by Héctor Tobar
“Well, no,” Yonni says. “Because here at 400 the rock is cut like a pane of glass. There’s nothing to grab on to. It’s impossible to climb any farther.”
To this Víctor gives a look of mock surprise: “What kind of a huevón are you?” he asks. “We’re going to climb up to 400 just to die there?” And then he bursts out laughing, and the laughter spreads to Mario Sepúlveda, who repeats “¿Sois huevón?” and he laughs, too, and suddenly everyone is laughing at Yonni.
Yonni Barrios, the man with two tough women in his life, doesn’t care that his brother miners are mocking him. He likes seeing them laugh, because at night, when his friends are asleep or trying to sleep, they look sad and vulnerable. Yonni sees the hand of one of his colleagues flutter, and watches as a tremor runs through another’s torso. He knows a bit about the lives of those trembling men, and it’s obvious to him that they’re going through alcohol withdrawal. They’ve been able to satisfy their nicotine urges by scrounging cigarette butts from the trash, drying the tobacco, and rolling it up in paper, but there’s no loose liquor lying around for them to sip at and calm their nerves. Such a painful thing, to see strong men reduced to a defenseless state by the absence of their fermented and distilled daily medicines. Alcohol withdrawal symptoms usually start within ten hours of the last drink, and get worse in the first forty-eight to seventy-two hours. The other symptoms include irritability and depression, but of course, there’s already a lot of that going around, with most of the irritability focused on Luis Urzúa, who conveniently isn’t around to hear his underlings complain about him. “He’s not worth anything,” they say. “Thanks to him we’re stuck down here!”
Several of the men have extra cookies hidden from their raid on the supplies the first day. They sometimes sneak away to eat them, a secret they keep from all but a few men. On that first day trapped, after Mario Sepúlveda had led the inventory of the remaining food, Ariel Ticona grabbed the cartons of spoiled milk that were tossed in the trash. It was curdled but he drank it all and it never made him sick and he can even joke with the other guys: “I’m going to last longer than all you guys thanks to that milk.”
In the Refuge there’s lots of time to joke around, but also to slip into a private reflection. “There is a great sense of powerlessness”—la impotencia es muy grande—Víctor Segovia writes in the diary he’s started to keep. “We don’t know if they’re trying to rescue us, or what’s going on outside, because here inside we don’t hear any machines working or anything.” Víctor is the operator of a jumbo lifter and a member of an old Copiapó family, who during his forty-eight years of life has never traveled outside the Atacama region—the town of Caldera, forty-five miles away, is the end of his known world. He got kicked out of school in the fifth grade for fighting but can write fairly well, and he begins his diary with a note to his five daughters that suggests he thinks of these written words as a message that might reach them after the stone walls around him become his tomb. Before August 5, when the San José was still a working mine, he brought a pen and graph paper in to copy down information from the gauges on the lifter, and also the duplicate forms he has to fill out when he operates it. Now he uses these materials to leave a record of what is happening to him and the men of the A shift. He begins by writing an account of the day before the collapse, when he spent an entire afternoon and evening on a beer-drinking binge with his cousin Pablo “the Cat” Rojas (who is also now trapped in the mine), the two of them mourning the death of Pablo’s father and reminiscing about the games they played as kids in the Copiapó River when a bit of water still ran through it, with Víctor getting quite drunk and then stopping to eat four hot dogs on the stumbling journey home. He expected to be too hungover to make it to the mine the following morning, and had even decided to keep his bedside alarm off, but for some reason he had woken up at exactly the time he needed to, and he’d made it to work feeling no hangover at all.
In his new diary he recounts how the chief of mine operations, Carlos Pinilla, drove past a group of workers in a truck just after the mine gave off a loud explosion at 11:30 a.m., ignoring their final, pleading questions about the mine’s safety. He describes the horror of the collapse itself, how the walls of the Ramp seemed to squeeze in on him. Víctor signs his name at the end of this first diary entry and tries to sleep, the stone walls and the ceiling around them trembling with the sound of distant thunderclaps. Each explosion carries the possibility that it will be the prelude to another collapse, and perhaps even a final one that will swallow up the Refuge and the steel door and net that protect the men inside.
