Deep Down Dark

by Héctor Tobar

  In the months after the rescue, Carlos Pinilla found jobs in other mines, including one that’s more than 250 miles south of Copiapó, in Ovalle. As luck would have it, two former workers from the A shift of the San José also found jobs there: Claudio Acuña and José Ojeda. Like Ariel Ticona, they work beneath the surface. Luis Urzúa shares this information with me, and I tell him it seems to me an especially cruel twist of fate: to have one mine fall on top of you, and then to find yourself obliged to work underground in a second mine, with the same boss who once left you behind and trapped for sixty-nine days.

  “That’s the life of a miner,” Urzúa says.

  21

  UNDER THE STARS

  Mario Sepúlveda is riding a horse near his home in Santiago when he’s summoned to a meeting with the men and women transforming his story into a book and film. We wait for him in an upper-floor conference room of a Santiago hotel, and when he arrives, late, he’s wearing his “kiwi” haircut, jeans, the wool poncho of a Chilean huazo, and rubber boots covered in mud. His intense expression and his riding outfit earn him odd looks from the concierge and the bellhops in the lobby. Mario’s postrescue life has been busy. A year after his rescue from the San José Mine, the media offers keep coming. He’s been invited to star on a Chilean reality television show, one where the participants will spend half their time living in Stone Age conditions, and the other half in the Digital Age. He’s started a foundation to build homes for people made homeless by the earthquake and tsunami that preceded the August 5 mining accident. His daughter, Scarlette, has been accepted at the University of Nevada, and he’s been invited to speak there, too, and many other places.

  In my first interviews with him, Mario wept and told stories of how he and his fellow miners pulled together during the first seventeen days. But now, in these final interviews, we take up the more complicated eight weeks that followed the publication of the letter in which he proclaimed himself “absolute leader,” and what happened in the days after he reached the surface, when he gave just enough of an interview to a BBC reporter to allow that reporter to write a book. Many of the miners feel Mario betrayed them and he, in turn, is angry at them, and especially furious with Raúl Bustos.

  “I really wanted to kick the shit out of Bustos in the mine, but they never let me,” he says.1 “But I haven’t lost hope of doing it. Here on the surface, one day. I swear … I hate the asshole.” Mario regales us with mad soliloquies that must be like the soliloquies he unleashed inside the Refuge. He tells us stories and acts them out, standing up to show us how he reacted when he felt the devil’s breath on his neck, or falling on the floor to show us what it was like when he fooled Edison Peña with a phony death speech. Above all, Mario raises his voice: in a shout, a plea, a denunciation, a joke. He makes us laugh and he makes us worry for his state of mind. When he talks about Raúl Bustos and his other “enemies” he repeats that same vulgar insult that refers to part of the female anatomy, again and again, despite the fact that his wife, young son, and a female member of the production company are all sitting at the table with us. Many wives would worry to see their husband so angry, but Elvira looks at him with a bemused detachment, perhaps because she knows that Mario can be angry with someone one moment, and love him the next. On those occasions when all the miners are summoned to a group meeting, all his “enemies” become his friends again. Mario can then sit or stand in a room with his brothers from the San José and hug everyone and tell stories as if none of them had ever said an untoward word to one another. In that sense, the sixty-nine days Mario spent in the mine have not changed him, but rather have simply brought the tumultuous aspects of his love-you/hate-you personality to the surface for all the people around him and a worldwide audience to see. He’s traveled to California, Germany, Hungary, Mexico, and other places, to be recognized as Super Mario and to offer a few words of his own frenetic brand of Chilean miner optimism. At home, his collection of dogs (strays and puppies) grows to eighteen, he buys a new meat locker (that’s always filled), and his wife gives birth to a baby boy, who enters the world after a full term at a healthy eight pounds, eleven ounces. When a Chilean judge finds the mine owners are not criminally culpable in the collapse of the mine, he tells a local reporter: “It makes me want to crawl back into a hole underground and not come out.” He learns that his hero Mel “Braveheart” Gibson won’t play him in the official movie, but that a well-known Spanish actor and heartthrob has agreed to take on the challenging but meaty role of the Man with the Heart of a Dog.

  * * *

  In Copiapó, there is no stardom for Carlos Mamani, the Bolivian immigrant. He’s turned down an offer of a good government job in his native country. Instead, like thousands of other immigrants, he decides to try to make a go of it in Chile, his adopted home. He gets a job with a construction company, operating a front loader of a similar make and model to the one he operated for half a day in the San José. One day, he’s operating his front loader, dumping dirt into a sifter, when the huge cloud of dust this produces transports him back to August 5 and the San José Mine. “I saw the entire collapse again, just like I lived it those first few moments.” He opens the door of his loader and lets out a scream. The sound of his panicked voice wakes him up and brings him back to the present. It’s been more than a year since the accident and Carlos is surprised to be having these flashbacks, which cause him to relive the fear and solitude of his weeks underground. “The hardest part about being down there was that I didn’t know anybody,” he tells me. Today everyone around Carlos knows who he is, but some of his new coworkers are not happy to see a Bolivian man with indigenous features and an Altiplano accent taking one of the company’s better jobs. “You shouldn’t be here. Why don’t you go back to your country,” they say. Then they’ll insinuate he’s wealthy—“a rich Bolivian, imagine that”—and tease him that he should invite the entire crew over to his house for a barbecue. Carlos has dealt with racism before, but never racism tinged with so much envy. The remarks anger him, but his response is to simply keep working. When we meet, his daily routine is taking him to a highway construction project on a road between Copiapó and the next city to the south, Vallenar. He has the satisfaction of getting paid to do the job he began on the day the San José Mine collapsed, only now he’s operating a Volvo 150 front loader, a slightly bigger model with “more prestige,” he says. When his work on the road is done he’ll drive it and take pride in the way he helped link two cities in Chile, the country where he became a Bolivian hero and where he’s decided to stay and raise his family.

