Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors

by Piers Paul Read

  A day later Arturo became weaker still and feverish. Pedro Algorta went up onto the hammock to sleep beside him and provide some warmth. They talked together about his family, Inés, the exams they would take together, and the football games they had watched on television. His talk was disconnected, and later he became delirious.

  ‘Look, here comes the milk cart. Here’s the farmer with the milk. Quick, open the door!’ He raved on about the milk cart, then an ice cream cart, then Inés and lunch with his family on a Sunday. He was shivering with a high fever. Suddenly he started up and attempted to climb down onto the bodies of the sleeping boys below. Pedro clung to him, but Arturo screamed that Páez and then Echavarren were trying to kill him. Pedro held him and then hit him so that he fell back into the hammock. Later he took some Librium and Vallium that they had among their medical supplies and fed them to his friend.

  Arturo remained half in a coma, half delirious, throughout the next day, and that night it was so cold that they brought him down from the hammock to sleep on the floor. He was quieter now and he slept in Pedro’s arms. It was in this position that he died. Methol and Zerbino tried to revive him with artificial respiration, but Pedro knew it was no use. He wept, and the next day, before the body was dragged out into the snow, he took the jacket and overcoat which had belonged to Arturo for himself.

  5

  Nogueira’s death came as a shock to them all. It destroyed the thesis that those who had survived the avalanche were destined to live. Escape became more urgent, and the boys became impatient for the expeditionaries to set out, but they were still trapped in the plane for days at a time by the bitterly cold winds and driving snow.

  In the days following the avalanche they had slept in no special order; the first to come in at night could take the warmest places. Later they evolved a stricter system which was designed to be more fair. Daniel Fernández and Pancho Delgado would take the cushions down from the roof where they had been drying in the sun and lay them out on the floor of the cabin. Then, at about five thirty, when the sun had gone behind the mountain and it became suddenly cold, the boys would line up in the order in which they were to sleep. First went Inciarte (but without Páez, who was his sleeping partner); then Fito and Eduardo; then Daniel Fernández and Gustavo Zerbino (unless it was their turn to sleep by the door). After them the order was not so fixed. Canessa would sleep where he liked, and Parrado usually slept with him. Francois and Harley stuck to each other. Javier Methol slept with Mangino, Algorta slept with Turcatti or Delgado, and Sabella with Vizintín. The last of these pairs to go in would be the one whose turn it was to sleep in the coldest place by the door, but last of all came Carlitos, who had been given the job of shutting up the entrance every night in exchange for his place (with Inciarte) in the warmest part of the plane.

  He was their tapiador (wall builder); but his place by the pilots’ cabin involved another duty, which was to empty the plastic mug they used as a chamberpot through a hole in the fuselage. It was a tedious job because the mug was often smaller than the bladder that had need of it and had to be passed back for a second or even a third time, but there was no larger receptacle which was suitable. It was also continuously in demand, because the boys were often confined in the plane for fifteen hours at a time. Most were good enough to urinate before coming in, and would make use of the mug if they felt the need at around nine o’clock when the moon went in and they tried to sleep, but there were some – notably Mangino – who invariably awoke at three or four in the morning and called on Carlitos for the pot. On one occasion this irritated Carlitos so much that he pretended he could not find it and Mangino had to stumble out of the plane into the cold; on another he bartered his services for an extra cigarette.

  At one point they tried to make a second ‘depot’ at the entrance to the plane but found that when the snow melted so did the urine, and it seeped back into the cabin. Nevertheless, it was difficult for those sleeping by the entrance to ask for the pot at night because it meant waking everyone else to have it passed down. Algorta once woke up with this need and felt this inhibition; he therefore decided to piss onto the wall of snow. The next morning, by the light of day, he saw that he had urinated all over someone’s tray of grease. He said nothing.

  The inside of the plane became a mess. It was not just the urine which soiled it but scraps of fat and bone which were left on the floor. After a time a new rule was made that no bones were to be brought into the plane and any fat that was brought in was to be taken out again the same day. All the same, the snow at either end remained filthy, and only the cold prevented an overpowering stench.

