Potosí: the agonizing hill

 

Jhonny lifts his helmet. He opens the carbide lamp, shakes and spits inside.
Black saliva thick drips and gives some life again to the chemical reaction necessary to light the lamp. Match. Function.

He raises his tools and leaves his undercut. Jhonny is sunk in the polvadera raised by the explosion of the dynamites.

It is of no use to stay here, better to go to ch'allar a while outside. Jhonny is called, but of the American comfort that should be linked to his name, perhaps chosen by his mother as a desire for opulence, he only has an adobe room without windows in the Altoso neighborhoods of Potosí. He walks quickly through the galleries, right, law, crouched, dragging, getting up, lowering the precarious wooden stairs, sliding down a mineral mailbox, again drag, get up, fold around here, go down there and finally reach the gallery major...

From there everything is easier. He arrives in about ten minutes until the departure of the main undercut, but unfortunately not to that of misery. Inside or outside he continues to walk between rocks and fugitive minerals. It is like a portable tunnel that follows it until the dream crushes it on its dry straw mattress.

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Bocamine Outside he rains and a group of muddy tourists prepares to have some emotion, of underground exotism. The other grouped and sitting at the entrance look at them as soon as the girls sometimes. Two or three words slide, laughs arise.

"In bad weather, good face" he says, find the drink. He fills the bottle lid with alcohol, a few drops are poured on the ground, the Pachamama, and dry, inside ... pass to the neighbor.

The conversation is encouraged a little more with the minutes and there is a bit of everything.

 

Tourists with their compassion and horror masks come out again. Toll. They are removed the dynamites, guides, detonators and remaining puchos that they bought in the market, as peanut for monkeys in the mining zoo.

 

The most respectful possible speaking as mentally backward in an almost religious ceremonial, offering their wealth as an electric alarm to an Amazonian head reducer. They are sorry. One or another miner mocks them, but everyone knows that when the "gringguit's" returns to their homes, their beds of thick matt ”Locked in their agony mine. They also know that they will sleep better even thinking about how happy they are belonging to the group of those who send on the planet. They know that they belong to another world, there, so far, behind the clouds.

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The same, in the end they don't care about a slum.

 

The hours parade and outside the cold, like a rabid dog, bites more and stronger.

Alcohol served something, but you have to leave. A cousin lowered his truck to the cooperative and everyone jumps. Along the road, the daddathared vehicle has to stop a dozen times to push to the side to those who are already thrown as christs on the crosses of their drunkenness. Ch’alla Tuesday and pure sacrificed on the tin mountain.

 

The next day, the same faces are covered with the same helmets, light the same lamps and swallow on the same hill. Inside, the same ore vein hooks or disappears between the stones, the same blows make the tip inside the rock, the tip inside the rock. Dynamites, ch’alla, blows on the wall to warn around, escape and count the detonations. The lamp goes out with the explosions and the earth trembles as a prey for a mineral orgasm.

 

In a distant undercut, the "uncle", devil and owner of the entrails of the world, laughs gently from the bottom of the glass eyes embedded in his mud statue and serpentines.

 

Jhonny lifts his helmet. He opens the carbide lamp, shakes and spits inside ...