Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors

by Piers Paul Read

  ‘For God’s sake, be quiet!’ came cries from the back of the plane. ‘You’re no worse off than anyone else.’

  At this the cries redoubled.

  ‘Shut up,’ shouted Carlitos Páez, ‘or I’ll come and smash your face in!’

  Her screaming grew louder and more insistent, then it abated, but then it started again as a boy who was still in a state of shock stepped on her as he tried to get to the door.

  ‘Keep him away!’ she shouted. ‘Keep him away, he’s trying to kill me. He’s trying to kill me!’

  The ‘assassin’, Eduardo Strauch, was pulled back onto the floor by his cousin, but a short time later he stood up and tried to climb over the seats and bodies to find a warmer and more comfortable place to sleep. This time he stood on the only surviving member of the crew (besides Lagurara) – Carlos Roque, the mechanic. He too took Eduardo Strauch for a murderer and, with the punctiliousness of a trained serviceman, asked him to identify himself.

  ‘Show me your papers!’ he shouted. ‘Identify yourself. Identify yourself.’

  When Eduardo did not present his passport but continued to clamber over Roque towards the door, the mechanic became hysterical.

  ‘Help me!’ he screamed. ‘He’s mad. He’s trying to kill me.’ Once again Eduardo was pulled back into place by his cousin.

  In another part of the plane a second figure, Pancho Delgado, stood up and made for the door. ‘I’m just going to the shops to get some Coca-Cola,’ he announced to his friends.

  ‘Then get me some mineral water while you’re there,’ replied Carlitos Páez.

  In spite of the intense discomfort, some of the boys managed to drift off into sleep, but it was a long night. The cries of pain continued as one boy stumbled over broken limbs to scoop up snow at the entrance or another awoke, not knowing where he was, and tried to leave the plane. There were cries, too, from those who were irritated by the bleating of self-pity, and there were acrimonious exchanges between some Old Christians and the boys from the Jesuit College of the Sacred Heart.

  Those who were awake huddled closer together as the wind blew through their improvised ramparts and the other holes that had been made in the wall of the fuselage. The boys by the entrance suffered most – their limbs numb with cold, their faces tickled by snowflakes which blew in over their bodies. The uninjured could at least buffet one another and rub their feet and fingers to keep up the circulation of their blood. It was the plight of the two Parrados and Panchito Abal that was most terrible. They were unable to warm themselves and, though the injuries they had sustained were so terrible, only Nando was unconscious, oblivious of his agony. Abal begged for help which no one could give him – ‘Oh, help me, please help me. It’s so cold, it’s so cold …’ – and Susana cried continuously for her dead mother – ‘Mama, Mama, Mama, let’s go away from here. Let’s go home.’ Then her mind wandered and she sang a nursery rhyme.

  In the course of the night the third medical student, Diego Storm, decided that, though Parrado was unconscious, his injuries seemed more superficial than those of the two others. He therefore pulled Parrado’s body over among the group of his friends, and together they combined to keep it warm. It seemed senseless to do this for the other two.

  The night was unending. At one point Zerbino thought he saw the dim light of dawn through their makeshift wall. He looked at his watch: it was only nine o’clock at night. Later still, those in the middle of the plane heard a foreign voice at the entrance. For a moment they thought it was a rescue party, but then they realized that it was Susana, praying in English.

  6

  The sun rose on the morning of Saturday, October 14, to find the hulk of the Fairchild half buried in snow. It lay at about 11,500 feet between the Tinguiririca volcano in Chile and the Cerro Sosneado in Argentina. Though the plane had crashed more or less in the middle of the Andes, its exact position was on the Argentine side of the border.

  The plane lay on a slant. Its bent nose pointed down the valley, which fell away steeply towards the east. In every other direction, beyond the carpet of snow, arose walls of immense mountains. Their slopes were not sheer; rather, they spread themselves, huge and inhospitable. Occasionally the grey and pink of the rough volcanic rock appeared through the snow, but at that altitude nothing grew in the shale – no bush, no scrub, no blade of grass. The plane had crashed not just in the mountains but in a desert, too.

