The Season of Migration (19 page)

At the bottom, there wasn't room to stand anymore, so we crawled on our hands and knees. Paul, crawling before me, called back to me, “I'm sorry for this! I'm taking you to the
maintenages
that are farthest away from the exit. I hope it is all right! If you're going to come down here you may as well see it all!” He couldn't see my face and so was concerned, I think, that I might be horrified by the depth of our journey but unable to express it. I wasn't, but I was amazed: I thought I had seen the mine, and that no part could be deeper or darker or more frightening, yet there we were crawling even farther.

I couldn't answer him; I couldn't come up with words; I could only dumbly follow. But my senses were completely alive. The mud beneath my hands was music, it was an ocean, I was controlling waves and landscapes with each plunge of my palm. I felt every drop of water that touched my skin, icy cold pinpricks on my skull and neck. One knee forward, one palm forward, one knee, one palm, this was how we made our way through the passage. I tried not to think of the weight above us, of how far under the ground we were, of how many hundreds of ways I could die down there, of how far a trek it was to get out. Every time I moved forward, I could see Paul's foot in front of me for a brief second before it disappeared, and I tried to concentrate only on that. The flash of a boot, cold water in darkness.

That was how the world was: There was no space for thought, no room for past or future, for doubt, talk, concerns. Only your hand in front of you, a foot disappearing, the thin light of a kerosene lamp. Darkness, darkness, and nothing to see, and yet somehow—and how can this be?—it felt like being blind was making everything clearer. I thought of Angeline, and comforted myself that she was elsewhere in the mine, higher up, where she might be able to breathe freely. I imagined for a while that Paul's foot was hers, and that I was following her, like in that fairy tale Uncle Cent used to read us, down to the bottom of the sea.

We continued on; I lost track of time. Every few minutes we'd have to flatten ourselves against the wall as a tiny cart was pushed through the passageway, pushed by younger and younger boys and girls, struggling to keep the cart on track without tipping over. The cells on that level were even narrower than the ones above, and getting narrower and narrower still. There were men crouching and sitting, lying on their backs, using only their forearms to swing their picks. There were no voices, only the sounds of the work. Rats scuttled by with no fear; they approached and nosed at our sweating arms, then turned and meandered away. All of the miners down there were naked, as the heat was well beyond any human notions of shame. They were coated black and swimming in sweat. If I could have spared the energy to contort my body in such a small space and remove my clothes, I would have.

The coal face extended for quite a ways off the passageway, inclining up like a flat, wide chimney. Peering into the darkness I could see the faint glow of lamps all the way up the slope, their lights tiny ghostlike flickers, throwing into relief a brief glimpse of an arm or a mustache, a shoulder or a knee, or a pick hitting the face. When a piece of coal fell off, there was a quick glint, and then the darkness swallowed everything.

Soon the cells were so narrow that in order to get up the coal face the miners had to drag themselves by their elbows, and they could not turn their bodies all the way over. They wedged themselves into the rock like dogs trying to fit into rabbit holes, with no fear of getting stuck. Once in place, in order to get at the coal they had to twist and contort, their arms over their heads and their picks slanted, so that when they knocked off a piece it would fall to the plank below them rather than just on their heads. The temperature only got hotter as the seam slanted upward, and the more coal that collected beneath the miners, the more the ventilation was blocked from reaching them. At the top the men were caught like grapes between the grips of a vise. I was at the bottom and not even moving, and I could barely stand one more instant of the heat and the dust and the water that constantly dripped from overhead. How was it possible that these men worked down here all day long?

We were down for about six hours before Paul took pity on me and we made our way out. I didn't complain, but I felt sure Paul could tell how I was suffering. In the last cells the air was terrible: When I breathed in, it seemed to ignite the dust in my throat, I had to swallow again and again to settle what I imagined was a raging fire that lit up my insides all the way into my nose and made my eyes water. Paul inspected the men's lamps and showed me how they were glowing blue, which indicated that there was gas in the air; he chastised them for working in these conditions, arguing they should leave for a day to have the bosses clean the air out. Decrucq was in that particular cell, it turned out, for I heard him call out, “Fontaine, you know the mine can't kill me!” The other men grumbled that they couldn't afford a day without pay.

