Vultur Gryphus
Daniel Seifert
Potosí wakes early. Dots of light appear inside its tilting houses. The homes sit like scattered dice underneath Cerro Rico, but no Bolivian calls it that—the men who work inside the mountain have another name for it.
Luis can’t remember when he last saw a sunrise. Each time he emerges to the surface of the mountain mine, the day seems painfully bright. White clouds tumble like dollops of cotton. He’s one of the many stuck with the early shift, 5:00 a.m. to noon.
Luis washes his hands with water from a grimy 7-Up bottle. A miner for less than a year and already his fingers look gnarled, old. He crouches on a rusty stool near the mine entrance, looks into the paper bag. Salteñas again. He keeps telling his mother. She just cuffs him on the head and says, “You want something different? Cook it yourself, Gordito.” Little fatty. A family joke because he’s rail-thin, with elbows like chicken bones. He’s made the mistake of telling his crew about his nickname; now everyone at work calls him Gordito and rubs his belly—for luck, they say. Secretly, he likes it.
Luis spits out the mash of coca leaves lodged in his cheek, breaks apart the pastry. The chicken has congealed into the egg and potato. Habit makes him look up and squint, to see if he can spot—ah. Far above, an Andean condor coasts the thin air with lazy wings. Vultur gryphus.
Before the mine’s silica dust crippled his lungs, his father would teach him the names of species and give him a sour candy for every bird Luis could spot and name. Vultur gryphus, Papa had said. “See how it just glides on the thermals? Effortless. Christ knows what we look like to that thing.” Then he would croon a little song, “Oh for some wings, oh for the wind in my hair, oh for a job that gives me air …” Only when he became a miner too did Luis realize how Papa cloaked his deep fatigue with songs and crooked smiles.
Luis closes one eye and points at the bird with a straight finger, perhaps to name it, perhaps to shoot it down in his mind. He wonders if the bird can see movement far below.
In a week he’ll be seventeen. In a year he will be blind.
Though he’s worked in the mountain’s veins for months, Luis has yet to see the glint of silver. He waits patiently while older men set dynamite charges. After the crump of an explosion, it takes many minutes for the dust to clear. Then he wades in with another boy to haul the rubble into carts. Only once this is done can the older men attack the chalky walls with picks. This far down the heat is intense, and after four or five hours, the sweat mixes with the dust into a thin paste on his skin.
At the start of each shift, Luis gives El Tio his daily gift. He used to roll his eyes when Papa told him about Tio, but not anymore. His first week on the job, a few men told Luis, Your dad stopped saying hi to Tio every day, I’m not saying that’s why he fucked up his lungs, God rest him, but… Then they would suck their teeth and lean in. Up there we worship God, sure. Below we worship the devil, okay Gordito?
Now Luis makes sure to start every day with something for Tio, the lord of the underground who safeguards miners. Luis squats in the culvert, the smoothest patch of land in the shaft. The statue of the demon grins at his riches: cigarettes, bags of coca leaves, candy bars. Luis unscrews a small bottle of puro and daubs Tio’s smiling mouth. In the still air, the pure alcohol makes Luis’s eyes water.
Further down, he hears the deep-throated cough of a detonation. He heads toward it.
The foreigners come in throngs. Rich tourists with air-conned skin and holiday voices, the whites of their eyes clear as pearls. By now he’s heard Jorge the tour guide yammer away enough to know the story. Welcome to Bolivia, friends. Welcome to what was once the world’s richest silver mine. If you could walk Potosi back then, you would see the most populous place on earth, bigger than London, richer than Paris. Luis can always tell when a tour group has snaked past. They leave behind a smell like clean new cars.
Luis has the confidence of youth. Luis has a plan. He will learn English. He will become a guide and flirt with blonde backpackers from Norway and California. He’ll get fat tips after each tour and whisper his phone number to them; these gringas love strong local men. Luis has spent long minutes examining his arms in front of a mirror. From the right angle he looks quite muscular. Maybe he will grow a mustache. He’ll be smart, save money. Get a tattoo, something classy. A condor silhouette whose wingtips brush his shoulders. And one day he will see a beach—not just any beach but the white strips of Miami, where he’ll drink five-dollar tequilas while a girl straddles his shoulders.
