Free Deep Down Dark by Héctor Tobar

decides she has to go to the mine, to get confirmation that he was even there when the mine collapsed. Her daughter’s friend drives her there in a pickup truck, using a GPS, because she’s never been there before and doesn’t know the directions.
    Carmen Berríos rides through an eerie night landscape filled with the shadows of round and rocky mountains, remembering a recent dream she had of Luis trapped underground: In that dream, he was rescued and rose to the surface in a bus. The pickup turns off the highway and onto the short spur leading to the mine, a mountain with a brightening cluster of lights, until they reach the front gate and the guard shack there, and she steps out into a night of dry and bitter cold. It’s nearly midnight.
    *   *   *
    At her home in a middle-middle-class neighborhood of Copiapó, Mónica Avalos, the wife of the foreman, Florencio Avalos, is sewing. She’s got one of her sixteen-year-old son’s sweaters and is taking it in a bit, while also cooking a soup for Florencio. Her husband is a big soup eater, and Mónica is making a concoction of chopped beef she’ll remember as being especially hearty, the way Florencio likes it. The smell of this meal is filling the living room and the small, attached dining room where she and Florencio and their two sons gather every night for dinner. Mónica is not watching television or listening to the radio, because she likes the silence in the house, and her sons are off in their rooms. Her main company at this moment is the big clock in the living room, which is marching toward the time Florencio usually comes home and she serves dinner: 9:30 p.m., as is the South American custom.
    The phone rings with a call from her sister. “Look, I don’t want to worry you, but there was a collapse in the mine. A really big collapse. In the mine where Florencio works. The San José Mine. Is Florencio there yet?”
    “No, but he’s going to be here any minute now.” This call is followed by the arrival of 9:30 and several long, long minutes with Florencio’s chair at the dining room table still empty. Suddenly, Mónica can’t even remember the name of the mine where Florencio works. Was it the San José? She remembers him saying he worked in a mine named for another saint: San Antonio. Anthony, not Joseph, that’s what she’s thinking. She’s walking up and down the stairs, in a kind of manic trance, looking at that clock push further away from 9:30. Her seven-year-old son, who’s alone in his room watching television, and who’s always talked to his father about work and knows perfectly well what the name of the mine is, suddenly comes running into the living room and yells: “Mommy, my father is dead! My father is dead!”
    “No! No!” his mother answers back. “Where did you get that from?”
    “Don’t be a liar!” the boy yells. “It’s on the news!”
    Upstairs, in her younger son’s room before the television set, Mónica faints. Her older son, César Alexis, “Ale,” comes to revive her, and to be steady and to play the role of father suddenly. Ale is sixteen years old, the same age Florencio and Mónica were when she got pregnant with him, and suddenly he is calm and strong, as if he were channeling Florencio somehow.
    “ Cálmate ,” Ale says to his mother. “ Cálmate .” They decide to go to Pablo Ramirez’s house, because Pablo works in the same mine, and if anyone knows the truth and can be trusted to tell them, it’s Pablo. When Mónica and her two sons arrive at Pablo’s house and knock at the door, they are unaware that Pablo is, at that moment, entering the collapsed mine in search of Florencio and the other thirty-two men with him. No one answers for fifteen minutes, until finally Pablo’s wife comes to the door and says: “Pablo’s not here. He went to the mine. Because there’s been an accident.” Mónica calls another of Florencio’s friends, Isaías, and they drive to the mine together, but get lost on