by Héctor Tobar
The mood changes suddenly, as the members of the escape expedition reveal the truth they learned higher up in the mine: They’re trapped and there will be no easy rescue or escape. They speak with a grave tone of focused urgency that catches many of the men in the Refuge by surprise. “What are you guys doing?” Mario Sepúlveda says, with the raspy, high-pitched paternalistic lament he might use for one of his dogs. “Don’t you realize we might be down here for days? Or weeks?”
No one immediately confesses to the crime of looting the provisions. Nor do any of the members of the failed escape expedition demand to know who was responsible, and in the confusion of the moment, a few men will not learn for many days what exactly transpired with the food supply. The fact of the taking will simply sit for days to come in the conscience of the men who did it. Víctor Zamora, recognized by many as the chief culprit, studies the faces of his friends and companions and understands, for the first time, the severity of what’s happened in that white-tiled room with the box that used to be sealed. He says nothing, and won’t say anything for days about what he’s done.
Now Mario Sepúlveda and Raúl Bustos begin to give details of their climb to the top, with Sepúlveda getting on his knees in the dirt to draw a diagram of the blocked ramp, and the chimney without the ladder. He speaks to them with a common term of endearment among men: chiquillos, or “kids.” “In other words, chiquillos, even if we’re superoptimistic about things, the best you can say is we’re in a load of shit. The only thing we can do is to be strong, superdisciplined, and united.”
In the silence that follows Sepúlveda’s assessment, Luis Urzúa steps forward to make an announcement. Given the circumstances, he says, “We are all equal now. I take off my white helmet. There are no bosses and employees.” He is surrendering, in effect, his responsibilities as a shift supervisor, as jefe de turno. A few minutes earlier on the walk down from the chimney, Urzúa had told the members of the escape expedition that he was going to do this, and now he’s gone ahead and done it, even though they told him not to. “We have to decide, together, what we’ll do,” Urzúa says. What he wants to communicate is their need to stand together and stand united, “one for all and all for one,” though what some take from this small speech and his low-key demeanor is meekness in the face of a challenge, and the sense that the man who’s supposed to be in charge isn’t.
“Sometimes Luis Urzúa says things without thinking,” Raúl Bustos later says. Bustos feels a kind of suppressed anarchy lingering there in the cavernous space underground. Five months earlier, he saw his hometown of Talcahuano descend into anarchy following a tsunami and earthquake, and he was nearly mugged outside a pharmacy that was being looted. Like a natural disaster, the collapse might cause the daily order and hierarchies of the mine to come apart. Bustos can see the possibility that the strongest and most desperate men in the cavern will take advantage of the weaker men. The logic of the street could take over the mine. There are, after all, a few among them who have spent a bit of time in jail, for fights in bars, that sort of thing, and each of those men is a potential “alpha dog,” he thinks. “At any moment, they could have turned on el jefe de turno if we didn’t back him up.”
Urzúa speaks his piece, but it leaves a kind of void, so others from the escape expedition try to fill it: Mario Sepúlveda and the foreman Florencio Avalos, and Juan Carlos Aguilar, the supervisor of the contract mechanics crew. El jefe de turno is correct, they all say. We have to stick together. Aguilar speaks with a voice that is at once authoritative and informed. The situation is not good, he says, but there are things they can do to prepare. Number one, they have to take care of all the water that’s down there with them, because the water they used to keep the machines and the mine running can keep them alive, too. It’s obvious they’ll have to ration the food, too, eating as little as possible every day to make it stretch out as long as possible, and the only question is how to do it.
Sepúlveda helps lead a tally of what is (and was) inside the emergency cabinet: 1 can of salmon, 1 can of peaches, 1 can of peas, 18 cans of tuna, 24 liters of condensed milk (8 of which are spoiled), 93 packages of cookies (including those that have just been eaten), and some expired medicines. There are also, incongruously, 240 plastic spoons and forks, and a mere 10 bottles of water, which serve as further proof of the mine owners’ thoughtlessness. The men will not die of dehydration, however, because there’s several thousand liters of industrial water in the big tanks nearby that’s used to keep the engines cool, and even though it’s probably tainted with small amounts of oil, it will likely be drinkable. But they have to divide those cookies and cans of tuna among them all: If each man eats one or two cookies and a spoonful of tuna each day, the provisions might stretch out a week. They put all the food back into the cabinet, and lock it again. Urzúa takes the key and gives it to Sepúlveda for safekeeping.
