the river. He carried a white towel and mopped the blood as soon as it was spilled — in pin-drops and tiny creeks — but when he was not quick enough it stained the wooden floors and could not be removed.
Once a man slipped him a few coins to be elsewhere during a round, and Huaina overheard him days later, saying: “Juan lost blood — you see? just here — the little stain shaped like a hat.”
Huaina spent his small wages on treats sold in the streets — praline nuts, or knobs of fruit sparkling in tiny cloaks of granulated sugar — but he found they brought him very little pleasure. He began to save for a new knife to give Eva — a sharper one — so he wouldn’t ruin everything with the dull blades any longer. He bought the knife from a toothless man who hawked his wares near the rainbow whores. When he presented it to Eva, she looked unhappy. “No no,” she said. “You should keep your earnings for yourself.”
* * *
He told Señora stories from the school of swords — minor rivalries between friends over coveted shafts and women, mishaps or practical jokes. The tales delighted her. “I wish I could live in your world,” she said. He couldn’t tell her that it wasn’t his simply because she had given it to him. She was clearly a woman who believed that once something had been given, it belonged wholly to the one who had received it.
But he found himself hoarding these stories, polishing them through the days for her ears: the one about the bird who flew into the chambers, was sliced cleanly in two — mid-flight — by a rogue sword; the ones about the girl who taped her breasts and fought. He began to hate this, that even when he was away from her his experience slanted toward her — as the mountain sloped to the city, as his body listed toward its missing piece.
* * *
He kept making mistakes with Eva — fruits mashed under his indelicate strokes, still, even with the sharper blade — and started working slowly in order to prevent them.
He could see her eyeing him, displeased, and finally broke. “I think of her constantly,” he said. “I need your help.”
“You certainly do,” she smiled. “We can’t have you ruining every last lacayote.”
“There must be something I can do.”
“There is nothing you can do,” she said. “But there is something I can do.”
She made him a potion of seeds, ground fine, and a Corazon de gigante pulped and mixed with milk. He watched her place a small green chile in the mixture to soak overnight.
“Heart juice,” she said. “You must drink it all at once. Just before bed.”
Eva turned Señora from the door that night, explaining that Huaina was sick and could not entertain her company. He sat on his bed alone, no knees to knock against, and willed his throat from gagging against the potion. It tasted like curdled milk and bananas, and raged against this throat like flames. He took it down. He fell asleep. He dreamed about Señora, like always, only this time she opened her eyes under the rubble — the first time she had done so, and blinked in such a constant pattern that he felt sure she was sending him a hidden message, though he did not know what it was.
* * *
The night before the full moon, according to Eva’s calculations, Señora came later at night than she had ever come before. He had already fallen asleep, sullen and disconsolate because she had not come. She hovered on the ladder like a ghost outside his window, her white dress so ruffled it looked as if it had just been cut from paper. She whispered before climbing inside: “Are you still inside your dream?”
He shook his head. He didn’t know.
“It is better if you are still in it,” she said. “It will keep you safe.”
She said she needed his help. They needed supplies for the night to come.
“The feast?” he asked.
“Not quite,” said Señora. “Something that will change me.”
“In what way?”
She paused. “It will make me more like you.”
* * *
There were items they needed from el mercado de la noche, she said, and there was something they needed from her home. They would have to steal it. He asked her why she needed to steal it, if it was in her home. She said that the things in her home did not belong to her. They belonged to her father. To be precise: it was in his mint.
El Mercado was a crowded alley lined with uneven cobblestones and sellers. Some stood with trays hanging from their necks, full of sugar-glistening sweets or sticks of meat, while others had ducked into small candlelit alcoves with their wares: long glistening knives, rows of hollow birds’ eggs as large as children’s fists. Huaina had always thought of Señora as a woman too pristine to touch the bodies of others, though she had always touched him without reserve or hesitation. Here it was the same: she moved expertly through the crowds, unafraid to knock her elbows against the women in her path.
She led him to a table spread with rolls of white fabric that glistened wetly, as if covered with grease. “Intestines,” she said. She bought one and placed it in his arms. He felt its moisture cold against his skin. They also purchased ten dried llama fetuses, dangling from ropes like laundry, a bag of black chalk, and a long wood-handled saw whose blade caught the moonlight in its savage teeth. She bought him a small ball of something she called a bombon — so dense and dark and rich it was like a piece of the night in his mouth. After a few moments there was a sudden spicy heat across his tongue, like the true flavor had been a child playing a game, crouched behind bushes and waiting to pounce.
