Deep Down Dark

by Héctor Tobar

  Not long afterward, the Plan A drill suffers a hydraulic problem and also shuts down. The reassuring sound of drilling traveling through stone to the trapped miners below stops, and in the silence that follows, the miners begin to feel more alone, abandoned, and desperate than they have since the first drill bit broke through above the Refuge. They write letters and make telephone calls to the surface demanding to know what’s going on, and they soon discover they might be stuck until December after all.

  Edison Peña returns to one of the passageways alone, and allows himself to slip deeper into loneliness than any of his colleagues, listening to the suddenly louder and clearer sound of his chopped-up “running boots” striking the mine floor one stride after another. Florencio Avalos, Luis Urzúa’s youthful second-in-command, decides he’s tired of sitting around waiting to be rescued. He gathers rope and other tools that can be used for climbing, and with three other men heads up toward the gray curtain of stone that’s blocking their way out.

  15

  SAINTS, STATUES, SATAN

  Before leaving on his escape expedition, Florencio Avalos calls to the surface and talks to his old friend and compadre Pablo Ramirez. I’m going to try to find a way out through the chimneys, Florencio says. Ramirez tries to talk him out of it, of course, but Florencio won’t be dissuaded. With his brother Renán, and with Carlos Barrios and Richard Villarroel, Florencio drives the kilometer up to Level 190 and the chimney closest to the site of the collapse. Their plan is to retrace the path Mario Sepúlveda and Raúl Bustos followed on that first night underground, up the chimney to the next level, and perhaps to another chimney after that. They start up the jumbo and its attached cherry-picker basket, and they begin to climb.

  * * *

  On the surface, the rescue team isn’t ready to give up the Plan B hole. If they can get that chunk of metal out, they can resume drilling. They lower a magnet into the hole, but they fail to lift the shattered drill bit. On that same day, the American driller Jeff Hart arrives at the mine site following his long journey from Afghanistan. He’s there for the next, final phase of the Plan B drilling, a mission that’s on hold until the currently blocked hole can be unblocked, or a new Plan B drill can be started.

  In the midst of the silence and the waiting, Carmen Berríos receives a letter from her husband, Luis Urzúa. He says the men are desperate because they can’t hear any drills. “The rescuers have worked hard for you,” she writes back. “Because God is with them. But if you all down there stop believing and stop praying it will all be for naught. Don’t you think?… Now, if you don’t hear the machines drilling, it’s not because they’ve left. Just have faith and don’t surrender to desperation. I write this because I want you to understand that a single objective motivates all the people involved in the rescue: getting you out of there.”

  Before nine on the foggy morning of September 10, the trucks carrying the parts for the Plan C drill arrive after their long drive across the Atacama. They drive slowly up the narrow road leading to the San José property. It’s cold and the mood among the family members gathered outside the mine is subdued, though several wave Chilean flags and a few manage another chant of “Chi-chi-chi, le-le-le.” While the trucks ahead of him park, one driver stops his vehicle, and as he waits near the gate, a television news crew stops to talk to him: “We’ve arrived, with many sacrifices, after crossing the desert,” the driver says, and he’s visibly moved to be at the mine, where his countrymen and so many people around the world have focused their hopes. “But here we are, with our hearts big, like all Chileans.”

