Many of the boys felt themselves too weak to do any labour of this kind. Some had learned to live with their uselessness, but others did not admit to themselves that they made no contribution to the welfare of the group. Carlitos once rebuked Moncho Sabella for not doing any work, whereupon the enfeebled Moncho fell to digging a hole with such hysterical frenzy that those who watched him feared for his life, but his exertions only led him to collapse with exhaustion. Here indeed was a case where the spirit was willing but the flesh weak. Moncho would have loved to be counted among the heroic cousins and expeditionaries, but his body betrayed him; he had no choice but to be one of the spectators.
At the same time as the boys dug into the snow in search of the buried bodies, the corpses that they had preserved nearer the surface began to suffer from the stronger sun which melted the thin layer of snow which covered them. The thaw had truly set in – the level of the snow had fallen far below the roof of the Fairchild – and the sun in the middle of the day became so hot that any meat left exposed to it would rot quickly. Added, then, to the labours of digging, cutting and snow melting was that of covering the bodies with snow and then shielding them from the sun with sheets of cardboard or plastic.
As the supplies grew short, an order went out from the cousins that there was to be no more pilfering. This edict was no more effective than most others which seek to upset an established practice. They therefore sought to make what food they had last longer by eating parts of the human body which previously they had left aside. The hands and feet, for example, had flesh beneath the skin which could be scraped off the bone. They tried, too, to eat the tongue off one corpse but could not swallow it, and one of them once ate the testicles.
On the other hand they all took to the marrow. When the last shred of meat had been scraped off a bone it would be cracked open with the axe and the marrow extracted with a piece of wire or a knife and shared. They also ate the blood clots which they found around the hearts of almost all the bodies. Their texture and taste were different from that of the flesh and fat, and by now they were sick to death of this staple diet. It was not just that their senses clamoured for different tastes; their bodies too cried out for those minerals of which they had for so long been deprived – above all, for salt. And it was in obedience to these cravings that the less fastidious among the survivors began to eat those parts of the body which had started to rot. This had happened to the entrails of even those bodies which were covered with snow, and there were also the remains of previous carcasses scattered around the plane which were unprotected from the sun. Later everyone did the same.
What they would do was to take the small intestine, squeeze out its contents onto the snow, cut it into small pieces, and eat it. The taste was strong and salty. One of them tried wrapping it around a bone and roasting it in the fire. Rotten flesh, which they tried later, tasted like cheese.
The last discovery in their search for new tastes and new sources of food were the brains of the bodies which they had hitherto discarded. Canessa had told them that, while they might not be of particular nutritional value, they contained glucose which would give them energy; he had been the first to take a head, cut the skin across the forehead, pull back the scalp, and crack open the skull with the axe. The brains were then either divided up and eaten while still frozen or used to make the sauce for a stew; the liver, intestine, muscle, fat, heart and kidneys, either cooked or uncooked, were cut up into little pieces and mixed with the brains. In this way the food tasted better and was easier to eat. The only difficulty was the shortage of bowls suitable to hold it, for before this the meat had been served on plates, trays, or pieces of aluminium foil. For stew Inciarte used a shaving bowl, while others used the top halves of skulls. Four bowls made from skulls were used in this way – and some spoons were made from bones.
The brains were inedible when putrid, so all the heads which remained from the corpses they had consumed were gathered together and buried in the snow. The snow was also combed for other parts which had previously been thrown away. Scavenging took on an added value – especially for Algorta, who was the chief scavenger among them. When he was not digging holes or helping the cousins cut up the bodies, his bent figure could be seen hobbling around the plane, poking into the snow with an iron stick. He looked so much like a tramp that Carlitos gave him the nickname of Old Vizcacha* – but his dedication was not without its rewards, because he found many pieces of old fat, some with a thin strip of flesh. These he would place on his part of the roof. If they were waterlogged, they would dry out in the sun, forming a crust which made them more palatable. Or, like the others, he would put them on a piece of metal which caught the sun and in this way warm what he was eating; once, when the sun was exceptionally strong, he actually cooked them.
