Potosi

Not the tallest city no, but it once was. It was once the Silver City, where luck flowed from the mine’s mouth in a river of molten metal stretching further than The Nile. To where Kings played in the shallows, laughing, splashing coins at each other with a carelessness of children wading over the sea graves of dead men. But now, on this day from the mine side, the silver city dulls. The church bells are dusty and silent. They have learned their lesson not to speak. It is the dulling of the Silver City, and it has been happening for thousands of years, for all rivers must dry.

But something cuts the silence on this day. It is not the ‘potoq, potoq, potoq’ of picks on rock that gave this city its name. No, today there is music. “Come!” The Miner says, he places coca leaves in my embarrassingly soft, white hands and cerveza in the other, “no work today!” His face is gleaming bronze, strong, hard, a record of something important, a moving statue, a living Ozymandias. His dusty brothers lead twenty llamas in ceremony to stand outside the mine’s mouth. “Watch.” He says with a proud solemnity. “Today we make luck.”

Three men to each animal, two to hold it down and one to saw it open from the neck and let the liquid rubies run, warm, across the dusty ground to settle it. With its eyes still blinking, he collects some with his right hand, his leading pick hand, and swipes it across my right cheek and lips. A taste of metal.

A hand on my shoulder and his eyes meet mine, dark pools that have absorbed a life spent underground, mine, clear oceans, like the ones that keep kings from the despair their empires are built upon. “Suerte,” he exhales, his breath a cloud of powdery gold dust that catches the light before it dissipates, alchemy in his lungs turning tin into a glimmering vapour for just a moment. He smiles to see my eyes grow dark as I can feel them change, the oceans fill with ink, with a darkness of death before 30. But I can’t help but blink, and they are clear again.

His hand falls from my shoulder, he turns to stare out at the dulling of his Silver City. Below our feet El Tio stirs and the mountain sinks a little lower. Let them have their day. Tomorrow we will see. There is a reason blood tastes metallic.