Chapter VIII #2
A soft glow brought his gaze down and forward.
The ground at his feet sloped down, gently, almost imperceptibly, a coy finger coaxing him inside.
The grotto was deep enough to be shielded from the noise and bustle of outside, but not so deep that the air tasted metallic or foul.
In fact, the air had a different taste to it: incense.
The taste of which—though unfamiliar—immediately brought the word church to his lips, though this wasn’t one.
Candles lined the back of the grotto, thick and satisfied, their short stature and long drips of wax attesting to frequent use.
A small carved effigy stood in the middle of the glow, its face cast in flickering shadow, its shoulders swathed not in the deep, virginal blue he had become used to seeing in Nueva Espana but in white.
The strike of his boots on stone echoed through the empty grotto, off the walls and ceiling, curling around him like shadows.
The effigy was thin and tall and lean as a skeleton—or was it a skeleton?
It was too cloaked in bone-white cloth and layered with silver jewelry to tell.
He drew closer, then a reflective glint caught his eye.
He knew the luster of quicksilver like he knew his mother’s face: No matter how long it had been since her death, he would still whirl in a crowd if he accidentally caught the right angle of crow’s feet or set of her chin in a passerby’s face.
No matter how long it had been since Almadén, that reflective glint stopped him like the sting of a whip.
Before the effigy’s feet, just as one might find scattered roses or angels before la Virgen, was a small silver bowl filled with mercury.
“?‘El azogue, por la ya dicha amistad, se abraza con la plata,’?” he whispered, the recitation as reverent as prayer. A line from Problemas y secretos maravillosos de las Indias .
One must understand that silver and mercury love each other , Juan de Cárdenas went on. They embrace and unite, the one with the other.
Mercury embraced the silver of the bowl, reflecting candlelight with a soft glow. The surface caught the flames and the shadows of the grotto alike, refining light and dark, blending the two into an intoxicating alloy.
It drew at him. Like called to like. After years in Almadén, there was mercury in his blood, in his bones, in his lungs, stiffening the empty caverns of his heart, and as he reached forward, his mind blank but for the allure of the gleam, his hand shook.
He observed this with a detached curiosity—it had been months since his hands had shaken so badly.
More months still since he had last breathed the metallic fumes of Almadén, since he endured the foul dark and the heat of the bowels of the earth, closer to Hell than any living man above.
It was as if his body remembered the poison and trembled in its presence. It cowered before its venom, its power.
A presence at his side. Before he could register who it was or how it had gotten there, so quickly and so silently—or perhaps they had needed neither swiftness nor quiet, for he had been so ensorcelled by the gleam—a hand slapped his away.
The sting brought his senses crashing back into him.
Carolina, María Victoriana’s mother, shouldered her way between him and the effigy, candlelight burning a corona around her silhouette.
“Back,” she snapped, and so stunned was he by her appearance that he obeyed, allowing himself to be all but shoved to the entrance and out into the light.
Sun seared his vision; he stumbled back a step or three, blinking to adjust. She blocked the entrance to the grotto, sentinel-like, arms folded over her chest and every stitch of her stance bleeding bellicosity.
Elías sputtered the beginning of a surprised I’m sorry , scrambling for further apologetic words. He faltered—what was he apologizing for?
What was that effigy?
“You’re just like him,” Carolina spat. “Never knowing when to keep your nose out of business that doesn’t concern you. It’ll be the death of you.”
—
The mine smelled different from Almadén.
It was different—and not simply because he was not shoulder to shoulder with other forzado laborers, shirtless and pouring sour sweat in the heat of the furnace, choking on its thick fumes.
Here, the ceiling was higher. Air flowed into the grand entryway, crisp with the bite of winter morning.
It swept away sweat and the earthy aroma of mules.
Sconces lined the walls with thick tallow candles, filling the space with light almost all the way up to the hewn ceiling.
It was beautiful.
Romero must have caught him looking up, for he pointed heavenward with an annoyed edge to his voice.
“Your old man wanted more space,” he said.
“Dug up instead of down for years.” He then rubbed the fingertips and thumb of one hand together, a wordless, universal gesture for tanta plata.
“Better conditions cost a few reales, I tell you. So enjoy it.” The sound he made was part scoff, part laugh. “Your family’s paying dearly for it.”
Elías did not reply. He was not a recluse by nature; he could make himself comfortable among others wherever in the world he lay—or was forced to lay—his head.
Between his encounter with María Victoriana and his experience in the grotto, he was ill at ease.
He did not feel like being friendly with Romero or any of the foremen and miners he had met that morning.
He was grateful when Romero asked him to descend into the mine to examine a newly discovered vein of ore, accompanied by a silent older man with another candle for light.
He followed the man’s directions into the dark passages and allowed the chill to embrace him.
He breathed deep of the cold, metallic air.
Almadén was thick with forzados serving their sentences and slaves captured from Barbary galley raids, swarming like an anthill kicked for sport.
The population of this mine was spread thin through cavernous chambers.
Its passages spread from the entrance like a dozen plaits, curling and twisting over one another as they followed veins of ore, as shafts dove deep into the mountain.
Sound carried through the narrow tunnels on reeling, drunken wings, echoes leaping from wall to wall.
Digging, sharp as the strike of stone on stone.
Voices from the entrance, calls to one another, songs to pass the time and keep rhythm.
No clank of chains nor snap of whips as in Almadén.
Then they turned a final corner, and it all faded.
The friends he made among the other forzados had laughed bitterly when he once said that he found being in a mine peaceful.
In the darkness, in the chill, in the silence, he felt as if he were walking through his own mind.
Time ceased to pass here. He ceased to have a name.
He was simply existing, moving, at peace.
Running his fingertips along cool stone, examining the black veins of ore.
As he did so, a voice, so soft it almost felt distant, curled up against the side of his neck.
Where are you?
He straightened abruptly, gooseflesh racing over his forearms.
I’m coming.
He exchanged a look with the other worker. “Did you hear that?”
It was a woman’s voice. Calling out, and calling out again, the echoes folding over one another.
To his relief, the whites of the other man’s eyes glinted in the candlelight. “What the fuck was that?” he said.
Elías was not mad. He was not hearing things. His heart still raced, but that knowledge alone helped him steady himself.
“Are we the only ones down here?” he asked.
“We’re the only ones who should be,” the worker replied.
I’ll find you.
It echoed coyly toward them from a deeper passage.
“Someone must be lost down there,” Elías said.
“None of our women are that reckless,” the worker replied. He avoided Elías’s eyes. “We must be hearing things, senor.”
“Really?” Elías said, staring at the man’s face until he lifted his gaze again, looking almost sheepish.
“Both of us, at the same time, heard a woman’s voice calling out…
in our heads?” He raised his brows toward his hairline.
“Next you’re going to tell me this mine is haunted. Should I have brought my rosary?”
“No, senor,” the man said.
“Then we’ll take a look,” Elías said. “Both of us.”
For that was the foremost rule at Almadén, a law he could never forget, even if it felt as though a lifetime had passed since he had been in a mine: When you descended into the dark, you never went alone.