It was a relief to Algorta that the expeditionaries were no longer there to help themselves to what he had so carefully scavenged and prepared. On the other hand, he did share what he had found with Fito. Alongside his bit of the roof there was Fito’s, and between the two was an area of food which they shared. It was Algorta who kept this common larder stocked with extra food. He had attached himself to Fito in the same way that Zerbino had become, as Inciarte put it, ‘the German’s page boy’. It particularly annoyed Inciarte that Zerbino would give cigarettes to Eduardo even when he still had some of his own, but Zerbino remembered the days after the second expedition, when Eduardo had let him sleep with his swollen feet on his shoulders.
As the division between the two groups of workers and work-shy, provident and improvident, grew wider, Coche Inciarte’s role became more important. By performance and inclination he was firmly in the camp of the parasites; on the other hand he was an old friend of Fito Strauch and Daniel Fernández. He also had the kind of pure and witty character that it was impossible to dislike. Whether he was coaxing Carlitos to cook on a windy day or shooting a pint of pus out of his dreadfully infected leg, he would always smile himself and make others smile at what he was doing. His condition, like Turcatti’s, was increasingly serious because both were reluctant to eat raw meat. Coche even became delirious at times and told the boys in all seriousness that there was a little door in the side of the plane where he slept which led out into a green valley. Yet when he announced one morning, as Rafael Echavarren had done, that he was going to die that day, no one took him seriously. Next day, when he awoke again, they all laughed at him and said, ‘Well, Coche, what’s it like to be dead?’
Cigarettes were, as always, the chief source of tension. Those like the cousins who had sufficient control over themselves to space their smoking and make their ration last, would find towards the end of the second day that each puff was watched by a dozen pairs of envious eyes. The improvident – and Coche Inciarte was among the most improvident – would exhaust their own supply the first day and then try and bum cigarettes off those who still had some. Pedro Algorta, who smoked less than the others, would move around with lowered eyes for fear of intercepting one of Coche’s importuning glances, yet if he avoided them for long enough, Coche would say to him, ‘Pedrito, when we get back to Montevideo, I’ll invite you to eat some gnocchi at our uncle’s house,’ at which the hungry Algorta would look up and be caught by the large, pleading, laughing eyes.
Pancho Delgado was also unable to ration himself and would sidle up to Sabella, say, and talk to him about his school days with his brother on the off chance that a cigarette might come out of it. Or he would be sent by Inciarte to persuade Fernández to give them an advance ration. ‘You see,’ he would say, ‘Coche and I are especially nervous people.’
There had been a time when Delgado himself had been in charge of the cigarettes, which was rather like putting an alcoholic in charge of a bar. One night the storm blowing outside was so dreadful that snow blew right into the plane. Delgado and Zerbino, who had been sleeping by the door, moved up the cabin to talk and smoke cigarettes with Coche and Carlitos. Most of the boys had stayed awake, smoking and listening to the rum
ble of avalanches, but in the morning, when they awoke all white from the snow, some doubted that they had smoked quite as many cigarettes as Pancho maintained.
There was another occasion when Fernández and Inciarte quarrelled over cigarettes. Fernández, who had charge of one of the three lighters, ignored Coche when he repeatedly asked to use it, because he thought Coche smoked too much. This made Coche furious, and for the rest of that day he refused to speak to Fernández. At night, as usual, they lay next to each other, but every time Fernández’s head lolled over onto Coche’s shoulder, Coche would shrug it off. Then Fernández said, ‘Come on, Coche,’ and Coche gave up his petulant rage. He was too good-natured to sustain it.
Their improvidence with cigarettes reinforced a bond which had already existed between Coche and Pancho. They either bummed alone – Pancho taking some of Numa Turcatti’s ration because he felt that smoking was doing him no good, while Coche tried to catch Algorta’s eye – or, as we have seen, presented a common front to get an advance from Daniel Fernández. They also talked together about life in Montevideo and weekends in the country with Gaston Costemalle, who had been their mutual friend. Pancho. Delgado, with his natural eloquence, described the scene of their former happiness so well that Coche Inciarte would be transported away from the damp, stinking confines of the wrecked plane to the green pastures of his dairy farm. Then, when the story ended, he would suddenly find himself back in the foul reality, which would so depress him that he would sit like a corpse with glazed eyes.
