by Héctor Tobar
“No, he’s not,” Susana says.
The sister puts Susana in touch with her husband. “There was a cave-in at the mine at two in the afternoon and los niños are buried alive,” he says over the phone. “There’s no escape.”
“That’s what he told me: ‘Buried alive.’ ‘No escape,’” Susana says later. “People who work in the mines know what it means to say those things. So I got desperate.”
With her sister, Susana heads to the local station of Chile’s national police force, the famously erect, incorruptible, and efficient Carabineros. But the police haven’t heard anything either. In the short time Susana and her sister are there, however, word reaches the station, and they watch as police vehicles start to head out to the San José. Go to the hospital, the Carabineros tell them, but first Susana and her sister race back to their neighborhood, to tell Marta, Yonni’s wife.
Marta is a much smaller, older, more severe and serious woman than Susana. The women have known each other for several years, as Yonni has bounced back and forth between their two homes. Susana first met Yonni in his wife’s house: She mentioned to Marta that she needed someone to build some furniture. “This ugly old man I live with, my husband, made that over there,” Marta said. “I’m bored of him.” Yonni then emerged from the room where his wife had him “prisoner,” or so Susana tells it. Marta explains that she’s endured his philandering for years. Susana thinks: This guy isn’t ugly at all. In his sad, lonely smile there is a hint of sly cunning, the come-hither look of a wounded man who wants to open his soul to you, right now, as soon as you can slip away and be alone with him. “I brought him over here, and I liked him,” Susana says, “and I made him a little lunch, and then we made a little love afterwards.” He never did make the furniture. Now this history is a light and comical prologue to the tragedy of that same philandering man buried and lost in the San José Mine. When she learns of the accident from her husband’s mistress, Marta responds in a rather bloodless tone: “This is as far as you go with him. Now I’m in charge. Go get me the marriage book.” The libreta de matrimonio is a kind of passbook, signed by the official who performs a civil marriage ceremony, and it’s used to apply for a variety of government services, and also to gain access to places where only a spouse will be admitted (for example, a hospital room or a coroner’s office). This document is in Yonni’s possession, at Susana’s home.
Susana obediently retrieves her boyfriend’s marriage book, and together, she and his wife head off to the hospital.
* * *
Carmen Berríos is in Copiapó, on the bus, and the driver is playing fast-tempoed Mexican music on the radio and forcing all his passengers to listen to it. She’s spent the day with her father and is headed back home, to make dinner for her husband, Luis Urzúa, and their two children at 9:30. Suddenly, the swirling accordions give way to an announcer’s voice. “Extra, extra, extra!” the announcer says, in a radio voice that can’t help but attach a note of cheerful anticipation to the dispensation of a news flash. “Tragedy in the San José Mine! A collapse in the mine!” The flash dispenses little more than the bare skeleton of a story before the Mexican music returns. For Carmen, learning that she might have lost her husband while that folksy music plays is a juxtaposition that’s odd, cruel, and unforgettable.
“Driver, what did he say?” she asks. Because, to be honest, Carmen’s not entirely sure exactly where Luis works. He switched jobs a few months back, and she’s never been to his new mine, and she can’t be sure the mine in the radio bulletin is the one where Luis works. For a moment her small doubt becomes a source of hope. “Can you change it to another station?” she asks the driver. “Maybe there’s more information…”
“That’s all there is,” the driver says. “It’s an extra. Maybe they’ll have more later.”
She gets home and hears more bulletins on the radio: There are wounded miners, and dead miners, the radio says, and it’s now undeniably clear it’s Luis’s mine. “The whole nightmare fell on top of us, because we didn’t know if it was true, or not.” The clock in the living room passes 9:30 and Luis doesn’t come home. Her two children, a son and a daughter both in college, are quietly studying and not especially aware that dinner is late. When the clock reaches 10:30 she calls them together and says: “We have to have a family meeting. The radio is saying there was an accident at the mine where your father works.” She turns on the radio for them to hear, and there are reports of injured men being taken to the San José del Carmen Hospital in Copiapó, but Carmen decides she has to go to the mine, to get confirmation that he was even there when the mine collapsed. Her daughter’s friend drives her there in a pickup truck, using a GPS, because she’s never been there before and doesn’t know the directions.