  * * *

  Above Level 190, Florencio Avalos and his three companions are summoning the courage to crawl up the chimney. They reach the opening to the next level of the Ramp, and walk toward the second, higher curtain of gray stone blocking the road to the surface. Florencio and the other miners begin to clear out small boulders at the site of this collapse, rocks that are on top of a huge reclining stone. Very soon, he’s cleared a space big enough to squeeze through, crawling like a cat. “I’m going in there,” he says, and Carlos and Renán and Richard all tell him it’s too dangerous. But Florencio squeezes through, and as he does so he sees a vast, open black space that swallows up the beam from his lamp. He crawls toward this precipice and loosens a rock, which falls into the blackness and lands with a crackling clap about two or three seconds later; his experience as a miner tells him the rock has fallen some 30 or 40 meters, roughly the height of a building that’s ten or twelve stories tall. He realizes he’s near some sort of new, interior rajo, or cavern. To advance farther, he ties a rope around his waist and passes it back to his colleagues, “because I knew that any wrong move and I might fall.” He’s able to crawl out of the crack and stand on a rock overlooking this cavern. “I shone my lamp and saw nothing but rocks, in this enormous space, and I thought, We can get out through here. I knew that from that point it was just another thirty meters up to a place where it was clear, and what I could see upward was thirty meters.” But Florencio also can see that the crack he’s just squeezed through is too narrow, and the remaining climb is too strenuous, for all of the men to make it. The bigger and older men would still be stranded. “At most, fifteen or twenty of us were going to be able to make it out this way. Luis Urzúa wouldn’t be able to make it. Franklin Lobos wouldn’t either, or José Henríquez or Jorge Galleguillos.”

  When the escape party returns back down to the Refuge, Florencio learns that André Sougarret has been trying to reach him. Don’t try that again, he says. It’s simply too unstable and too dangerous. Florencio has set eyes upon the new chasm created by the collapse and explosion of the skyscraper-size chunk of diorite that destroyed the mine on August 5. The crumbling mountain is still spitting rockfalls every few days or hours, and Florencio is fortunate to have seen this chasm, and to have stood inside it, without being seriously injured.

  * * *

  At 10:00 p.m. on September 13, with a group of engineers, mechanics, and drillers still trying to rescue the Plan B hole, the Virgin Mary arrives at the San José Mine. She’s made of wood, a newly sculpted representation of the Virgen del Carmen, the patron of Chile and spiritual guide to the soldiers who fought in the War of Independence against Spain. The Ecuadorian artist Ricardo Villalba carved her, under commission from Pope Benedict XVI, who’s blessed her and given her to Chile to mark the country’s bicentennial. She’s been touring the mining cities and towns of northern Chile, and since August 5 thousands have asked her to intercede on behalf of the thirty-three trapped men. As the Virgin is carried onto the mine property inside a glass case, several women gather below her with candles whose yellow flames are protected from the Atacama wind inside holders fashioned from discarded cups and bottles. A flickering yellow light glows through the plastic skins of these humble receptacles, painting the faces of the faithful with a glow that’s warmer and kinder than the stark gray of the flood lamps that hover over the camp. Following the liturgy led by the bishop of Copiapó, Monsignor Gaspar Quintana, the women whisper prayers, and as they do, some allow the hot wax of white candles to drip over their fingers, until their wind-chapped hands themselves begin to resemble weeping wax sculptures. They pray for the Virgin to remove the obstacles that are keeping those thirty-three workingmen in darkness, under the ground upon which they are standing. From behind the glass, the Virgin sees their devotion and looks down upon them with the faint, fixed beatific smile that the sculptor Villalba has given her.

  * * *

  News of the presence of the Virgin Mary on the surface soon arrives below. For the Catholics, the power of the mother of God can be summoned to Earth, and sometimes it takes concrete form in an object said to have been created by the hand of God: for example, as in the Virgin of Candelaria in Copiapó, a tiny stone sculpture said to have appeared, miraculously, to an eighteenth-century mule driver seeking shelter from a storm in the nearby mountains. People venerate these objects because they feel closer to God in their presence. Now sever
al of the Catholics trapped in the San José Mine will credit the Virgen del Carmen for the fortuitous event that follows mere hours after she’s left the mine: the rescue of the Plan B hole. The drillers and engineers at the Plan B site have lowered a metal “spider” into the hole and managed to retrieve a 26-pound chunk of metal stuck inside, 862 feet below. The Virgin, it seems, has interceded on their behalf, and the men who are especially devout Catholics hold pictures of the mother of God, the patron of Chile, and give thanks. After five days and nights of crisis, and of prayer, the best hope for a timely rescue of the thirty-three men is back on.

