Deep Down Dark

by Héctor Tobar

  When González arrives at the San José Mine he meets the other men who are candidates to journey in the Fénix and there is an instant collegiality between them. They will work to prepare one another for the rescue, and they will compete to be the man who enters the Fénix first. When the completed capsule arrives at the mine, they see that it resembles a toy spacecraft you might find in a museum for kids to play in. It has oxygen tanks, a harness, lights, and a radio, and the cigar-shaped steel skin doesn’t look much different from the metal that playground merry-go-rounds are made from. The Fénix is a capsule designed to travel inside the Earth, and a bureaucrat with a more creative bent might have dubbed it the Jules Verne instead. González and the other men train inside the Fénix, which is placed inside a tube 20 meters long, and then lifted and lowered by a crane, in a simulation of the rescue to come. One at a time, the rescue candidates enter the capsule and travel up and down inside the tube over and over again, and sometimes the capsule is left stationary, and minutes are allowed to pass with the rescuer “stuck” inside this steel prison, a small taste of the torments that await them should the mountain begin to crack and rumble during their journey into the mine.

  * * *

  When the trapped miners enter the capsule, they’ll journey upward and meet their loved ones at the surface. But who will be there to greet Yonni Barrios, the man with two households? His wife, with whom he’s been corresponding feverishly? Or his girlfriend, who is also the woman he lives with (most often)? In the weeks since a drill broke through to the thirty-three men, Yonni has been living his personal life underground much as he did while he was up on the surface, in the Juan Pablo II neighborhood. On the weekends, he’s been dividing his eight minutes in the videoconference booth in half: four minutes with his wife, Marta, and four with his girlfriend, Susana. “I didn’t care that it was just four minutes,” Susana says. “Because just one little minute was gold for me.” For Susana those moments she’s spent talking to her lover via fiber-optic connection have a magical and mystical quality. The first time she sees Yonni he’s wearing a white coat, his uniform as the miners’ medical officer. His white garb and the lights illuminating him in that cavern studio leave Susana with the impression that Yonni is in “heaven,” or someplace else, far away. “He was sitting down and had this light in his eye. Like he was a Martian. He had a bright light around him, you’d only see his eyes. For a moment, I thought he was dead, and the company was playing some sort of trick on me.” She begins to weep, despite the psychologist’s entreaties to keep up a brave face. “You’re dead!” she says to the screen. “I cried and cried and Yonni said, ‘I’m alive. Chana, I’m alive. Look at me! Do you understand? I’m alive!’” After these dramatic first words, they fall into something resembling a normal conversation, and Yonni is talking to her in that gentle and uncertain voice of his, and he starts to say things that sound familiar, because they involve Marta. He explains to Susana that he’d rather not be talking to his wife in these teleconferences, but he’s forced to because Marta has told him she’s sick from all the stress of almost losing him, and she’ll die if she doesn’t speak to Yonni (literally die). Susana believes that Marta is manipulating Yonni and she forgives him, like she always does.

  After the teleconferences, when Susana goes back to the home she shared with Yonni, she watches and reads as she and Yonni are cast as cheap, one-dimensional villains in a media soap opera, with Marta as the victim. A global Greek chorus of strangers loathes Susana—and she doesn’t care. “My happiness was so big, I didn’t even feel it. He was alive and all the stories just made me laugh. It was as if the more bad things they said about him, the more alive he was. When you’re fighting against death, there’s nothing that can embarrass you. Because death is such a huge thing. Let them say whatever they want, let them tie me up, let them call me ‘lover.’ I was the ‘lover.’ Sure, I’m the ‘lover.’ ‘How many women does he have?’ ‘About ten women! He has more women than he has shoes!’”