Señora took him across the river and he felt himself shrink: the buildings got larger, the streets wider, every house had a balcony like Eva’s but there were no ladders or open windows, only metal railings and oak doors twice the height of any man. He ran his eyes like a reptile’s over everything, flat and calculating and unsurprised. He could not show Señora that this place made him feel small. Her family’s home was a dark blue-fronted building that stood across the street from the courtyard with the machine. “La Moneda is guarded at night,” she explained. “Our home is not.”
He looked up at the darkened windows and wondered if her bedroom lay behind any of them. He pictured her pulling a clean white nightgown over her delicate back, the bones of her shoulders moving like bird wings under the pale skin. He wondered if she kept her candles lit late, and what she did by their light.
She walked past the main door. “Too large a risk,” she explained. “The wood creaks.” They descended a set of exterior stairs to a small door with a rusty padlock that Señora pried open with a rusty key. The cellar smelled of sour cheese and something tangy that Huaina recognized as mouse urine. Señora moved aside a rack of wine in jars — red jewels glowing dimly through their dusty glass — to show another, even smaller set of wooden stairs descending into darkness.
“My father has a theory that the local chamber is watching him,” she said. “He wanted a way to reach La Moneda in secret.”
“What is the local chamber?”
“A band of city officials,” she said. “Long-blooded Mestizos. They fight with the men who have come more recently.”
“And your father believes—
“He believes what he wants to believe,” she said, leading them down the steps. “All of his life he has wanted to be a man so powerful that other men would hate him.”
They reached a dusty passage. Señora’s candle cast a round arc of light before them.
“And you?” Huaina asked. “You said you hate him too?”
Señora stopped abruptly. Her candle glow sharpened into a quivering egg on the dusty floor. She faced him but her face was in shadows. “It is not a question of hate,” she said. “What he does is wrong.”
She picked up her skirts — already dusty, no doubt — and led them the rest of the way in silence. They climbed another set of steps into a room covered with hay. Señora shielded her candle in her cloak, as if protecting the light from something, or else protecting something from the light. Huaina noticed the smell of urine once again, though this time it was different urine — richer and softer, less acid, and he sensed this was from a larger beast. He heard whinnying in the darkness. As his eyes adjusted to the dimness, he saw their bodies lined against the wall: seven horses, perhaps eight.
“This is where they sleep,” Señora explained. “Dreaming whatever they dream.”
“They are standing,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “They prefer to sleep this way.”
He realized the mules on the mountain must sleep this way as well, but he had never seen them resting — only laboring, always, bearing the rubble on their flea-scattered backs. She approached, softly stroking the head of the tallest, and summoned him closer. “Here,” she said. “It won’t hurt you.”
“I know that,” he said. “I have spent my life with animals.”
Which was true: mules on the mountain, llamas hoofing down the frozen slopes. He had clutched a llama once, its stupid face flushed frantic with fear, just to feel its pulse skittering under its fur. It wasn’t often he was able to feel another heartbeat.
He approached the horse. Señora placed his hand against the animal’s hide and felt the hide hot under his palm and her skin cool above it. She pulled his hand toward her, under the slip of her cloak, until he could feel the sharp line of a blade. She pulled out the knife — the sudden gleaming like the crack of moonlight from a barely-opened door — and his hand dropped away, no longer held. She sliced away a thumb’s width of the horse’s coarse brown fur and tucked it into a small silk purse. “Now,” she said, “we need a piece of the machine.”
She took him by the hand and led him under a stone archway. He nearly gasped when he saw it: the machine was two stories tall and composed of an intricate maze of wooden parts: wheels with teeth and metal nails curled like an old man’s toes, pegs as long as human arms. There was a huge wheel at the bottom with four leather harnesses dangling from its rim. “They walk in circles all day,” Señora said. “That’s how it runs.”
“These are the horses that carried it from Buenos Aires?” he asked.
“You think those horses survived?” she laughed. “There were probably a hundred horses on that journey. Each time one died, they’d substitute a new one.”
She used the knife to chip a splinter of wood from the nearest spoke, then turned toward the stone arch. Huaina stayed behind, holding one finger between his teeth, clenched hard, to imagine the feel of a harness pushed between his lips.
“Come quickly,” she hissed from the darkness, “he can sense things.”