  After listening to all the Catholics around him boast of the powers of this or that statue or image of the Virgin, José Henríquez begins to make some casual remarks during the daily prayer about the danger of venerating images instead of venerating God. One of the miners has even done a dance to the Virgin. Henríquez finds the cult of statues at once quaint and offensive. It’s one of the Ten Commandments, after all: Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven images. On Mount Sinai, God came to Moses and said not to bow before such objects. Eventually, Henríquez will expound on his beliefs in a way several miners find insulting. “To a certain point, Don José wanted to impose his religion on us,” Omar Reygadas says. “He started to renounce the saints. I don’t believe in the saints either, but I respect all religions. The people going to the prayers were from different religions, some were even nonbelievers who just wanted to pray. And there were a lot of people devoted to the Virgin of Candelaria, who is the one they say takes care of the miners. So when Don José started to speak out against the saints and the adoration of images, those people were offended.” Henríquez says, “I didn’t attack anyone. Did I make a commentary? Yes. Because it’s there in the Word: Don’t worship images.”

  Víctor Segovia, who was never religious before, loves to attend the informal underground church at which José Henríquez is pastor. But he, too, is put off by the direction the services are taking. One day in September he describes going to the daily service and seeing Osman Araya, now fully recuperated from starvation, slip into the holy trance of an inspired Evangelical pastor, raising his arms up in the air because he’s really feeling the Lord. “I am no longer enjoying the noon prayer as much because Osman has started to scream and cry when he prays, and that reminds me of those churches where they cry and jump and scream,” Víctor writes. To Víctor it looks theatrical and strange, though he will continue going to the daily prayers led by José and Osman after others have dropped out.

  Omar Reygadas also attends the prayers and notes those who are missing: “Franklin Lobos started praying by himself. Others would step to the side and do their own prayers. And some just forgot about praying and would listen to music.”

  * * *

  For Mario Sepúlveda, who first issued the call to prayer five weeks earlier, the absence of his fellow miners at those holy sessions is another blow. Once all thirty-three men prayed together, but eventually, fewer than half a dozen men will stand with the Pastor to hear the word of God. Mario can see that the brotherhood that kept them together is falling apart, and the distress this causes him leads him to go walking downhill, into the deeper recesses of the mine, down to Level 44. It’s one of the most recently excavated corners of the mine, and in a mountain filled with perils it’s an especially dangerous place, and also hotter and more dank, thanks to the water filling up in a pool there. The underground pond and the large open space adds to the mystical feel of Level 44. Mario has claimed this fetid corner of the mine for himself, calling it his “sacred place” (lugar sagrado), and he’s moved around some stones to build a shrine and speaker’s podium there. He goes to Level 44 alone to read Bible verses, and to practice public speaking. On the video the miners sent to the surface, Mario looked into a camera and spoke to the entire world; in this place he reads Bible verses and speaks to multitudes that exist only in his imagination. He’s practicing because he can see that his future, once he leaves this mine, will be as an orator, traveling the world to speak of God and the strength and goodness of the Chilean workingman. In his solitary speeches he tells stories about riding bikes with his son, Francisco, and about tending to the horses he owns. The sound of his voice echoes back to him in that stone chamber. But now, on September 11, his thirty-seventh day underground, he’s going down to this empty gallery cut from the rock, this personal auditorium of his, not to speak as much as to pray and collect his thoughts, and to ask God what can be done about bringing together the increasingly divided and angry men living in caverns higher up in the mountain. Mario knows it’s his thirty-seventh day underground because he’s been keeping a tally on his helmet since the first day. It was after he made the twenty-second mark that the men started to turn on themselves, and now on day thirty-seven, “crying, I went down there, asking God to make me stronger, asking God to do his will with us. Because the insect, the devil, was circling us.”

  The devil is present in the mine, taking form in all the greed, the misunderstanding, the envy, and the betrayals among the men. He believes that the devil has come from the surface, attaching himself to those letters, the offers of money and fame, to pit them against one another.