He studies hard, counts the number of words he has truly learned each week. Covers his face at the cinema, listening to Marvel movies with eyes screwed shut to follow the dialogue, murmuring “I – am – Iron Man” until his friends smack his head and say, “Callate, man, I’m trying to watch the movie.”
He’s saving up for a third-hand smartphone, one that doesn’t have a tired battery and a screen cracked to hell, so he can download an app that pings him English lessons every day. He listens to American rock. There’s a band called Rage Against the Machine. He likes the panther-like guitars, the fury of it. Though the lyrics are spit out too fast—the English a fiery blur—Luis mouths along in his bed, his bangs tickling his eyelashes as he sings “Fuck you! Fuck you!” But quietly, so Mama doesn’t hear.
In the pauses between songs, he realizes the toll of daily dynamite blasts has planted a ringing in his ears.
Luis makes the mistake of telling Mama that, for him, working in the mountain is temporary. He doesn’t want an underground life, doesn’t want to taint his body with silica and end his years in a miner’s care home, wheezing and grinning. He wants to see the world, do something different from three generations of men who withered before him. Papa would have wanted him to. Remember Papa, by the end? Hands still big as shovels and he wasn’t strong enough to lift a glass of water.
Mama is rolling the dough for tomorrow’s salteñas, and the back of her neck tightens. She swings, cuffs him on the head. Tells him to stop dreaming.
He works up the courage to ask Jorge. Though the guide wears a permanent scowl when not shepherding herds of tourists, Jorge can be kind. If you catch him between bouts of puro.
“An assistant?” Jorge closes one nostril with a dusty forefinger and blows something thick onto the ground. “I don’t know, Gordito.”
“I’ll do it for free,” says Luis. “For a month. Head up the rear so stragglers don’t get lost down there. Answer their questions. If I do good, you pay me.”
“Your English is for shit.”
“Fuck you,” he says fluently, then rattles off some of the patter he’s heard as groups trundle past. “Hey man where from? Yeah Chermany cold, huh? Bayern Munich, man—fantastic strong team.”
Jorge purses his lips thoughtfully and clears the other nostril.
He joins the tours shyly at first, his English withering under the bright foreign smiles. Even so, a few people slip him tips. Month by month, he grows more confident.
At the end of each tour, the visitors emerge from underground, knuckling their backs to crack sore muscles. For an extra fee, Jorge gives customers a few grams of dynamite tucked into plastic bottles with a meter-long fuse. Luis lights the fuse as they hold the bottle. They toss the bottle nervously to one another—“Snap a photo, quick”—before Luis takes it. He’ll trot away and drop the plastic in an empty patch of sand. After a few seconds, it sends petals of dust high into the air. It makes Luis happy to see how excited this makes them, like little children. He feels old and wise.
The Mexican tour groups love ghost stories. So in the dark pressing heat of the shafts, Luis tells them a few, whispering for effect. Most are stories Papa told him when he was a boy, gruesome anecdotes about dead miners who still clock in, cheerful grins shining beneath crushed skulls, mangled arms dragging shovels, jaws melted from mercury run-off. The groups chuckle. They think he’s exaggerating.
Tourists ask him to pose next to Tio. He smiles and tilts a bottle of puro to the devil’s mouth. A retired doctor from Oaxaca looks at the bottle and whistles. “Ninety-four percent pure? It’s practically ethanol. You guys actually drink this? It’ll rot the eyes right out of your head.” He gives Luis his smartphone. Luis takes a photo of the doctor pretending to glug puro, his eyes crossed.
The doctor calls over his wife and whispers, but Luis hears. “Give the kid a few notes. I don’t know how these guys live past forty.”
The wife nods. “You know what the guide said they call this place? The Mountain That Eats Men.”
Every few days, Luis takes the bills from a coffee can in a drawer and counts them, again and again. After ten months of work, he has saved up nearly $200. He imagines buying the plane ticket, imagines taking flight, gliding away on lazy wings.