  As with Carlos Mamani, the emotional crisis caused by his sixty-nine days underground hits Víctor Segovia with a delayed effect. More than a year after the rescue, he begins to feel alone and isolated. The unpaid loans he’s made have left him feeling used and small, and it bothers him that none of his relatives and friends ask him how he’s doing emotionally. It’s like they don’t care, he thinks. He becomes a recluse, rarely leaving his home, and his inner turmoil begins to manifest itself in physical maladies, including swollen limbs and troubled breathing. His doctors give him medication, but at first it’s too strong and it makes him sick. The dose is eventually corrected and this helps Víctor, as does a new outlet he’s found for his hurt: He starts writing again, keeping a diary. “My Rescue,” he calls it, and in its pages he details the trips he’s taken, his descent into depression, illustrating his story and its drama with drawings.

  When he was trapped, Juan Illanes kept his mind limber by telling stories and also by imagining himself completing domestic projects. When he gets home to Chillán, he finishes these projects, including that gutter he built several times over in his mind while trying to sleep at Level 105. Among the thirty-three survivors of the San José Mine, he’s one of the first to return to work, finding a job with Geotec, the company whose workers and rig drilled the Plan B hole. “If you’re working, it’s the best therapy for posttraumatic stress,” Juan says. Studies have shown that the gravity of post
traumatic stress is directly proportional to the length of time one lives with the threat of death, and Juan slowly unwinds the trauma of the sixty-nine days he lived inside a thundering mountain by going to work, fixing machines, then going back home, and then returning to work again. His job is at the enormous open-pit Collahuasi copper mine, near the port of Iquique, even farther from his home in southern Chile than the San José Mine was, a whopping 1,300 miles in all, or about the distance between New York and Tulsa. Most of his commute is on an airplane, however. He works twelve days on, twelve days off, each dozen days and each journey back and forth across his country causing another layer of hurt to fall away. “I’ve been learning and growing a lot,” he says of his new job.

  Months and years pass and the lessons of those sixty-nine days are made clearer to the men of the A shift of the San José Mine. Raúl Bustos remembers how he and his wife were always scrambling for more and better-paying work, and how he was drinking whiskey and Red Bull in the middle of the night, waiting for her to return from another job, when an earthquake and tsunami struck. He remembers the risk he took, for mere money, when he accepted a job in the San José just months later. Now he asks himself: What was I chasing, and why? Sixty-nine days of loneliness liberated him from his restlessness. His family, his home, the garden in the back, and the peach tree—he sees them all bathed in a brighter light, and time moves slower and seems richer somehow. “We’re not so worried about getting ahead,” he says. Pedro Cortez, the young miner who didn’t like the “rock star” treatment he got in the months after the rescue, starts to feel better when the pressures and expectations of his celebrity start to fade. The nightmares and daydreams that caused him to weep go away. “You start thinking about other things,” he says: his daughter, his studies, the new jobs he might get, the new person he will become. “You don’t think about the tragedy anymore.”

  Darío Segovia and his wife, Jessica, launch their own business. Instead of buying and selling produce as Darío had once hoped, they become distributors for a soft-drink company. Darío maintains their two-truck fleet and Jessica does the accounting and their home is their office, and they meet their employees there for breakfast every morning. Darío and Jessica go to bed late and get up early. “Movie money or no movie money, we’re going to keep this business going,” Jessica says. She likes the idea that they’ve become “micro-entrepreneurs,” following in the footsteps of Darío’s sister María.

  “There’s nothing like making your own dough,” María says. “If what you have you earned in sacrifice, you value it more.” The onetime mayor of Camp Esperanza keeps working in Antofagasta, and she’s selling her pastries at a flea market one day when one of her daughters calls and tells her: “Mommy, you’re going to have to be strong again.” Her thirty-six-year-old daughter, Ximena, has been diagnosed with leukemia. The disease advances quickly, requiring Ximena’s transfer to an intensive-care unit in Santiago, and once again María Segovia feels as if the forces of nature and fate are trying to sweep her family away. She takes to the bus and travels south. María’s daughter is dying, and like any mother she will do anything to help her, so when she gets to Santiago she calls the most powerful person she knows, Minister Golborne. The minister receives her in his office, and calls her his friend, and embraces her, and listens to her story, and weeps with her. He promises to call the minister of health to make sure Ximena is getting the best possible care, and not only does Golborne make good on his promise, he shows up at Ximena’s hospital with flowers and with the minister of health, too. Ximena gets better.

