The Best American Travel Writing 2013 (24 page)

Standing there, looking at these real stones that were also Pip’s fictional stones, I felt a powerful confluence: the lovely loneliness of the landscape, the sadness of that family’s tragedy, the old elegance of the graves (Pip thinks of them as “lozenges”), my affection for
Great Expectations
and this immediate physical connection to its author, whom I tried to imagine standing on this same spot, his body touched by these same patterns of cold wind, having some version of these same feelings. There was no parking garage, no admission fee, no gift shop, no hidden camera taking my picture. I felt pinned between worlds.

We drove deeper into the country, to Dickens’s old house, Gad’s Hill Place. This was the emblem of Dickens’s success: as a child, he walked by it many times with his father and fantasized about someday buying it. As an adult, he came back and did. It’s now a private school, and on this day it was empty and locked. We stood outside its front gate for a while, looking. My friend said, finally, that it looked exactly right: the kind of house a child would find impressive but that’s not actually great—drab, slightly pompous. I just kept trying to imagine the actual human Charles Dickens walking across this lawn. I was having trouble not picturing him in black and white.

We drove to Rochester, an ancient Roman town whose castle and cathedral had been staring at each other for many centuries before Dickens was born. Dickens wanted to be buried there but was overruled, after his death, and taken to Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, where he remains pressed up against Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling. (And so the great enemy of institutions began to be institutionalized.) In Dickens’s final, unfinished novel,
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
, a character remarks that being in Rochester Cathedral was like “looking down the throat of Old Time.”

For all its history, Rochester has been for years now a kind of proto–Dickens World. Many of the stores on its High Street have kitschy Dickensian signs: A Taste of Two Cities Indian restaurant, Pips grocery, Little Dorrit’s Piercing Studio. Down an alley you can find Dickens’s actual writing hut: a two-story chalet decorated with Swiss frippery in which Dickens wrote for the last five years of his life. It was moved, years ago, from the yard at Gad’s Hill Place and is now (according to the informational banner in front of it, which also calls it “the most iconic building in British literature”) about to collapse. It’s being held up, inside, by steel props, and the Dickens Fellowship is hoping to raise £100,000 to fix it.

Our last stop was one of Dickens’s last stops: Miss Havisham’s house. My friend, who was skeptical about literary tourism when we started our trip—authors, he insisted, are just ordinary people—was suddenly in ecstasy. “Of course this is Miss Havisham’s house!” he shouted. “Look at that window up top—a perfect window for peeking!” The house is open to visitors during the summer, but today it was closed. My friend was determined to see into its walled back garden, so we walked down an alley, ascended a metal staircase on the side of a church, climbed on top of the stairs’ highest railing—and from there we could see down into it: Miss Havisham’s garden, the Eden of the 19th-century novel, source of all desire, conflict, motion, disturbance, and growth. It was manicured now rather than overgrown, but it still seemed like the right place. Looking into it felt like looking into the nerve center not only of
Great Expectations
, or of Dickens’s imagination, or of 19th-century literature—but of the entire history of the novel. And we had it all to ourselves.

We left Rochester in an ecstasy of Dickens communion, my friend exclaiming about how, in just a few hours, in one morning, he had come to understand Dickens on a totally new level. This, then, seemed to be the real Dickens World, at least for us, on that day.

MARIE ARANA

FROM
Virginia Quarterly Review

F
OR AS LONG
as Senna Ochochoque can remember, she has worked to support her family. She began at four, helping prepare food that her family would hawk about town, when her father was too sick to pick rock in the gold mines. She would accompany him to market three hours away, bumping down mountain roads in a dilapidated minibus in the freezing penumbra of dawn. She’d haul bags up the slippery inclines, lug water down from the trickling glacier. To earn a few extra cents, she’d drag rocks from the maws of mineshafts, apply her tiny frame to the crushing of stones.

When she turned 10, she was hired to run one of seven public toilets that served the town’s 20,000 inhabitants. There is no sewage system in La Rinconada; no water, no paved roads, no sanitation whatsoever in that wilderness of ice, rock, and gold, perched more than 18,000 feet up in the Peruvian Andes. Senna’s job—from 6 in the morning to 10 at night—was to hand out tiny squares of paper, take a few cents from each customer, and muck out the fecal pits at the end of the day. When she was 12, she took a job that paid a bit more so that she could buy medicine for her dying father. Trudging the steep, fetid roads where the whorehouses and drinking establishments proliferate, she sold water trucked in from contaminated lakes.