  The first out of the plane were Marcelo Pérez and Roy Harley, who pushed down the barricade they had been at such pains to erect the night before. There were clouds in the sky but the snow had stopped. The frost had frozen the surface of the snow, and they were able to take some steps away from the plane and study the utter bleakness of the situation.

  Inside the plane Canessa and Zerbino began, once again, to examine the wounded and discovered that three more had died in the night. Panchito Aballay motionless over the body of Susana Parrado. His feet were blackened by frostbite, and it was quite evident from the stiffness of his limbs that he was dead. For a time they thought that Susana must also be dead, for she was quiet, but when they removed the body of Abal they saw that she was still alive and still conscious. Her feet, too, had gone purple from the cold, and she complained to the mother who was no longer there. ‘Mama, Mama,’ she cried, ‘my feet are hurting. They are hurting so much. Oh, please, Mama, can’t we go home?’

  There was little that Canessa could do for Susana. He massaged her frostbitten feet to try and bring back the circulation, and again he wiped away the caked blood from her eyes. She was sufficiently conscious to be glad that she had not gone blind, and she thanked Canessa for his care. Canessa was only too well aware that the superficial cuts on her face were, in all probability, the least of her injuries. He felt sure that her internal organs were badly damaged, but he had neither the knowledge nor the facilities to do anything about it. Indeed, there was little he could do for any of them. There were no drugs on the plane beyond those which Carlitos Páez had bought in Mendoza and some Librium and Vallium found in a handbag. There was nothing in the wreckage which seemed suitable to be used as splints for broken limbs, so Canessa could only tell those with broken arms or legs to lay them on the snow to help bring down the swelling; later he advised them to massage their sprained ligaments. He was afraid to tie the bandages he had made from the antimacassars too tightly because he knew that in the extreme cold this might impede the circulation of the blood.

  When he came to Señora Mariani, he thought that she too was dead. He crouched down beside her and made another attempt to move the seats which still pinned her to the floor, whereupon she started to scream once again, ‘Don’t touch me, don’t touch me! You’ll kill me!’ So he decided to leave her alone. When he returned later in the morning to see how she was, she had taken on a lost look and was silent. And then, just as he looked into her eyes, they rolled around into her skull and she ceased to breathe.

  Canessa, though he had studied medicine for a year longer than Zerbino, could not bring himself to say that someone was definitely dead. He left it to Zerbino to kneel and place his ear to Señora Mariani’s chest to listen for the faintest sound of her heart. There was none, and so the other boys pushed back the seats, tied a nylon belt from the luggage hold around the shoulders of the corpse, and dragged it out into the snow. They told Carlitos Páez that she was dead, and Páez was filled with remorse for his harsh words of the night before and hid his face in his hands.

  It was also Gustavo Zerbino who examined the hole in Enrique Platero’s stomach from which he had pulled the steel tube the day before. He unwound the shirt and there, just as he had feared, was a protruding piece of gristle which so far as he knew could be part of the intestine or the lining of the stomach. It was bleeding, and to stem the flow of blood Zerbino tied it up with some thread, disinfected it with eau de cologne, and then told Platero to push it back into his stomach and bind up the wound once again. This Platero did without complaint.

  The two doctors wer
e not without their nurse. Liliana Methol, though her face was still purple from the bruises she had received in the crash, did what she could to help and encourage them. She was a small, dark woman whose whole life until then had been devoted to her husband Javier and four children. Before they married, Javier had suffered an accident. He had been knocked off a motor bicycle and then run over by a car; as a result, he had been unconscious for several weeks and in the hospital for several months after that. His memory never completely recovered, and he had lost the use of his right eye.

  This was not his only misfortune. When he was twenty-one his family had sent him to Cuba and then to the United States, to study the production and marketing of tobacco. In the town of Wilson, North Carolina, he was told that he had tuberculosis. His illness was too far advanced for him to return to Uruguay, and he had to spend the next five months in a North Carolina sanatorium.