  A cynic might note that Minister Golborne is about to launch a presidential campaign and that he visits Ximena in the hospital with the Santiago media in tow—the coverage is a reminder of Golborne’s role in the miracle of the San José Mine. Golborne’s compassion and tenacity during the search and rescue at the mine made him one of Chile’s most popular politicians. The Piñera administration has disappointed most Chileans, but Golborne is a rising star, a conservative leader with a compelling story of service to thirty-three workingmen and their families. Two years after the rescue he seems poised to easily claim his party’s presidential nomination. But his campaign is quickly brought down by controversies, including one that completely undermines his image as a man of the people: the revelation that he kept part of his wealth in an undeclared account in the British Virgin Islands.

  * * *

  Events in Santiago always seem very far away to Juan Carlos Aguilar, the former supervisor of the mechanics crew. He’s returned home to the southern edge of mainland Chile, in the town of Los Lagos, and leads a low-key life that includes giving talks to local schools. In his gentle and unhurried voice, and his unassuming demeanor, he tells children and teenagers about the importance of teamwork, about how humble people can overcome the steepest odds, and how faith can give you strength even when death is near. His role as one of the leaders of the thirty-three men underground is not widely known, but his fellow miners all acknowledge what he did, and that’s enough for Juan Carlos. Two or three times a year he travels half the length of Chile to meetings in Copiapó, because those same men have chosen him to be one of three members of their leadership committee. They discuss starting a foundation to help impoverished miners. But Juan Carlos feels he isn’t doing enough. Something special happened to him, something that nearly killed him and that gave him new life. He remembers the faces of the men in that hole, and the slate-colored “guillotine” that trapped them. In letters written in the Refuge and in starvation dreams, they said farewell to their families, and then an entire country worked to bring them out of the dark. Juan Carlos wonders why he, among so many millions of workingmen, was chosen to live these things. “I wake up every morning and ask God, ‘What am I supposed to do with this?’”

  Two and a half years after the accident, Juan Carlos Aguilar is alongside Luis Urzúa in Copiapó at the press conference announcing the creation of the miners’ new nonprofit foundation, the Thirty-Three of Atacama. The foundation’s mission is to aid the poor of the region, and the perquineros, the artisan miners whose culture shaped the childhood and family life of several of the thirty-three men. Most of the survivors of the San José Mine are there, including Mario Sepúlveda, Raúl Bustos, and Edison Peña, along with the former minister of mining Laurence Golborne, who can no longer be accused of having immediate political motives. They meet at the Antay Casino and Hotel, across the street from the chapel that holds the Catholic relic most sacred to local miners, and they listen as Luis Urzúa reads some prepared remarks. “Why did we survive a tragedy?” he asks. “What is the mission each one of us must follow?” Since the rescue, Luis has taken classes in public speaking, and aboveground he’s tried to be something he wasn’t underground—the undisputed leader of the thirty-three miners. He tells me he’s learned to talk to “big people,” and more than once he’s written pointed letters and e-mails to powerful lawyers and film producers in Santiago and Los Angeles. Eventually, however, his fellow miners question his actions (much as they did underground) and they vote to remove him from their leadership committee.

  The last time I speak with Luis, he is angry with many of his former colleagues. But to outsiders he still retains his role as a figure of Chilean and mining history. Luis can feel the way the collapse of the mine and the drama of the rescue linked him to strangers around the world. In Chile, people tell him they’ll never forget where they were when they heard the news that the men had been found alive. It was on a Sunday, a family day, at the hour of the day’s biggest meal. “We were just sitting down to eat,” they tell him, and they remember the church bells ringing, and the people running out into the streets. Chileans who were traveling abroad when 1.2 billion people watched the men being rescued on television tell him that to be Chilean in those days in October was to feel the entire world had adopted you. People congratulated us for being chilenos, they tell him.

  From all these strangers, Luis does not get the sense that they think he’s a
hero, necessarily, or that they’re in awe of him. Rather, he understands that it’s as if he and these strangers had lived something together: a shared experience with him in the mine and them on the outside. What he feels from these strangers is the gratitude of people who’ve been given a true and hopeful story, a timeless legend born of their own time, in a humble country in the shadow of the Andes.

  * * *

  The first time I met Alex Vega, it was in his home in Copiapó, about eleven months after his rescue. He was not well. I asked him about his family history, and how it was he came to work in the San José, and I noticed his hand was trembling. I talked to him a bit more, and the tremor seemed to spread through his body, as if he were shivering from cold on that warm, sunny day of Southern Hemisphere spring. “You look a little nervous,” I said, and soon Alex talked about the “scars” he still had and how he’d struggled with mood swings, and nightmares that were starting to diminish in frequency but which still haunted him. Above all, what troubled Alex was the sensation that he needed to be alone, that his wife and children were better off when he wasn’t in the same room with them, which is a painful and confusing thought for a family-loving man to have in his head, especially after spending sixty-nine days longing to be reunited with them.