Deep Down Dark

by Héctor Tobar

  “Four months!” Several of the men begin to shout at Urzúa. We can’t wait here until December, there’s no way, they say. We need to find our own way out of here. Through the Pit, someone says. As soon as we’re strong enough we can climb out. The air of incipient mutiny once again fills the space, until Mario Sepúlveda begins to speak.

  “You think I don’t want to get out of here, too?” he says. “If I could, I’d grab on to the next thing that comes down that hole and pull myself through it. But I can’t, because I’m too big.” Perri speaks these words in the raspy, half-crazed, and ironic shout his companions know too well. It’s the voice of a possessed lover of life trapped in a dungeon, a man who can joke about death, about eating other men, and about squeezing into a six-inch borehole. No, the only alternative is to wait, Mario says, and soon the other strong, calm men among the trapped thirty-three are repeating his words. “Tranquilos, niños.” It’s what you say to two guys who are about to get into a fight in a bar. Tranquilo. We have to stay patient and organized, says Juan Carlos Aguilar, who’s been saying that since August 5. We have to thank the Lord for the miracles that have already unfolded before our eyes, says José Henriquez. And we have to be prepared to live together in this hole until December if we have to, says Mario Sepúlveda.

  Not long afterward, Luis Urzúa has his first discussion, via telephone and privately, with the psychologist, Iturra. “What comes now,” the psychologist tells him, “is going to be the hardest part.”

  12

  ASTRONAUTS

  In the first days after contact with the men trapped inside the San José Mine, the professionalism of the Chilean doctors on the surface saves their lives. The minister of health, Jaime Mañalich, has assembled a medical team that makes a critical early decision: They will resist the entirely understandable desire (expressed by assorted drillers and local officials) to start “shoving food down the hole” (as one NASA doctor puts it) to the starving men below who are asking for it. A man who’s been denied food for more than five to seven days is severely depleted in phosphates and potassium, which the body uses to digest carbohydrates. In the absence of these compounds, a hearty meal can trigger cardiac failure. This was the lesson learned in the final days of World War II, when GIs inadvertently killed many starving concentration camp survivors by feeding them C rations and chocolate bars. The Chilean medical authorities have consulted with experts at NASA and other agencies from around the world, and they will now heed their advice to go “low and slow,” and begin to feed the men a mere 500 calories a day for the first few days, largely with an energy drink that’s supplemented with potassium, phosphates, and thiamine, a B vitamin that the body uses up during starvation. Without thiamine, feeding the men could trigger Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome, a nerve disorder that causes a catastrophic loss of muscle coordination. The Chileans send urine test strips down to the men, similar to the ones used by NASA to monitor the health of its astronauts. The strips test for “specific gravity” (an indicator of dehydration), ketones (an indicator of starvation), and myoglobin (which is produced when muscles break down). Sixteen of the thirty-three men test positive for high myoglobin: The eating away of their muscle tissue has triggered the early stages of kidney failure. Those men are sent down extra freshwater, and also cots to keep them off the hard surface of the mine when they sleep, because sleeping on rock is also causing their muscles to break down. (The Chilean government puts out a public call for portable cots that can be fit into a paloma tube and assembled below, and a local firm provides them.) Soon the men who were in danger of kidney failure are recovering. The Chileans handled the initial stages of treatment “in textbook fashion,” the NASA physician James D. Polk will say afterward, “and because they did … out of the thirty-three miners they had not a single complication.”

  * * *

  To further assess the state of the men’s health, the doctors send down a scale. It’s a harness-and-wire contraption, and the men attach it to one of the cherry-picker baskets they used when fortifying passageways. They raise the basket, sit in the harness, and hang in the air, suspended, another miner weighing each man as if he were an enormous specimen of pale-skinned produce. The smallish Alex Vega discovers that he’s lost 16 kilos (35 pounds) and now weighs just 46 kilos (101 pounds), and the much taller Franklin Lobos is shocked to see he’s lost 18 kilos (40 pounds) of the 86 kilos (189 pounds) he weighed before entering the mine.

