Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors

by Piers Paul Read

  Some could not do it: Liliana and Javier Methol, Coche Inciarte, Pancho Delgado. Marcelo Pérez, having made up his mind that he would take this step, used what authority he still possessed to persuade others to do so, but nothing he said had the effect of a short statement from Pedro Algorta. He was one of the two boys who had been dressed more scruffily at the airport than the others, as if to show that he despised their bourgeois values. In the crash, he had been hit on the head and suffered total amnesia about what had happened the day before. Algorta watched Canessa and Fito Strauch cutting the meat but said nothing until it came to the moment when he was offered a slice of flesh. He took it and swallowed it and then said, ‘It’s like Holy Communion. When Christ died he gave his body to us so that we could have spiritual life. My friend has given us his body so that we can have physical life.’

  It was with this thought that Coche Inciarte and Pancho Delgado first swallowed their share, and Marcelo grasped it as a concept which would persuade others to follow his example and survive. One by one they did so until only Liliana and Javier Methol remained.

  Now that it was established that they were to live on the dead, a group of stronger boys was organized to cover the corpses with snow, while those who were weaker or injured sat on the seats, holding the aluminium water-makers towards the sun, catching the drops of water in empty wine bottles. Others tidied the cabin. Canessa, when he had cut enough meat for their immediate needs, made a tour of inspection of the wounded. He was moderately content with what he saw. Almost all the superficial wounds were continuing to heal, and none showed signs of infection. The swelling around broken bones was also subsiding; Alvaro Mangino and Pancho Delgado, for example, both managed, despite considerable pain, to hobble around outside the plane. Arturo Nogueira was worse off; if he came outside the plane he had to crawl, pulling himself forward with his arms. The state of Rafael Echavarren’s leg was growing serious; it showed the first indications of gangrene.

  Enrique Platero, the boy who had had the tube of steel removed from his stomach, told Canessa that he was feeling perfectly well but that a piece of his insides still protruded from the wound. The doctor carefully unwound the rugby shirt which Platero continued to use as a bandage and confirmed the patient’s observation: the wound was healing well but something stuck out from the skin. Part of this projection had gone dry, and Canessa suggested to Platero that if he cut off the dead matter the rest might be more easily pushed back under the skin.

  ‘But what is it sticking out?’ asked Platero.

  Canessa shrugged his shoulders. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It’s probably part of the lining of the stomach, but if it’s the intestine and I cut it open, you’ve had it. You’ll get peritonitis.’

  Platero did not hesitate. ‘Do what you have to do,’ he said, and lay back on the door.

  Canessa prepared to operate. As scalpel he had a choice between a piece of broken glass or a razor blade. His sterilizer was the subzero air all around them. He disinfected the wound with eau de cologne and carefully cut away a small slice of the dead skin with the glass. Platero did not feel it, but the protruding gristle still would not go back under the skin. With even greater caution Canessa now cut yet closer to the living tissue, dreading all the time that he might cut into the intestine, but again he seemed to have done no harm and this time, with a prod from the surgeon’s finger, the gut retired into Platero’s stomach where it belonged.

  ‘Do you want me to stitch you up?’ Canessa asked his patient. ‘I should warn you that we don’t have any surgical thread.’

  ‘Don’t worry.’ said Platero, rising on his elbows and looking down at his stomach. ‘This is fine. Just tie it up again and I’ll be on my way.’

  Canessa retied the rugby shirt as tightly as he could, and Platero swung his legs off the door and got to his feet. ‘Now I’m ready to go on an expedition,’ he said, ‘and when we get back to Montevideo I’ll take you on as my doctor. I couldn’t possibly hope for a better one.’

  Outside the plane, following the example of Gustavo Nicolich, Carlitos Páez was writing to his father, his mother, and his sisters. He also wrote to his grandmother.

  You can have no idea how much I have thought about you because I love you, I adore you, because you have already received so many blows in your life, because I don’t know how you are going to stand this one. You, Buba, taught me many things but the most important one was faith in God. That has increased so much now that you cannot conceive of it.… I want you to know that you are the kindest grandmother in the world and I shall remember you each moment I am alive.

  4

  Zerbino, Turcatti and Maspons followed the track of the plane up the mountain. Every twenty or twenty-five steps the three were forced to rest, waiting for their hearts to beat normally again. The mountain seemed almost vertical, and they had to clutch at the snow with their bare hands. They had left in such a hurry that they had not thought how they should equip themselves for the climb. They wore only sneakers or moccasins and shirts, sweaters, and light jackets, with thin trousers covering their legs. All three were strong, for they were players who had been in training, but they had barely eaten for the past eleven days.

  The air that afternoon was not so cold. As they climbed, the sun shone on their backs and kept them warm. It was their feet, sodden with freezing snow, which suffered most. In the middle of the afternoon they reached a rock, and Zerbino saw that the snow around it was melting. He threw himself down and sucked at drops of water suspended from the disintegrating crystals. There was also another form of lichen, which he put into his mouth, but it had the taste of soil. They continued to climb but by seven o’clock in the evening found that they were only halfway to the peak. The sun had gone behind the mountain and only a short span of daylight remained. They sat down to discuss what they should do. All agreed that it would get much colder and if they stayed on the mountain the three of them might well die of exposure. On the other hand, if they simply slid back down, the whole climb was for nothing. To get to the top or find the tail with the batteries was the only chance of survival for all twenty-seven. They made up their minds, therefore, to remain on the mountain for the night and look for an outcrop of rocks which would provide some shelter.

