by Héctor Tobar
* * *
On a table in the Refuge, some of the men play checkers, from a set made with pieces of cardboard. Later, Luis Urzúa, concerned about the men in the Refuge beginning to wallow and snap at one another, makes a set of dominoes by pulling apart and cutting up the white plastic frame of the reflective traffic-hazard triangle in his truck. Higher up the Ramp, at Level 105, where the mechanics and Luis himself sleep, Juan Illanes is working hard to keep up the morale of the viejos. He tells them stories. Illanes has a deep baritone voice, and the clear, confident enunciation of a television anchor, and he’s articulate, educated, and has traveled widely enough in Chile that he has many interesting things to say.
Mostly, Illanes, on the sixth, seventh, and eighth days of their involuntary fast, talks about food. “Have you ever seen a lamb being cooked? On a spit, over a fire?” he asks the men grouped around him, sitting on their makeshift “beds” of cardboard and canvas scraps over on the Ramp by Luis Urzúa’s pickup. Several of the men say yes, they have seen a lamb on a spit. “Ah, but what about six being cooked all at once?” It might seem torture to speak of food to men who don’t have any, but no one tells Illanes to stop as he continues with his cheerful description of how it was he came to attend such a banquet. “I was on the pampa. By Puerto Natales,” he tells the miners. He was in the army during the near-war with Argentina in 1978. “I was out there, with fifty reservists, about twelve hundred meters, no, make that eight hundred meters from the border.” It was Christmastime, a season of traditional feasts, and “all we had to eat was army food,” the tasteless provisions doled out to men on the front. One of the soldiers, a local boy, said: “This isn’t the way we do Christmas down here. We make big meals.” At that point, another soldier spotted some horses nearby. “They were Argentine horses: big heads, all mangy, truly ugly animals,” Illanes recounts with a chuckle. “I can do a little business with these,” said the local soldier, who had the look of a gaucho, and he disappeared into the night leading several away.
“The next morning, we wake up, and there are twelve lambs on two poles, all skinned and cleaned and perfect,” Illanes tells his fellow miners, several of whom are now grinning. Six lambs each on a pair of long metal rods hanging between posts. “So we all go to get firewood,” scrambling around the treeless pampa in search of bits of scrub branches, he says. “Pretty soon, we had a nice little bonfire, a real tower of embers going. Chiquillos, it was beautiful.” Illanes hears little sighs of comfort from some of the miners around him, who are no doubt imagining the sound of meat and fat crackling over a fire, but he’s not finished yet. Because then, he continues, one of the gaucho soldiers showed up with a bag, and passed out a bit of golden tobacco to each soldier, and a piece of paper, and they each rolled a cigarette in the peasant style. “In short, chiquillos, it was a Christmas to remember.”
Illanes recounts the story with such detail that it must be true, and in the dim light, and in his slow telling, the miners around him feel as if they’ve been listening to an old radio show. He tells them another military story from the south, of riding across the Chilean pampa on horseback, and his encounter with a fungus known as the dihueñe. To the northerners from drier climes who’ve never seen these delicacies, he describes them: “They’re mushrooms that grow on the branches of trees, and especially roble trees when they’re young.” They’re orange and honeycombed, the size of a walnut, with a sweet, clear liquid inside. “So there I am horseback riding, when I come upon this shrub that’s not six feet high. And its branches are all covered, top to bottom, with dihueñes. You can’t even see the branch they’re attached to, there are so many. And each one is the size of an apple.”
“No!”
“Liar!”
“It’s true. As big as apples, and riquísimas, too. And viejos, let me tell you: I ate those. And I ate, and ate and ate. And since they’re so spongy and light, you never feel like you’re getting full.”
Illanes finishes his story and none of the men have asked him to stop talking about food. “When you’re hungry,” he tells them, remembering his soldier days on the pampa, “everything tastes good.”