  It was difficult to sleep. They were packed so tightly together that, if one moved, everyone else had to move and all the flimsy seat covers came off their bodies. They also suffered from an understandable fear of another avalanche. They could always hear odd sounds outside the plane – either the rumbling of the Tinguiririca volcano or other avalanches elsewhere in the mountains. Stones would break – loose from the mountains and tumble down towards them. One once hit the plane as they were trying to sleep, and Inciarte and Sabella leaped to their feet, thinking it was another avalanche. The rest were always ready to do the same. Methol slept in a sitting position, his head covered by a rugby shirt to warm the air he breathed. Then, as he dropped off, he would loll forward or fall to one side, to the discomfort and annoyance of whoever slept beside him.

  It was this kind of irritation which caused the only quarrels which led to a fight. They all swore at one another for sticking a foot in a face or stealing a blanket, but on only a few occasions did this lead to blows. Canessa and Vizintín were the most uncontrolled in this respect. They were stronger than the others and took advantage of their status as expeditionaries to sleep how and where they liked, though they were careful not to antagonize Parrado, Fernández or the Strauchs. On one occasion Vizintín lay down with one foot in Harley’s face because Harley would not make room. When asked to move it, he would not. Roy then pushed the foot off his face, so Vizintín kicked him. At this Roy became furious and would have attacked Vizintín had not Daniel Fernández intervened. On another occasion Vizintín kicked Turcatti, and Numa, who normally had the sweetest temper, flew into a rage and screamed at him, ‘You dirty brute, for as long as I live I’ll never talk to you again!’ And Inciarte, taking Turcatti’s side, joined in, ‘You son of a whore, get your leg out of the way or I’ll smash your face in!’ Vizintín told them both to go to hell, and once again Fernández intervened and told them all to calm down.

  Inciarte also quarrelled with Canessa, who raised his hand to hit him, but Inciarte said, ‘If you do that, I’ll break your neck’ – brave words for someone who was now among the weakest, but enough to make Canessa think better of what he was about to do. This quarrel, like most of the others, ended as quickly as it had started, with further tears, embraces, and repetition once again of the general view that if they did not stick together they would never get away.

  The bickering, threatening, cursing and complaints were also the only way in which they could release the intense frustration which had built up inside them. If someone knocked against Echavarren’s leg, for example, he would scream out of all proportion to the pain it had caused, thereby giving vent to the nagging agony that he suffered all the time. In the same way it made many of them feel better to shout ‘big balls’ at Vizintín or call Canessa a ‘son of a whore’. What was strange was that some especially Parrado – never quarrelled at all.

  One night Coche Inciarte dreamed that he was sleeping on the floor of his uncle’s house in Buenos Aires. Mangino was sleeping next to him, rubbing up against his infected leg. In the dream Coche began to kick him; he then heard shouting and awoke to find Fito and Carlitos shaking his shoulders and Mangino in tears beside him. His dream had come true – except that he was not in his uncle’s house in Buenos Aires but in the wreck of a Fairchild in the middle of the Andes.

  6

  Before sleeping at night they wo
uld talk together. Several subjects were touched upon, such as rugby, which most of them played, or agronomy, which most of them studied, but somehow they would always end up discussing food. What they lacked in their daily diet they made up for in their imagination, and when each boy had exhausted his own menu, he would prey on that of another. Echavarren, for instance, had a dairy farm and could tell them about cheese, lingering over every detail of its manufacture and describing the taste and texture of each different variety with such passion that many of the others were left wondering why they too were not dairy farmers.

  To draw out the conversation, and dredge everyone’s memory for the smallest scrap, they would categorize. Each boy would have to describe a dish that was cooked at home, – then something he could cook himself. After that came the novia’s speciality, then the most exotic food he had eaten, then his favourite pudding, then a foreign dish, then something that was cooked in the countryside, then the oddest thing he had ever eaten.