The shadows danced and grew; they became menacing and then they disappeared when I looked at them; they were there and then they were not there. I saw a hand and I heard the noises of scraping in the darkness, of men grumbling and sighing, men sweating. There was a black ankle and then there was a rock. All was darkness, all was flickering fire. Inside my body was a mine filled with soot; inside my body was darkness, darkness was all we were, all of us, darkness. Coal. I tried to grow my eyes in their sockets, I thought if I could make them bigger that perhaps I could overcome the darkness, but of course there was no escape. I fixated on the flickering flames through the gauze in the lamps, for they were the only concrete things I could see, though after a while they were no real comfort, for they would not stay still. I would not complain; I would not permit myself to want out; this was how these men lived. As the mariners ashore are homesick for the sea, notwithstanding all the dangers and hardships which threaten them, so the miner would rather be underground than above it.

I was peering through the darkness, trying to use the dim halos cast from the blue lamps to discern a particular chin, an eyebrow, the hook of a nose. It was of sudden and dire importance that I know who the people were that were toiling before me. I had to identify them, Theo; I had to reveal them in their work and danger. I slunk toward them, feeling a desperateness, a compulsion to see. The lamps cast a light that was in itself a kind of shadow, so that all the men I glimpsed were unreal, men made out of wax and mud. They would have surely moved away from me if there had been room—a few gasped with surprise when I came close to them and then grumbled for me to move away.

I was making a list in my head, a kind of census. Hubert Aert, Joseph Trouls, Nim Parling. Who knew these people were down there, Theo? It felt in that moment like the whole town was there, mothers and fathers and boys and girls and babes—they were laboring there for a world that had forgotten them, carving out pieces of darkness in darkness so that others might have a light for their suffering. Now, writing this, after what has happened since then, I can see that such a census was necessary; that work is a laying down of life as much as on a battlefield. And I was there. I saw them, Theo, and I knew them and will remember them all until I die. I might grow old and daft, I might even forget one day that I had a brother, and that he deserted me, but I will never forget those faces, or how hard I had to look to discern an eye, a cheek, a chin.

I was still moving around, peering into the darkness like some kind of deranged explorer, when I heard a voice next to me that had the effect, in that underground inferno, of making my skin turn to ice.

“Monsieur Vincent, is that you?”

It was Angeline, Theo; I was sure of it from the sound of her voice, although I could not quite make her out. Angeline, who I had thought was in the upper part of the mine, who I had imagined was free to move her limbs and breathe better air! There she was next to me, in that place of extreme derangement, asking me if I were me.

I could not answer her. I panicked. I turned to move away; I had to get out of there. I struck my arm against what must have been a haulage cart. “Paul,” I croaked into the darkness. “Paul!” My throat felt like two hands clasped tightly around a piece of string. “Paul!”

“I'm here,” I heard him say. “Follow me; we're on our way out.”

I couldn't catch my breath the whole way back, even when we got to where the air was cooler and we could walk once again; the panic was still plaguing me, my heart beating fast, and the sound of that gentle voice—
Monsieur Vincent, is that you?
—echoing in my mind. We walked for what seemed like forever along the big main passageway, the air growing cooler and cooler, carts and horses hurtling by us constantly, boys shouting orders and galleys opening up off the right and the left.

Theo, do you remember when we were boys and I used to tell you that if you looked down the inside of your mouth that you could see all the way down into your stomach? I remember the two of us standing face-to-face, one of us opening wide and the other peering in, holding up the lamp to get a better look. I want you to look inside me now, just like that. How am I different now? How have I changed? Look! Inside me is the machinery of the mine, the cage dropping down that shaft, the thick passageways with the blind horses hauling rumbling carts through, the big cells and then the ladder down to the smaller ones and then down still more to the darkness, the heat and the blindness and all along the hands scraping at the walls, scraping away the refuse of the walls and hauling the discharge away, and those canaries all around, carts rolling on wobbly wheels carrying coal, and then, there at the very bottom, Angeline with her barely blue light.