* * *
Ever since his epiphany about God and the need to be strong for his miner brothers, Omar Reygadas has tried to be upbeat around them. God is with us, he says again and again. But the days of hunger, the rising and falling of emotions as he listens for the drills, begin to sap his strength. He is fifty-six years old, a number that hovers over him as he thinks about the pains that are spreading across his body. First it feels as if someone were squeezing his chest, then a burning sensation spreads in his arm, and finally he loses much of the ability to move the arm. He believes he’s having a heart attack, and he begins to imagine his own death, and visualizes the thirty-two remaining men being left with his body and how quickly his corpse will rot in this heat. The fear of death grows as he lies on the ground outside the Refuge, the heavy air around him transformed into invisible, suffocating hands. Suddenly, he feels the air moving. It’s cooler. There’s a fresh breeze blowing over him. He sits up, takes out a cigarette lighter, and watches the flame bend, pointing upward on the sloping Ramp. Air is coming up from somewhere farther down in the mine. Maybe they’re injecting air into the mountain. Or maybe one of the drills broke through farther down. Omar announces his discovery to the other men, and a short while later he’s on his feet and walking downhill, with a few others joining him in an expedition into the deeper reaches of the mine, to see if they can discover where the air is coming from. The idea that they might find a shaft drilled from the surface and make contact with the outside world drives Omar and the others down past several curves and switchbacks. They reach Level 80 and then Level 70, and the flame is still blowing upward. Finally, they enter the corridor called Level 60 South and here the lighter flame blows straight up and flickers and dies: There isn’t enough oxygen to keep the flame burning. At Level 60 North the same thing happens. They go farther down into the mine to Level 40 and there the flame moves back and forth and bends back on itself—the air is moving there, it’s fresher again, but then it goes out. They inspect many dark and abandoned corridors but they never do find the opening down below where fresh air is entering the mine. But in all that walking and searching, something else happens to Omar: The tightness in his chest lifts. Thanks to that light breeze, “I started to breathe well again. And when I had to walk back up to the Refuge, the breeze stayed with me all the way back.”
Near the Refuge he sees José Henríquez, the Pastor, and tells him what he’s seen, how the breeze keeps coming from below.
“Where could it be coming from?” Henríquez says. “The caverns are all blocked up. There is no drill that’s broken through.”
“It’s the thirty-fourth miner, my little compadre,” Reygadas says. “He hasn’t abandoned us.” The thirty-fourth miner is the soul of every miner who’s ever toiled, the spirit of the God that protects them.
The cooler air returns every day, at six o’clock in the early evening. “That little breeze [vientecito] would come and it would leave us calmer.” Omar decides that if he gets out, he’s going to tell the world about it one day. “This can’t just be forgotten here.” All his years in mining offer no explanation that he can think of other than that it’s God blowing into the mine. And even if he really hasn’t seen a miracle, but rather the product of another shift of rock, it doesn’t matter. Because Omar believes that in the bending flame he has seen something divine, again, the breath of God keeping him alive, feeding oxygen to his lungs. He relaxes, takes easier breaths, feels better.
* * *
The drilling grinds on, and it then stops, often for hours at a time, leaving a cruel silence that’s filled, as their ears adjust to it, with the sound of their breathing and their coughs. When the drill goes quiet the self-described athlete Edison Peña thinks: This is insane! A man next to him says: “What are those guys doing up there?” Edison asks himself the same question. He is a sensitive, articula
te man who was already deeply in tune with the whole absurd cycle of human existence even before the guillotine fell over the Ramp and trapped him inside. He’s had prior bouts of suicidal depression, and going down into the bowels of the mountain always felt like a kind of ending to him. “Death was always there in the mine. I knew it, everyone did. You’d try to tell people outside, and they wouldn’t believe you. They’d look at you like you were talking about science fiction.” For Edison to enter the mine on a regular day was to face the existential truth most men grasp only near the end of their lives: We will all die. Death is waiting for us all the time. Perhaps this is his time, and his waiting will finally end: He thinks this, especially, when the drills stop and the silence inside the caverns of the mine goes on for two hours, and then three. There is no drill coming for us now. They gave up! Four hours. Five. With his relatively alert and lucid thirty-four-year-old mind he is seeing firsthand what a true kick in the ass it is to be a human being, because he can see he’s trapped inside a kind of metaphor about the cycles of life and death, halfway on that metaphorical journey from the sunshine of being fully alive to the permanent blindness and deafness of death. “I felt an emptiness. A vacuum in my body,” he later says. Some of his fellow miners try to fill the silence by doing things like honking horns to let people know they’re still alive down there in the mine. Edison hears the noises they make and thinks: How innocent these people are, how naïve. We’re seven hundred meters underground! No one can hear us! No one! Perhaps more than any other miner, Edison feels fate descending upon him, like some angry creature residing in his rumbling stomach, pulling the life out of him from the inside. Eight hours. Nine. There’s no drill. No one is coming for them. Edison tries to fight the emptiness he feels growing inside him, to shake it away, and he starts tossing and turning on the floor of the Refuge, his eyes wildly out of focus. To his fellow miners, he seems to be losing his mind.