Because of this, the Strauchs and Daniel Fernández tried to keep Coche away from Delgado. They felt that these escapist conversations would lower his morale to such an extent that he would lose the will to survive. Also, they were coming increasingly to mistrust Delgado. There was an incident when some of the boys were outside the plane and called to those inside to send someone out to fetch their rations of meat. Pancho appeared and, while taking the pieces of meat, asked Fito if he could take a piece for himself.
‘Of course,’ said Fito.
‘The best piece?’
‘If you like.’
Fito and the others had remained on the roof eating their portions of flesh, and after delivering the rest to the others, Pancho had come out to join them. When Fito had eventually gone in, Daniel Fernández, who had cut the meat Pancho brought into smaller pieces, said to him, ‘Hey, you didn’t give us much to eat.’
‘I cut twelve pieces,’ said Fito.
‘More like eight. I had to cut them all up again.’
Fito shrugged his shoulders and said nothing more, for to have expressed what he suspected would have been against his better judgment. It was essential to the group that there should be no real dissension.
Carlitos, on the other hand, felt less compunction. ‘I wonder where the ghost is, then,’ he said, staring at Pancho, ‘who took the four other pieces?’
‘What do you mean?’ said Pancho. ‘What are you suggesting? Don’t you trust me?’
They might have said more, but Fito and Daniel Fernández told Carlitos to let the matter go.
* … a land-louping scapegrace, hung with rags,
That lived like a leech in the fens and quags,
A gully-raking veteran scamp,
Bad-biled as a mangy boar.
José Hernández, The Gaucho Martin Fierro. II, xiv.
(Translated by Walter Owen, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1935.)
2
While these developments were taking place in the plane, the three expeditionaries and Roy Harley were in the tail. Their journey down had only taken them one and a half hours, and on the way they had found a suitcase which had belonged to Parrado’s mother. They found sweets inside and two bottles of Coca-Cola.
They spent the rest of that first day at the tail resting and looking through the suitcases which had appeared from under the melting snow since they were last there. Among other things Parrado found a camera loaded with film and his airline bag with the two bottles of rum and liqueur which his mother had bought in Mendoza and asked him to carry for her. Neither was broken, and they opened one of them but saved the other for the expedition they would have to make if they could not get the radio to work.
Canessa and Harley set about that task next morning. It seemed at first that it would not be difficult, because the sockets in the back of the transmitter were marked BAT and ANT to show where the wires to the batteries and antenna should be fixed. Unfortunately there were other wires whose connections were not so clear. Above all they could not make out which wires were positive and which negative, so often when they made a connection sparks flew into their eyes.
Their hopes of success were raised when Vizintín found an instruction manual for the Fairchild lying in the snow beside the tail. They looked at the index for some reference to the radio and discovered that the whole of chapter thirty-four was devoted to ‘Communications’, but when they came to look for this section they discovered that certain pages had been torn out of the book by the wind and it was just these pages which made up the chapter they needed.
They had no choice, therefore, but to return to trial and error. It was a painstaking business and, while the others worked, Parrado and Vizintín would rummage around, rifling all the baggage for a second time, or light a fire to cook the meat. Though there were only four of them, they were not exempt from the tensions which existed up in the fuselage. It irritated Roy Harley, for example, that Parrado would not give him the same ration as the others. It seemed clear that since he was on an expedition he should eat the same amount as an expeditionary. Parrado, on the other hand, held that Roy was only an auxiliary; if the radio failed he would not have to walk out through the mountains. Therefore he should eat only what was necessary to survive.