  Nogueira, before he died, presented them with cream, meringues, and dulce-de-leche, a thick sweet sauce made with milk and sugar, with a taste between that of condensed milk and caramel cream. Harley, as a winter dish, thought of peanuts and dulce-de-leche coated with chocolate, and, in summer, peanuts and dulce-de-leche ice cream. Algorta had no dish which he could cook himself, but he offered the boys the paella his father sometimes made and his uncle’s gnocchi. Parrado could promise the barenkis cooked by his Ukrainian grandmother; and for those who did not know what they were he described these little pancakes filled with cheese, ham, and mashed potatoes. Vizintín, who always spent the summer by the sea near the Brazilian border, described a bouillabaisse, and Methol told him that when they returned he would get Vizintín to show him how to make it.

  Numa Turcatti was listening to this conversation. ‘Methol,’ he began.

  ‘If you call me Methol I won’t answer you.’

  Numa was formal as well as shy. ‘Javier,’ he said. ‘When you make that bouillabaisse, will you ask me along?’

  ‘I will,’ said Methol, and he smiled, for though Numa had started the sentence with the second person singular, tu, he had retreated in the second half to the more formal usted.

  Methol was their expert on food. The cream bun was by no means his only contribution. He had lived the longest and so eaten the most, and when they started to make a register of all the restaurants they knew in Montevideo, each with its speciality, he was the one who could name the most. Inciarte made the list in a notebook which had belonged to Nicolich, and when the last restaurant with its most obscure speciality (cappelletti alla Caruso) had been entered into it, they numbered ninety-eight.

  Later they had a competition to see who could invent the best menu – including wines – but by then these imaginary feasts had come to cause more suffering than joy. It depressed them when they came out of their gourmandizing dreams to the reality of raw flesh and fat. They were also afraid that all the digestive juices that were released by their fantasies would give them ulcers. They therefore came to a tacit agreement that conversation about food should stop. Only Methol continued.

  Alas, though they might consciously decide to cut food from their minds, they had no control over their dreams. Carlitos dreamed of an orange suspended in the air above him. He reached for it but could not touch it. On another occasion he dreamed that a flying saucer came and hovered over the plane. Stairs were lowered and a stewardess came out. He asked her for a strawberry milkshake but was given only a glass of water with a strawberry floating on the top. He flew off in the flying saucer and landed at Kennedy Airport, New York, where his mother and grandmother were there to meet him. He crossed the lobby and bought a glass of strawberry milkshake but it was empty.

  Roy dreamed that he was in a bakery where biscuits were being shovelled out of the oven. He tried to tell the baker that they were up in the Andes but could not make him understand.

  Their inclination was to think and talk about their families. For this reason Carlitos liked to look at the moon; it consoled him to think that his mother and father would be looking at the same moon in Montevideo. It was one of the disadvantages of his place in the plane that he could not see out of a window, but once, in exchange for the pot, Fito held up a pocket mirror so that Carlitos could see the reflection of his beloved moon.

  Eduardo would talk to Fito about his trip to Europe, or the two double cousins would discuss their families, but often when they did so they would hear the rhythmic sniffing which told them that Daniel Fernández had started to sob beside them. It was too painful to think of home, and to protect their sanity most boys succeeded in excluding such thoughts from their minds.

  There was little else to talk about. Most were deeply interested in Uruguayan politics but were wary, after Nogueira’s outburst, of discussing anything which might inflame conflicting passions. When they heard on the radio, for example, that the Colorado politician Jorge Batlle had been arrested for criticizing the Army, Daniel Fernández – a Blanco – leaped in the air with delight: yet both Canessa and Eduardo had voted for Batlle in the recent presidential election.

  The safest topic of conversation was agriculture, because many were training or already working as farmers and ranchers or else had a farm or ranch in the family. Páez, Francois and Sabella all had properties in the same part of the interior, and Inciarte and Echavarren both ran dairy farms.

