‘Tell me, Muscles,’ said Viziritín, ‘is there anything … I mean, any part of the bodies that one shouldn’t eat?’
‘Nothing,’ said Canessa. ‘Everything has got some nutritional value.’
‘Even the lungs?’
‘Even the lungs.’
Vizintín nodded. Then he looked at Canessa again. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Since you’re going on and I’m going back, is there anything of mine you think you might need? Don’t hesitate to say, because all our lives depend on your getting through.’
‘Well,’ said Canessa, looking Vizintín up and down and eyeing his equipment. ‘I wouldn’t mind that balaclava.’
‘This?’ said Vizintín, handling the wool balaclava which he had on his head. ‘Do you mean this?’
‘Yes. That.’
‘I … er … do you think you really need it?’
‘Tintin, would I ask for it if I thought I didn’t need it?’
Reluctantly Tintin stripped off and handed over his prized balaclava. ‘Well, good luck,’ he said.
‘Same to you,’ said Parrado. ‘Take care going down.’
‘I certainly will.’
‘Don’t forget,’ said Canessa. ‘Tell Fito we’ve gone west. And if they rescue you, make them come and look for us.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Vizintín. He embraced his two companions and set off down the mountain.
Eight
1
The thirteen boys who remained in the Fairchild had watched the progress of the three expeditionaries up the mountain through their homemade sunglasses. It was easy to follow them on the first day, but by the second they had become just specks on the snow. What depressed the spectators was the slow progress they were making. They had thought it would only take a morning, or at most a day, to climb to the summit, yet on the morning of the second day the expeditionaries were barely halfway up. By the afternoon of the second day, they reached a band of shale and disappeared from view.
At the same time, however, an aeroplane appeared over the tip of the mountain. The boys immediately prepared to signal to it, but no sooner had they seen it than it turned back to the west.
There was nothing more they could do for the expeditionaries but pray for them; on the other hand, there were several practical problems which they faced themselves. Chief among these was the shortage of food. Although they still had not found all the bodies around the plane, Fito decided that he would climb up the mountain in search of those bodies that had fallen out of the tail. With each day that passed, new shapes and, dark patches appeared on the side of the mountain, and he felt it important, if these were bodies, to go and cover them with snow before they rotted.
Zerbino, who had been up the mountain and found the bodies more than seven weeks before, agreed to accompany Fito, and the two set out early on the morning of December 13. The surface of the snow was still hard and they made rapid progress. They were better equipped than Zerbino had been on that first expedition with Maspons and Turcatti, and both boys were now better trained. Occasionally, as they climbed higher, they would pause to rest and look down on the Fairchild beneath them and the mountains beyond and to either side. The higher they climbed, the more mountains came into view – all exceptionally high and covered with snow – and this depressed them enormously. It seemed impossible that they were, as they had hoped, in the foothills of the Andes. With such gigantic peaks all around them they could only be in the very middle of the range. What chance could Canessa, Parrado, and Vizintín have of reaching Chile through such impassable terrain? It must be many miles to the nearest human habitation, and the three expeditionaries had only taken food for ten days.
‘We may have to send out another expedition,’ said Fito. ‘This time with more food than before.’
‘Who?’ asked Zerbino.
‘The two of us and Carlitos, perhaps, or Daniel.’
‘Perhaps the plane will find us first.’
They stopped and looked down at the Fairchild. Since its roof was white the plane itself was practically invisible; what stood out most clearly from that altitude were the seats, clothes, and bones scattered around in the snow.
‘We’d better leave all the bones,’ said Fito. ‘They’re the only things that can be seen.’
After climbing for two hours the two boys came across the first sign that they were in the area where the dead bodies might be found. It was a corduroy jacket lined with wool. Fito picked it up, shook off the snow, and put it on over his sweater.
They went on up the mountain and soon saw a body lying on its back in the snow. Fito was shocked to recognize the features of another of his cousins, Daniel Shaw. He was immediately overcome with conflicting feelings; he had found the food he had been looking for, but because the body was his cousin’s he was exceptionally reluctant to use it. He turned to Zerbino and said, ‘Let’s go on and see if we can find the others.’
They continued trudging in the snow, which was quickly becoming mushy under their feet. When they reached the area where Zerbino seemed to remember the other bodies had lain, there was nothing to be seen but odd fragments of the plane itself. One of these was large enough to be used as a kind of sledge, and Fito, realizing that his duty to the other boys left him with no alternative, took it as he turned back towards the body of his cousin.
When they reached it again they strapped the corpse, stiff from death and the cold, onto the curved piece of metal with nylon cords that came from the luggage compartment. Fito sat on one of the cushions they had brought with them as snowshoes and tied that to the sledge. Then they kicked their heels into the snow and began to move down the side of the mountain.
This improvised means of transporting the corpse turned out to be more efficient than they had supposed, and as they slid down towards the valley it gathered speed until it was moving very fast indeed. Zerbino, sitting behind the body, tried to steer the sledge with his feet, but he had little control – insufficient, certainly, to manoeuvre it between the boulders which lay strewn over the snow. A hidden hand seemed to guide them, however, for the sledge did not hit a rock, and when it came to the level of the Fairchild, Fito dug his feet into the snow and the cavalcade slowly came to a stop.