As if summoned, another swath of candlelight emerged from the darkness beyond the machine. Huaina froze. The man was upon him in a matter of moments, holding him from behind, and Huaina could feel a chill against his neck. It took him a moment to realize it was a blade. The man’s breath smelled like wine. “You are planning to make off with the whole thing?” he chuckled. “I’m afraid you won’t find enough room to hide it in your coat.”
“I don’t want your machine,” Huaina whispered.
“Oh really?” he said. “And who are you?”
“Father,” Señora’s voice was calm, though Huaina could not turn to see her face. “He is with me.”
“Ah,” her father said. “Your little slave.”
“He has never seen a horse in his life,” she said. “I thought I would show him one.”
This wasn’t true, of course. He had seen horses every time the rich men came up the mountain to inspect their shafts — to make sure, the miners knew, that the mita was being paid properly, in full, by bodies hard at work.
“I imagine,” Señor began, “he might have seen them a bit more clearly in the daylight.”
But he pulled the knife away and released his grip. Huaina gasped for breath, and felt ashamed for gasping. He hadn’t been strangled; only too afraid to breathe — thinking the motion might expand the skin of his throat onto the blade. He stood perfectly still.
“You know as well as I do,” she said. “You wouldn’t have permitted it.”
“That’s right,” he said. “And I don’t permit it now.”
Huaina could see the man’s eyes turn into dark wet slits.
“It appears your permission hardly matters,” she said. “We were just preparing to leave.”
As Huaina moved for the archway, the man reached out and grabbed him by the collar, whipped him around and sliced across his single arm with two swift strokes. Huaina cried out — more from surprise than pain — and when he heard a second scream, he couldn’t tell for certain whether it had come from Señora or once again from his throat.
“A reminder,” Señor whispered, “for when you think of coming here again.”
Part Five
Señora took him to the parque central, where he sat leaning against a tree. He felt the urge to hold his bleeding arm — but, of course, could do nothing but let it hang. Señora struggled out of her white slip with no mind for his gaze. She ripped it into strips and used it to wrap the gashes. Alongside the liquid heat of his arm, he felt a rising hardness in his crotch. The wound wasn’t serious but the blood was heavy and continuous. A reminder. Her father had been right. It would be that. But he knew already that he would not resent this branding — it would be something of her printed into his skin, proof that she had wanted him to be a part of this.
* * *
Eva woke him before dawn the next morning and told him there was work to do. He took his instructions wordlessly: boiling her sheets and drying them, crumbling dried herb stalks between his fingers, placing a bowl of oranges in the salon. After a full day of work, she instructed him to sleep. He would need his strength, she explained. He should return when the moon was hanging high enough to see without obstruction.
* * *
He woke in a sweat. He had been dreaming of a machine that made horses, tiny horses, that men passed between their palms — sometimes squeezing them so hard their twig legs splayed out between knuckles, between handshakes, coins passed. He washed his face and put on his finest shirt, bright blue as a jewel. He found the front door closed. He knocked. There was no reply. He tried the knob. It turned. He went inside. The hallway was empty. He was afraid to call out. He was afraid to go further. He could hear a steady murmuring. It did not sound like the voices of women so much as the voice of smoke — if smoke could have a voice — harsh and painful in the throat, saturating everything. He came to the edge of the salon.
Eva was sitting on her wooden throne. She was entirely naked. Her legs were not crossed and he could see the gray fuzz between them like mold growing on fruit. Her eyes were sharp as whittled sticks and focused on him. Her hair was down, for once, and hung like moss around the folded skin of her face.
The other women were lying on the floor, each with her hands clasping the feet of another, forming a path. Their naked skin glowed in the candlelight, covered in a glistening sheen of sweat. He remembered his own damp skin, waking from his twilight dreams, and had the notion that perhaps their sweat had passed through the walls like steam and found his sleeping body.
Eva crooked one finger to beckon him to the foot of her throne. He was nearly level with her spread legs, and when she smiled he could see her teeth were blackened, and when she spoke — Do not be afraid, we are stronger than devils — he could see her tongue was black as well, as if she had eaten the pene from so many years before and it had stained her whole mouth with its dark soot.
She handed him a bundle of herbs, tied by ribbon in the middle like a sash around a woman’s waist. He could see a small dried head — one of the unborn llamas, he recognized — emerging from the brittle green strands. “Eat,” she said, and turned him to face the women spread before them. He watched the lying women rise and kneel — still in their line, each one facing the back of the next, and they began to braid one another’s long and tangled locks, each one working her fingers through the tresses so quickly that her fingers seemed themselves to sprout hairs — long gray strands — that entered the rivulets of woven and unwoven knots. He felt the hair in his throat, where the herbs had been. He gagged. Eva gripped his arm.