  Occasionally Pedro Algorta would feel excluded from the group because he knew nothing of country matters. Seeing this, the farmers would try and draw him in. They planned a Regional Consortium of Agricultural Experimentation in which Pedro was to have charge of the rabbits. They would all live together on some land that Carlitos owned in the Coronilla in adjoining houses designed by Eduardo.

  They all thought a great deal about their Regional Consortium – especially Methol, who, with Parrado, was to run the restaurant. One evening, when they were lying in the plane waiting to go to sleep, Methol leaned across to Daniel Fernández and asked him if he would not mind moving away, as he wanted to ask Zerbino something personal. Fernández did as he was asked – disrupting the whole line of recumbent figures – whereupon Methol whispered in Zerbino’s ear to ask whether he would do the accounts of the restaurant.

  The Regional Consortium was an honest project but the restaurant was its weakness, and soon they talked less about methods for fattening cattle or improving grain and more about plovers’ eggs and sucking-pig that would be served in the restaurant. It was hard to keep off food, too, when they planned the parties they would have with their novias on their return to Uruguay. They did not envisage asking anyone outside their group, and when they thought of their novias, or talked about them, it was always with purity and respect. They had too great a need of God to offend him with salacious thoughts and conversation. Death was too close to risk even the smallest sin. Moreover, all sexual feeling seemed to have left them, due no doubt to the cold and their own debility. Some even became slightly alarmed that their inadequate diet would make them impotent.

  There was therefore no sexual frustration in a physical sense, but there did exist a great emotional need to think of a partner in life. The letters written by Nogueira and Nicolich had been addressed more to their novias than to their parents. Those who still lived and had novias – Daniel Fernández, Coche Inciarte, Pancho Delgado, Rafael Echavarren, Roberto Canessa, Alvaro Mangino – thought of them intensely and with the greatest devotion. Pedro Algorta, as we have seen, had forgotten about the girl who was waiting for him in Santiago and was impatient to get back to Uruguay and find a novia. Zerbino was not engaged, but he talked to the others about a girl he had met, and by general acclaim she became his novia.

  They were not induced by the extremity of their situation to talk at length about the more fundamental philosophical issues of life and death. Inciarte, Zerbino and Algorta – the three most politically progressive among the eighteen who were still alive – once discussed the relationship between religious faith a
nd political responsibility. On another occasion Pedro Algorta and Fito Strauch discussed the existence and nature of God. Pedro was well trained by the Jesuits in Santiago and could explain the philosophic theories of Marx and Teilhard de Chardin. Both he and Fito were sceptics’; neither believed that God was the kind of being who watched over the destiny of each individual. To Pedro, God was the love which existed between two human beings, or a group of human beings. Thus love was all important.

  Carlitos tried to join in this conversation – he had his own notions about God – but Fito and Pedro told him that his mind was too slow to keep up with the argument. Carlitos had his revenge the next day when Pedro swore at someone for kicking his face or stepping on his tray of fat: ‘Oh, but why are you saying such dreadful things, Pedro? I thought love was everything?’

  There was nothing to read but one or two comics. No one played games, sang songs, or told anecdotes any more. There was the odd coarse joke about Fito’s piles, and they laughed when Coche Inciarte stretched up to fetch something from the hat rack and brushed his face against a lifeless hand which had been brought in to stave off hunger in the night. There was an occasional witticism about eating human flesh – ‘When I go to the butcher in Montevideo, I’ll ask to taste it first’ – and the chances of their own death – ‘How would I look in a piece of ice?’ They also invented words or changed the ending of words – especially Carlitos and evolved phrases and slogans either to rally their morale or to express a stark truth which they could not bring themselves to express more clearly. ‘The loser stays’ was the nearest they came to saying that the weak would die. ‘A man never dies who fights,’ they would say, or ‘We’ve beaten the cold,’ and over and over again they would repeat the only fact they knew to be true: ‘To the west is Chile.’