  The doctors ask Urzúa if anyone down below has experience in giving injections and taking blood pressure. The shift supervisor discusses this with the other men and someone remembers hearing Yonni Barrios talking about doing something like that.

  “We need you to give some injections,” Urzúa tells Yonni, and at first Yonni declines. “He’s kind of pigheaded, but eventually we told him that had to be his job.” Yonni talks by phone to the medical team on the surface, and tells them he’s administered only one injection in his entire life: to his mother, who was a nurse, when he was fourteen years old. But he knows how to take blood pressure because Susana has high blood pressure and he’s taken hers. Perfect, they say. You’ll be our nurse down there, and very soon the Latin American media has dubbed Yonni “El Doctor House,” after a U.S. television program that’s popular in the region. NASA has informed the Chilean medical team that living in isolated and stressful conditions, away from sunlight—trapped in a mine, or working in a space station—can cause both vitamin D deficiency and something called “latent virus reactivation.” Yonni must therefore give his fellow miners vitamins and vaccinations against pneumonia, tetanus, and diphtheria. He performs this task with the calm gentleness that the women in his life have always admired.

  The same tube that brings lifesaving vaccinations brings more private letters from the surface, and sends private letters back to the top. Víctor Segovia writes a message that is tinged with despair. “Panchito, I’m not going to lie to you about how things are down here. We’re in really bad shape. There’s so much water. The mountain is thundering a lot. This hell is killing me. I try to be strong, but when I sleep I dream that I’m in a barbecue, and when I wake up I’m in this eternal darkness. Each day wears you down.” When his relatives read this, they decide to inform the psychologist.

  In the diary he’s keeping below, however, Víctor records some good news that other miners have received in their own letters. “One of our companions was told that Leonardo Farkas put 5 million [pesos] in a bank account in our names.” Farkas, he writes, is trying to raise enough donations to make them all rich, “so that we will never have to work again.”

  * * *

  Two days after the miners beg the president to get them out of “this hell,” the rescue team sends a camera down to the trapped men so they can send back some video of what their hell looks like. Florencio Avalos operates the camera, and a bare-chested Mario Sepúlveda acts as tour guide, with a thickly bearded Alex Vega (in a very dirty and timeworn Dallas Cowboys jersey) as his assistant. The men shoot about thirty minutes of video, of which about eight minutes will be broadcast to a captivated prime-time audience in Chile that night.

  The portion of the video that’s broadcast begins with Mario showing Luis Urzúa sitting in his white pickup truck, making a schematic drawing for the rescue team above, and moves on to the Refuge, where two exhausted-looking miners, Osman Araya and Renán Avalos, are sitting atop the box that was once looted and that contained their provisions. “Here we have two very important miners, who are monitoring the palomas,” Mario says in the cheerful voice of a talk-show host, as if he were trying to get the two men to ease their grim expressions. They stand up and open the box to reveal its contents, five bottles of fresh water recently sent from the top. “One way or another,” Mario says, “we’re trying to make a good organization out of this so that all turns out well.”

  The video cuts to Jorge Galleguillos, who lifts himself and sits up straight as Mario wakes him. His look is distant, dazed. Another man nearby remains asleep, his mouth
open to the ceiling, even as the camera’s light shines on him. Claudio Yáñez sits up and manages to smile and send a saludo to his family. Next the camera cuts to the Refuge, which Mario describes as “our cafeteria.” Edison Peña looks directly into the camera and says: “Get us out of here quickly, please.” Mario shows the audience a table where five men are gathered, a game of dominoes in progress. “This is where we have meetings every day, where we plan things,” he says. “This is where we pray. Where we have an assembly to make decisions among the thirty-three of us.” Mario approaches Víctor Zamora, the former orphan from Arica, the town on the border with Peru. “We don’t know if he’s Chilean or Peruvian,” Mario jokes, and everyone laughs and Zamora breaks into the smile of an oversize child. Zamora led the attack on the food the first night they were trapped, but of course no one watching this video on the surface will know that. He addresses the camera, and looks and sounds more composed than any of the other trapped miners as he tells his family, with a reassuring nod, to “take care of yourselves” and that “all of us are going to get out of here.” Then he addresses the rescuers: “We want to thank you all for having the courage not to leave us here, helpless.” Zamora speaks like a man deeply at peace with himself and his difficult situation, as if he were some philosopher or motivational speaker who’s wandered into the mine. “We heard what you did out there,” he says to the miners’ unseen rescuers. “And you know what, niños? We’re going to give you all a big round of applause.” All the miners around him start clapping, and the edited video cuts to a collective chant of “Chi-chi-chi, le-le-le,” followed by Osman Araya praising God, and a rendition of the national anthem.