  Even after his return to Montevideo he was bedridden for four more months, but there he would be visited by his girl friend, Liliana. He had known her since he was twenty, and on June 16, 1960, they were married. For their honeymoon they went to Brazil, but only once since then had they been abroad – to the lakes of southern Argentina. It was as a belated celebration of their twelfth wedding anniversary that Javier had brought Liliana on the trip to Chile.

  After the accident Liliana had been the first to notice that Javier – almost alone among the survivors – suffered chronically from the altitude. He remained nauseous and weak. His movements were heavy and his mind became slow. Liliana had to show him where to go and what to do and strengthen his spirit with her resolve.

  She was also the natural source of comfort for the younger boys. Many of them were not yet twenty. Many of them, too, had been cared for throughout their lives by admiring mothers and sisters, and in their terror and despair they turned to Liliana, who – aside from Susana – was the only woman among them. She answered their need. She was patient and kind, speaking soft words to make their spirits strong. When, on the first night, Marcelo and his friends insisted that she sleep in the warmer part of the plane, she accepted their chivalrous gesture, but the next day she insisted that she be treated in just the same way as the others. Though some of the younger boys such as Zerbino would still have liked to accord her some deference and privacy, they had to recognize that in the confines of the plane the segregation of the sexes was not practicable, and from then on she was treated as one of the team.

  The attention of the doctors and their nurse was drawn to one of the youngest members of the first fifteen, Antonio Vizintín, called Tintin, who seemed to be suffering from concussion and had been put to rest on the webbing of the luggage area. It was only now, the day following the accident, that blood was seen dripping from the sleeve of his coat. When they asked Vizintín what was wrong with his arm, he insisted that it was perfectly all right because he felt no pain. Liliana took a closer look, however, and found that the sleeve of his jacket was sodden with blood. The two doctors were summoned and, finding it impossible to remove Tintin’s jacket, they cut away the sleeve with a penknife. As they pulled it away – heavy with the blood that had soaked into it – more blood gushed from a severed vein. They at once made a tourniquet to stop the flow from his body and then bandaged the wound as best they could. Vizintín still felt no pain but he was very weak. Sceptical about his chances of survival, Canessa and Zerbino laid him down again on his bed in the luggage compartment.

  Their final tour of duty was to the pilots’ cabin. Since early that morning no sound had come from Lagurara, and when they forced their way in from the luggage compartment they found, as they had suspected, that he was dead.

  With the death of Lagurara they had lost the one man who might have told them what they should do to facilitate their rescue, for Roque, the only surviving crew member, was of little use. Since the crash he had wept continuously and lost all control of his bodily functions, being conscious of soiling his trousers only because of the complaints of those around him and the actions of the boys who helped to change them.

  He was, all the same, in the Uruguayan Air Force, and Marcelo Pérez asked him if there were any emergency supplies or signal flares in the plane. Roque said no. Marcelo then asked him if the radio could be made to work, and Roque replied that it would need the power of the plane’s batteries, which had been stored in the missing tail.

  There seemed nothing to be done, but Marcelo was so confident they would soon be rescued that he was not unduly concerned. It was agreed, all the same, that what food they had should be rationed, and Marcelo made an inventory of everything edible that had been salvaged from the cabin or from those pieces of luggage which had not been lost with the tail. There were the bottles of wine which the pilots had bought in Mendoza, but five of them had been drunk in the course of the night and only three remained. There was also a bottle of whisky, a bottle of crème de menthe, a bottle of cherry brandy, and a further hip flask of whisky, half of which had been drunk.

  For solid food they had eight bars of chocolate, five bars of nougat, some caramels which had been scattered over the floor of the cabin, some dates and dried plums, also scattered, a packet of salted biscuits, two tins of mussels, one tin of salted almonds, and a small jar each of peach, apple and blackberry jam. This was not a lot of food for twenty-eight people, and since they did not know how many days they would have to wait before being rescued, it was decided to make it last as long as possible. For lunch that day Marcelo gave each of them a square of chocolate and the cap from a deodorant can filled with wine.

  That afternoon they heard an aeroplane flying overhead but saw nothing because of the clouds. Again night came upon them more quickly than expected, but this time they were better prepared. They had cleared more space in the plane, they had built a better wall against the wind and snow, and there were fewer of them.

