Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors

by Piers Paul Read

  When he had first met his novia, he told them, she was only fifteen, while he was three or four years older. He was not at all sure whether her parents would welcome him, and he was anxious about the impression he would create. Within a short time, Delgado reported he had accidentally pushed her father into a swimming pool, injuring his leg; he had discharged a shotgun into the roof of their family car, a brand new BMW 2002, leaving an enormous hole with pieces of metal bent back like the petals of a flower; and he had very nearly electrocuted her father while helping him prepare for a party in the garden of their house in Carrasco.

  His anecdotes were like a tonic to the boys sitting in the dank atmosphere of the plane, waiting to feel tired enough to sleep, and for this they felt grateful. Yet when the turn came for other stories, no one spoke, and as the light faded, each returned to his own thoughts.

  2

  They awoke on the morning of Sunday, October 22, to face their tenth day on the mountain. First to leave the plane were Marcelo Pérez and Roy Harley. Roy had found a transistor radio between two seats and, by using a modest knowledge of electronics, acquired when helping a friend construct a hi-fi system, he had been able to make it work. It was difficult to receive signals in the deep cleft between the huge mountains, so Roy made an aerial with strands of wire from the plane’s electric circuits. While he turned the dial, Marcelo held the aerial and moved it around. They picked up scraps of broadcasts from Chile but no news of the rescue effort. All that came over the radio waves were the strident voices of Chilean politicians embroiled in the strike by the middle classes against the socialist government of President Allende.

  Few of the other boys came out into the snow. Starvation was taking its effect. They were becoming weaker and more listless. When they stood up they felt faint and found it difficult to keep their balance. They felt cold, even when the sun rose to warm them, and their skin started to grow wrinkled like that of old men.

  Their food supplies were running out. The daily ration of a scrap of chocolate, a capful of wine, and a teaspoonful of jam or tinned fish – eaten slowly to make it last – was more torture than sustenance for these healthy athletic boys; yet the strong shared it with the weak, the healthy with the injured. It was clear to them all that they could not survive much longer. It was not so much that they were consumed with ravenous hunger as that they felt themselves grow weaker each day, and no knowledge of medicine or nutrition was required to predict how it would end.

  Their minds turned to other sources of food. It seemed impossible that there should be nothing whatsoever growing in the Andes, for even the meanest form of plant life might provide some nutrition. In the immediate vicinity of the plane there was only snow. The nearest soil was a hundred feet beneath them. The only ground exposed to sun and air was barren mountain rock on which they found nothing but brittle lichen. They scraped some of it off and mixed it into a paste with melted snow, but the taste was bitter and disgusting, and as food it was worthless. Except for lichens there was nothing. Some thought of the cushions, but even these were not stuffed with straw. Nylon and foam rubber would not help them.

  For some days several of the boys had realized that if they were to survive they would have to eat the bodies of those who had died in the crash. It was a ghastly prospect. The corpses lay around the plane in the snow, preserved by the intense cold in the state in which they had died. While the thought of cutting flesh from those who had been their friends was deeply repugnant to them all, a lucid appreciation of their predicament led them to consider it.

  Gradually the discussion spread as these boys cautiously mentioned it to their friends or to those they thought would be sympathetic. Finally, Canessa brought it out into the open. He argued forcefully that they were not going to be rescued; that they would have to escape themselves, but that nothing could be done without food; and that the only food was human flesh. He used his knowledge of medicine to describe, in his penetrating, high-pitched voice, how their bodies were using up their reserves. ‘Every time you move,’ he said, ‘you use up part of your own body. Soon we shall be so weak that we won’t have the strength even to cut the meat that is lying there before our eyes.’

  Canessa did not argue just from expediency. He insisted that they had a moral duty to stay alive by any means at their disposal, and because Canessa was earnest about his religious belief, great weight was given to what he said by the more pious among the survivors.