Carmen Berríos rides through an eerie night landscape filled with the shadows of round and rocky mountains, remembering a recent dream she had of Luis trapped underground: In that dream, he was rescued and rose to the surface in a bus. The pickup turns off the highway and onto the short spur leading to the mine, a mountain with a brightening cluster of lights, until they reach the front gate and the guard shack there, and she steps out into a night of dry and bitter cold. It’s nearly midnight.
* * *
At her home in a middle-middle-class neighborhood of Copiapó, Mónica Avalos, the wife of the foreman, Florencio Avalos, is sewing. She’s got one of her sixteen-year-old son’s sweaters and is taking it in a bit, while also cooking a soup for Florencio. Her husband is a big soup eater, and Mónica is making a concoction of chopped beef she’ll remember as being especially hearty, the way Florencio likes it. The smell of this meal is filling the living room and the small, attached dining room where she and Florencio and their two sons gather every night for dinner. Mónica is not watching television or listening to the radio, because she likes the silence in the house, and her sons are off in their rooms. Her main company at this moment is the big clock in the living room, which is marching toward the time Florencio usually comes home and she serves dinner: 9:30 p.m., as is the South American custom.
The phone rings with a call from her sister. “Look, I don’t want to worry you, but there was a collapse in the mine. A really big collapse. In the mine where Florencio works. The San José Mine. Is Florencio there yet?”
“No, but he’s going to be here any minute now.” This call is followed by the arrival of 9:30 and several long, long minutes with Florencio’s chair at the dining room table still empty. Suddenly, Mónica can’t even remember the name of the mine where Florencio works. Was it the San José? She remembers him saying he worked in a mine named for another saint: San Antonio. Anthony, not Joseph, that’s what she’s thinking. She’s walking up and down the stairs, in a kind of manic trance, looking at that clock push further away from 9:30. Her seven-year-old son, who’s alone in his room watching television, and who’s always talked to his father about work and knows perfectly well what the name of the mine is, suddenly comes running into the living room and yells: “Mommy, my father is dead! My father is dead!”
“No! No!” his mother answers back. “Where did you get that from?”
“Don’t be a liar!” the boy yells. “It’s on the news!”
Upstairs, in her younger son’s room before the television set, Mónica faints. Her older son, César Alexis, “Ale,” comes to revive her, and to be steady and to play the role of father suddenly. Ale is sixteen years old, the same age Florencio and Mónica were when she got pregnant with him, and suddenly he is calm and strong, as if he were channeling Florencio somehow.
“Cálmate,” Ale says to his mother. “Cálmate.” They decide to go to Pablo Ramirez’s house, because Pablo works in the same mine, and if anyone knows the truth and can be trusted to tell them, it’s Pablo. When Mónica and her two sons arrive at Pablo’s house and knock at the door, they are unaware that Pablo is, at that moment, entering the collapsed mine in search of Florencio and the other thirty-two men with him. No one answers for fifteen minutes, until fina
lly Pablo’s wife comes to the door and says: “Pablo’s not here. He went to the mine. Because there’s been an accident.” Mónica calls another of Florencio’s friends, Isaías, and they drive to the mine together, but get lost on the roads outside of town. When she arrives, she takes note of the emptiness of the place. She sees men in helmets and uniforms walking back and forth with unknown purpose before the mine entrance. It feels like she’s the first and only woman there.
* * *
In Talcahuano, Carola Bustos, who survived the earthquake and tsunami with her husband, decides she can’t bear to tell her two young children what’s happened to their father. They will hear her voice breaking and see her weeping, and the sight of their stricken mother will wound them. To spare her children that hurt, she leaves them in the care of her parents, in the physical and emotional safety of their home, and she slips away for a northward flight without saying goodbye. Carola leaves it to her parents to explain her absence to their grandchildren: “Mommy’s going back to Santiago to look for work, and she’ll be back soon.”
* * *
Some seventeen hours after the collapse, the phone rings at the home of Mario “Perri” Sepúlveda in Santiago. Elvira, who goes by the nickname “Cati,” takes the call from a friend just after 7:00 a.m.
“Cati, there was an accident in a mine and it looks like Mario is there,” says a friend.
For a moment, it seems like a joke. “No,” Elvira says. It seems impossible that a friend from Santiago would know anything about what Mario was doing hundreds of kilometers to the north.
