by Héctor Tobar
The other men in the water detail eventually notice Florencio’s absence. They look for him in the corridors, in the Refuge, and at the spot where the men go to the bathroom, and they don’t find him.
Florencio falls into a deep sleep. When he wakes up, he doesn’t feel quite as desperate. Eventually he sees light. He sits up in the pickup and soon the beams of the search party’s headlamps are shining on his face.
“Here you are, Florencio.”
“We were worried about you.”
“We thought you threw yourself in El Rajo.”
* * *
As the sixteenth day without news arrives, the wives and girlfriends and children of the trapped thirty-three men are also allowing themselves to imagine what the future might look like if the men are never rescued. Elvira Valdivia, the wife of Mario Sepúlveda, has been staying at a hotel in Copiapó, praying with her daughter and son at their bedside every night. After the latest prayer, her son, Francisco, asks her: “Are you sure my father is still alive?” He’s twelve years old but he poses the question like a grown-up, like someone who needs an honest answer.
Yes, his mother says. But there is, perhaps, a trace of doubt in her voice, a sense that she’s finally losing hope, because now Francisco asks another question.
“What if he isn’t?”
Elvira thinks about this a moment and answers: “Son, you have to be prepared for anything because if your father isn’t alive it’s because God wanted it that way. Maybe his life only reached this far and we’re going to have to learn to live without him. Whether it makes sense or not, that’s the way it might be.”
“Damn, Mommy, that would hurt,” he says. Pucha, Mami, qué lata sería. “But what can we do?”
The possibility of Mario’s death is a discussion Elvira can’t and won’t have with her eighteen-year-old daughter, who seems to be holding on by a thread. Scarlette is taking medication to sleep, and asking her mother unanswerable questions. “Does my father have water, does he have light?” To her daughter, Elvira does not express the slightest doubt that Mario is alive. But Francisco wants to know the truth, he’s steeling himself for a future that unfolds without the man who is his hero. Francisco is willing to do this, clearly, because his father raised him to be a “warrior” and to deal with painful truths as a man should. Elvira can see now that Francisco has the strength and determination of his father, but also a calmness Mario doesn’t have. When Francisco was born he weighed just 1.09 kilos, about 2.4 pounds, and it’s one of those everyday miracles of the human species that a boy so fragile and small when his mother first held him can grow up to become a young man possessed of the inner strength to lift up his mother’s spirit and help her prepare for a future without the man she loves.
* * *
At about this time, deep in the mine, Mario Sepúlveda is still in charge of dispensing the daily meal, such as it is—among other things, it’s no longer daily, and it isn’t much of a meal. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner are now a single event that comes once every two days. A cookie that can be split in half. At the end of one of these meals, there’s dessert. A single slice of peach, about the size of a thumb, has survived an earlier dispensing of the contents of a can among the men. This single peach slice is precious—and it has to be divided thirty-three ways. An act of surgery is required, and Mario performs it slowly, with several men staring. “Excuse me, Perri,” one of them says. “But isn’t that one piece there bigger than all the others?” When Mario is finished, each miner takes a sliver about the size of a fingernail. Like most of the other men, Mario allows that hint of syrup and fruit to linger on his tongue like a communal wafer, trying to hold it for as long as possible, managing to keep it there for quite a long time—until another miner bumps into him and he accidentally swallows his morsel, and he wants to slug the guy, he’s so angry.
But mostly, there’s just that one cookie, with its approximately 40 calories and less than 2 grams of fat. It isn’t enough to keep them alive, and Víctor Zamora, the man who led the assault on the food cabinet fifteen days earlier, can see this. “It’s the most terrible thing,” he says. “That’s what I’ll never forget: to see your compañeros dying before your eyes.”
By now, the daily prayer sessions and meetings have evolved into ever-longer apology sessions as well. I’m sorry I raised my voice, a miner might say. I’m sorry I didn’t do my part with the water yesterday. Today it’s Víctor Zamora, with his round face that isn’t so round anymore, his curly mop of hair weighed down by sweat and grime, who steps forward.