But how many of them are there, exactly? Urzúa counts them again, and checks the list against his mental notes on how many men should be there among them. “Thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three…”
“There are thirty-three of us,” he announces.
“Thirty-three?” Sepúlveda shouts. “The age of Christ! Shit!” ¡La edad de Cristo! ¡Mierda!
Several other men repeat the phrase, including Aguilar and Lobos. “¡La edad de Cristo!” they yell out. Even for men who aren’t especially religious, the number carries an eerie meaning, especially for those who have reached and passed the age themselves. Thirty-three, the age of a crucified prophet. The number and the name sit there among the group for an instant, a coincidence that’s both trivial and frightening. Really, there should only be sixteen or seventeen of them, but thanks to all the men working overtime, or makeup days, there are many more. Twice as many, in fact. So many that no one man has met all the others. Thirty-three in all. How can that be?
Finally, Sepúlveda speaks, loudly, because in the eyes of the men around him he sees confusion and fear. Somos treinta y tres. “There are thirty-three of us. This has to mean something,” he says. “There’s something bigger for us waiting outside.” He says this with the anger of the street fighter he once was, and with the conviction of the father he’s become, a man who’s seen a wall of stone and a half-empty cabinet of food, and who refuses to believe it marks the end of his life’s journey.
* * *
One group goes back up to the rock at Level 190, and to the nearby chimneys and caverns, to listen for the approach of rescuers and then to make noises alerting people on the surface to the presence of living men down below. They’ll be so busy moving rocks, lighting fires, and doing other things that they won’t be able to sleep for a couple of days. But most of the thirty-three trapped men stay in or near the Refuge. A few, in fact, are afraid to leave that room, and won’t for several days, because they can’t forget running for their lives in the collapsing, exploding mountain outside. Sleeping behind the steel door of the Refuge, or just next to it, they can at least pretend they are in a safe place.
“Remember those Mexican miners who were buried underground,” one of the miners says. “They just put a stone over the entrance to the mine and said, ‘They’re dead. This is their tomb.’ They didn’t even bother getting out their bodies.”
“No, you’re wrong,” another miner shouts back. “Right now, our families are all up there. They’re going to make sure they come after us.”
Someone says that the rescuers could carve a new ramp to come and get them. Maybe even a ramp from the brother mine nearby, the San Antonio.
“But it took ten years to make the ramp that’s here now,” says Yonni Barrios, who’s worked at the mine that long. “It would take ten years for them to reach us that way.”
Or maybe we could climb out through the Pit, another miner suggests.
No, that would be suicide, useless, like trying to climb a cliff of shifting and tumbling boulders, several men reply. You’d be sure to fall or be crushed.
One of the older miners says the on
ly solution is to drill for them. A drill can reach them in a few days, send down food, keep them alive while the people on the surface devise a rescue plan.
So they’ll reach us in a day or so, someone says, hopefully.
No, another miner answers. “Did you see a drill out there when we came into work today? No. They’re going to have to bring one in from another mine. And then they’re going to have to build a platform for it. It’s going to take a few days, at least, just to get started.”
It’s past 10:00 p.m. as the men scatter about the Refuge looking for a spot to sit or lie down. There is nothing else to do there, for the moment. Several make beds from the cardboard boxes that once stored various explosives, or with the soft plastic ripped out from the ducts that pumped fresh air from the surface. On a normal day they’d be back in their bunks at the hostel in Copiapó, their bellies warmed by wine or beer or something stronger, or in their homes dozing off to sleep with wives, girlfriends, children around them. This is the hour when their bodies usually give up, surrendering to gravity and sleep after twelve hours on their feet, underground, but tonight the only rest is on the white floor of the Refuge, the sandy surface of the Ramp, catching the eyes of other men, exhausted, disoriented, with the childlike stares of the lost. Ten years for a new ramp to reach them. Days just to hear a drill. Or maybe just the silence of being forgotten, of having that stone across the Ramp be the closed door of their tomb. When there is nothing left to say, they open their eyes wide in the darkness and think how cruel and how wrong and how unfair it is to find themselves here, among these other sweaty, smelly, and frightened men.
