Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors

by Piers Paul Read

  Pancho Delgado, on the other hand, though no more of a parasite than Inciarte, did not have the advantage of Inciarte’s candid personality or his long-standing friendship with Fito Strauch. He was a boy of considerable eloquence and charm and had hitherto done well in life by the use of these talents. The Sartoris, for example, who had once been so opposed to his engagement to their daughter, had been won over by the bunches of flowers and the presents that he always brought when he came to call.

  There were no flowers on the mountain, and charm and eloquence were not the qualities looked for in extreme conditions. Indeed, the eloquence that Delgado had shown now counted against him. The little mob did not forgive him his facile optimism. He was one of the oldest and should have known better than to raise their hopes without good cause. Thus, when he told them that he could not work because of his leg, some would not believe him and dismissed him as a malingerer.

  It was a dangerous mood. A group in stress looks for a scapegoat, and Delgado was a likely candidate. His only friend from before was Numa Turcatti, who was too noble to know what was going on. All the others who did not pull their weight were somehow protected: Methol by his condition; Mangino, Sabella, Harley and Francois by their youth; Inciarte by his good nature. Moreover, Inciarte did not pretend to be anything but what he was, whereas Delgado already had a lawyer’s mind. He played life as if it were poker but did not realize that at that moment he had a weak hand. It was weak because he was hungry and he, almost alone among the nineteen, could neither pilfer himself nor count on friends and protectors to pilfer for him. It was a situation which was to become worse.

  The effects of the trial expedition on Roy Harley and Carlitos Páez were contrary to what might have been expected. Roy, whose performance had been better than that of Carlitos, went into a decline. His rejection as an expeditionary led him to feel that he had disappointed his companions, and this, following so quickly on the death of his friend Nicolich, was as crippling to his mind as a broken bone would have been to his body. He became fragile, weeping if anyone spoke sharply to him and speaking in a high-pitched whine like a petulant child. He was lazy and selfish and could only be induced to do anything at all by oaths and abuse.

  Carlitos, on the other hand, went the other way. The spoiled sissy and self-confessed coward became increasingly hardworking and responsible. He not only helped cut the meat but took on the duties of closing the entrance at night.

  He had adverse qualities. He was bossy and quarrelsome and pilfered more than anyone else, yet his novel personality made a unique contribution to the morale of the group. Although the youngest, he was thick-set, with a gruff voice like some giant teddy bear. His thinking was naïve, his pronouncements pompous, and his behaviour often irresponsible – he would lose lighters and knives in the snow – yet up on the mountain, as in Montevideo, the mere thought of Carlitos brought a smile to the lips. He made them smile not so much because his jokes were funny but because of the comic effect of his whole personality. It was an important talent to possess, for there was little else to amuse them.

  Carlitos Páez belonged to the second echelon of power. With Algorta and Zerbino, he acted as an auxiliary to the Strauch cousins. These three were the non-commissioned officers who received orders from those above and gave them to those below. Gustavo Zerbino, in particular, tended to flatter the older boys and bully the younger, though he was himself, at nineteen, one of the youngest in the group. He was affectionate but tense. Like Canessa, he became easily overexcited and would fly into hysterical rage if, for instance, someone took his place in the plane opposite Daniel Fernández. It was to Fernández that he particularly attached himself. If Fernández asked for one of his pairs of trousers, he would give them to him; if Vizintín, an expeditionary, did the same, Zerbino would say, ‘Go to hell, you dirty brute. Find a pair for yourself.’

  With Fernández, Zerbino made himself responsible for collecting and guarding all the money and documents of those who had died. He also took it upon himself to investigate any misdemeanours, such as moving in the night. For this, he was sometimes called ‘the detective’. Before the accident, his nickname had been Ears, but this was changed to Caruso when it emerged during a conversation about food that Zerbino had never eaten cappelletti alla Caruso (a kind of ravioli with a sauce named after the singer Caruso) and did not even know what they were. His warm, simple nature made him easy to tease. Sometimes the boys would laugh at him because, in the late evening or early morning, he could not tell whether the sun was the moon or the moon the sun. He was also consistently pessimistic. If Fito sent him out to see what the weather was like, he would always return and say, ‘It’s bitterly cold and there’s a blizzard just getting under way.’