Their aim had been wrong. They were on the wrong side of the valley, and by now the snow was so soft, and the two of them were so tired, that they decided to leave the body where it was, buried in snow, and come back for it the next day. As they were digging a trench with their hands they saw the figures of Eduardo, Fernández, Algorta, and Páez coming toward them.
‘Are you all right?’ Fernández shouted.
They did not answer.
‘We saw you hurtling down the mountain at such a speed that we thought you’d killed yourselves.’
Again they did not answer.
‘Did you find anything?’
‘Yes,’ said Fito. ‘We found Daniel.’
Fernández looked at Fito but said nothing. They made their way back to the Fairchild, but next morning, when the surface of the snow was frozen hard once again, they went back to fetch the body. After they had brought it back to the plane, Fito asked the other boys if his cousin’s body could be placed beside those which were to be kept until the very end, and they agreed.
Páez and Algorta went up the mountain on a separate expedition to see if they could find another body. First they found a handbag from which they took the lipstick so useful for protecting their cracked and blistered lips from the sun. The two of them started to dab it onto their faces, looking at themselves in the mirror of the powder compact. ‘You know what they’ll think,’ said Carlitos, laughing at Pedro’s painted face. ‘If they rescue us this afternoon and find us looking like this, they’ll think that sexual frustration has made us into raving queens.’
They climbed on up the mountain and came across a body. The skin of the face and hands that had been exposed to the sun had turned black and the eyes were missing, either because the sun had burned them out or because the cond
ors had eaten them. By now it was hot and the snow was getting soft, so they covered the body with snow and set off back down the mountain.
The next day Algorta returned to the body with Fito and Zerbino. They started to cut it up at once having concluded that this would be easier than taking the whole body down to the plane. They put meat and fat into rugby socks and ate what they felt they deserved for the extra expenditure of energy. Then, at half past nine in the morning, though they had not finished their work, they set off back to the plane – Fito and Zerbino with full knapsacks, Algorta carrying an arm over his shoulder and the axe tied to his belt.
When they reached the Fairchild an extraordinary sight met their eyes. The other survivors were all out of the plane, standing in the middle of the cross and staring up at the sky. Some were embracing one another; others were praying aloud to God. On the outer extremity of the cross, Pancho Delgado was on his knees, shouting, ‘Gaston, poor Gaston! How I wish he was here now.’
Daniel Fernández stood at the centre of the cross, the radio held to his ear. ‘They’ve found a cross,’ he said. ‘We’ve just heard on the radio that they’ve found a cross on something called the Santa Elena mountain.’
The spirits of the three who had newly arrived with the meat soared at this news, for what other cross could they have found but their own? They thought that the Santa Elena mountain must be the mountain behind them, and for the rest of the morning they waited for the rescue they believed to be imminent, Fernández always with the radio pressed to his ear. He heard that the Chilean and Argentinian planes had joined the Uruguayan C-47 in the search and that the Argentinian authorities were investigating the cross, which was thought to be on their territory.
While Fernández was listening in this way to the radio, Methol brought out the small statue of Saint Elena which Liliana had had among her belongings. Along with some other boys he prayed to that patron saint of lost things, and many of them promised that if ever they had daughters they would call them Elena.
All that day they waited for the helicopters, and suddenly around midday they heard them from the other side of the mountains. Once again they embraced and jumped in the air, but their celebrations were premature. No helicopters appeared in the sky. The sound they had heard degenerated into a rumble and then disappeared, leaving only the huge silence of the cordillera. What they had taken to be the sound of a helicopter had been the noise of an avalanche.
When evening came they returned to the plane, bitterly disappointed. Their thoughts became more sober. What plane had flown over them, or even over the tail, that could have – seen one or other of the crosses they had made? And if they had been found, why were there no helicopters?
The next morning – very early, and in freezing weather – the same three boys as before returned to the body on the mountain to cut away the flesh that remained before it decomposed. Again they ate the extra food they felt they deserved and filled their knapsacks until only the spine, the ribs, the feet, and the skull remained. This last they split open with the axe, but the brains smelt putrid so they put them aside and set off back down the mountain.
2
On the morning of December 15, those boys who were sitting on the seats laid out in front of the plane suddenly saw something hurtling at tremendous speed down the side of the mountain. They thought at first it was a boulder dislodged by the melting snow, but as it came closer they saw it was the figure of a man – and as it came closer still they recognized this figure as Vizintín. He seemed to be falling, yet his déscent was controlled, for he was sitting on a cushion, and when he drew level with the plane he dug his feet into the snow and came to a stop.
A variety of dread emotions came over the thirteen boys as they watched him plod towards them over the snow. They thought that either one or both of the two other expeditionaries must have been killed or that all three had given up and Vizintín was the first to return. Some were a little more optimistic, thinking that the expeditionaries had been seen by the aeroplane which had appeared over the tip of the mountain.