  ‘It is meat,’ he said. ‘That’s all it is. The souls have left their bodies and are in heaven with God. All that is left here are the carcasses, which are no more human beings than the dead flesh of the cattle we eat at home.’

  Others joined the discussion. ‘Didn’t you see,’ said Fito Strauch, ‘how much energy we needed just to climb a few hundred feet up the mountain? Think how much more we’ll need to climb to the top and then down the other side. It can’t be done on a sip of wine and a scrap of chocolate.’

  The truth of what he said was incontestable.

  A meeting was called inside the Fairchild, and for the first time all twenty-seven survivors discussed the issue which faced them – whether or not they should eat the bodies of the dead to survive. Canessa, Zerbino, Fernández, and Fito Strauch repeated the arguments they had used before. If they did not they would die. It was their moral obligation to live, for their own sake and for the sake of their families. God wanted them to live, and he had given them the means to do so in the dead bodies of their friends. If God had not wished them to live, they would have been killed in the accident; it would be wrong now to reject this gift of life because they were too squeamish.

  ‘But what have we done,’ asked Marcelo, ‘that God now asks us to eat the bodies of our dead friends?’

  There was a moment’s hesitation. Then Zerbino turned to his captain and said, ‘But what do you think they would have thought?’

  Marcelo did not answer.

  ‘I know,’ Zerbino went on, ‘that if my dead body could help you to stay alive, then I’d certainly want you to use it. In fact, if I do die and you don’t eat me, then I’ll come back from wherever I am and give you a good kick in the ass.’

  This argument allayed many doubts, for however reluctant each boy might be to eat the flesh of a friend, all of them agreed with Zerbino. There and then they made a pact that if any more of them were to die, their bodies were to be used as food.

  Marcelo still shrank from a decision. He and his diminishing party of optimists held onto the hope of rescue, but few of the others any longer shared their faith. Indeed, a few of the younger boys went over to the pessimists – or the realists, as they considered themselves – with some resentment against Marcelo Pérez and Pancho Delgado. They felt they had been deceived. The rescue they had been promised had not come.

  The latter were not without support, however. Coche Inciarte and Numa Turcatti, both strong, tough boys with an inner gentleness, told their companions that while they did not think it would-be wrong, they knew that they themselves could not do it. Liliana Methol agreed with them. Her manner was calm as always but, like the others, she grappled with the emotions the issue aroused. Her instinct to survive was strong, her longing for her children was acute, but the thought of eating human flesh horrified her. She did not think it wrong; she could distinguish between sin and physical revulsion, and a social taboo was not a law of God. ‘But,’ she said, ‘as long as there is a chance of rescue, as long as there is something left to eat, even if it is only a morsel of chocolate, then I can’t do it.’

  Javier Methol agreed with his wife but would not deter others from doing what they felt must be done. No one suggested that God might want them to choose to die. They all believed that virtue lay in survival and eating their dead friends would in no way endanger their souls, but it was one thing to decide and another to act.

  Their discussions had continued most of the day, and by mid-afternoon they knew that they must act now or not at all, yet they sat inside the plane in total silence.
At last a group of four – Canessa, Maspons, Zerbino, and Fito Strauch – rose and went out into the snow. Few followed them. No one wished to know who was going to cut the meat or from which body it was to be taken.

  Most of the bodies were covered by snow, but the buttocks of one protruded a few yards from the plane. With no exchange of words Canessa knelt, bared the skin, and cut into the flesh with a piece of broken glass. It was frozen hard and difficult to cut, but he persisted until he had cut away twenty slivers the size of matchsticks. He then stood up, went back to the plane, and placed them on the roof.

  Inside there was silence The boys cowered in the Fairchild. Canessa told them that the meat was there on the roof, drying in the sun, and that those who wished to do so should come out and eat it. No one came, and again Canessa took it upon himself to prove his resolution. He prayed to God to help him do what he knew to be right and then took a piece of meat in his hand. He hesitated. Even with his mind so firmly made up, the horror of the act paralysed him. His hand would neither rise to his mouth nor fall to his side while the revulsion which possessed him struggled with his stubborn will. The will prevailed. The hand rose and pushed the meat into his mouth. He swallowed it.

