Free Deep Down Dark by Héctor Tobar Page A

the roads outside of town. When she arrives, she takes note of the emptiness of the place. She sees men in helmets and uniforms walking back and forth with unknown purpose before the mine entrance. It feels like she’s the first and only woman there.
    *   *   *
    In Talcahuano, Carola Bustos, who survived the earthquake and tsunami with her husband, decides she can’t bear to tell her two young children what’s happened to their father. They will hear her voice breaking and see her weeping, and the sight of their stricken mother will wound them. To spare her children that hurt, she leaves them in the care of her parents, in the physical and emotional safety of their home, and she slips away for a northward flight without saying goodbye. Carola leaves it to her parents to explain her absence to their grandchildren: “Mommy’s going back to Santiago to look for work, and she’ll be back soon.”
    *   *   *
    Some seventeen hours after the collapse, the phone rings at the home of Mario “Perri” Sepúlveda in Santiago. Elvira, who goes by the nickname “Cati,” takes the call from a friend just after 7:00 a.m.
    “Cati, there was an accident in a mine and it looks like Mario is there,” says a friend.
    For a moment, it seems like a joke. “No,” Elvira says. It seems impossible that a friend from Santiago would know anything about what Mario was doing hundreds of kilometers to the north.
    “I’m not bullshitting you,” the friend says. No te estoy huevando . “Turn on Channel Seven.”
    Elvira turns on the television and sees the report from Copiapó. After a few moments, Mario is on the screen, a clean-shaven and not especially happy man of forty, staring into the camera with red, flashbulb eyes in the unflattering picture on his mining company identity card. His full name is there as a caption: MARIO SEPÚLVEDA ESPINACE . The news report fills out some details. The collapse took place yesterday afternoon, they’re buried several hundred meters underground, all communication has been lost. After she digests the gravity of what’s happened, when she has time to think about exactly what her husband must be suffering, she wonders: How is that crazy man going to survive cooped up like that? He needs to be moving around. He won’t be able to take it .
    As to the accident itself, Elvira is not surprised: Mario had more or less predicted it. When he went to work, Mario often reminded her about the insurance and social security she would be entitled to if anything happened to him in the mine. He spoke so often and angrily about the San José being on the verge of collapse, his worries invaded the dreams of his eighteen-year-old daughter, Scarlette. One day, several months earlier, Scarlette had a nightmare in which she learned her father had been killed in the mine. She woke up screaming “My father is dead!” and could not be convinced that it was just a dream. She was crying and trembling, and her mother was forced to take her to the hospital, until Mario emerged from his shift and called home and said: “Scarlette, it’s me, your father! I’m alive! I’m fine! Nothing happened to me. I was just at work…”
    With Mario now buried, Elvira can’t help but think of Scarlette’s dreams as a kind of a prophecy no one chose to heed. She wonders: How am I going to explain to our son that his father is trapped and there’s nothing we can do? Francisco is thirteen years old but is small for his age, and always has been. He was born after a pregnancy of just five months, weighed a mere 2.4 pounds at birth, and spent the first sixty-nine days of his life in an incubator. They are very close, father and son, their bond having been forged during those ten weeks when a powerless Mario was forced to endure the sight of his baby boy in a box, with his impossibly tiny limbs and closed eyes, being fed by tubes, seemingly fighting for his life with clenched fists as small as rosebuds. Mario has filled up the rest