The truth is this: Edison was already a bit of a lunatic before he came into the mine. And his was not the loquacious, extroverted madness of Mario Sepúlveda, but a darker, lonelier, more morose introspection. More than once during the routine workdays at the mine another worker has pronounced Edison “crazy” for his tendency to violate certain safety rules: for example, the rule that says a man should never walk anywhere alone in the mine. It’s a self-destructive, rash thing to do underground, to go off where you might accidentally step into an abyss, or have a rock fall on you, and not have anyone nearby to hear your muted cry for help. His I-don’t-give-a-shit attitude and the possessed look in his eyes earned him the nickname “Rambo” from Alex Vega. Edison walked alone in the mine all the time, daydreaming in those fatal corridors, where he once found a massive, murderous slab of fallen rock at a spot he often walked past.
As he waits for the sound of drilling to begin again, Edison is living in a space of physical and emotional desolation. The thunder of falling rock, the textures of the colorless walls, with their millions of serrated edges, and the increasingly fetid air all suggest that he and his fellow miners have been sent here for punishment. How can God be doing this to us? Edison thinks. Why me? Why us? What did I do? There is judgment, too, in the simple absence of light. “The darkness around us was really killing us,” he later says. Edison the electrician has helped Illanes bring a battery and some light to the Refuge and the space next to it. But then there is a moment when the battery fails, and suddenly everything around Edison disappears in complete darkness. “That’s when you really feel you’re in hell. That’s where hell is, in the darkness.” Aboveground, Edison was in one of those tempestuous relationships that is colloquially called “hell,” in which objects fly across the room, where the love and hate two people have for each other causes them to treat each other poorly. But now he’s in a real hell, as he can see when the weak light comes back on again. It’s like he’s in the catacombs of the purgatory described by a certain devout Italian poet at the end of the Dark Ages. He sees bodies of men sleeping, or not sleeping, fitfully, stretched out on pieces of cardboard, on tarpaulin, their faces painted black with soot and sweat, in the Refuge and just outside, in rows of that tunnel, that defile of stone that leads down toward the hot center of the Earth. “Visually, it looked like my time had come.”
Or maybe not. Because after twelve hours of silence here comes the drill again. Rat-a-tat-tat, grind-grind. Rat-a-tat-tat, grind-grind. The sound of other men working to reach him provides some comfort, a muted joy for an hour or two, or three. And then it stops again. “The silence just destroyed us. Because you would feel abandoned, alone. Without a positive sign, your faith collapses. Because faith isn’t totally blind. We’re vulnerable, we’re really a small thing. I knew what it was like to feel alone and helpless, to feel there was no way out. Because your faith empties out second by second, it doesn’t get stronger as the days go by. People say that, but it’s a total lie. You’ll find a lot of my companions who make those stupid statements about feeling stronger. I don’t know. I hear them and I want to kill them.”
Edison wants to live, and to live he chooses to do as little as possible. Some will criticize him and the other men in the Refuge for not leaving that room, with its cheap white tile floor and steel door. But to Edison it’s what makes the most sense, really, when you’re not eating. To simply wait and rest. “I conserved my energy. I’d go walk sometimes. But then I started to see that my legs wouldn’t respond when I had to go to the bathroom. I was starting to feel really fatigued. I had enough intelligence, innate intelligence for survival, to not do anything to kill myself. A lot of us were like that.”
Edison is also in a room surrounded by people with hurt and rage, a long lament with many voices. “They’d say, ‘If I get out, I’m going to do this, that, and the other,’” Edison says. “They’d say, ‘I wish I’d been a better father.’ You’d ask someone, ‘How many kids do you have?’ and his eyes would fill with tears. And you’d look at the man next to you, and you’d realize that he was even more destroyed than you were. And that’s the great truth: that in the mine there were no heroes.”