Nor would he let Roy smoke cigarettes. His reasoning was that they only had one lighter with them and they would need it for any final expedition; but it was also true that neither Parrado, Canessa nor Vizintín smoked themselves, and all were intolerably irritated by Roy’s whimpering and wailing. Thus they told him that he could only smoke when they lit a fire. On one occasion, however, when Roy came to light a cigarette at the fire, Parrado, who was cooking, told him to get out of his way and come back later. But when Roy came back the fire had gone out. He was so angry that he picked, up the lighter Parrado had left on some cardboard and lit a cigarette. When the three expeditionaries saw what he had done they went for him like a pack of zealous school prefects. They cursed him and might have snatched the cigarette out of his mouth had not Canessa thought better of it and stopped them. ‘Leave him alone,’ he said to the other two. ‘Don’t forget that Roy may be the one to save all our lives by getting this damned radio to work.’
It was clear by the third day that they had not brought enough meat to last them the time it would take to set up the radio. Therefore Parrado and Vizintín set off for the plane again, leaving Harley and Canessa at the tail. The ascent, as before, was a thousand times more difficult than the descent had been. After reaching the top of the hillock which lay just east of the plane, Parrado was assaulted by a momentary but profound despair; instead of the fuselage and its thirteen inhabitants, there was nothing but a huge expanse of snow.
He assumed at once that there must have been another avalanche which had completely covered the plane, but he looked up and saw no signs of a fresh fall of snow on the sides of the mountains above him. He walked on and to his immense relief found the plane on the other side of the next hill.
The boys had not expected them and had no meat prepared. Also, they were all almost too weak to dig for the bodies that would have to be found if the expeditionaries were to restock their larder. Therefore Parrado and Vizintín themselves set about digging. They found a corpse from which the cousins cut meat and stuffed it into rugby socks, and after two nights up in the plane they returned to the tail.
There they found that Harley and Canessa had made all the necessary connections between battery and radio and shark’s-fin antenn
a but still could not pick up any signal on the earphones. They thought that perhaps the antenna was faulty, so they tore out strands of cable from the electrical circuits of the plane and linked them together. One end of this they tied to the tail, the other to a bag filled with stones which they placed on a rock high on the side of the mountain, making an aerial more than sixty feet long. When they connected it to the transistor radio which they had brought with them, they could pick up many radio stations in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay. When they connected it to the Fairchild’s radio, however, nothing came through at all. They therefore reconnected the transistor, found a programme which played some cheerful music, and went back to work.
Suddenly there was a shout from Parrado; he had found in one of the suitcases a photograph of a child at a birthday party. It was a little girl, and she was sitting at a table piled with sandwiches, cakes and biscuits. Parrado clutched the photographs and devoured the food with his eyes, but soon the other three, alerted by his cry, came up behind him and joined in the feast. ‘Just look at that cake,’ said Canessa, groaning and rubbing his stomach.
‘What about the sandwiches?’ said Parrado. ‘I think I’d even rather have the sandwiches.’
‘The biscuits,’ Vizintín moaned. ‘Just give me the biscuits.’
On the transistor radio that they had attached to their antenna, the four of them heard a news bulletin in which it was announced that the search was to be resumed by a Douglas C-47 of the Uruguayan Air Force. They received the news in different ways. Harley was ecstatic with hope and joy. Canessa too looked relieved. Vizintín showed no particular reaction, while Parrado looked almost disappointed. ‘Don’t get too optimistic,’ he warned the others. ‘Just because they’re looking again doesn’t mean they’ll find us.’
They decided, all the same, that it would be a good idea to make a large cross in the snow by the tail, and they did so with the suitcases that lay scattered all around. By now they had almost given up hope of the radio, though Canessa still pottered with it and procrastinated about a return to the plane. Parrado and Vizintín, on the other hand, already had their minds on the expedition, for it had been decided up in the plane that if the radio failed the expeditionaries would set off straight up the mountain in obedience to the only thing of which they were sure – that Chile was to the west. Thus Vizintín removed the rest of the material which was wound around the Fairchild’s heating system in the dark locker at the base of the tail which had contained the batteries. It was light and yet designed by the most technologically sophisticated industry in the world to contain heat; sewn together into a large sack, it would make an excellent sleeping bag and solve the one outstanding problem which had beset them – how to keep warm at night without the shelter of either tail or plane.
Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors Page 18