There was comfort in the rushing rhythm of their daily working lives, in the 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. shift going underground and coming out again, and then back into this mountain where the tiniest share of the bounty of copper and gold was theirs to keep. Now there is nothing to do but sit still, listen to the intermittent thunder of falling rock, and wonder if this is all they will know. Maybe all the pleasures of sweat and simple living under the sun, the moon and the Southern Cross in the night sky belong to the past. So many memories left behind, out there in the world of the unburied: filling boxes with picked grapes, seeking out the pretty newcomer at the family gathering, joining friends for hard drinking, walking through doorways and into Copiapó bars where stationary mirror balls awaited. Collecting paychecks and coming home at 9:00 p.m. to the voices of children gathered under the streetlamps in the sloping neighborhoods of Copiapó, under lights tinged amber and emerald. The outside has slipped into the was, because now they live in a present, and perhaps a forever, of darkness. The past was family patios where men gathered to discuss whether La U or Colo-Colo would win the next fútbol championship, and other important and relaxing subjects of male-centered conversation. The past was the open windows leading to their backyards, to grills and the cracked skin of cooked sausage. It was the silhouettes of their pregnant wives and girlfriends, moving about living rooms and kitchens, the mystery of the feminine there in the bellies growing with their progeny.
Two of the miners are awaiting the birth of their children to pregnant girlfriends. There is Ariel Ticona, a spry twenty-nine-year-old, who already has two with the same girlfriend. Richard Villarroel is a tall mechanic. His pregnant polola is called Dana, and he lives with her in Ovalle, several hours to the south of Copiapó, a place that fancies itself as a kind of Eden, a haven of palm trees and flowing waters amid dry, barren hills. Tonight his girlfriend is a pregnant Eve in that oasis while he, her Adam, is stuck in a hole paying for their recent carnal sins. He remembers her swollen belly, and the baby swimming inside, and those first few faint kicks he felt when Dana brought his hand to that hard shell of skin. Those kicks, he now realizes, might be the closest he ever gets to knowing his son. Richard’s own fisherman father died when he was five, in an accident on a lake in Chilean Patagonia, leaving Richard with a lifetime of unsettled thoughts and shifting homes, and finally a teenage rebellion against his widowed mother in which he actually ended up in jail, briefly, angry at the unjust world that would deprive a boy of all but the faintest memory of having a father. It was as if his father’s life had been taken by a lightning bolt, and Richard’s death will feel that way too, to Richard’s son, if he dies here. It’s an act of chance, the absurd hand of fate at work, because Richard wasn’t even supposed to be underground. He signed up to work aboveground, and he knows that his mother will be confused when she sees his name on a list of missing men, because as far as she knows, he doesn’t even work in a mine. The idea that Richard will soon leave his son an identical legacy of absence to the one he knew, a lifetime of suppressed suffering, now looms over him.
That’s the cruelest thing about this August 5, a day whose final minutes are playing out in the Refuge with the sounds of men moving about on their makeshift resting places: the knowledge that they will be missing to all the people who love and hate them, who depend on them and who are frustrated by them. They won’t be there to protect or provide, to be fed, to be listened to, or to hear the complaints of mothers-in-law or face the angry wordlessness of their adolescent children. The miners won’t be there for the party for the baby, la guagua, or at the cemetery to place sunflowers and marigolds on the graves of the men who raised them to be something other than a miner, someone other than a man who could die this way.
Omar Reygadas, the scoop operator who was at the bottom of the mine when it collapsed, was at the cemetery in Copiapó just a few days earlier. He was in the sunshine, walking past the roofed portal into a space cluttered with crumbling crosses and monuments, the nearby dun mountains visible in the distance. He’s a widower, and during these last seven days off he had gone to see the grave of his late wife, the mother of his children, a woman he left while she was still alive. And next to her, the grave of their adult son, who died in an accident. During those same days off, he had gone to the lawns at El Pretil Park, under the pepper and eucalyptus trees, for a party and barbecue in honor of his seven-year-old grandson, Nicolás. “All my children were there, my grandchildren, my great-grandchildren.” And he had gone to Vallenar, the town where he had grown up, an hour to the south of Copiapó, to see his brothers. All of this during just a few days of rest, perhaps his last. Remembering this, and being of a sentimental age, it now looks to Omar as if all these events were foreordained: as if God had given him the chance to say goodbye to everyone before leaving this Earth. It’s a thought at once comforting and devastating, because it means facing the fact that this really is his end.