The mountain shimmers like a hot plate. The bangs on Luis’s forehead are claggy with sweat. A rowdy group of Australians are the last tour of the day. They bought a bottle of puro, barely diluted with water, and have been daring each other to take nips throughout the tour. Two of them are now bent with arms around each other, throwing up into the dust.
“I try to warn you, man,” Luis says. He gives them each a few coca leaves and mimes chewing. “This is good for nowzee…nowzee-ah?” He pats his stomach.
Jorge is lighting the fuse held by the smallest tourist, whose eyes are blank and drunk. The Australian looks down at the hissing fuse like it’s a present and goes into a little routine. Pretends to drink it. Rocks it like a baby. Dangles it between his legs.
Luis smiles at one of the coca-chewing men. “Your friend is Mister Bean, yeah?”
The man cackles. “Too right.“
Jorge tries to take the dynamite bottle from the blank-eyed man, who tucks it into his body and pushes past. He cradles it like a rugby ball, pretends to pass it right, left. His friends laugh a little.
“Jezza, that’s enough mate,” they say. “Hand it back now.”
It doesn’t seem like enough time has passed for the fuse to be a thumb’s length from the top of the bottle. Remembering it later, Luis feels like he’s watching the scene from above, a condor with clear icy eyes. Jorge is fighting the short Australian for the dynamite. There’s a quiet thunk as the laughing man head-butts Jorge, who snaps his face back and holds his nose.
Luis moves quickly, threads through the men like he’s dribbling a football with his friends down the street. He snatches the bottle. Momentum keeps him running for two steps, three. He arcs his arm back, ready to throw. There is a flash.
Now, he still wakes early, well before the sun heats the gray mountain. He likes the feeling of the world asleep around him. In the kitchen Luis grips a spoon with his left hand, spoons potato and raisins and chicken into the cold dough. His right hand, and his sight, are gone. The doctors tried but they couldn’t save his eyes.
He was swimming in a new dark, but it was nothing like being in the mine when your helmet light failed. It was like his fifth birthday party, friends spinning his blindfolded head like a top, laughing and saying, “Count to one hundred, Luis, then come find us,” but when he reached one hundred, the world was empty and lurching. He learned to walk again, swaddled with bandages, arms outstretched, and the doctor said, “Look at our mummy, a regular Boris Karloff.” Luis didn’t know who this Boris was but he could hear the smile and the pity, and if Mama were not in the room he would have throttled this kind man, stuffed his mouth with the reek of his bandages and hoped the doctor throttled him back.
For a long time, dreams came calling. Sights so sweet and unreal they made him crush a pillow to his chest. A girl on an American beach, his unruined hand. The color blue. His double-dealing mind trying to placate him with sight. “You are my brave boy,” said Mama, clinging to him with a grip so meaty and insistent it frightened him. When he told her he wanted to die, her grip tightened even more and she whispered, “If you leave me I cannot.”
“Cannot what?” he asked, but she didn’t answer, just ran her hand over his face like cool water and he felt the hate leak out of him.
With practiced fingers, he pinches the pastry shut and makes sure they’re spaced neatly on the tray so they brown evenly. He slides it into the warm oven and hops onto the counter. Drumming his heels against the cabinet, he listens to the wind.
When the timer rings, he feels his way to the oven gloves and takes out the salteñas. He will pack them gently into a Mickey Mouse Tupperware. Mama will take his elbow and walk him down the street to his usual corner. He is still learning to wield a stick, to get used to the leper-tap of the rubber against stone. From above, he must look like an old man. His friends will greet him on their way to work and buy a pastry or three. Some still rub his belly. They call him Gordito the Lucky. Insane that he’s still alive. Tio took pity on him. Others glue their eyes to his stump when they meet him, he can hear it in their voices. “Gracias a dio eres diestro, “Mama says. Yes, how good to be right-handed. This is the fortune he has been left with: scraps of luck and women’s work.
He’s getting better at identifying birds by sound. Wings crackling, they ripple out from house eaves and settle on street lights. Sometimes when they sing, he sings back their names. Passer domesticus. Tyto alba. Calocitta formosa. But no condors. They glide too high to hear their call.