  Then Fito would turn to Carlitos and say, ‘You go and have a look.’ And Carlitos, who was an optimist, would return and report, ‘There’s a little snow but it won’t last long. In half an hour we’ll have a clear blue sky.’

  Pedro Algorta was an unlikely hero. Following the criteria which brought down the spirit of some of the others, he should have been the first to go. Though he had started his schooling with the others at the Stella Maris College, he had continued it in Santiago and Buenos Aires (because of his father’s work) and so knew few of the nineteen. Of his two friends, one, Felipe Maquirriain, was dead and the other, Arturo Nogueira, crippled and morose inside the plane.

  There were several qualities which might have separated Algorta from the rest. He was shy, introspective, and a socialist, while they were boisterous, extroverted and conservative. In Uruguay he had worked for the Frente Amplio, a kind of Popular Front which had presented itself to the electorate for the first time in the recent presidential election. Daniel Fernández and Fito Strauch, on the other hand, both belonged to the University National Movement (MUN), which supported Wilson Ferreira (a liberal Blanco); Eduardo Strauch supported Jorge Batlle (a liberal Colorado); while Carlitos Páez had voted for the reactionary Blanco General Aguerrondo.

  Another disadvantage for Algorta was his amnesia. He still could not remember what had happened in the days preceding the accident. He once ran around the plane with joy when Inciarte told him that an Argentinian team had won the football championships. It was quite untrue. More seriously, Algorta had entirely forgotten that his interest in going to Chile had been not just the cheap economics textbooks, or a first-hand study of South American socialism, but a girl whom he had met when he lived in Santiago. He had thought then that he loved her, but they had not met for a year and a half, and the letters they had exchanged had not been enough to sustain their feelings at the pitch he desired. His aim, then, had been to settle their relationship one way or the other, but now he had forgotten that it existed at all. Indeed, one of the reasons he wanted to get back to Montevideo was to find himself a girl friend.

  His mind was sufficiently alert for him to realize that he must work to survive, and his efforts gained the approbation of the cousins, especially Fito. He continued to feel slightly excluded, however, chiefly because he could not join in the conversation, which was so often about agriculture – but not so much as to develop a serious sense of isolation.

  The three who were the government of this little community, Eduardo and Fito Strauch and Daniel Fernández, were not as individuals so different from the others. They dominated the group by virtue of the strength they brought to one another.

  Daniel Fernández, for instance, was the oldest of the survivors, after Methol, and was conscious of the responsibility this placed on him. He was mature even for his age (he was twenty-six years old) and worked hard at keeping the cabin tidy, collecting the documents, and controlling the distribution of lighters and knives. He massaged Bobby Francois’s frozen feet (for which Bobby promised to be his slave when they returned to Montevideo) and warned Canessa not to operate on Coche’s infected leg. Though temperamentally shy, Daniel liked to talk and tell stories. He was calm, responsible and fair. Indeed, the only qualities he lacked were physical streng
th and an assertive personality.

  Eduardo Strauch, although nicknamed ‘the German’, was in most ways less German than his two cousins. In appearance he took after his mother, an Urioste, having a smaller frame than Fito. His demeanour was attractive and his manner personable. He was the most urbane of the nineteen – perhaps because he had travelled in Europe – and had the most open mind. In general he was calm, but he was capable of passionate anger. He was inclined to be bossy, especially with Páez, but like Fito he was kind to the younger, more irritating boys, such as Mangino and Francois.

  Fito Strauch was more temperamental than Eduardo, but he inspired more confidence in the group. When they considered their predicament, his thinking was always the most positive, his judgment the most sound. He also had to his credit the invention of the sunglasses, which they needed to protect their eyes from the snow. Taking the sun visors, which were made of shaded plastic, from the pilot’s cabin, he cut out two small circles and sewed them into plastic surrounds which had been cut from the cover of a folder containing the flight plan.

