The
coal miner's wife wakes him and he coughs. He shuffles to the small
bathroom sink and spits black liquid, washing it away with with the
brown tap water.
Last
night he slept badly, suffering from stomach cramps, diarrhea and
vomiting again. He had been working in the zinc mine at Arnao in
Castrillon but the Belgian company who own the site have let him go to
the San Juan mine. He felt himself to be quite lucky. At least there
they had a river pool for the miners to wash in.
As
he leaves for another day under the earth the miner looks for a last
time at the mountains, at their ferns and the tall groups of eucalyptus -
– pencil thin, not quite straight, just like the trees in a Dr Seuss
book. He sees the houses with their sharp pitched roofs in front of deep
gorges and is comforted by the roll of the hills across this green
land.
Our
miner is living before the era of the chemical plants and big metal
factories. He knows others who dig for iron and knows it’s vital for
tinned food because electricity and refrigeration have not yet arrived
to this part of the world.
His
mine, like many mines, is close to a river: a means of transporting the
coal for trading this raw material with British towns like Cardiff and
Newcastle-upon-Tyne [where my own father was born and also grew up next
to a polluted river.]
This
miner's children will one day see the construction of chemical
industries, thanks to the mines, thanks to his labour. In fact, he
thinks, as he makes the walk to the pits, the story of Asturias is the
story of the miner and the story of the miner is the story of Asturias.
It is one of hardship and scant reward, of growth but also ill health.
It is a tale of the deep earth's hidden secrets and humanity’s
immeasurable suffering with the open spaces of the valleys and their
claustrophobic confines - as unforgiving and back-breaking as any
imagined hell in those greedy shafts penetrating ever downwards into the
planet.
Today,
like thousands of other days, he will launch his body into the ground
and probe for hour after hour for that black rock. Finally, at the end
of the day our miner will take aspirin for his aching bones, smiling at
the ironic fact that it has ingredients made from the very coal he has
been digging for. He does not yet know though that, decades later, his
children are going eat kiwi-fruits and chestnuts that will come to grow
particularly well in the carbon-coloured soil left from abandoned
open-cut mines scattered across the nearby hills.
As
the miner eats his simple lunch with his hands still blackened by coal
dust, he remembers his father, who was also a miner. He too worked to
extract the iron that was in such high demand for both twentieth century
century world wars – a metal that helped the rich become richer. His
father started life as a rural worker and had to adapt from the rhythms
of the seasons to the very different rhythm of an industrial timetable.
He had to learn to accept days and nights with no sky or trees, down in
the mines which lay right next to his cramped terrace house.
Like
every other subterranean labourer, his father and he both wondered if
life could ever be different for them. He’d heard that things were a bit
better at the only mine run by a trade union. But it was on the other
side of Asturias and he had never even visited there.
Our
miner lives in Bustiello town where all of the aristocrat Marques de
Camilla's workers have their neat little houses below everyone else, at
the bottom of the valley. It is an orderly, rectangular village and each
house has a small garden. Up the hill above them live the engineers and
above them is the church, then God of course. This is what he knows:
the planning of the town exactly reflects the social and spiritual
hierarchy. The Marques is a conservative man. He fears the progressive
men who want social change.
Further
on in the mountains there are mining zones that suffered from “special
measures” during Franco's dictatorship. Around Pozo Fortuna trade union
activists were assassinated and their bodies were thrown down an old
pit-hole. Our miner speaks about this sadly with his friends and later
falls asleep hoping that the bad times will end.
In the morning, he rises and faces another day.
[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, December 2016.]