  He felt triumphant. His conscience had overcome a primitive, irrational taboo. He was going to survive.

  Later that evening, small groups of boys came out of the plane to follow his example. Zerbino took a strip and swallowed it as Canessa had done, but it stuck in his throat. He scooped a handful of snow into his mouth and managed to wash it down. Fito Strauch followed his example, then Maspons and Vizintín and others.

  Meanwhile Gustavo Nicolich, the tall, curly-haired boy, only twenty years old, who had done so much to keep up the morale of his young friends, wrote to his novia in Montevideo.

  Most dear Rosina:

  I am writing to you from inside the plane (our petit hotel for the moment). It is sunset and has started to be rather cold and windy which it usually does at this hour of the evening. Today the weather was wonderful – a beautiful sun and very hot. It reminded me of the days on the beach with you – the big difference being that then we would be going to have lunch at your place at midday whereas now I’m stuck outside the plane without any food at all.

  Today, on top of everything else, it was rather depressing and a lot of the others began to get discouraged (today is the tenth day we have been here), but luckily this gloom did not spread to me because I get incredible strength just by thinking that I’m going to see you again. Another of the things leading to the general depression is that in a while the food will run out: we have only got two tins of seafood (small), one bottle of white wine, and a little cherry brandy left, which for twenty-six men (well, there are also boys who want to be men) is nothing.

  One thing that will seem incredible to you – it seems unbelievable to me – is that today we started to cut up the dead in order to eat them. There is nothing else to do. I prayed to God from the bottom of my heart that this day would never come, but it has and we have to face it with courage and faith. Faith, because I came to the conclusion that the bodies are there because God put them there and, since the only thing that matters is the soul, I don’t have to feel great remorse; and if the day came and I could save someone with my body, I would gladly do it.

  I don’t know how you, Mama, Papa, or the children can be feeling; you don’t know how sad it makes me to think that you are suffering, and I constantly ask God to reassure you and give us courage because that is the only way of getting out of this. I think that soon there will be a happy ending for everyone.

  You’ll get a shock when you see me. I am dirty, with a beard, and a little thinner, with a big gash on my head, another one on my chest which has healed now, and one very small cut which I got today working in the cabin of the plane, besides various small cuts in the legs and on the shoulder; but in spite of it all, I’m all right.

  3

  Those who first peered through the portholes of the plane the next morning could see that the sky was overcast but that a little sun shone through the clouds onto the snow. Some darted cautious looks toward Canessa, Zerbino, Maspons, Vizintín, and the Strauch cousins. It was not that they thought that God would have struck them down, but they knew from their estancias that one should never eat a steer that dies from natural causes, and they wondered if it might not be just as unhealthy to do the same with a man.

  The ones who had eaten the meat were quite well. None of them had eaten very much and in fact they felt as enfeebled as the others. As always, Marcelo Pérez was the first to raise himself from the cushions.

  ‘Come on,’ he said to Roy Harley. ‘We must set up the radio.’

  ‘It’s so cold,’ said Roy. ‘Can’t you get someone else?’

  ‘No,’ said Marcelo. ‘It’s your job. Come on.’

  Reluctantly Roy took his shoes down from the hat rack and put them on over his two pairs of socks. He squeezed himself out of the line of dozing figures and climbed over those nearest the entrance to follow Marcelo out of the plane. One or two others followed him out.

  Marcelo had already taken hold of the aerial and was waiting while Roy picked up the radio, switched it on, and began to turn the dial. He tuned in to a station in Chile which the day before had broadcast nothing but political propaganda; now, however, as he held the radio to his ear, he heard the last words of a news bulletin. ‘The SAR has requested all commercial and military aircraft overflying the cordillera to check for any sign of the wreckage of the Fairchild Number Five Seventy-one. This follows the cancellation of the search by the SAR for the Uruguayan aircraft because of negative results.’