“I want to say some words to the group,” he begins. “I made a mistake. I was one of the people who took the food out of the box. I’m sorry. I regret that I did that.” Not all of the men knew about Víctor’s role in the disappearance of the food, and some now find out for the first time. “I thought we were only going to be stuck here for a few days,” he continues. “I didn’t realize the harm I was causing by taking that food. Now I truly regret what I did and I’m sorry for it.” Víctor seems very nervous, deeply regretful as he delivers this speech in a soft, tremulous voice, Omar Reygadas later says. “We all realized that he really did feel terrible about what he had done.”
After the apology, it’s time to eat. This is a day when they’ll eat. But then Alex Vega steps forward. “Can I speak?” he asks. El Papi Ricky has become Bicycle Chassis, or Charqui de Mariposa, and he looks smaller and frailer and clearly more in need of a meal than most of them.
Mario Sepúlveda turns to Omar Reygadas and whispers: “This guy is going to ask for more food. What do we do?”
“I’ll share a bit of my cookie with him, you another little bit,” Omar says. “We’ll ask if there’s anyone else who wants to help out…”
But Alex isn’t asking for more food. “This thing is going to go on for a while,” he begins. One drill has just missed them and it’s possible the next one they hear coming will, too. “There’s only a little food left and I think that today we shouldn’t eat. Let’s not eat. Let’s leave it for tomorrow, and that way we’ll last a day longer.”
Some of the men groan and shake their heads: No, they don’t want to skip their meal. Let’s eat! I want to eat! But in the end they do skip it. Three days without anything but water. Several are deeply moved by Alex Vega’s act of nobility, his willingness to sacrifice, the skinniest man among them putting the group and their collective health beyond his own obvious need.
* * *
After listening to the sound of that last drill missing them, several more men begin to write farewell letters, in imitation of Víctor Segovia. Like him, they write in the hope that some rescuer, one day, might find their final message. They’re starting to feel weak enough, now, that it seems possible that the next time they fall asleep they might not wake up again, or that they might soon lack the strength to write. Some of the men need help to rise to their feet and walk to go to the bathroom, holding each other up to climb up and down the slope of the Ramp, to the pile of rocks where they bury the llama pellets that come out of their bodies, and to the nearby rank-smelling porta-potty. Someone suggests that they reconnect the hoses that lead up to the water tanks, because in a few days they will be too weak to travel up higher in the mine and fill the barrels of water they’ve been bringing down to the Refuge. The sense of finality is contagious, and as the writing of goodbye letters spreads, Carlos Mamani watches and listens to the emotional Chileans around him call back and forth to each other: “Are you done? Lend me that pencil. I need some paper.” Some of the men weep as they write, and Mamani hears them, and feels bad for them, because for a mining man to cry in front of all of his coworkers like that, he must be truly broken. To Mamani, it seems that the older miners especially are beginning to resign themselves to their fate. “I heard people say later that the older guys were all pillars of strength down there, but that’s a lie,” Mamani will remember. Jorge Galleguillos has a swollen foot. Mario Gómez’s lungs are barely holding up. “The only one of the older guys wh
o was always strong was Omar Reygadas. He’d always say, ‘Don’t worry, they’re coming. They’re coming for us.’ But most of the old guys started to go crazy.” Víctor Segovia has been writing about his mortality for days, and now that most of his companions are doing the same, he finally allows some of the dark thoughts he’s been committing to paper to spill out into the open.
“We’re all going to die!”
“Be quiet, old man! ¡Concha de tu madre!”
Carlos Mamani resists the temptation to begin his own goodbyes to his loved ones. He hasn’t yet dreamed of his oldest sister, and until he does, he won’t believe it’s his time to die. “I didn’t want to write my letter … If I started to write that letter, it would be because I was in my death throes.” Mamani feels weak, but he is not yet in his final agony, agonizando. And besides, even if he wanted to write a letter he doesn’t have a lamp to write one, because he left it up in the changing room.