Do you see, Theo? What do you see?

Monsieur Vincent, is that you?

We stopped at the stable while Paul had a coughing fit, and in the darkness I came up close to one of the horses and laid my hands on his mane. The hair at the top of his neck was coarse and long, it fell down over the side of him, and I ran it through my fingers and thought of Mother brushing our sisters' hair in the sitting room while I sat and looked on. I always wished I could have hair like theirs so that I could experience that treatment, our mother touching a part of me so gently.

I laid my forehead against the horse's shoulder and breathed in, and the horse breathed out quickly and shook his head, snorting loudly and stamping his foot, a gesture perhaps of pleasure and perhaps of annoyance. I didn't care; the beast was alive. His hair against my face was warm and soft, and I felt it slowly rescuing me. I held on to the horse tightly, as if we were on a sled hurtling down a hill.

I felt such love for that horse in that instant, and for all of the creatures toiling in that strange underworld, countless people moving and sweating and carting, the birds in their hanging cages, and Paul behind me, leaning on the rock and spitting onto the earth, the other horses breathing loudly into their hay. I felt I could hear it all, the small noises in that magical place thunderous and deafening; they moved through me, along with all the innumerable bodies, human, bird, beast, insect, rat. We were all in the darkness together and we were all alive.

That's it, Theo! We are all in the darkness, and we are all alive.

December 20

Petit Wasmes, the Borinage

Dear Theo,

After going down in the mine, I saw everything in the Borinage differently. Finally I knew where life really took place: it was not in the village, though this may be where the miners slept and very often where they died. The villages look desolate and lifeless and forsaken, and then I understood why: The heart of the place was underground. Decrucq once said something to me about toiling in a hole in the ground only to be buried in one at the end of one's days; the distance isn't very far from those cells underground to the cells a man's body lies in for the rest of time.

In March, after the visit to the mine, I moved out of the Denis house for good, preferring my hovel once and for all to their home of comfort. Can you understand this? To me, it was as clear as a mathematical equation: I simply could not sleep in a home like theirs while men were naked in those mines with those flickering lamps, while men and women, my sisters and brothers, were coming home from that terrible underworld to dinners of potatoes and maybe a leek. I capitulated to Father when he came to visit, but I could not do it again, not after what I had seen. Another man could have, perhaps, Father and his colleagues, maybe even you could have, but I could not.

Madame Denis pleaded with me; she told me that the miners knew I was a good man, that I had nothing to prove, and that times had changed since the days of Jesus Christ. I could not explain to her that I was in need of a different sort of comfort, a sort that could not be found under a quilt or with a warm bath. I remembered what Father said when he was here, but this was no sacrifice, this was no altering of station. It was not a punishment; it was not an eccentricity, as I am accused of again and again. It was an honest act of fellowship, an act of love. How else can I explain it? Why does no one understand? I thought at least you would understand. I wondered when you would come to visit me, and how I could possibly explain all that had happened since we had last seen each other. I thought that when you finally arrived, you would see it as clearly as I.

I stuffed the holes in my shack's walls with sacking to keep the wind out. I bought myself a month's worth of coffee, cheese, and bread. Then I gave the rest of my salary to Madame Decrucq, so she could buy her children warm clothing. Whatever money I had from then on would no longer be for me. The spider and the mouse were happy to have me back. I asked Paul Fontaine if I might have one of the canaries from the mine—perhaps one that was too old to serve its purpose properly. He brought me one in a wire cage; it had only one leg, though despite a few years underground it was still a bright yellow. It was the strangest thing, this bird, for it was almost always silent; I would stand in front of its cage and coax it with my finger, trying to make it sing.