When Vizintín reached them he explained what had happened. ‘Nando and Muscles got to the top,’ he said. ‘They’re going on, but they sent me back to make the food last longer.’
‘But what’s on the other side?’ they all asked, clustering around him.
‘More mountains … mountains as far as you can see. Myself, I don’t think they’ve got much chance.’
Their spirits now sank once again. Another cherished dream – that there were green valleys on the other side of the mountain – had been pushed out by brute reality. What Vizintín said depressed them all. ‘The climb was hell,’ he said, ‘utter hell. It took us three days to get up there. If they have to climb another like that, I don’t think they’ll make it.’
‘How long did it take you to come down?’
Vizintín laughed. ‘Three quarters of an hour. Coming down’s no problem. It’s going up.’ He paused, and then added, ‘And the funny thing is that there’s less snow to the east’ – he pointed down the valley – ‘than there is to the west. And Muscles thought he saw a road.’
‘A road? Where?’
‘To the east.’
The Strauchs shook their heads. ‘But that’s impossible. Chile is to the west.’
‘Yes,’ went up the chant from the younger boys. ‘To the west is Chile … to the west is Chile.’
At midday there was a slight dispute as to how much meat Vizintín should be given. ‘But I’ve just come back from an expedition. I need to build up my strength … and I haven’t eaten much. I gave all my food to Nando and Muscles.’
They gave him a little more, but on the understanding that in future he would be treated the same as the others. That afternoon, therefore, Vizintín went around the plane picking up all the lungs he could find and piling them on his tray. Until then they had been thrown aside (except on one occasion when Canessa had palmed them off as liver), and no one had bothered to cover them with snow; they had formed on the outside a tough leathery skin. The others watched Vizintín gather up this load and lay it on his part of the roof of the plane.
‘Are you going to eat those?’ someone asked.
‘Yes.’
‘They will make you ill.’
‘No, they won’t. Muscles said they would do me good.’
They watched him cut pieces from the putrid lungs and eat them; and when, the following day, they saw that he was no worse for having done so, some of the other boys started to follow his example. They did so from the need of a new taste, not because food was short, for suddenly the melting snow had started to reveal all the bodies of those who had died in or just after the original accident. There were ten bodies, five of which they had promised to eat only from extreme necessity. One had been largely consumed before the avalanche, but the six which remained, together with the two pilots who were still in their seats, could last the survivors for another five or six weeks. All the bodies had been perfectly preserved by the snow, and because they were the first who had died they had more and better meat on them than the bodies of those who had died in the avalanche or after.
These sudden fruits of the thaw might have tempted a less disciplined group to relax the strict rationing of the meat, but the Strauchs had very much in mind that they might have to mount a second expedition and equip it with supplies for a far longer journey than had been envisaged for Canessa, Parrado and Vizintín. They therefore dug two pits in the snow. In one they put the bodies that were to be left until last and in the other those they would use as the need arose.
It would have been possible now to avoid eating such things as rotten lungs and putrid intestines of bodies they had cut up weeks before, but half the boys continued to do so because they had come to need the stronger taste. It had taken a supreme effort of will for these boys to eat human flesh at all, but once they had started and persevered, appetite had come with the eating, for the instinct to survive was a harsh tyrant which demanded not just that
they eat their companions but that they get used to doing so.
Perhaps the most paradoxical in this respect was Pedro Algorta. He did not come from a ranching family like the others – he was a sensitive socialist intellectual – and it was he who had justified eating those first slivers of human flesh by comparing what they were doing to eating the body and blood of Christ in the Holy Eucharist. Yet now when they discovered once again the same carcass from whom the first meat was taken, it was Algorta who sat down on a cushion with a knife and cut away the rotten, sodden flesh which remained around the shoulders and ribs. It was still more difficult for him and for the others to eat what was recognizably human – a hand, say, or a foot – but they did so all the same.
In the middle of the day the sun was now so hot that they could almost cook their meat on the roof of the plane. There were other consequences of the rapid thaw. The level of the snow fell to the base of the fuselage, which not only made it difficult to get onto the roof but also made them fear that the plane might topple over. The melting snow also dislodged boulders higher up the mountains which came hurtling down towards them. The warmth brought more signs of outside life; a few swallows flew around the plane, and one settled on the shoulder of one of the boys, who tried to grab it but failed. On the whole, however, the waiting had a bad effect on their nerves. In their minds they dithered between hope for the success of Canessa and Parrado and more sober plans for a second expedition which was to set out on the second or third of January.
It was the moment for their scapegoat to come centre stage. A tube of toothpaste had been issued to the whole group, a spot at a time, as their dessert; this tube was found squeezed empty on the floor of the plane. There was an immediate inquiry, and suspicion seemed to fall on Moncho Sabella or Pancho Delgado, because they were the only ones who had been inside the plane, but since nothing could be proved no one was directly accused. In the course of this investigation, however, it emerged that Roy Harley had among his belongings his own small tube of toothpaste. When asked to account for it, he said that he had swapped it with Delgado for seven cigarettes.
Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors Page 21