The El Teniente mine, which sits inside the cordillera above Machalí at more than two thousand metres and which is the largest underground copper mine in the world, with its fourteen hundred kilometres of tunnels dug out over more than a century, ever since the camp at Sewell clung to the mountain like a city of painted wood, is a mountain that men have hollowed out from within; and Sergio Tapia, who had worked there for nineteen years and who on the Thursday night had come back up with the shift-change crew while the six men of the Andesita section were going down to take his place, knew this before he said it to the commission, knew it the way miners know things, not with words but with the back, because a hollowed mountain presses to be full again, and sooner or later the emptiness you have made inside it, it gives back to you.

Before the technical commission, convened at Rancagua in the Codelco building with the geologists and the lawyers and a seismograph printed on a roll of paper, Sergio then declared that the blow had not been an earthquake, or rather: that the tremor of magnitude four point two recorded that night had not come from the fault, it had come from them, from the excavation, from the very method of block caving by which the ore is made to collapse in on itself so as not to have to be broken loose by hand, which is the method that makes El Teniente what it is, the copper that goes down to the port of San Antonio and from there to China, the copper that pays for the schools of Machalí and the wages and the pensions and the buses that climb the road of the seventy hairpin bends; and the mountain, which is made of that copper, at a certain point took back in an instant the pressure they had taken from it, in a jolt that in the jargon is called an estallido of rock, an explosion in reverse, the rock imploding into the emptiness you have left it.

Anyone who has never been inside El Teniente does not know that it is not a hole but an inverted city, with its streets that have names (Teniente 8, Teniente Sub 6, the Esmeralda ramp), its shifts counted in crews and not in hours, its vehicles that go down the spiral ramp the way one descends into a port, and its canteen, and the casa de cambio, and the chapels carved into the rock with the Virgen del Socavón whom the miners greet on their way down; a city that on the first of October celebrates its dead of a century, the three thousand and more men the mountain has kept for itself ever since a North American engineer, in the early years of the twentieth century, said that down there was more copper than at any other point in the cordillera, and he was right, and he was wrong only about the price, which was not in dollars. Sergio had started there at nineteen, like his father at Sewell when Sewell was still inhabited and the children went to school among the steam pipes; and in nineteen years he had learned that the mountain makes no noise when it decides, or rather makes a single noise, once, and whoever hears it tells it, and whoever does not tell it is because he was underneath.

Before saying it, Sergio stayed still with his hands on the table, and the lawyers waited, because to say this in that room was not to describe an accident, it was to say that the Andesita section could have been foreseen, that the sensors had marked something, that the emptiness had been calculated and the calculation had a margin and the margin that night had ended up beneath six men; and he could describe only the noise and the dust and the shift, as suited him, as suited the mine that gives bread to the whole province, or else he could say the word he had in his throat. He said it. He said: it was the extraction. Not nature, the extraction. He put it on the record, per the minutes, at ten past six in the evening, and he signed.

And after saying it, while they were walking him out and the journalists waited in the forecourt with their cameras and the evening was coming down over the cordillera turning the high snow violet, Sergio thought neither of the commission nor of the word, he thought of the section's changing room, the one they call the casa de cambio, where every man has his sheet-metal locker with its padlock and inside it the things of the life outside, and he thought that in one of those lockers, the number of one of the six, the one belonging to the young man from Coya whose daughter was to marry in November, there had been left the green thermos of mint water his mother made for him, a thermos of old plastic with the name scratched badly into the bottom with the point of a nail, set down on the iron shelf where he had left it going down, still warm probably that night, cold now, holding inside it the water of a mother who did not yet know, a thermos no one had opened and no one would ever open, shut up there above its shelf in the belly of the mountain that had taken back what had been taken from it, and which, of all that copper, of all that century, of all those kilometres, now held tight, at the bottom, only that.