  A little farther up they found a small hillock where the snow had been blown away to reveal the rocks underneath. They piled up loose stones to form a windbreak and, as dark was almost upon them, lay down to sleep. With the dark, as always, came the cold, and for all the protection their light clothes afforded them against the subzero wind, they might as well have been naked. There was no question of sleep. They were compelled to hit one another with their fists and feet to keep their circulation going, begging one another to be hit in the face until their mouths were frozen and no words would come from them. Not one of the three thought that he would survive the night. When the sun eventually rose in the east, each one was amazed to see it, and as it climbed in the sky it brought a little warmth back to their chilled bodies. Their clothes were soaked through, so they stood and took off their trousers, shirts, and socks and wrung them out. Then the sun went behind a cloud so they dressed again in their wet clothes and set off up the mountain.

  Every now and and then they stopped to rest and glance back towards the wreck of the Fairchild. By now it was a tiny dot in the snow, indistinguishable from any of the thousand outcrops of rock unless one knew exactly where to look. The red S which some of the boys had painted on the roof was invisible, and it was clear to the three why they had not been rescued: the plane simply could not be seen from the air. Nor was this all that depressed them. The higher they climbed, the more snow-covered mountains came into view. There was nothing to suggest that they were at the edge of the Andes, but they could only see to the north and the east. The mountain they were climbing still blocked their view to the south and west, and they seemed little nearer its summit. Every time they thought they had reached it, they would find that they were only at the top of a ridge; the
mountain itself still towered above them.

  At last, at the top of one of these ridges, their efforts were rewarded. They noticed that the rocks of an exposed outcrop had been broken, and then they saw scattered all around them the twisted pieces of metal that had once been part of the wingspan. A little farther up the mountain, where the ground fell into a small plateau, they saw a seat, face down in the snow. With some difficulty they pulled it upright and found, still strapped to it, the body of one of their friends. His face was black, and it occurred to them that he might have been burned from the fuel escaping from the engine of the plane.

  With great care Zerbino took from the body a wallet and identity card and, from around the neck, a chain and holy medals. He did the same when they came across the bodies of the three other Old Christians and the two members of the crew who had fallen out of the back of the plane.

  The three now made a count of those who were there and those who were below, and the tally came to forty-four. One body was missing. Then they remembered the floundering figure of Valeta, who had disappeared in the snow beneath them on that first afternoon. The count was now correct: six bodies at the top of the mountain, eleven down below, Valeta, twenty-four alive in the Fairchild, and the three of them there. All were accounted for.

  They were still not at the summit, but there was no sign of the tail section or any other wreckage above them. They started back down the mountain, again following the track made by the fuselage, and on another shelf on the steep decline they found one of the plane’s engines. The view from where they stood was majestic, and the bright sunlight reflecting off the snow made them squint as they observed the daunting panorama around them. They all had sunglasses, but Zerbino’s were broken at the bridge, and as he climbed the mountain they had slipped forward so that he found it easier to peer over them. He did the same as they started to slide down again, using cushions they had taken from the seats at the top as makeshift sleds. They zigzagged, stopping at each piece of metal or debris to see if they could find anything useful. They discovered part of the plane’s heating system, the lavatory, and fragments of the tail, but not the tail itself. Coming to a point where the track of the fuselage followed too steep a course, they crossed to the side of the mountain. By this time, Zerbino was so blinded by the snow that he could hardly see. He had to grope his way along, guided at times by the others. ‘I think,’ said Maspons, as they approached the plane once again, ‘that we shouldn’t tell the others how hopeless it seems.’

  ‘No,’ said Turcatti. ‘There’s no point in depressing them.’ Then he said, ‘By the way, what’s happened to your shoe?’

  Maspons looked down at his foot and saw that his shoe had come off while he was walking. His feet had become so numb with cold that he had not noticed.

  The twenty-four other survivors were delighted to see the three return, but they were bitterly disappointed that they had not found the tail and appalled at their physical condition. All three hobbled on frozen feet and looked dreadful after their night out on the mountainside, and Zerbino was practically blind. They were immediately taken into the fuselage on cushions and brought large pieces of meat, which they gobbled down. Next Canessa treated their eyes, all of which were watering, with some drops called Colirio which he had found in a suitcase and thought might do them good. The drops stung but reassured them that something was being done for their condition. Then Zerbino bandaged his eyes with a rugby shirt, keeping it on for the next two days. When he removed his bandage he could still only see light and shadow, and he kept the rugby shirt as a kind of veil, shielding his eyes from the sun. He ate under the veil, and his blindness made him intolerably aggressive and irritable.