  The video ends with Mario Sepúlveda, standing at the center of the frame, still shirtless, making an impassioned final statement. “This family of miners, my friends, isn’t that same family you knew one hundred or one hundred and fifty years ago,” he says. “Today the miner is an educated miner. He’s a man that you can sit down and talk to. He’s a man who’ll stick out his chest, who can sit and talk at any table in Chile. A big kiss to all Chileans.”

  The video sets off a wave of national pride in Chile. Above all, people are moved by the sight of the half-starved and soot-covered Mario Sepúlveda, a Latin American everyman speaking with a kind of manic eloquence, and with great courage despite being trapped in what looks like a dank, dark, and foul place. In the weeks to come Mario will be referred to in newspaper and website articles in Chile and around the world as “Super Mario.” His energetic video performance is broadcast far beyond Chile, too, making him the hopeful and unlikely figure at the center of a drama that fleetingly unites the globe, his raspy-voiced optimism offering a reaffirmation of the human spirit. Those are real men down there, 2,200 feet underground, and not mythical figures, even though there’s something mythically epic about their story. They were given up for dead, trapped in stone, but this new video offers proof of how alive they are, how real and how dirty, looking desperate but sounding hopeful, stuck in a place of darkness and splashing water. These haunting images are broadcast and rebroadcast, looping their way across time zones and continents, as the tale of the thirty-three men is told and repeated by professional tellers and retellers of melodrama. When the world’s televisions and computer screens are turned off, the story continues to circulate, in family and workplace conversations. Did you hear about those guys, those miners in South America? Did you see them? There are no instruments that monitor the collective subconscious, no global psychic seismographs, no gauges to measure the flow of humanity’s dreams. But if such instruments existed they would pick up, in these final days of August, a substantial increase in the volume of nightmares and dreams set in caverns, graves, tunnels, and other dark and forbidding places.

  Among those who know the thirty-three trapped men well, the effect of those eight minutes of video is markedly different. Jessica Chilla, who received that long, heartfelt embrace from her life partner and the father of their daughter on the day he went to work, sees the video and slips into an anxious state of near mourning. The Darío Segovia she sees on the video is not the man she knew. He’s suffering a constant torment she can see in his wan eyes, in the way he holds his temples and turns away from the camera. His sister María, the “mayor” of Camp Esperanza, sees him and thinks that now more than ever he needs someone to embrace him. Most of the other miners don’t look anything like themselves. To those who know him, Osman Araya is a man self-assured in his Evangelical identity; on the video he looks meek and wounded, and when he gives his speech about God, he is clearly fighting back tears. Pablo “the Cat” Rojas can be seen in profile, sitting on the ground shirtless, and he looks washed out and shrunken, as if he’d taken his square, middle-aged head and slipped it on top of the body of a boy. Jorge Galleguillos, known to his family as a man who’s tall, stubborn, robust, and proud, can barely utter a word and is almost unrecognizable under the layers of soot and the fungi covering his skin.

  The relatives of the thirty-three trapped men, and Chile itself, would be more disturbed if they were allowed to see what the government has edited out of the video—one news report will hint at what the rescuers know about the condition of the men when it says that five are suffering from depression and didn’t want to appear in the video. In the unseen footage, Mario Sepúlveda sloshes though the mud, shows the viewers a decrepit bathroom, and begins to lose his composure toward the end as he summarizes their condition and their mood. “We’re going to get out of here. We aren’t going to stay here. Our families need us,” he says. “We are very grateful, chiquillos … The only thing that we ask, personally—don’t show the humidity and the conditions we’re living in.” He makes an allusion to death, revealing how close it feels to them. “This is a situation for warriors. If we have to give our lives for Chile, we’ll do it here, or anywhere else … We’d be truly grateful if you could tell our families that we love them. There are a lot of beautiful people behind us.” He then mentions his hometown, Parral, his neighborhood in Santiago, the sports clubs he belongs to, and says: “The people who know me know that I have a heart that’s this big,” opening his hands to form a circle before his bare chest. “And I’m going to take this little heart, and lift it to the top for the people in need. I’m going to keep on fighting, until the bitter end.”