On the morning of the third day in the mine, Víctor begins his diary entry at 3:30 a.m. by listing the names of his daughters. “Girls, sadly destiny only allowed me to be with you until the fourth of August … I am weak, and very hungry. I’m suffocating … it feels like I’m going to go crazy.”
When the mine is quiet, some of the men put their ears to the stone walls, because after all the talk of drillers coming for them, listening for the sound of their rescuers becomes an obsession. “Do you hear it?” one miner might say. “I think I can hear something! Do you hear it?” Víctor Zamora says that yes, he can hear it. “I was lying,” he says later. “I couldn’t hear anything.” But he feels responsible for keeping up the men’s spirits, so he repeats: “It’s really faint, but yes, I think I hear it. They’re coming for us.”
Yonni Barrios places his ear to the stone. “It was like listening to the inside of a seashell,” he will say later. You hear nothing and you hear everything, you can imagine an ocean roiling inside that shell, and then you take away your ear and realize it’s all an illusion.
* * *
The camps into which the men are divided are becoming more defined. One of the mechanics sleeping by Level 105 calls the naysayers in the Refuge “the Clan.” Mario Sepúlveda is one of the few men to move back and forth between both groups. He keeps frenetically busy, talking in that upbeat, squeaky voice of his. In the Refuge, his foulmouthed soliloquies are lifting up the spirits of Carlos Mamani, Jimmy Sánchez, Edison Peña, and many others. But he has vertiginous mood swings: After being funny and inspiring to his fellow miners one moment, he’ll be suddenly angry and itching for a fight the next; or sullen and quiet, lost in thought. Sitting outside the Refuge, Yonni Barrios sees Sepúlveda slip into a kind of manic, angry hopelessness. He is pacing. “He was always a little anxious. And I was watching him walk up and down the Ramp, when all of a sudden he stopped. He yelled, very loudly. ‘I want to pray!’” The prone and sitting men around him are startled. “¡Yo quiero orar!” A few look at him as one might regard a possessed street-corner seer.
“I’m angry,” Sepúlveda shouts. “I feel powerless.” Impotente. By now the men are soaking wet and more have begun to shed their shirts, but Sepúlveda, the man with the heart of a dog, looks sweatier, grimier, and more desperate than all the others. He’s tried to climb up one of the chimneys, after all, and has been working to move rocks and send messages. One miner will describe him as looking at this moment “like a commando,” as if covered in face and body paint for battle in the jungle. Mario falls to his knees. “Those who want to pray, come and join me,” he says. Yonni looks at him and thinks: We aren’t going to get out. Perri knows this. And he wants to get good with God. He thinks we have to talk to God and ask him to forgive us.
Sepúlveda will remember later: “I was angry at the mine owners, because they were responsible for our safety. I was angry because it wasn’t fair. I’d had such a hard life already and now this was happening to me.” He is going to die, slowly suffocated and starved to death, two thousand feet underground, in a dry corner of Chile far from home, forever absent from the lives of the people who need him most.
The truth is, he’d been thinking about praying a few hours earlier, during a private talk with José Henríquez, a tall, balding man from the south who is a devout Evangelical. Mario is a Jehovah’s Witness, which makes them both part of a non-Catholic minori
ty inside the mine. They’ve talked before the collapse about religion, because Mario once thought he felt a ghost pass through his body at the site where the engineer Manuel Villagrán was killed. After the accident on August 5, when it was clear they were trapped, José whispered into Mario’s ear: “God is the only way out of this.” Now Mario has issued his angry call to prayer, and with all the surprised and amused miners around and inside the Refuge still staring at him, he turns to José and says: “Don José, we know you are a Christian man, and we need you to lead us in prayer. Will you?”