Senna has pounded rock; she has ground it to gravel with her feet; she has teetered under heavy bags of crushed stone. But she was never lucky as a child miner; she never found even the faintest glimmer of gold. Today, with her father dead and her mother bordering on desperation, she makes fancy gelatins and sells them to men as they come and go from the mineshafts that pock the unforgiving face of Mount Ananea. When she is asked why she slogs through mud and snow for a few hours of school every day, as few children do, she says she wants to be a poet. She is 14 years old.

Peru is booming these days. Its economy boasts one of the highest growth rates in the world. In the past six years, its annual growth has hovered between 6.2 and 9.8 percent, rivaling the colossal engines of China and India. Peru is the world’s leading producer of silver; it is one of Latin America’s most exuberant founts of gold, copper, zinc, lead, and pewter. It is an up-and-coming producer of natural gas. It harvests and sells more fish than any other country on the planet, save China.

But it is the gold rush that has gripped Peru—the search for El Dorado, that age-old fever that harks back to the time of the Inca. More than 500 years later, it is in full frenzy again, in men’s imaginations as well as on front pages of newspapers.

In 2010, Peru extracted a total of 170 tons of gold from its mountains and rain forests, the highest production of that mineral in all of South America. Last year, it produced somewhat less. Every year has seen a drop in the output, which is hardly surprising since there is so little of this precious stuff left to dig out. “In all of history,”
National Geographic
reports, “only 161,000 tons of gold have been mined, barely enough to fill two Olympic-size swimming pools.” More than half of the world’s supply has been extracted in the last 50 years. Little wonder that the price of gold has soared in the past decade; little wonder that multinational companies have scrambled to wrest it from remote corners of the globe.

La Rinconada’s “informal” mines alone yield as much as 10 tons a year—worth up to $460 million on the open market. Even illegal operations are claiming a place in the boom. The irony is that every niche of this gargantuan industry—from Tiffany’s to the mom-and-pop store—owes Osama bin Laden a debt of gratitude for its rising profits. After the sobering events of 9/11, when financial markets grew jittery and the dollar began to lose ground, gold began its meteoric upward spiral. Everyone seemed to want it, especially in the form of jewelry, and especially in countries whose populations were clawing their way up toward the middle class: India and China accounted for the highest demand for gold, their surging numbers driving the prices ever skyward. One ounce of gold, which sold for $271 on September 11, 2001, now sells for $1,700, a whopping increase of 600 percent. That boom has prompted an equivalent explosion in the population crowding into La Rinconada; it is why the number of inhabitants on that icy, forbidding rock—less than 20,000 in 2007—has doubled and tripled in the course of five years.

Today there are 30,000 miners working the frozen tunnels of Mount Ananea, most of them with families, and all in the service of a buoyant global market. There is no legal oversight, no benevolent employer, no operational government, no functioning police. At least 60,000 souls have pressed into the lawless encampment, building huts on the near-vertical cant of that dizzying promontory—harboring hope that this may be the day they strike a gleaming vein, cleave open a wall to find a fist-sized nugget. They think they’ll stay only as long as it takes to find one. There are just enough stories of random fortune to keep the insanity alive.

The mines at La Rinconada are called “informal,” a euphemism for illegal, a status without which Peru’s economy would screech to a standstill. For 40 years now, the Peruvian government has turned a blind eye to increasingly wretched conditions in this remote community, its government agents unwilling to scale the heights, brave the cold, take control. In the interim, what was once a region of crystalline lakes and leaping fish—replete with alpaca, vicuña, chinchilla—has become a Bosch-like world that beggars the imagination. The scrub is gone. The earth is turned. What you see instead, as you approach that distant glacier, is a lunar landscape, pitted with rust-pink lakes that reek of cyanide. The waterfowl that were once abundant in this corridor of the Andes are gone; no birds flap overhead, save an occasional vulture. The odor is overwhelming; it is the rank stench of the end of things: of burning, of rot, of human excrement. Even the glacial cold, the permafrost, the whipping wind, and driving snows cannot mask the smell. As you ascend the mountain, all about you are heaps of garbage, a choking ruin, and sylphlike figures picking idly through it. Closer in are huts of tin and stone, leaning out at 70-degree angles, and then the ever-present mud, the string of humanity streaming in and out of black holes that scar the cliffs. Along the precipitously winding road, flocks of women in wide skirts scrabble up inclines to scavenge rocks that spill from the mineshafts; the children they don’t carry in slings—the ones who are old enough to walk—shoulder bags of rock.