  Fito was not free from failings. Like Daniel Fernández he was irritated by Mangino. He also quarrelled with Eduardo as they settled down to sleep, and once he became so incensed at Algorta for lolling over onto him at night that he leaped to his feet and screamed at him, ‘You’re killing me, you’re killing me!’

  Algorta just opened his eyes and said, ‘Oh, Fito, how can you?’ and then went back to sleep.

  4

  The system which was evolved worked well. As in the Constitution of the United States, there were checks and balances. The Strauch cousins with their auxiliaries limited the power of the expeditionaries, and the expeditionaries limited the power of the Strauchs. Both groups respected one another, and both acted with the tacit consent of all nineteen.

  There were two among them who could play no part in the group because of the injuries they had suffered at the time of the accident. These were Rafael Echavarren and Arturo Nogueira. They both slept on the hammock that had been made by Canessa and rarely left the plane. It hurt them too much to walk, and to drag themselves out into the snow took almost more strength than was left in their limbs.

  The two were quite different in background and temperament. Nogueira at twenty-one was a left-wing student of economics; Echavarren at twenty-two, a conservative dairy farmer. Their values were divergent and not likely to be reconciled on their bed of suffering, for at night the slightest inadvertent movement by one would cause great pain to the other.

  Echavarren, a Basque in origin, had an open and courageous nature. The condition of his leg was appalling. The calf muscle which had been torn away from the leg had been pushed back into place, but the wound had become septic. Worse still, he was unable to move his leg or wriggle his feet at night, so the toes first went purple and then black as they were attacked by frostbite. During the day he would ask others to try and restore the circulation. ‘Patroncito,’ he would say to Daniel Fernández, ‘give my legs a massage, would you? They’re so numb that I can’t feel them any more.’ And when Daniel had completed this task, Rafael would say, ‘I promise you, Fernández, that if I get out of this I’ll give you all the cheese you want for the rest of your life.’

  He was utterly determined to escape. Every morning he would say to himself, ‘I am Rafael Echavarren and I swear I shall return,’ and when someone suggested that he write a letter to his parents or his novia he replied, ‘No, I’ll tell them all about it when I get back.’ This faith made him popular with the other boys, as did his openness and honesty. When people knocked against his leg he would curse them and then, a minute or two later, apologize. He made them laugh, too, by eating an empty sweet box, and he entertained them by describing how he made cheese on his dairy farm.

  His condition got worse. His leg became heavy with pus, and the black skin of gangrenous flesh spread from his toes to his foot. One morning, in a voice as emphatic and optimistic as ever, he asked for the attention of the whole group and told them that he was going to die. They protested, but he was firm. He told them, he said, because he wanted those who survived to convey his last wishes to his family, which were that his motorcycle should go to his steward and his jeep to his novia. The boys protested again, and the next day this sense of doom had left him and he returned to being among the most optimistic.

  Arturo Nogueira was in better physical condition than Echavarren, but his mental state was the worst of all. Even before the accident he had been a brittle, difficult person, closed and silent even in his own family. The only person who had been able to draw him out of this introversion had been his novia, Inés Lombardero. She herself had suffered greatly in life – one of her brothers had been drowned with two other boys when their canoe had capsized off the coast at Carrasco. Her solace was Arturo; he would kiss her openly in the street.

  His only other passion was politics. His strong sense of justice made him a militant idealist – sometimes socialist, sometimes anarchist. He had more or less abandoned the Church of Rome in favour of Utopia. Like Zerbino, he had worked in the slums of Montevideo at the behest of the Jesuits, but now he believed in more sweeping solutions to the problems of poverty and oppression.

