Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors

by Piers Paul Read

  4

  Twenty-nine of those who had left in the Fairchild had not returned, and for the families of those twenty-nine the return of the sixteen meant the confirmation of their deaths. It was, moreover, a confirmation of a disturbing nature. The Abals learned of the physical suffering of their son; the Nogueiras faced the mental agony of theirs. Every member of every family confronted the knowledge that their husbands, mothers, and sons were not only dead but might have been eaten.

  It was a bitter admixture to hearts already brimful with sorrow for, however noble and rational the mind may have been in contemplation of this end, there was a primitive and irrepressible horror at the idea that the body of their beloved should have been used in this way. For the most part, however, they mastered this repugnance. The parents showed the same selflessness and courage as their sons had done and rallied around the sixteen survivors. Dr Valeta, the father of Carlos, went with his family to the press conference and afterwards spoke to the newspaper El Pais. ‘I came here with my family,’ he said, ‘because we wanted to see all those who were the friends of my son and because we are sincerely happy to have them back among us. We are glad, what is more, that there were forty-five of them, because this helped at least sixteen to return. I’d like to say, furthermore, that I knew from the very first moment what has been confirmed today. As a doctor I understood at once that no one could have survived in such a place and under such conditions without resort to courageous decisions. Now that I have confirmation of what has happened I repeat: Thank God that the forty-five were there, for sixteen homes have regained their children.’

  The father of Arturo Nogueira wrote a letter to the papers:

  Dear Sirs:

  These few words, written in obedience to what is in our hearts, want to pay tribute, with homage, admiration and recognition, to the sixteen heroes who survived the tragedy of the Andes. Admiration, because this is what we feel before the many proofs of solidarity, faith, courage and serenity which they had to face and which they overcame. Recognition, profound and sincere, because of the care they gave in every moment to our dear son and brother Arturo up to the time of his death many days after the accident. We invite every citizen of our country to spend some minutes in meditation on the immense lesson of solidarity, courage and discipline which has been left to us by these boys in the hope that it will serve us all to overcome our mean egotism and petty ambitions, and our lack of interest for our brothers.

  The mothers showed similar courage. Some saw their dead sons in the survivors, for it was not difficult to understand that if their children had stayed alive and the others had died, the same thing would have happened; and that if all forty-five had survived the accident and avalanche, all forty-five would now be dead. They could imagine, too, the mental and physical anguish suffered by the survivors. All they wished now was that they should forget what they had been through. After all, it was not the sons or brothers or parents of their friends that they had eaten to survive. They had been already in heaven.

  Most of the parents had resigned themselves to the death of their sons soon after the accident. There were some, however, who felt particularly cheated by fate. Estela Pérez had believed quite as firmly as Madelon Rodríguez and Sarah and Rosina Strauch that Marcelo was alive, yet while their faith had been rewarded, hers had not. It was also a mean and bitter twist of fate that Señora Costemalle, whose other son had drowned off the coast of Carrasco and whose husband had died suddenly in Paraguay, should now have lost the last surviving member of her family.

  The parents of Gustavo Nicolich were tormented by the knowledge that their son had lived for two weeks after the accident. They also felt some animosity towards Gerard Croiset, Jr, who, they concluded, had sent them off on a false trail at a time when to continue towards the Tinguiririca and Sosneado mountains might have saved their son’s life.

  It was certainly true that the interpretation that had been put on Croiset’s clairvoyance had misled the parents, but there were many things in what he had said which turned out to be true. He had seen some difficulty with officials over one of the boys’ papers at Carrasco airport; there had been such an incident. He had said that the pilot was not flying the plane, and it was true that Lagurara, not Ferradas, was at the controls. The plane, he had said, lay like a worm with a crushed nose but no wings, and the front door was half open. All this was true. Croiset had also accurately described the manoeuvres which would be necessary for a pilot to see the wreck from the air. He had said that the plane was near a sign reading danger and not far from a village with white, Mexican-style houses. Though nothing of this sort was encountered by Parrado and Canessa on the walk into Chile, a later expedition from Argentina to the site of the accident found in the vicinity a sign reading danger and a small village, Minas de Sominar, with white Mexican houses.