  17

  REBIRTH

  Jeff Hart wears a U.S. flag on his shirtsleeve as he works on the Plan B drill, and sometimes he wears a cloth that protrudes from the back of his white Layne Christensen helmet. Almost always, he drills with one foot on the rig, and one day the minister of mining asks why. Drilling is “a feel,” Hart explains. “You have to actually be standing on the rig so you can feel what’s going on.” Down below, metal is rubbing and pounding against rock, and the friction is transmitted up the shaft, where Hart and his foot take note of “good vibrations” and “bad vibrations” coming from the rig. “That’s how you know your bits are coming apart, or if their cutting edge is actually gone,” he says. The Americans are all the more vigilant because the rock here at the San José Mine is harder than they expected. As the drilling for the final stage of the Plan B shaft goes deeper, they have to stop and change bits every 10 or 20 meters or so. “It started to get very nerve-racking, because it got very sticky,” Hart says. “We’re in a hole that’s curving around. We have drill pipe that in our minds is in the center of the hole all the way down, but it’s not, it’s rubbing [against the edges] all the way down. We were losing a lot of torque value in wall rub.” Hart and the three other Americans are supposed to be working twelve-hour shifts of two men each, but instead they’re working sixteen- to eighteen-hour shifts, then sleeping at the mine property in tents. Drilling toward living, trapped men is infinitely more stressful than drilling toward a water table or a mineral vein. Hart feels a sense of urgency that’s driven by the idea that if one of those miners gets sick and it takes an extra month to get him out, he might not make it. Hart is a parent, too, one who might spend months away from home on a job, and he wants to get all those fathers at the bottom of this hole back to their kids. Soon, the stress causes him and the Americans, like the Chileans down below, to snap at one another.

  * * *

  As the T130 drill gets closer, a new plague sweeps through the corridors where the thirty-three men live and sleep. First there was unrelenting heat and thunder, then water and mud and fungi; now a slow-moving cloud of dust and steam begins to flow down into the mine. For seven days beginning September 27, a misty, gritty cloud floats toward Level 105 and the Refuge and stays there. “It’s 7:40 a.m. and there is dirt and steam everywhere,” Víctor Segovia writes in his diary. “It’s like when the fog rolls in, everything is steamed up.”

  The men sleep and stir in the steamy, dusty cloud and Víctor wonders if breathing this in will make him sick. There are still prayer sessions, but only a handful attend. Several of the men pass around flags and pictures they’ve been asked to sign, mementos of what already feels like an event in Chilean history: “If something has signatures from all thirty-three of us, it’s more valuable,” Víctor notes. Mostly the men write letters, and already there’s a sense that they’re living a time that will soon pass into memory as a written story. How will they remember it, and how will it be written? Undoubtedly, they’ll recall the sacrifice of the men and women who worked to pull them out of there, and their own faith and suffering. Already, Víctor “the Poet” Zamora has penned a poem exploring those themes, and it’s been published on the surface. “Keep up those spirits, comrades, we have to organize ourselves first / Come together, everyone, we have to pray,” Zamora begins, describing their first underground pleas to God.1 Zamora also describes the regret he felt at the idea that he was leaving his family. “… the only thing I thought at that moment / tell my wife and sons I’m sorry / they, with yearning, are waiting for me to arrive at the door.”2 He ends his message with a hopeful “We are in your hands, Chile.”

  There is, however, another way to think of their story. Isn’t it really just a series of betrayals, of men failing to see how this mine was already killing and maiming people and destined to come crashing down and kill everyone inside? The mine owners need to be held accountable, but so do the supervisors who work for them, as at least one of the men argues. After one of their daily meetings, a miner
turns on the shift supervisors, Luis Urzúa and Florencio Avalos. It’s because of you guys we got trapped down here, he says. If you had shut down the mine, we wouldn’t have been trapped. The miner threatens to file a criminal complaint against Urzúa and Avalos when he reaches the surface for “quasi homicide,” and go on the airwaves and tell the story, as he sees it, of the culpability of the supervisor and his foreman in the events of August 5.