Omar thinks: God, if you’re going to take me now, at least let them find my body eventually. He begins to weep. “I’m not embarrassed to say I cried, a lot, at that moment, thinking that I wouldn’t see my family again, and thinking of the suffering they would go through outside.” He doesn’t want his fellow miners in and near the Refuge to see him broken, so he steps out of that place and begins to walk, alone, in violation of a mining code that says you should never walk alone underground. Safety doesn’t matter anymore, the rules don’t matter, and he walks downhill, following the light of his lamp, until he finds a front loader like the one he used to operate. He sits inside the cab, a quiet place to think, but after a few minutes he remembers the moment of the collapse. Tons and tons of rock fell on top of them, and yet “there wasn’t anyone who was hurt, not even a scratch.” They are thirty-three trapped men, suffering with their fears and their memories, yes—but they are alive. Omar realizes that the improbable fact of their survival also carries a hint of the divine. To be alive in this hole, against all odds, speaks to Omar of the existence of a higher power with some sort of plan for these still-living men. He decides to go back to the Refuge, and to wrestle with his own fears and to be a strong old man instead of a weak one. He thinks that maybe if he can transmit strength to those men and boys up there in the Refuge, that will be good for something. And if it’s all part of a plan from his Creator, then maybe Omar’s prayers, his thoughts, and his will can reach up to the sur
face, too, and make the people who love him strong, because they must be suffering, out there in the night, wondering if he and thirty-two other men could still be alive.
5
RED ALERT!
Down in the Refuge, Darío Segovia, the miner who said goodbye to his girlfriend with a long, silent embrace, says very little as the hours pass from night into morning. Darío has crevices that cut across his sandpaper cheeks, and his expressive face speaks for him: He might narrow his eyes to say I am determined, or allow his otherwise steady brow to retreat into a silent statement of worry. During his first twenty-four hours trapped underground, a wrinkling of his leather brow says, very clearly, I am confused and afraid. He’s always been a man of few words, as his big sister, María, can attest. She spent much of her childhood looking after her little brother and four other siblings, and like the rest of the Segovia family she knows him by his middle name, Arturo. When Darío Arturo Segovia was a teenager he worked in a mine carrying rocks in a leather bag called a capacho that slipped over his torso. His relatives smiled and laughed at the eagerness with which Darío accepted his job as a beast of burden, and they made “Capacho” his nickname.
When they were little, growing up in the Atacama Desert, Darío Arturo spoke little and María spoke a lot, defending her little brother and their siblings against the vicissitudes of a life with parents who often left them to fend for themselves. Today all the Segovia siblings are deep into middle age, approaching or just past the landmark of fifty, but María, small and squat and sunburned from many days and years working in the open air, remains the one who takes charge in a crisis. So it will be today, even though she is on the other side of the desert, more than three hundred miles from Copiapó. María Segovia is at the city hall of the port city of Antofagasta, and she’s there for the same reason Darío is in the mine—trying to win one of the small victories that give her a dignified existence. Her life has been this way for as long as she can remember. When she was a girl of about nine taking care of Darío, who was six, they lived in the desert town of San Félix, in a home built of river stones, wire, and wood scraps in a ravine. La Quebrada de los Corrales, the ravine was called, because there were corrals for animals nearby. Drops of water began to fall from the perpetually dry skies, drumming on the nylon tarp that was their roof, followed by rivulets that snaked along the floor in the spaces where they slept and ate. A torrent knocked down the stone walls of their home and carried away their belongings. Later, María was pregnant at fourteen, and today, at the relatively young age of fifty-two, she is a happy great-grandmother, but memories of poverty, of living in places that can be literally swept away in a moderate rainstorm, lead her very often to be a pain in the ass to anyone who gets in her way.