  The landscape around the aircraft as described by Croiset – the three mountains, one without a top, and the lake – was found by the parents, but forty-one miles south of Planchon, whereas the Fairchild had crashed forty-one miles north of Planchon. The plane was not under a mountain, not in or near a lake, nor had the pilot flown towards a lake to make a forced landing. The accident was not due to a blocked carburettor, as Croiset had said, nor was the pilot alone in the cabin, and whether or not he had indigestion could not be known. There were other details given by Croiset, when under pressure from the parents to supply them with more information, that seemed in retrospect to have little relevance to the tragedy, but at least in giving them he had saved some of the mothers from despair.

  The dreams of Señora Valeta had also been extraordinarily accurate, but the only extrasensory perception which events had shown to be completely correct was that of the old water diviner whom Madelon’s mother and Juan José Methol had visited in the impoverished Maroñas district of Montevideo. He had pointed on a map to a spot nineteen miles from the spa of Termas del Flaco, which was exactly where the Fairchild was found to have come down. Remembering this, Juan José Methol went to find the old man and rewarded him with gifts of meat and money, which he in his turn shared with his impoverished neighbours.

  5

  An investigation into the causes of the accident was conducted by the air forces of both Uruguay and Chile. Both blamed the crash on the human error of the pilot, who had begun his descent toward Santiago when still in the middle of the Andes. The actual spot where the plane had crashed was nowhere near Curicó. The mountain on which the boys had spent so many days lay on the Argentine side of the frontier, between the Sosneado and the Tinguiririca volcanoes. The fuselage had lain at about 11,500 feet; the mountain climbed by the expeditionaries was about 13,500 feet high. It was estimated that if the expeditionaries had followed the valley beyond the tail instead of climbing the mountain to the west, they would have come to a road in about three days (though the road which Canessa thought he saw as he climbed the mountain was almost certainly a geological fault). Only five miles to the east of the Fairchild there was a hotel which, though open only in the summer, was stocked with supplies of tinned food.

  The attempt to call help with the plane’s radio, which in all had cost them more than two weeks on the mountain, could never have succeeded. The transmitter required 115 volts AC, normally supplied by an invertor. The current supplied by the batteries was 24 volts DC.

  There was little in the way of a post-mortem. Though some of the parents felt anger toward the Uruguayan Air Force for the incompetence of its pilots, it was not a moment in the political history of Uruguay to take on a branch of the armed forces. On the whole they accepted what had happened as the will of God and were grateful to Him for those who had returned, accepting the elevated view of what had happened which emanated from the survivors themselves.

  Javier Methol, now that he was living at sea level, lost the dopiness which had afflicted him at the high altitude of the mountain. Like his former companions, he too believed that God had permitted them to survive for some purpose, and the first task he un
dertook was to make up to his children, in so far as he could, for the loss of their mother. He went to live with Liliana’s mother and father, who had, as he had known they would, taken care of his children. Reunited with them, Javier was almost content, for though he continued to miss Liliana he knew that she was happy in heaven.

  One evening in Punta del Este, he went walking along the beach with his three-year-old daughter, Marie Noel. She was skipping along at his side, chattering all the time, when suddenly she stopped and looked up at him.

  ‘Papa,’ she said. ‘You came back from heaven, didn’t you? But when is Mama coming back?’

  Javier crouched down to the level of his little daughter and said to her, ‘You must try and understand, Marie Noel, that Mama is so nice, so very nice, that God needs her in heaven. She is so important that now she is living with God.’

  6

  On January 18, 1973, ten members of the Andean Rescue Corps, together with Freddy Bernales of the SAR, Lieutenant Enrique Crosa of the Uruguayan Air Force, and a Catholic priest, Father Ivan Caviedes, were flown in helicopters to the wreck of the Fairchild. There they pitched camp, intending to spend some days on the mountain, and set about gathering up the remains of the dead. They climbed to the top of the mountain to recover those bodies which were there and had now been uncovered by the melting of the snow.