A miner lucky enough to find work once he reaches this mountain inferno labors in subzero temperatures, in dank, suffocating tunnels, wielding a primitive pick. In the course of that work, he risks lung disease, toxic poisoning, asphyxiation, nerve damage. He exposes himself to glacial floods, collapsing shafts, wayward dynamite, chemical leaks. The altitude alone is punishing: at 14,000 feet a human body can experience pulmonary edema, blood clots, kidney failure; at 18,000 the injuries can be more severe. To counter them, he chews wads of coca. He carries pocketfuls of the leaf to curb his hunger, prevent exhaustion. If he lives to work another day, he celebrates by drinking himself into a stupor. The ore he extracts, grinds down, leaches with mercury, then purifies in a blazing furnace will make his boss and his boss’s bosses very rich; but for the vast majority who slave in that high circle of hell, gold is as elusive as a glittering fool’s paradise.

The system of
cachorreo
, used by contractors in La Rinconada and elsewhere, is akin to the Mita, the system of imposed, mandatory servitude that once enslaved Indians to the Spanish crown. Under
cachorreo
, a worker surrenders his identity card to his employer. He labors for 30 days with no pay. On the 31st day, if he is lucky, he is allowed to mine the shaft for his personal profit. But he can take only what he can carry out on his back. By the time a miner struggles out under his cargo of stones, grinds it, and coaxes the glittering dust free, he may find he has precious little for his efforts. Worse still, because he must sell his gold to the ramshackle, unregulated establishments in town, it will fetch the lowest price possible. On average, a miner in La Rinconada earns $170 a month—$5 for every day of grueling labor. On average, he has more than five mouths to feed. If he has a bad month, he will earn $30. If he does well, he will earn $1,000. In most cases, workers simply go up the hill, spend their hard-won cash on liquor and prostitutes, and count themselves lucky if they make it home without a brawl. Crime and AIDS are rampant in La Rinconada. If work doesn’t kill a man, a knife or a virus will. There are few miners here who have reached 50.

It’s hard to imagine, as we hover over the gleaming counters of jewelry stores in Paris or New York, or even Jakarta and Mumbai, that gold can take such a hallucinatory journey, that the process remains so medieval—that little has progressed in half a millennium of human history. Families like Senna Ochochoque’s, who have spent as many as three generations under the spell of gold’s promise, live in abject poverty, barely able to eke out an evening meal. The world boom in the value of gold has not translated to better lives in La Rinconada. It is the same in the gold mines of Cajamarca in northern Peru (owned by the U.S. giant Newmont Mining Corporation), or in Puerto Maldonado, where anarchic mines carve into the Amazon jungle. In Cajamarca, which has poured $7 billion of gold into the global market in the last 30 years, 74 percent of the population lives in numbing poverty. In the outlying areas of Cuzco, where Australian and U.S. companies are busily ferreting Peru’s gold out into international markets, more than half of the population earns less than $35 a month. Peruvians, in other words, may perch on some of the world’s most valuable mountains, but as the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt is said to have observed 200 years ago, “Peru is a beggar, sitting on a bench of gold.”

Humboldt was quick to see—when he traveled Peru in the early 1800s—that the terrain just south of Lake Titicaca, where the Andes make a stately march south to Potosí, held vast reserves of gold and silver. According to him, Mount Ananea harbored a considerable store of wealth, even though its mines had lain dormant for a hundred years. History books tell us that during the 1700s the glacier atop Ananea had grown heavy with accumulated ice; eventually it collapsed the Spanish mines and flushed them with freezing water, drowning all life within. Spain tried to resuscitate their operation in 1803, but the land was too difficult to govern, its peaks too vertiginous, its cold too lacerating. The winds and snows of Ananea had done what the Inca could not: they had driven the conquistadors away. But, by then, Spain had scores of mines to satisfy its voracious lust for gold and silver. So it was that Ananea remained that mythic titan—remote, frigid, and threaded with gold.