  The newscaster moved on to a different topic. Roy took the radio away from his ear. He looked up at Marcelo and told him what he had heard. Marcelo dropped the aerial, covered his face with his hands, and wept with despair. The others who had clustered around Roy, upon hearing the news, began to sob and pray, all except Parrado, who looked calmly up at the mountains which rose to the west.

  Gustavo Nicolich came out of the plane and, seeing their faces, knew what they had heard.

  ‘What shall we tell the others?’ he asked.

  ‘We mustn’t tell them,’ said Marcelo. ‘At least let them go on hoping.’

  ‘No,’ said Nicolich. ‘We must tell them. They must know the worst.’

  ‘I can’t, I can’t,’ said Marcelo, still sobbing into his hands.

  ‘I’ll tell them,’ said Nicolich, and he turned back toward the entrance to the plane.

  He climbed through the hole in the wall of suitcases and rugby shirts, crouched at the mouth of the dim tunnel, and looked at the mournful faces which were turned toward him.

  ‘Hey, boys,’ he shouted, ‘there’s some good news! We just heard it on the radio. They’ve called off the search.’

  Inside the crowded cabin there was silence. As the hopelessness of their predicament enveloped them, they wept.

  ‘Why the hell is that good news?’ Páez shouted angrily at Nicolich.

  ‘Because it means,’ he said, ‘that we’re going to get out of here on our own.’

  The courage of this one boy prevented a flood of total despair, but some of the optimists who had counted on rescue were unable to rally. The pessimists, several of them as unhopeful about escape as they had been about rescue, were not shocked; it was what they had expected. But the news broke Marcelo. His role as their leader became empty and automatic, and the life went out of his eyes. Delgado, too, was changed by the news. His eloquent and cheerful optimism evaporated into the thin air of the cordillera. He seemed to have no faith that they would get out by their own efforts and quietly withdrew into the background. Of the old optimists, only Liliana Methol still offered hope and consolation. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘We’ll get out of here, all right. They’ll find us when the snow melts.’ Then, as if remembering how little food remained besides the bodies of the dead, she added ‘Or we’ll walk to the west.’

  To escape: that w
as the obsession of the new optimists. It was disconcerting that the valley in which they were trapped ran east, and that to the west there was a solid wall of towering mountains, but this did not deter Parrado. No sooner had he learned of the cancellation of the search than he announced his intention of setting off – on his own, if necessary – to the west. It was only with great difficulty that the others restrained him. Ten days before he had been given up for dead. If anyone was going to climb the mountains, there were others in a much better physical condition to do so. ‘We must think this out calmly,’ said Marcelo, ‘and act together. It’s the only way we’ll survive.’

  There was still sufficient respect for Marcelo and enough team discipline in Parrado to accept what the others decided. He was not alone, however, in his insistence that, before they got any weaker, another expedition should set out, either to climb the mountain and see what was on the other side or to find the tail.

  It was agreed that a group of the fittest among them should set off at once, and a little more than an hour after they had heard the news on the radio, Zerbino, Turcatti and Maspons set off up the mountain, watched by their friends.

  Canessa and Fito Strauch returned to the corpse they had opened the day before and cut more meat off the bone. The strips they had put on the roof of the plane had now all been eaten. Not only were they easier to swallow when dried in the outside air, but the knowledge that they were not going to be rescued had persuaded many of those who had hesitated the day before. For the first time, Parrado ate human flesh. So, too, did Daniel Fernández, though not without the greatest effort of will to overcome his revulsion. One by one, they forced themselves to take and swallow the flesh of their friends. To some, it was merely an unpleasant necessity; to others, it was a conflict of conscience with reason.