  However their story is told, there is the question of who will benefit from the telling. Let’s be smart about this, several miners say, and let’s not allow others to make money from our suffering, like they always do. Several of the miners have insisted, in the face of the media onslaught from above, that they need to stick to the pact of silence first suggested by Juan Illanes. Everything that happened between August 5 and August 22 belongs to the group, and no individual, Illanes has said. If they stick together, they will all share equally in whatever money there is to be made selling their story on the surface. But the temptation of individual riches is hovering over them, and sometimes it reaches down into the mine to touch them, via offers made to their relatives and relayed via the mail in the paloma tubes. “I’ve got a contract that’s brilliant,” Edison Peña tells Illanes, because he wants to know if he can accept it without breaking the rules. A certain athletic shoe company based in the United States has offered Peña, already famous as the “miner athlete,” money for wearing its shoes when he gets out. Mario Sepúlveda approaches Illanes, too, because the pact was Illanes’s idea after all, and Illanes has become a kind of legal counselor down below. Sepúlveda doesn’t say he has a contract for an interview or some other media deal, but the mere fact that he’s asking what, exactly, he can and can’t talk about is suspicious to Illanes.

  “Look, compadre,” Illanes begins. “Be very careful. Because between what’s yours and what’s property of the group there is a very fine line … If you fuck up, I’m going to put you in jail.3 Let’s be clear. You don’t have anything down here that’s just yours. Nothing. Are you going to tell me that if we threw you down here for weeks and left you all alone, completely alone, and then we came to rescue you, we’d find you as fine and dandy as you are now? Did you pull that off all by yourself? No, compadre. You made it this far because behind you there were thirty-two others.”

  As September winds to a close Juan Illanes and Luis Urzúa and others wonder if they should formalize their oral agreement and make it a legally binding one. “The ambitions of the families were going to lead people to break the pact,” Urzúa says. “Ambition changes people.” Illanes and Urzúa can see that people are leaking bits and pieces of information about their story to the press. In letters to the surface, and in discussions with the psychologist, Iturra, the men ask that a notary be sent to the mine, a person who can give the oral agreement among the thirty-three men a written form, and validate that they’ve all signed and agreed to it—even while they are still trapped and waiting to be rescued.

  Iturra agrees to the miners’ request—and gets himself in trouble with the Piñera administration for doing so. “They wanted to fire me for it,” he says. The miners haven’t told Iturra why they want to talk to a notary, in part because they don’t want the media to figure out what they’re up to, so the officials can only speculate: Have those trapped men become thirty-three ingrates planning on suing the very government that’s trying to rescue them? Do they already have a movie deal with someone? Iturra tells the officials he’s not concerned, because the miners are still underground and “they really can’t do anything.”

  The notary arrives at the mine on October 2. The men discuss their plan, and the notary tells them that he can consult with an attorney and draw something up, but nothing can be legally formalized until the men reach the surface, since a notary has to be present at the signing of any document—and not watching it, from 2,100 feet away, via videoconference.

  As the notary leaves the mine, the T130 drill has reached 428 meters, and is less than 100 meters from breaking through and freeing the men once and for all.

  * * *

  Before the capsule can reach them, however, the trapped men will have to pull off one more mining job. They’re going to have to set off a blast at the very bottom of the Plan B shaft. Even when the final shaft is complete, the rescue capsule won’t fit inside the mine unless the men below can remove part of the stone wall next to the shaft opening. It’s a relatively routine piece of mine work, but it requires using a jackhammer to pound a hole into the stone for the explosive charges. The jackhammers need compressed air that used to be supplied in hoses from the surface until they were cut by the collapse of the mine on August 5. Jorge Galleguillos, whose job it was to maintain that air supply, now works on rigging together a series of two-inch hoses that the rescuers have sent down to supply fresh air from the surface. Having recovered from his swollen legs, he runs the hoses up to Level 135, where Víctor Segovia and Pablo Rojas eventually get enough pressure to run a jackhammer to drill eight holes in the rock.

  Jorge is in the middle of this work, walking alone in the corridors near Level 105, when he crosses paths with Yonni Barrios. Yonni is feeling harried with his medical duties—he’s carrying several plastic bottles with medicines shipped from the surface—and for some reason he assumes Jorge is just taking a relaxing stroll through the mine.

  “Hey, asshole,” Yonni says. “You’re just goofing off, aren’t you?”4

  Jorge is tired and frustrated himself, and he responds to this insult by taking the palms of his hands, which are covered with mud from lifting up hoses, and wiping them on Yonni’s white medical smock. “There, that’s how lazy I’ve been,” he mumbles. Then he slaps Yonni across the face.

