A villager in one of the last places I went explained the effects of the desert invasion through an interpreter. That’s how I came to understand the value of that great esplanade of shifting sands before the mine was built. Multinational companies defended their actions by saying it was a perfect spot, a nothing in the middle of nowhere. As if the nothing was not as valuable, or even more priceless, than the something, the populated, the city. Ignoramuses. Because of them, the desert is losing its presence. They made the necessary nothing disappear, that indispensable place for insignificant plants and animals that were and are going extinct, essential for the survival of nearby villages and tourism. The relentless racket of heavy machinery and its constant beeping every few seconds supplanted the silence. The emptiness, a mythical place for those coming from far away and a fundamental physical space for those living nearby, was filled up with trucks and roads that coiled into an enormous spiral descending level by level to below the ground, a kilometer-wide oval where thousands of hands scrabbled in search of the cancerous substance.
The man who acted as my interpreter placed a tiny reptile that looked like a pink chameleon in the palm of my hand. It was one of only a few of that species that were left, or at least the villagers said they no longer found them in the sand as they had before. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a beautiful creature. Its mouth was turned up in a permanent smile, but its skin was what caught my eye, so fine it seemed translucent. Looking closer, I realized that what at first I thought were the pastel tones of its skin—bluish orange, a very soft green—were in fact the colors of its internal organs, which were visible underneath. I thought of that legend of the old queen of Brittany whose skin was so delicate, so white, that when she drank red wine, her throat went blue with each swallow. How could such a delicate creature resist the harsh desert light, the direct rays of the sun that a few minutes earlier had turned my arms, my hands, my unprotected skin all red and patchy? How could that little animal—seemingly unformed, still inside the egg—survive in such a severe environment? A land scorched by the ruthless sun was its habitat, and yet it couldn’t survive something ostensibly so much less powerful than the king of the solar system: the human touch.
One day the locals observed the arrival of vast quantities of heavy machinery: trucks, equipment of all makes and models, technologies they’d never heard of or seen before. The British company Rio Tinto had been working the mines since the seventies. They had promised to build schools, create jobs, and provide better infrastructure for the population, and over the years they’ve done exactly nothing to better the lives or the standard of living of the locals. The only thing that rose was the death toll from direct and indirect contamination. The workers labored for a pittance and the uranium profits were siphoned out of the country or stolen by the government officials who signed away the mine’s exploitation rights. A few years later, in 1978, a sort of prefabricated city grew up some ten miles away from the mine for the Rössing laborers. They christened it Arandis. To visit the mine and the settlement was for me like a new descent into hell, as you’ll see in my chronicle of events. As I mentioned earlier, the hell in my life hasn’t been organized as levels one below the other, but horizontally, on the same plane, like a huge flat surface on which each door opened onto a different version of suffering. I’d never seen it as a gradation of pain going from lesser to greater, though each form of misery seemed worse than the last, even if it wasn’t, as a result of the newness in the form of pain. But what I saw in Rössing was like an authentic classical descent into Avernus, and being belowground added to the feeling of perversity. For once, an inferno into which I was thrown fit the traditional subterranean image.
ARANDIS REMINDED ME of Los Alamos, not only because its infrastructure broke the desert landscape, but because of the inexorable sun, the heat suffocating everything like an allegorical representation of what was being cooked up there, the atomic material. A rudimentary cardboard and wire sign on the way into the housing zone read WELCOME TO ARANDIS. It was something like a bad joke, welcoming one to a place that could scarcely be differentiated from the work camp barracks. The atmosphere was laden with despair. The way the building materials had been arranged made the settlement a far more soulless place than Los Alamos. People were there simply to earn their daily bread—literally, the bread for one day, not the bread for two days. All the hope had been sucked out of the place. The air was grimy and bleak, unlike in the North American camp.
Not a soul could be found outside the tiny shacks. They were all working in the mine. Within an hour I was there. The hellish oval yawning under an open sky, the great pit where so many black people worked, as Yoro had explained in her letter. I remember reading her words and thinking how working here must have been a bit better, at least in comparison with toiling in the subterranean galleries. But when I walked into Rössing, I was overcome with pity for Yoro because of the blistering sun she would have had to endure there. So again I proved my case that data alone can’t be trusted at all. I would never have believed that there was something worse than suffocating in a tunnel until I experienced that heat: being scorched by the free-falling rays of sunlight that burn more than the skin—the stomach, the throat, the nostrils, other organs. To me, it was like the sinister prank of a superior being: an invisible cloak of fire laid out between the blue sky and our heads, held in place by the unremitting breath of a dragon condemned to immobility, not allowed to fly an inch into the open air. I couldn’t find a single white face among the black ones. After I had paid the negotiated fee, they let me walk down to the mine’s first level. I could now see down into it and into that upside-down cone used to extract the sterile material that would be separated from the mineral.
The scaled terraces of Peruvian farmlands came to mind; those terraced plots that follow the natural curves of a mountain. The shapes were similar, but the colors were wildly different. In Peru, everything was green; in Arandis, it was all yellow. A massive film of yellow powder coated everything, even the lungs, though you couldn’t see it, and of course the workers weren’t told about this. Soon, though, any connection between the living terraces of Peru and these fell away. This was an open-air mine contaminating the atmosphere and the surface and subterranean waters. It was destroying or extinguishing the local flora and fauna and dismembering the landscape. The simple thought that Yoro could be there made my heart skip a beat in my chest, though knowing she might be in some other mine, far away from me, also brought a sense of panic. My anxiety was exacerbated by a sun that blistered my skin even under my clothes, even though I was covered and wearing a hat. Some workers wore helmets, but the majority went unprotected. There was no water anywhere, even though sweat streamed from everyone’s face. No one ever looked up, either from force of habit or to avoid the impact of the sun shining straight in their faces. In that awful space, the land’s once-beloved sun had become a source of humiliation, like the foremen who obliged them to work with heads hanging; the work didn’t allow for hats or even shirts. The blackness of their skin was tinged with red.
It was too much for me, at my age, to take in all that horror in a single day. I felt a wave of fatigue and had to sit down on a rock by myself, crestfallen and all choked up, with no idea how or where to begin. Though I took care to sit in something akin to shade, I still had never experienced heat like that. It was like the summer at the dead center of all summers. My vision clouded and I remained transfixed like that for minutes that felt like eternity. I’m aware of what happens in these processes. I knew the sun’s heat was beginning to damage my cells, to clog the invisible ancestral passageways all over my skin. Only once had I felt comparable temperatures, though less intense. It happened in America, when I was with S in Teotihuacán. Both experiences of extreme heat fused somehow, and the weariness brought me back there, or maybe it was the dizziness or a need to escape or stay put, but I relived, collapsed into, that day in Mexico.