Mario Sepúlveda is still strong and alert enough to see how degraded the men in the Refuge are becoming. He picks out the slight Claudio Yáñez as looking especially immobile and pathetic. Yáñez is a small man with angular features. His cheeks have hollowed out, sharpening a haunted look, a faraway gaze. Mario can get the rest of the men to sit up to the sound of his voice, but Claudio just lies there.
“Hey, concha de tu madre, stand up! You have to stand up because if you stay tossed there on the floor you’re going to die, and we’re going to eat you. For being lazy we’re going to eat you.” When spoken by a man who hasn’t eaten in three days, the words we’re going to eat you carry a meaning they might not otherwise. “So you better stand up, because if you don’t, we’re going to make you stand up by kicking you.” Startled, Claudio tries to climb to his feet, and when he does everyone around him can see how skinny and weak he’s become. He rises slowly, with buckling knees and bent legs. “It was like watching when a little horse is trying to walk right after it’s born,” Omar Reygadas later says. Finally, the “little horse” straightens his legs and takes a step.
The younger men like Claudio are in bad shape, too, and have each lost about thirty pounds. When Alex Vega stands up to go to the bathroom, his vision clouds and then, for a few seconds, he goes blind, the first signs of a common side effect of hunger, caused by vitamin A deficiency. Many of the older and bigger men still have layers of fat around their waists: It’s their upper bodies that have caved in the most, giving them a boyish appearance when they walk around shirtless. They can now see that the beefiness in their chests wasn’t composed of muscle after all, but just the layers of fat of the overfed. But it’s in their faces and expressions that the change is most dramatic. Yonni Barrios has eyes that have retreated into his skull, his once-seductive brown irises fixed in the sad stare of a man suffering something akin to combat fatigue. The veteran miner and onetime whistle-blower Jorge Galleguillos opens his mouth to talk and seems to be chewing his words as he does so. To keep the weakened Jorge and his swollen limbs off the muddy floor, the other miners have built him a bed from a wooden pallet, and he lies there for hours on end, staring at the ceiling. Jorge is turning gray; they are all turning gray. Their faces and arms have lost the cinnamon and bronze of the South American sun. Instead, they are the hue of mushrooms, of watery ash.
The mushroom men avert their eyes from one another, as if they are ashamed of their appearance, though it’s not vanity that causes them to do this. It’s the way they feel inside: small, broken, like a dog that’s been kicked, or a boy who’s been teased so often he believes that humiliation is all he deserves.
On their seventeenth night underground, the men hear another drill getting closer. The rat-a-tat-tat, grind-grind is getting louder, holding the promise of either their liberation or another disappointment.
Víctor Segovia won’t allow himself to believe the drill will break through. Instead, he asks Mario Sepúlveda: “What do you think dying is like?”
Mario says it’s like falling asleep. Peaceful. You close your eyes, you rest. All your worries are over.
Up on Level 105, the sound of the drilling is getting closer as Raúl Bustos falls asleep, causing him to have an odd and hopeful dream. He’s been thinking about his children, and especially his six-year-old daughter, María Paz. She’s a bright and competitive little girl and is always winning races and trying to get perfect scores on her tests. In his dream she’s operating the drill that’s trying to reach him. “She always wants to win, she has a strong personality,” Raúl says. He asks her, “Please, María Paz, come and get me. You can do it.” She answers: “I’m going to win, Papá, I’m going to get you out of there.” María Paz doesn’t like to lose, and in his dream Raúl is hopeful that his daughter, a six-year-old girl driller, will reach him and save his life.
