Sub terra by Baldomero Lillo: read free online & download PDF or EPUB

“Los inválidos” (The Disabled) opens the book with Diamante, a horse that after ten years of hauling coal carts underground is brought up into the light, lame and useless, before the old pithead workers; one of them sees in him the image of them all: “¡Pobre viejo, te echan porque ya no sirves! Lo mismo nos pasa a todos” (“Poor old thing, they throw you out because you’re no use any more! The same happens to all of us”). In “La compuerta número 12” (Door Number 12), a miner takes his eight-year-old son Pablo down the pit so the boy can earn his bread opening and closing a ventilation door in the dark.

“El grisú” (Firedamp) follows Mister Davis, the chief engineer, on an inspection in which he cuts the hewers’ pay and humiliates Viento Negro, a quarrelsome youth, in a tunnel where gas is leaking. “El pago” (Payday) tells of payday through Pedro María, a hewer of thirty-five who already looks old, with his family going hungry and the Company store, the only shop in the place, closed to them.

In “El Chiflón del Diablo” (The Devil’s Shaft), Cabeza de Cobre (Copperhead), a lad of barely twenty, takes a place in the most notorious gallery in the mine without telling his mother, who has already lost her husband and two sons there. In “El pozo” (The Well), Remijio and Valentín, friends since childhood, compete for Rosa, and their rivalry explodes while they dig a well beside her family’s vegetable plot.

“Juan Fariña” is the story of a blind man of enormous strength who asks for work as a hewer, digs more coal than anyone and announces: “Cuando yo muera la mina morirá conmigo” (“When I die the mine will die with me”). The book closes outside the mine with “Caza mayor” (Big Game): Palomo, a little old man who lives by hunting partridges, watches the estate steward’s dog snatch the partridges he shoots.

Lillo published Sub terra in 1904, a year after winning a short-story contest with “Juan Fariña”, and nearly all the stories portray the coal mines of Lota, the town where he was born. It is social-realist fiction: the mine is a monster that devours men, horses and children; the Company makes workers buy with tokens at its store, fines them and evicts widows; the bosses despise the miners, and pity never lasts long. In his formative years Lillo had read Émile Zola, who wrote about the French coal mines.

But the book is more than protest: it has an almost visionary sweep, as in Pedro María’s dream, where the coal seam turns out to be “el sudor, la sangre y las lágrimas vertidas por las generaciones de mineros” (“the sweat, blood and tears shed by generations of miners”), or the whirlpool where Juan Fariña reappears. That is why it is still read as a classic in Chile: the Chiflón del Diablo mine in Lota was declared a Historic Monument in 2009, and in 2003 the director Marcelo Ferrari brought several of these stories to the screen in the film Subterra.

Baldomero Lillo was born in Lota, in southern Chile, on 6 January 1867, and died in San Bernardo on 10 September 1923. He grew up in the coal country, where his father worked in the mines, and as an adult moved to Santiago.

He is considered the master of social realism in Chile. Besides Sub terra he published Sub sole (1907), with stories of the countryside and the sea, and much of his work appeared after his death.