From this moment forward Henríquez will be known as “the Pastor” to his fellow miners because as soon as he opens his mouth and begins to talk it’s clear that he knows how to speak of God and to God. Henríquez is fifty-four years old, and he’s been in mining since the 1970s. He’s survived five mining accidents, including two in southern Chile that wiped out most of the men in his shift. In one of those accidents, walls of seemingly immovable, ancient rock exploded spontaneously; and in another the silent killer carbon monoxide knocked him out and nearly ended his life. This proof of his vulnerability and mortality before fate and geology has helped send him deeper into his Christian faith, and he’s a loyal member of his church in Talca in southern Chile.
“We have a certain way of praying,” Henríquez says. “And if you want to pray the way we do, fine. If not, you can have someone else do it.”
“Don José, let’s do it the way you know how,” Sepúlveda says.
Henríquez drops to his knees and tells the men they should also do so, because when you pray you have to humble yourself before your Creator.
“We aren’t the best men, but Lord, have pity on us,” Henríquez begins. It’s a simple statement, but it strikes several of the men hard. “No somos los mejores hombres.” We aren’t the best men. Víctor Segovia knows he drinks too much. Víctor Zamora is too quick to anger. Pedro Cortez thinks about the poor father he’s been to his young daughter: He left the girl’s mother, and he hasn’t even done the basic fatherly thing of visiting his little girl, even though he knows his absence is inflicting a lasting hurt on her.
“Jesus Christ, our Lord, let us enter the sacred throne of your grace,” Henríquez continues. “Consider this moment of difficulty of ours. We are sinners and we need you.” Just about everyone who was at the entrance to the Refuge or inside is on his knees, and they are looking pious and small before God, and small before Henríquez, who is a tall man, by the standards of both Chileans and miners. He is a man of God, and suddenly here, in this tomb, the religious severity that many of them found annoying during the everyday encounters of the A shift is exactly what they need.
“We want you to make us stronger and help us in this hour of need,” Henríquez says. “There’s nothing we can humanly do without your help. We need you to take charge of this situation. Please, Lord. Take charge of this.”
The men kneel and pray, silently. In his unspoken thoughts, Sepúlveda recites a rambling and desperate version of the Our Father, “because that’s how I learned to pray when I was a kid.”
“Our Father who art in heaven … Lord Jesus Christ, you who are the son of our Father Creator, I thank you for all the blessings, for life, for health … I ask today that you protect our families, because they don’t know what’s happening here. And give us much strength [fuerza] and fortitude [fortaleza] to keep going, because we have to get out of here.” He thinks about the cookies that are their chief remaining source of sustenance and says: “I don’t know how, but find a way to feed us.” Around him, Sepúlveda sees the sweating and unshaven men of the A shift, men of different faiths, joined together in poses of penitence and desperation, some with their eyes closed, others with their eyes open, praying, whispering, crossing themselves. He sees men who are still in their overalls, and men who have shed them; men who are crying, and men who look perplexed, as if they can’t quite believe they could find themselves on their knees in this cavern, begging God to rescue them.
The Pastor speaks again to say the men are being tested, because they lived their lives in sin. That’s why they have to get on their knees, they have to literally throw themselves on the floor (tirarnos al piso) and humble themselves before God. We have to recognize that we’re nothing, the Pastor says. In the surface world, when they returned from the mine and showered and entered their homes, they were princes, kings, spoiled sons, well-fed fathers, Romeos. They believed their private worlds of home and family spun thanks to their labor, and that as workingmen and breadwinners they had every right to expect their world to revolve around their needs. Now the heart of the mountain has collapsed on top of them, and they are trapped by a block of stone, an object whose newness and perfection suggest, to some, a divine judgment. We have sinned, the Pastor says, and so the men speak to expiate their various sins. Our Father, who art in heaven, forgive me for the violence of my voice before my wife and children, says one. Forgive me for abusing the temple of my body with drugs, says another. When you’re a boy in Chile, that’s how you’re taught to pray, to speak to God in the first person. The men ask to be forgiven for the moments when they betrayed the women who loved them, for their jealousies and their uncontrolled desires. They ask God to guide their rescuers to the tiny room and the passageway where they are waiting, ready to accept salvation and to begin new lives as better men.