  Finally, like many of the other men, Mario feels the need to speak directly to his family. “Francisco,” he begins, though he can barely utter his son’s name without beginning to cry. He coughs and continues. “My slogan: Dog. Braveheart, huevón. Mel Gibson, huevón. Papá will always be there to protect you, viejo. I swear to you that I’ll always be there.” With that, Super Mario is overcome with emotion and turns away from the camera, gesturing for Florencio Avalos to stop recording. When the minister of mining and the other leaders of the rescue effort see this video, they agree to respect Sepúlveda’s wishes: After extracting a few scenes for public consumption, the officials store the complete video, and its most disturbing and sad images, in a government archive.

  * * *

  The psychologist, Iturra, examines the images in this first, extended video from below and finds reasons to be optimistic about the mental state of the thirty-three men. After some additional telephone consultations, and after assessing the first communications back and forth from the mine to the surface, he pronounces the group and its members in good shape. “Están cuerdos,” he says. They’re sane. A few members of the rescue team think the doctor himself is crazy for saying this, but the clinical evidence is pretty clear. “Psychologically speaking, they were all healthy,” he later says. “They were scared, yes. To be scared under those circumstances is normal. But they weren’t screaming to get out either.” Among other things, the psychologist takes heart in the concern the miners have expressed for others—he heard it in that first conversation with the minister, when they asked if the truck driver Villegas had made it out; and in Mario Sepúlveda’s and Víctor Zamora’s speeches to the rescuers. The men ha
ven’t yet succumbed to panic and have retained some semblance of organization, and the psychologist is pleasantly surprised by this development, since studies of large groups of men and women confined in small spaces for long periods of time have often ended with people turning violent and walls literally covered with blood. Iturra, whose training is based on the client-centered philosophy of the American psychologist Carl Rogers, believes he can treat the men below as he would any client. “This is a collaboration and we’re going to work together until you get out,” Iturra tells the miners in phone conversations. “I’m here with you until the end.” Whatever happened between the men in the seventeen days before they were found doesn’t interest him, he says. “I’m not here to judge. You did whatever you had to do.”

  Iturra has the numerous case files on the thirty-three men that have been assembled by the Chilean medical authorities and social service agencies. In these records he can see many prior battles with the unique torments of mining life, and also the family and amorous puzzles that are common among Chilean workingmen. One of the men has a previous suicide attempt, two are epileptics, another was once diagnosed as bipolar—and from his own observations on the surface, he knows several have mistresses whose existence has been either confirmed or revealed to their wives for the first time in the improvised little village of Camp Esperanza. Iturra is a psychologist specializing in the mining industry and none of these things faze him much, because he knows that in addition to the stresses and sorrows of a miner’s life, there is the fortitude, brotherhood, and sense of self-worth mining’s hypermasculine culture gives him. But neither Iturra nor anyone else in Chile has experience in treating men suffering the extended isolation these men are going to have to endure. If they are indeed stuck until Christmas, they will have been trapped underground twice as long as any human being in history. They are like men on a mission inside a stone space station, or castaways on a lifeless planet, and to learn how men can endure such confinement and isolation, Iturra has consulted via e-mail with NASA. Albert W. Holland, a psychologist for the space agency, will soon arrive on a flight from Houston (along with two NASA medical doctors and an engineer). Holland has told Iturra via e-mail that he will have to prepare the men and their families for the long haul. “Long-duration thinking,” he calls it. “We’re looking at a marathon here,” he tells Iturra, and soon the marathon metaphor is being disseminated by the Chilean psychologists to the men and their families. Un maratón.