  In the plane he lay alone, his wide green eyes staring out of his emaciated face, a small beard on his chin. There was a time when he had shown some interest in their plight – above all in their precise position in the Andes – and had taken upon himself the role of cartographer, but as the days passed his faith diminished and the maps were put aside. He remembered that he had had a premonition as a child that he would die at the age of twenty-one. He told Parrado that he knew he was going to die.

  Worse than this despair was his isolation within the group. He was barbed and moody with the others, and no one, in those conditions, took the trouble to penetrate his unfriendly exterior. Pedro Algorta was his only close friend, but Pedro himself was in danger of isolation and in no position to integrate Arturo against his will.

  His antagonism towards the others was largely political. He and Echavarren quarrelled ostensibly over blankets and the position of their feet, but it was the underlying divergence in their views that made their quarrels so acrimonious. There was also an occasion when Páez was entertaining the others with stories of his father. He told them how Páez Vilaró had been to Africa with Gunther Sachs and how Gunther Sachs and Brigitte Bardot had been to stay with them at Punta Ballena.

  ‘Hey, Arturo, what do you think about all this?’ Canessa asked.

  ‘I’m not interested. I’m a socialist,’ said Arturo.

  ‘You’re not a socialist, you’re a fool,’ said Canessa. ‘Stop trying to seem so hard-boiled.’

  ‘You’re all oligarchs and reactionaries,’ said Arturo bitterly. ‘And I don’t want to live in a Uruguay imbued with the kind of materialistic values that you represent … especially you, Páez.’

  ‘I’m not going to listen to him,’ said Carlitos.

  ‘You may be a socialist,’ Inciarte said, stuttering with indignation, ‘but you’re also a human being, and that’s what counts up here.’

  ‘Ignore them,’ Algorta said to Nogueira. ‘It’s all so unimportant.’

  Nogueira lapsed into silence, and later he told Páez that he regretted what he had said.

  During the day, even when the sun was shining, Nogueira would remain in the plane. He would catch water which dripped through a hole in the roof, or Algorta, Canessa and Zerbino would bring him water from outside. They would talk to him about his family and try and persuade him to go outside the plane, because some of them suspected that the injuries to his legs were imaginary, but all that these friends did to raise his spirits was to no avail.

  It was cold, dark and wet in the plane. Those who remained inside breathed only its dank air. Nogueira became weaker, and it was only after a week that it was realized that he had not been eating his ration of meat. After that Algorta took it in to him and would place the small pieces of flesh into his mouth �
�� wet from the saliva which dribbled out of it.

  Parrado and Fito Strauch had at last realized that Nogueira’s isolation would kill him. Parrado came in to talk to him. ‘Do you want to stay here?’ he asked him – ‘stay here’ was the euphemism they used for death.

  ‘I know I will,’ Arturo replied.

  ‘You won’t,’ said Parrado. ‘I’ll get you out of here for Inés birthday. You’ll see.’

  One night, as they were settling down to sleep, Arturo asked if he could lead the rosary. They agreed that he should, and Páez handed him his beads. Arturo then spoke his intentions, praying to God for their families, their country, their companions who were dead and those who were there. He spoke with such feeling in his voice that the other eighteen – some of whom thought of the rosary as another way of counting sheep – were struck with a new respect and affection for him. When he had finished the five decades they were all silent; only Arturo himself could be heard weeping silently on the hammock. Pedro looked up at him and asked him why he was crying. ‘Because I am so close to God,’ Arturo replied.

  He had among his belongings the list of clothes he had made before packing his suitcase. He took this and wrote on the other side, in a hand much weaker than before, a letter to his parents and his novia.

  In situations such as this, even reason cannot understand the infinite and absolute power of God over men. I have never suffered as I do now – physically and morally – though I have never believed in Him so much. Physically this is torture – day by day, night by night – with a broken leg and swollen ankle, and the ankle of the other leg equally swollen. Morally and physically because of your absence and my longing to see you.… and embrace you in the same way as my beloved Mama and Papa, to whom I want to say that I was wrong in the way I behaved towards them.… Strength. Life is hard but it is worth living. Even suffering. Courage.