* * *
They are not heroes, but ordinary men who are afraid, silencing their rumbling stomachs with large quantities of dirty water, and waiting until noon, when they all gather to eat. But first, just before the meal, the tall, balding José Henríquez begins the session with a prayer, and then a few words that serve as a kind of sermon. Sometimes he tells Bible parables from memory. There is, most appropriately, the story of Jonah, who was swallowed by a whale. Jonah was sent on a mission by God, to speak in a certain village, but instead Jonah got on a ship and went in the opposite direction. “Jonah was a guy with a bad temper,” Henríquez says, “so God put the squeeze on him.” The Lord sent a powerful storm to toss that ship about, and when Jonah’s shipmates realized he was the source of God’s wrath, they tossed him overboard, where he was swallowed by a great whale. “Disobedience is never good,” Henríquez says. Jonah was in the belly of hell and in the “depths,” Henríquez says, speaking a word that he remembers from a Bible passage. Profundidad is the word in Spanish, and hearing it spoken by a man of God inside the depths of the mine leaves a powerful impression on the mind of the diary writer Víctor Segovia, who will scribble the word down a few hours later.
“I went down to the bottoms of the mountains,” the Bible passage reads. “The earth with her bars was about me for ever.” Jonah submits himself to the Lord, he says God has brought him up from a life of “corruption,” and promises that he will sacrifice unto God “with the voice of thanksgiving.” The Lord then commands the whale to spit Jonah out. Here, in this horrific place, trapped inside stone walls, the message is more powerful than it will be when spoken in any church: It’s as if they are living inside a Bible parable, Yonni Barrios thinks.
They have survived two weeks without a true meal, with no certain prospects that they’ll ever eat again, and everything that’s happening to them seems to have some deeper message. Víctor Segovia never wen
t to church much, but now he’s sort of going to church every day, because with each prayer session the sense grows that the union of those thirty-three men is a holy event. Before this accident befell him, Víctor writes in his diary, he’d thought of church as a place where sinners went to seek forgiveness. But Henríquez speaks to him now of a message of hope and love. The Pastor is, by now, a man physically transformed, too: He’s shed his shirt against the relentless heat and humidity, cut off his pants to shorts, and walks around in ripped-up boots that look like sandals. Speaking of God with his bare chest and its patches of hair covered in sweat, and with his bald pate and its matted fringe of hair, Henríquez is beginning to look like a crazed mystic who lives in some desert cave, an effect heightened by the fact that when he speaks, he seems utterly convinced of what he’s saying. Christ loves you in spirit, the Pastor says, and Víctor later records the Pastor’s words in his diary: “Look for him and you will see that he loves you, and you will find peace.” For Víctor, this is a revelation. “I see now that people who are thankful go to church, too, and that the people who go there have been touched by the grace of God,” he writes.
In another sermon, Henríquez tells the story of Jesus taking five loaves of bread and two fish and multiplying them to feed five thousand people. He then leads them in a prayer that the Lord will find a way to take their small supply of food and make it last longer, because very soon they’re going to run out.
“The Pastor would pray that the food be multiplied,” Mario Sepúlveda later says. “Afterward, I’d see one of los niños walk over to the cabinet and try to peek inside, to see if there really might be more food there.”
Instead, each opening of the cabinet reveals less food. The men begin to scavenge around to see what they might find to eat. Yonni Barrios, the man who failed to protect the food against the hungry men on the day of the collapse, sees one pick up a discarded can of tuna and take his finger to it, wiping the inside and licking his finger again and again: Yonni never thought he’d see a well-paid man like him reduced to such a state. Other men begin to go through the trash cans, and when they find orange peels they clean them well and eat them. Yonni himself devours the brownish remains of a pear. “That was good to eat. The hunger was terrible.” Víctor has also eaten half-chewed fruit he found in the trash, and on Wednesday, August 11, he writes about it in his diary, remembering how he used to see the poorest of the poor in Copiapó sifting through the garbage. “We ignore it. People think that it will never happen to them and now look at me, eating peels, trash, and anything that is edible.” Carlos Mamani, the Bolivian immigrant, scans the ground to see if there are any bugs or worms crawling around: He would grab one if he saw it and eat it. But, just as there are no butterflies in the mine, there are no beetles or caterpillars either. “I didn’t see a spider, or even a termite, nothing.”