“I’m not bullshitting you,” the friend says. No te estoy huevando. “Turn on Channel Seven.”
Elvira turns on the television and sees the report from Copiapó. After a few moments, Mario is on the screen, a clean-shaven and not especially happy man of forty, staring into the camera with red, flashbulb eyes in the unflattering picture on his mining company identity card. His full name is there as a caption: MARIO SEPÚLVEDA ESPINACE. The news report fills out some details. The collapse took place yesterday afternoon, they’re buried several hundred meters underground, all communication has been lost. After she digests the gravity of what’s happened, when she has time to think about exactly what her husband must be suffering, she wonders: How is that crazy man going to survive cooped up like that? He needs to be moving around. He won’t be able to take it.
As to the accident itself, Elvira is not surprised: Mario had more or less predicted it. When he went to work, Mario often reminded her about the insurance and social security she would be entitled to if anything happened to him in the mine. He spoke so often and angrily about the San José being on the verge of collapse, his worries invaded the dreams of his eighteen-year-old daughter, Scarlette. One day, several months earlier, Scarlette had a nightmare in which she learned her father had been killed in the mine. She woke up screaming “My father is dead!” and could not be convinced that it was just a dream. She was crying and trembling, and her mother was forced to take her to the hospital, until Mario emerged from his shift and called home and said: “Scarlette, it’s me, your father! I’m alive! I’m fine! Nothing happened to me. I was just at work…”
With Mario now buried, Elvira can’t help but think of Scarlette’s dreams as a kind of a prophecy no one chose to heed. She wonders: How am I going to explain to our son that his father is trapped and there’s nothing we can do? Francisco is thirteen years old but is small for his age, and always has been. He was born after a pregnancy of just five months, weighed a mere 2.4 pounds at birth, and spent the first sixty-nine days of his life in an incubator. They are very close, father and son, their bond having been forged during those ten weeks when a powerless Mario was forced to endure the sight of his baby boy in a box, with his impossibly tiny limbs and closed eyes, being fed by tubes, seemingly fighting for his life with clenched fists as small as rosebuds. Mario has filled up the rest of the boy’s days with as much love as he can give him. He’s become the boy’s personal cheerleader, comedian, and preacher, leading him on a series of outdoor adventures and pontificating, always, on the wonders and idiosyncrasies of electrically operated machines, and on the common sense and sensitivity it takes to care for both horses and dogs, and also on the Sepúlveda family’s rural roots as huasos, the poncho-wearing, horse-riding Chilean equivalent of cowboys. She has watched father and son ride horses and kick around a soccer ball together, and sit before a television screen again and again, enraptured by a movie about fatherhood, loyalty, and warfare that’s Mario’s favorite: Braveheart. Mario is a big Mel Gibson fan “because me and my son, we aren’t tall, and neither is Mel Gibson.” Gibson’s Academy Award–winning film is titled Corazón Valiente in Spanish. “Your heart is free,” the movie says. “Have the courage to follow it.”
Mario has told his son, “I am your Corazón Valiente,” and now that Chilean-miner Braveheart is on the television. First in his employee photograph and then, most improbably, in a video in which he’s talking to the camera, laughing, being Perri.
The only images we have of the miners are these recorded by Mario Sepúlveda, the television says. Mario loves to film things, and there he is, narrating a description of the bunk beds in the house where he stays with his fellow out-of-town workers during the seven days he’s in Copiapó.
Elvira travels to the airport for the flight to a city she’s never visited. Later that afternoon she’s over the southern edge of the Atacama Desert with her weeping son, who can’t stop saying how much he misses his father. And also with a daughter who was once hospitalized for believing a dream that seemed like madness, but which has now taken form in the waking world, in images and words broadcast and repeated on all the televisions and radios around her as she steps off the plane, into the light of a desert winter: Mario Sepúlveda Espinace, father of two. Feared lost in the San José Mine.
4
“I’M ALWAYS HUNGRY”
The trapped men eventually begin to turn their backs on the curtain of stone that separates them from the surface. They split into two groups. The first, smaller group decides to search in the mine’s matrix of intersecting tunnels and excavated holes for a passageway to the surface. About eight men in all, they head for one of the cylindrical chimney shafts bored into the stone between different levels of the Ramp. The main purpose of these chimneys is to allow air, water, and electricity to flow into the mine, but they were also supposed to have been fitted with ladders to provide an escape route between each level. In theory it should be possible to climb about ten such passages and make it past the collapsed section of the mine, but in practice only a few of the chimneys have ladders, and los niños don’t have much faith that they’ll be able to find a path upward. Still, they start off for the nearest chimney opening, a short walk downhill to Level 180.