  7

  On the morning of Sunday, October 15, those who came out of the plane saw that for the first time since they had crashed the sky was clear. It was a deep blue, quite unlike any sky they had seen before, and in spite of their circumstances the survivors were impressed by the grandeur of their silent valley. The surface of the fresh snow had frozen, the crystals reflecting the bright, unfiltered sun. All around them were mountains, dazzling now in the bright light of early morning. Distances were deceptive. In the thin air, the peaks seemed close at hand.

  The clear skies gave them reason to believe that they would be rescued that day, or at least be spotted from the air. In the meantime there were certain problems facing them, and they set about their solution in a more methodical way. Their most pressing need was for water. The snow was difficult to melt in sufficient quantity to quench their thirst, and to eat it merely froze one’s mouth. They found that it was better to compress it into a ball of ice, and then suck it, or cram it into a bottle and shake the bottle until the snow melted. This latter process, however, not only took time but energy and provided barely enough for the needs of a single person. There were also the wounded who were not well enough to help themselves: Nando and Susana Parrado and Vizintín, who craved water to replenish the blood he had lost from the wound in his arm.

  It was Adolfo Strauch who invented a water-making device. Adolfo – or Fito, as he was called – was an Old Christian, but he played for a rival rugby team in Montevideo. He had been persuaded to come to Chile at the last moment by Eduardo Strauch, his double cousin (their fathers being brothers, their mothers sisters). The Strauch family had come to Uruguay from Germany in the nineteenth century and had built up large business interests in banking and the soap industry. Fito and Eduardo came from a junior branch of the family; their fathers were trained as jewellers and until recently had been partners in Montevideo. On their mothers’ side, the two boys came from the well-known Uruguayan family of Urioste.

  Both boys were blond and good-looking, with recognizably German features. In fact, Eduardo was called ‘the German’ by the others. The two were extremely close, more bro
thers than cousins, but while Eduardo had already developed serious ambitions as an architect, and had travelled to Europe, Fito was shy and indecisive about his life. He was a student of agronomy because he had no vocation for anything else and his family owned a ranch. Until this trip, he had never set foot out of Uruguay.

  In the crash both Fito and Eduardo had been knocked unconscious. When they regained consciousness they were in such a state of shock that they did not realize where they were. Fito had tried to leave the plane immediately, and during the first night it was Eduardo who had stepped on Roque and Señora Mariani. They had been restrained by another cousin who had survived, Daniel Fernández, the son of their fathers’ sister.

  By Sunday, Fito had recovered sufficiently to apply his mind to the difficulty they were facing in converting snow into water. The sun shone brightly, and as the morning proceeded its rays became increasingly hot, melting the brittle crust on the surface of the snow that had formed the night before. It occurred to Fito that they might somehow harness this solar heat to make water. He looked around for something to hold the snow, and his eye fell upon a rectangle of aluminium foil, measuring about one by two feet, which came from inside the back of a smashed seat thrown from the plane. He extracted it from the upholstery, bent up the sides so that it formed a shallow bowl, and twisted one corner to make a spout. He then covered it thinly with snow and tilted the whole apparatus to face the sun. In a short time drops of water appeared in the spout, and then a steady trickle poured into the bottle that Fito held ready beneath it.

  Since every seat contained such a rectangle of aluminium, there were soon several water-makers at work. Melting snow required a minimum of physical energy, so this became the regular task of those who were not well enough to do anything more strenuous, for Marcelo had decided to organize the survivors into different groups. He took upon himself the position of general coordinator and distributor of the food. The first group was the medical team, composed of Canessa, Zerbino, and to a lesser extent Liliana Methol. (Its composition was somewhat vague because Canessa refused to be limited by any narrow definition of his function.) The second group were those who were put in charge of the cabin. It was made up of some of the younger boys, such as Roy Harley, Carlitos Páez, Diego Storm, and the central figure in that group of friends, Gustavo Nicolich, whom they called Coco. It would be their duty to keep the cabin tidy, to prepare it at night by laying cushions on the floor, and in the morning to dry in the sun the covers of the seats which they had used as blankets.