  Their feet had also suffered. They were red and swollen with the cold, and their friends massaged them gently. It escaped no one’s notice however, that this expedition of a single day had almost killed three of the strongest among them, and morale once again declined.

  5

  On one of the days which followed, the sun disappeared behind clouds, rendering the water-making devices useless, so the boys had to return to the old method of putting the snow in bottles and shaking them. Then it occurred to Roy Harley and Carlitos Páez to make a fire with some empty Coca-Cola crates they had found in the luggage compartment of the plane. They held the aluminium sheets over the fire, and water was soon dripping into the bottles. In a short time they had enough.

  The embers of the fire were still hot; it seemed sensible to try cooking a piece of meat on the hot foil. They did not leave it on for long, but the slight browning of the flesh gave it an immeasurably better flavour – softer than beef but with much the same taste.

  The aroma soon brought other boys around the fire, and Coche Inciarte, who had continued to feel the greatest repugnance for raw flesh, found it quite palatable when cooked. Roy Harley, Numa Turcatti and Eduardo Strauch also found it easier to overcome their revulsion when the meat was roasted and they could eat it as though it were beef.

  Canessa and the Strauch cousins were against the idea of cooking the meat, and as they had gained some authority over the group their views could not be ignored. ‘Don’t you realize,’ said Canessa, knowledgeable and assertive as ever, ‘that proteins begin to die off at temperatures above forty degrees centrigrade? If you want to get the most benefit from the meat, you must eat it raw.’

  ‘And when you cook it,’ said Fernández, looking down on the small steaks spitting on the aluminium foil, ‘the meat shrinks in size. A lot of its food value goes up in smoke or just melts away.’

  These arguments did not convince Harley or Inciarte, who could hardly derive nutrition from raw meat if they could not bring themselves to eat it, but in any case the limit to cooking was set by the extreme shortage of fuel – there were only three crates – and the high winds which so often made it impossible to light a fire out in the snow.

  In the the next few days, after Eduardo Strauch became very weak and emaciated, he finally overcame his revulsion to raw meat – forced to by his two cousins. Harley, Inciarte and Turcatti never did, yet they were committed to survival and managed to consume enough to keep alive. The only two who still had not eaten human flesh were the two eldest among them, Liliana and Javier Methol, and as the days passed and the twenty-five young men grew stronger on their new diet, the married couple, living on what remained of the wine, chocolate and jam, grew thinner and more feeble.

  The boys watched their growing debility with alarm. Marcelo begged them over and over again to overcome their reluctance and eat the meat. He used every argument, above all those words of Pedro Algorta. ‘Think of it as Communion. Think of it as the body and blood of Christ, because this is food that God has given us because He wants us to live.’

  Liliana listened to what he said, but time and again she gently shook her head. ‘There’s nothing wrong with you doing it, Marcelo, but I can’t, I just can’t.’ For a time Javier followed her example. He still suffered from the altitude and was cared for by Liliana almost as though he were her child. The days passed slowly and there were moments when they found themselves alone; then they would talk together of their home-in Montevideo, wondering what their children were doing at that hour, anxious that little Marie Noel, who was three, might be crying for her mother, or that their ten-year-old daughter, María Laura, might be skipping her homework.

  Javier tried to reassure his wife that her parents would have moved into their house and would be looking after the children. They talked about Liliana’s mother and father, and Liliana asked whether it would be possible when they returned to have her parents come and live in their house in Carrasco. She looked a little nervously at her husband when she suggested it, knowing that not every husband likes the idea of his parents-in-law living under the same roof, but Javier simply smiled and said, ‘Of course. Why didn’t we think of that before?’

  They discussed how they might build an annex onto the house so that Liliana’s parents could be more or less independent. Liliana wo
rried that they might not be able to afford it or that an extra wing might spoil the garden, but on every point Javier reassured her. Their conversation, however, weakened his resolution not to eat human meat and so when Marcelo next offered him a piece of flesh, Javier took it and thrust it down his throat.

  There remained only Liliana. Weak though she was, with life ebbing from her body, her mood remained serene. She wrote a short note to her children, saying how dear they were to her. She remained close to her husband, helping him because he was weaker, sometimes even a little irritable with him because the altitude sickness made his movements clumsy and slow, but with death so near, their partnership did not falter. Their life was one, on the mountain as it had been in Montevideo, and in these desperate conditions the bond between them held fast. Even sorrow was a part of that bond, and when they talked together of the four children they might never see again, tears not only of sadness but of joy fell down their cheeks, for what they missed now showed them what they had had.

  One evening just before the sun had set, and when the twenty-seven survivors were preparing to take shelter from the cold in the fuselage of the plane, Liliana turned to Javier and told him that when they returned she would like to have another baby. She felt that if she was alive it was because God wanted her to do so.

  Javier was delighted. He loved his children and had always wanted to have more, yet when he looked at his wife he could see through the tears in his eyes the poignancy of her suggestion. After more than ten days without food the reserves had been drawn from her body. The bones protruded from her cheeks and her eyes were sunk into their sockets; only her smile was the same as before. He said to her, ‘Liliana, we must face up to it. None of this will happen if we don’t survive.’