  Yonni drops his medicine bottles on the ground, recovers himself, and then kicks the older Jorge in the leg. After countless heated words and threats among the men of the A shift during the more than eight weeks they’ve been trapped underground, this is the first physical altercation. There is one witness, Luis Urzúa, but before he can say anything, the fight is over.

  * * *

  On October 9, Jeff Hart and the T130 drill crew are less than a foot away from breaking through to the workshop at Level 135 when the drill rig emits a loud pop. “It scared us all to death,” Hart later says. For a few seconds the drill team considers the implications of losing the hole and all the work that went into it, but then, surprisingly, the drill just keeps going, without any noticeable change in pressure or torque. Hart will never find out exactly what caused that pop.

  Minister Golborne has told the families that when the drill breaks through the crews will set off a horn. At 8:02 a.m., the wail of a siren travels across the mountain: The Plan B drill has reached its destination. In Camp Esperanza, family members call out, “To the flags!” and they rush toward a collection of flags, thirty-two Chilean and one Bolivian, located at the bottom of a scree of stones, a place where the families have met before to celebrate good news, or to face bad news together. “Our joy will be even greater when they’re all taken out alive,” María Segovia tells a reporter. It will take two or three days to remove the drill bit and to test the hole itself for stability and safety. Later, in a press conference, Golborne makes the observation that it’s taken thirty-three days of drilling to reach the thirty-three men. The last man is scheduled to enter the capsule and leave on October 13: If you add up the digits for the date, month, and year, Golborne points out, you will also arrive at the number thirty-three.

  * * *

  At Level 135 the men gather to look at the hole that will take them to the surface, and celebrate with embraces, and by taking pictures with cameras their relatives have sent from the surface. They are one step closer to freedom. But Víctor Segovia is worried: The opening seems too small, and he can already sense the claustrophobic torment of being lifted up through it. A short time later, the miners pack nitrate explosives into the holes they’ve drilled nearby. They set off the very last explosive charges in the 121-year history of
the San José Mine, a relatively small blast that will help set them free.

  * * *

  The next morning, several of the men awake to the sound of distant thunder transmitted through stone. A series of rock explosions can be heard, coming, perhaps, from inside the cavern that Florencio Avalos glimpsed, a storm inside the mountain like the one that trapped them on August 5. Samuel Avalos, alias CD, manages to sleep through this thunder, until Carlos Barrios kicks him in the leg and wakes him up. “Hey, CD, stand up, huevón! The mine is making noises. Put your helmet on. What do we do?” Pedro Cortez, the young miner who wants to buy a yellow Camaro, is woken up, too, by another of the mining veterans, Pablo Rojas.

  “The mountain is cracking a lot,” Pablo says.

  “Yes, it’s been doing that,” Pedro answers. A series of strong thunderclaps, pencazos fuertes, have interrupted his sleep. Now they come just a few seconds apart, and they will continue for four hours, but there’s nothing to be done about it, so Pedro throws himself back on his inflatable bed and tries to sleep. This infuriates Pablo, who doesn’t understand how anyone can sleep when the mine sounds like it’s about to collapse again. “It was funny because in the news they’d been talking about the old foxes of the mine as if they were these experts who helped all us young guys survive,” Pedro later says. “And now the old guys were coming to us young guys in a panic.”

  Soon all the miners who sleep by the Refuge are getting up and gathering by the shaft where the men receive paloma shipments from the surface. The older miners look distressed and Yonni Barrios is crying. We have to talk to Sougarret and Golborne, they say. We have to tell them we can’t afford to wait another two or three days. They need to come for us now. “There’s this myth that the devil lives in gold mines,” one of the younger miners says. Some of the men believe the rumbling is the devil, and that the devil is angry because the men are about to leave. It’s a Sunday, the day the men get to talk to the surface, and in the conversations later that afternoon several miners beg their family members to tell Sougarret and Golborne to speed up this rescue, for the love of God, because the devil inside the mountain is angry and he doesn’t want to let them go. But the organizers of the rescue stick to their plan: On that Sunday and the following Monday, they continue to test the stability of the borehole, and of the Fénix capsule by filling it with sandbags and lowering it into the shaft.