Sleeping nearby, Alex Vega dreams that he is climbing through the mine. He squeezes past the stone wall blocking the Ramp into the cavern of the Pit, and begins to crawl and grab his way upward over boulders, rising ever higher until he reaches the opening where the weathered old winch building stands. He walks out onto the surface and sees an entire city of rescuers and drillers trying to reach the men below. “We’re alive, we’re down there,” he tells them. “I can show you the way.”
* * *
The Terraservice team is getting closer. On the morning of August 21 their third attempt to reach the miners has drilled 540 meters deep: Their target is a gallery next to the Refuge, or the Refuge itself, at 694 meters, or 2,276 feet, beneath the surface. Nelson Flores is the drill operator working the day shift, which involves standing on a grill-shaped platform attached to the Schramm T685 truck, monitoring two gauges that measure the torque at which the drill is turning and the air pressure the truck is sending to the drill bit and hammer below. The diorite is good for drilling, Flores thinks, it’s free of cracks, as smooth and even as gelatin. Every six meters they stop to add another steel tube to the drill assembly, and begin drilling again. Flores touches his hands to the shaft and raises a lever, increasing the pressure until he feels the hammer kicking in. As the drill goes lower, the hammer pulse transmitted to the surface through the steel shaft gets weaker and eventually Flores has to close his eyes and concentrate to feel it working. He drills until sundown and heads home, passing the entrance to the camp, where he and the other drillers who’ve finished their shifts hear another round of applause from the family members.
María Segovia is still at her tent, closest to the gate, with her family and the Vega family nearby, all about to begin a night of nervous anticipation. Golborne and Sougarret have informed the miners’ relatives at the daily briefing that one of the drills is getting closer and there is a chance it could break through the next morning. Jessica Vega normally goes to sleep in her tent a bit after midnight, but tonight she’ll stay up late into the night with a group of relatives that includes Alex’s younger sister Priscilla and Priscilla’s boyfriend, Roberto Ramirez, both of whom are just shy of thirty. The young couple are singers and Roberto has a mariachi band (Mexican music is popular in northern Chile) and mariachi sideburns to match. He’s brought his guitar, to liven things up, and maybe to celebrate, because this might be the last night they spend without word from Alex. Roberto can already feel it’s “a special night, a magical night.” His spirits have been lifted, unexpectedly, by what he’s seen in the drive into the mine. A storm passed through the desert a few days earlier, dropping a light, rare rain on the driest desert on Earth. The average annual rainfall in Copiapó is less than half an inch, but this is an El Niño year, and a somewhat early rain (the first storms in the Atacama usually come in September) has briefly moistened the surrounding land and produced what’s known in Chile as the desierto florido, the flowering desert. Roberto has seen the rocky and sandy landscape of khaki- and copper-colored mountains covered, suddenly, with fields of fuchsia, white star-shaped flowers, and yellow trumpets swaying in the breeze. It’s enough to make a man want to sing.
As night falls in the camp, the desert
breeze blows at the bonfire the Vega family builds next to their camp, and Roberto begins to strum his guitar. The Segovias in the next set of tents are unusually quiet, and Ramirez and the Vega family feel the need to fill the silence by making a “racket.” It’s about two or three in the morning and they’ve been singing for an hour or two when Roberto tells Jessica that he’s written a song in honor of Alex. He pulls the lyrics from a piece of paper in his wallet. Like many Latin American folk songs, it tells a true story, in this case the history of the events the Vegas and the other families are living, and it opens with a slow, sad tempo as it describes the mournful mood in the Copiapó neighborhoods where many of the miners live.
Cuando camino por las calles de mi barrio
no veo el rostro feliz en los familiares.
En Balmaceda y Arturo Prat
sin ti no existe un mundo mejor.
When I walk through the streets of my barrio
I don’t see happiness on the familiar faces around me.
In Balmaceda and Arturo Prat
there is no better world without you.
Next, the song describes the mountain’s collapses, and José Vega’s attempt to enter the mine and reach his son.
Se desintegran las rocas del cerro
Los mineros pronto saldrán