“No!” she said. “Chew.”
He kept chewing. His underarms were damp and stained his tunic. Darkened silk showed the moisture. His vision began to blur — when he turned away from Señora’s face, it took a moment for her face to drop away as the new vision arrived.
His body began to come alive as if it had not been alive before: he felt his nails growing deeper under his skin; he heard blood creaking through the passages of his ears. There were insect ticklings across his skin. He could hear a murmuring like it was coming through water. Eva was talking. He turned back to her face and saw the words as if they were being written just outside her lips — “You feel the spiders in your bones? You feel the old ones in your ribs?” — nothing but a set of shapes, those words, he could not read. But he was not aware of hearing them. It felt like seeing.
The women gathered around the fireplace, shaking and quivering as they walked, holding out their hands as if to roast them like meat over the flames. They held slices of orange in their mouths as if to keep their teeth from gnashing — like leather bits, he thought, horses pulling the machine of this fever. They knelt and passed around something so tiny Huaina could barely make it out: a small brown egg, perhaps, or a dried flower. They took turns holding it against their skin. They beckoned him. As they parted to make way, he could see Señora lying on a white sheet — flat on her back, with arms spread wide and eyes closed, absolutely naked as well. He felt himself go hard.
“Remove your clothes and kneel,” Eva said. He heard the words like she had whispered them in his ear, though she was seated across the room. He was ashamed to show his body and its excitement, which did not feel like his own. He kneeled at the Señora’s side, and by his knee there was a long metal saw, and an oval made of silver, no larger than a piece of fruit, and there was a well carved into this oval and the tiny brown object that Hauina had seen passed — it was a thimble, he could see now, made of clay — fit perfectly into this well, the oval balanced beneath it. The thimble was brimming with clear liquid: their sweat.
Eva was nowhere and then she was close, bent over him, undoing the buttons that held the fabric tight around his stump. Her fingers trembled. Everything trembled. She picked up the saw and drew its surface along the scarred flesh. She handed him the thimble. It spilled in her quivering grip. “Take this,” she said, “drink what we shed.”
He felt a heat in his belly. He imagined the liquid soaking the herbs in his stomach like kerosene on kindling, that glass-crackle into flames. His vision blurred and trembled even harder, the whole room a frightened child in his gaze. He saw Eva extend her pitch-dark tongue and run it — very slowly, very gently — from Señora’s middle fingertip to the top of her shoulder. Señora didn’t stir. She didn’t even seem to breath. Huaina felt a heaviness in his skull as if liquid were being poured into the top — tipping him over, tipping him toward sleep. He saw Eva reel back — as if in anguish, shaking harder — and then he saw her take the saw. He heard the women let out their cries as if they were a single woman, letting out a single cry. Señora was still. The saw caught flakes of firelight and before the world got dark he could see it moving back and forth, back and forth, and nothing was wrong and nothing was trembling anymore.
* * *
In the end, Huaina and Señora made a home together. They lived in Eva’s house after she died, though they never married — as many thought they would. They grew to despise each other, soon enough, and could not even bring themselves to speak across the morning stove. She blamed him for a degradation that had made her own seem necessary; he resented her for turning his misfortune into a contagion — for infecting herself. She died in her sleep, at her own hand, before she grew old — slipping quietly under the glaze of a dark syrup she’d purchased at the same mercado they had visited before the full moon, years before. He survived her death in years of half-drunk poverty, indistinguishable from the poverty of those around him.
But they always had the knowledge, both of them, of their single triumph: that the mint had closed the morning that the moon began to wane. Rumors differed but their thrust was the same, verified by public messengers: the machine had broken. Unmade silver coins hovered in the air above Potosí like stillborn children, thickening the clouds. Some said the horses had died in their sleep, all at once, and that their substitutes had died as well, one after another — that there was a disease in the hay, spread by vermin. Others said the horses had escaped, driving Señor into a frenzy so profound he shut the gears in anger. One man — a count of wealth but ill repute — maintained it was the local chamber, that they had blackmailed Señor de Vasco with scraps of information on his wayward daughter. But some, and these were the ones Huaina believed, swore by the word of a single servant boy, who testified that he had come into the basement chamber and seen the machine bleeding from two wounds crossed upon its central column.