  A spot was found about half a mile from the site of the accident which was sheltered from possible avalanches and had enough earth to make a grave. Here they buried those bodies which were still intact and all the remains of those which were not. A rough stone altar was built beside the grave, and over it was placed an iron cross about three feet high. The cross was painted orange and on one side of it in black was the inscription ‘The World to Its Uruguayan Brothers’, while on the other side were painted the words ‘Nearer, O God, to Thee’.

  After saying mass, Father Caviedes made an address to the men who had assisted at the ceremony. Then the Andinists returned to the hulk of the Fairchild, splashed it with petrol, and set it on fire. The plane burned quickly in the strong wind, and as soon as they were sure that it was properly alight the Chileans prepared to leave. The silence of the mountains had been broken all too frequently by the rumble of avalanches, and they judged it too dangerous to stay.

  Acknowledgments

  In writing this book I was helped by various people – especially by Edward Burlingame of J. B. Lippincott Company, who first suggested that I should write it.

  In Montevideo my researches were aided by two Uruguayan journalists. The first was Antonio Mercader, whose, assistance was suggested to me by the Committee of the Old Christians. He provided me not only with the complex details of the search for the plane undertaken by the parents but also with invaluable material on the background of the survivors. The second journalist was Eugenio Hintz, who gathered material about what was done by the official agencies of the Uruguayan and Chilean governments. I am also indebted to Rafael Ponce de León and Gerard Croiset, Jr, who told me of their roles in the search for the Fairchild; to Pablo Gelsi, who acted as my interpreter; and above all to Dr Gilberto Regules, for his advice and friendship.

  In London I was helped with the transcription of the tapes and the organization of the considerable material I had gathered in Uruguay by Georgiana Luke and later, in further research, by Kate Grimond.

  I was given a free hand in writing this book both by the publisher and the sixteen survivors. At times I was tempted to fictionalize certain parts of the story because this might have added to their dramatic impact, but in the end I decided that the bare facts were sufficient to sustain the narrative. With the exception of the rendering of some speech in dialogue form, nothing in this book departs from the truth as it was told to me by those involved.

  It is to them, finally, that I am most grateful. Everywhere I went in Uruguay I was met by ‘that intimate courtesy and native grace of manner’ which W. H. Hudson encountered in the same country more than a hundred years ago. I found it in the families of those who died, in the families of the survivors, and, above all, in the survivors themselves, who treated me with a most exceptional warmth, candour, and trust.

  When I returned in October 1973 to show them the manuscript of this book, some of the survivors were disappointed by my presentation of their story. They felt that the faith and friendship which inspired them in the cordillera do not emerge from these pages. It was never my intention to underestimate these qualities, but perhaps it would be beyond the skill of any writer to express their own appreciation of what they lived through.

  P.P.R.

  About the Author

  Piers Paul Read, third son of poet and art critic Sir Herbert Read, was born in 1941, raised in North Yorkshire, and educated by Benedictine monks at Ampleforth College. After studying history at Cambridge University, he spent two years in Germany, and on his return to London, worked as a subeditor on the Times Literary Supplement. His first novel, Game in Heaven with Tussy Marx, was published in 1966. His fiction has won the Hawthornden Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Two of his novels, A Married Man and The Free Frenchman, have been adapted for television and a third, Monk Dawson, as a feature film. In 1974, Read wrote his first work of reportage, Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, which has since sold five million copies worldwide. A film of Alive was released in 1993, directed by Frank Marshall and starring Ethan Hawke. His other works of nonfiction include Ablaze, an account of the nuclear accident at Chernobyl; The Templars, a history of the crusading military order; Alec Guinness: The Authorised Biography, and The Dreyfus Affair. Read is a fellow and member of the Council of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the Council of the Society of Authors. He lives in London.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  Copyright © 1974 by Piers Paul Read

  Cover design by Kat JK Lee

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-3912-3

  This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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