  Mario begins to pray: “My Lord, protect us and get this insect out of our minds. The devil has entered the soul of each and every one of us. Have pity on us, and make us as we were before. And my Lord, you can start with me, because the truth is I’m afraid of evil.”

  Mario is speaking these words when he hears a tremendous crash. A huge stone slab in that unstable cavern has broken off from one of the walls, some ten feet away, as big and as lethal as the one that maimed Gino Cortés. To see a slab of rock fall is not an unusual event in the mine, but having that stone crash nearby when he’s talking to God about the devil causes Mario to recoil in shock and fear, and at that same instant he feels the presence of someone just behind him, a kind of hot breath that strikes him on the back of the neck. “Who goes there?” he shouts. He turns around, swinging his lamp, and shines it on the pool of water, and as he does so he sees a pair of startled, half-crazed eyes looking back at him—his own eyes, reflected by the water. He sees the face of his own fear, and it shocks him more than anything else he’s seen in the mine in the thirty-seven days he’s spent down below.

  “¡Diablo!” he shouts into the blackness. He can feel the devil trying to grab hold of him. Suddenly, evil isn’t just an idea, it’s a presence lurking down there in Level 44, hovering over the water. “You’ll never take me, I’ll never be your son!” The crashing stone, the image of his own face in the water, and the hot breath on his neck all send Mario into a crazed state of mind in which he truly believes he’s at war with an evil being. He scrambles in the mud in search of rocks and begins to throw them at the darkness, at that thing down there in the cave that’s trying to get inside his skin. “I’m never going to be your son! ¡La concha de tu madre!” He throws rocks against the walls of the cave, and then he runs away, uphill, three-quarters of a mile toward Level 90 and the living souls trapped there, waiting to be rescued.

  When Mario reaches the others they see him with his clothes and face covered in mud, as if he’d been wrestling with someone down below.

  “What happened to you?” they ask.

  “I was fighting the devil,” Mario says.

  Some of the men laugh, but others don’t, because just about everyone who’s worked at the mine long enough will have seen or felt the devil living down there at one time or another. A Chilean mining legend has it that Satan lives in all gold mines, and gold is precisely what they were digging out of the stone, down there, in those caverns at the very bottom of the mountain. The men dug out tons of rock to get at a few precious ounces of gold, and in so doing they weakened the mountain and transformed it into a mine whose walls can burst without warning. The men of the San José have seen rock explode, and it’s put the fear of God and the fear of the devil into them. Sometime after Mario Sepúlveda’s fight with the devil, there’
s another collapse down at Level 44. A chunk of rock weighing more than a ton breaks away from the ceiling of the cavern with another huge crash, and the place where Mario built his auditorium and his chapel is declared off-limits.

  16

  INDEPENDENCE DAY

  When he entered the mine on August 5, Ariel Ticona knew that his wife was due to have their third child, a girl, on September 18, Chilean Independence Day. For the first seventeen days he was trapped underground, he told himself he needed to stay alive so that he could rise to the surface and see the girl whose name he and his wife had already agreed would be Carolina Elizabeth. Perhaps it was the desire to see his daughter that led him to privately ration the extra cookies he was given by Víctor Zamora after the first night’s raid on the food stores—four cookies that he ate, secretly, over the course of that first week. After the miners had been discovered on the seventeenth day, Ariel held on to the idea that he would rescued in time to see Carolina born, and that he would be able to fulfill a promise he’d made to his wife: For this baby, unlike the previous two, he would be inside the maternity room with her. Ariel is twenty-nine years old, and he admits to being more mature today than he was after first becoming a father. After a man has a couple of kids he has a greater appreciation of the domestic labor that a family is built upon, and with his wife’s third pregnancy he had tried to be more helpful. He was there to help her do the laundry, for example, and he had hoped to be there for her final moments of labor, to hold her hand and make her stronger.