The prayer becomes a daily ritual. They gather each day just before they eat, at around noon, for a brief sermon from Henríquez, and then later from others, including Osman Araya, a man who converted to Evangelical Christianity after a tumultuous young adulthood. The prayers and the meals are the one time each day all thirty-three of them unite. Soon, each prayer meeting will include a self-criticism session at which the men apologize to one another for their transgressions, big and small. I’m sorry I raised my voice. I’m sorry I didn’t help get the water. With each passing day there are fewer headlamps illuminating their prayer and apology sessions, and those still working have a light that’s a little dimmer. This is frightening, to have each new prayer take you a little deeper into what may be a final and unending darkness. A little later, Juan Illanes removes the paper clip–size bulb from the headlight of one of the vehicles, and uses some strands of telephone wire to connect it to a battery he’s removed from one of the nineteen vehicles trapped with them. From then on, a weak, gray light hovers over the praying miners. To Yonni Barrios, in that light, they all seem to grow taller. He knows it’s an illusion of light and shadow, but there’s something magical about the way they look under that small bulb, standing or kneeling, listening to the word of God.
* * *
When Víctor Segovia begins to write again, it’s to say he cried during the prayers led by José Henríquez. He addresses his daughters. “I deeply feel the pain I am causing you,” Víctor writes. “I would give everything to soothe your pain, but it’s not in my hands.” He’s absorbed the ideas of the Pastor’s sermon, of his own smallness before the mountain and God’s judgment. In the course of a single day of writing in his diary he reflects on his life—“Now I understand how wrong I was to drink so much”—and he gets closer to accepting the idea that he’s going to die in the San José Mine. “Never in my life did I think I would die in such a manner,” he writes. Just days earlier he’d been at home surrounded by the things that made him feel good: his music, his friends from the mine, gathered for a party at his home. “I don’t know if I deserve this or not, but it is very cruel.” He begins to say goodbye, to his daughters, his parents, his grandchildren, promising: “I love you and will look after you wherever I am.” A few hours later he writes: “I feel guilty for causing you this pain. I should never have been in this mine knowing the shape it was in.” He begins to give his daughter Maritza instructions for settling his affairs and begs her to help his mother with her debts. Maybe someone will find their bodies, eventually, and take this note to Maritza, and if that happens Víctor will have cared for his family, in some small way, from beyond the grave.
* * *
Someone says that if you heat up food it has more calories and more nourishment. So on the third day they’re trapped the miners decide to cook a batch of soup and have a kind of picnic inside the mine, by the place where the mechanics used to work and the air circulates a bit. They manage to get all of the men out of the Refuge for the walk uphill to that place, on Level 135.
In the middle of a gray pile of stones, they make a fire that’s about as big as two cupped hands. They remove the cover from the air filter on one of the big machines, turn it upside down, and make that their pot. José Henríquez has a cell phone he brought into the mine and realizes he can use it to record this event—but he doesn’t know how to operate the camera, so he gives it to Claudio Acuña. Mario Sepúlveda becomes the main narrator of the video, speaking to Acuña and the camera with a voice that suggests he believes outsiders will find this recording one day. “Tuna with peas!” he announces. “Eight liters of water, one can of tuna, some peas. A little tiny fire here. So that we can survive this situation!” Around Sepúlveda, men move about with yellow and red helmets on, most of them shirtless, and a few are sitting on the pile of rocks by the fire, a dancing ball of orange light near the center of the dark frame of the video. Sometimes Acuña turns the camera and captures the lamp of one of the vehicles, but mostly the image is of a black space that’s filled up with Sepúlveda’s voice. “And we’re going to show that we are Chileans of the heart. And we’re going to have a delicious soup today,” he says. Acuña turns off the cell-phone camera to save the battery, and a few minutes later he turns it back on to record Sepúlveda serving his completed soup to each man, using a metal cup that clanks against the bottom of the air-filter pot. He pours the hot liquid into plastic cups to several different men, and the water is murky colored.