A second, much larger group of about two dozen men heads back to the Refuge to wait, walking back downhill toward the personnel truck. As the two groups split up, Florencio Avalos, the shift’s foreman and second-in-command, takes Yonni Barrios aside. “Down in the Refuge, take care of those two boxes with provisions,” he tells Barrios. “Don’t let los niños eat them yet, because we may be trapped for days.” Avalos says this sotto voce, because he doesn’t want to spread a panic among the men. He chooses to tell this to Barrios, because Yonni is among the oldest and most experienced in the group—and also because Yonni is the kind of guy who will follow any order you give him. “Yonni, I’m trusting you, I want you to take care of that cabinet for me. Don’t let anyone open it until we get back, please.”
Carlos Mamani, the Bolivian immigrant, joins the line of walking men and realizes how much he needs that lamp he left in his locker on the surface. The supervisor testing him out on the Volvo L120 loader had said it wasn’t urgent to have one and he could pick it up during the lunch break. Now Mamani is going to have to come to terms with his natural, human fear of the dark, because without a lamp, darkness is his constant companion. As the line of marching men spreads out on t
he walk downhill, he finds himself inside a patch of blackness, walking uncertainly between the silhouettes of the boulders scattered across the roadway, looking up to follow the cones and beams of incandescent light shining from the helmets of other miners, until they finally reach the personnel truck and he jumps in the back for the ride down to the Refuge.
Upon their arrival, and after a quick exploration of the nearby area, the men take note of the fact that all the connections to the surface have been cut: the electricity, the intercom system, the flow of water and compressed air. Despite this very bad sign, there are still some among the trapped men—especially those with less experience in underground mining—who think they’ll be rescued within a day, or perhaps in a few hours. Those first few hours begin to pass, slowly, punctuated by a rumbling stomach or two (they have just missed lunch, after all), and by the continual thunder of rock falling somewhere in the dark spaces beyond the weak, warm light of their headlamps, many of which the men now begin to turn off, to save their batteries. When you’re hungry, waiting to eat is an ordeal, and even more so when you’re sitting in a room with two locked cabinets filled with food, a stock of calories guarded by one rather timorous, middle-aged miner. Yonni Barrios, the man who can’t stand up to either of the women in his life, now has the responsibility of trying to keep two dozen hungry men from eating the emergency supplies for dinner.
* * *
The small escape expedition begins with one miner driving a jumbo lifter with a long arm and a platform to the chimney opening. This piece of equipment is usually employed to lift the men who fortify the mine’s ceilings and who bore holes into the rock to place explosive charges. Mario Sepúlveda climbs into the basket and is lifted up into a hole in the ceiling. Raúl Bustos, the mechanic from the port city of Talcahuano, follows after him. For Luis Urzúa, the shift supervisor, scaling the chimney is at once dangerous and useless, and he has made a halfhearted effort to keep the men from trying. “Climbing up that chimney wasn’t going to work. None of those guys were thinking about safety. And you’ll notice that the guys who went up there first weren’t really miners,” he later says, referring to Sepúlveda and Bustos, neither of whom is from a mining family. But Urzúa is quickly losing his authority over the men, who are determined to do something to try to save themselves. Raising his head into the two-meter-diameter hole, Sepúlveda is surprised to see a ladder, built from pieces of rebar driven into the rock. He begins to climb, hopeful that he’ll find a way out. After a minute or so, he realizes he’s really too overweight to do this, but he keeps on going. It’s a hundred feet or so to the next level, the hole rising on an incline. The taste of dust and vehicle exhaust makes it hard to breathe. Behind them are two other men, Florencio Avalos and Carlos Barrios, a twenty-seven-year-old whose girlfriend has not yet told him she’s pregnant with his child. The walls are slippery with humidity, and soon the four men are covered with sweat, too. Halfway up, one of the rebar rungs breaks off as Sepúlveda grabs it, and the metal strikes him in the front teeth, sending a rush of blood into his mouth. He shakes his head in pain, but keeps climbing.