Deep Down Dark

by Héctor Tobar

“Has everybody got some?” Sepúlveda asks. “There’s a bit more, if anyone wants it.” He scrapes his tin cup against the bottom of the air filter and starts to talk to his son, as if he were watching the recording. “Francisco, when God tells you to be a warrior, these balls [esta hueva] are what it means to be a warrior.” He imagines his son watching him, a warrior feeding these other warriors, refusing to surrender. You see, Francisco, a warrior isn’t just someone who slays dragons—or Englishmen, like Mel Gibson does in our favorite movie, Braveheart. A warrior can also be a man who takes apart an engine to make soup and then serves it to his brothers, keeping up their spirits with the rising inflections of his voice.

  Acuña stops recording so that he can pray with the others when Henríquez blesses the meal. As the men around Henríquez bow their heads, he gives thanks to God for the food they are about to eat. Then they sit on or near the pile of rocks and sip from their “soup,” with its sheen of oil that might be from the tuna but also from the clouded industrial water they used to cook it. And sitting there, in that relaxed and convivial moment, a few of the men remember the last big meal they shared together, at Víctor Segovia’s house in Copiapó, when Víctor had most of the men from the A shift over for a party, on a Wednesday afternoon after their last shift was over, before the men from the south departed for home on the overnight buses to Santiago.

  It was two weeks earlier in a neighborhood where the streets are named for minerals. Víctor Segovia’s house is on Chalcopyrite Street. Alex Vega brought a big pot that’s called a fondo in Chile. They were going to make cocimiento, with chicken, pork, fish, and potatoes with the peel still on, and a little bed of cabbage at the bottom. The recipe says to cook all this in water, then pour in some wine near the end. They set it all to boil, and then they imbibed Cristal beer and some wine, but not Mario Sepúlveda, because he’s a Jehovah’s Witness and doesn’t drink—he agreed to keep an eye on the pot instead. After a few drinks Edison Peña picked up a microphone—Víctor Segovia is a musician, he has a lot of sound equipment around the house—and started singing some Elvis tunes, including “Blue Suede Shoes,” in his thick, Chilean-accented English. “Hey, that’s music for old people,” Pedro Cortez and some of the younger guys said, teasing Edison, because they live in the world of reggaeton and cumbia, and that old music from the U.S. South sounds like something their parents might listen to.

  Yeah, we were all having a pretty good time, out there at Víctor Segovia’s house, the men remember. But then the party ended, not long after Pablo “the Cat” Rojas’s cell phone sounded at about 4:30 p.m., just when Sepúlveda was saying the cocimiento was ready to go and the scent of stewed meats was floating about the house, and the guys were feeling nice and warm inside from the wine and the beer. Pablo Rojas and Víctor Segovia are cousins, and the call brought word that Pablo’s father had just died. This was not unexpected news, because the elder Rojas was a lifelong miner who had become a hopelessly addicted drinker after he retired. You could find him in the plaza of Copiapó, after drinking for several days at a time, begging for money to drink a little more. José Rojas had been slowly killing himself for a few years, and now the inevitable had happened, and the news hit Pablo pretty hard. Pablo didn’t cry, but his cousin Víctor could see he was in a bad way, so he said that maybe Pablo should go to the hospital to see his father and not worry about the party and the meal.

  No one was in the mood to eat after Pablo left, and the party broke up pretty quickly—Luis Urzúa arrived late, when the last of the guests was leaving. Urzúa didn’t have any food either, and that huge pot of cocimiento went uneaten.

  “All that food! And we just left it all there and went home!” Pedro Cortez shouts out now, as they sit around a pile of rocks at Level 135. Freshly cooked pork, fish, and chicken, boiled in white wine, in a huge fondo. And now they’re drinking a cup of “soup” cooked in a truck’s air filter from a single can of tuna and eight liters of Mario Sepúlveda’s bathwater, with no salt and only a few peas and some motor oil for flavoring—all divided among thirty-three men!

  It’s funny what can happen to a miner in the course of just two weeks: They’ve finished one shift, working hard to lift gold and copper from the earth, and they’ve lived well, cooking up big, miner-size portions of food to eat, with beer and wine to drink (even if they never did get around to eating the meal); and they’ve lost a father and an uncle who killed himself when he couldn’t be a miner anymore; and then they’ve gone back to work, got trapped in a mine, made soup from water meant for machines, and blessed that dirty water as “food” and shared it with their brothers. If they manage to get out of here, they will tell this to the people they love, a story about food, family, and friendship. It’s a tale of two meals: one aboveground, with nice dishes, lots of food, and very little eating; and one belowground, with very little food, in which they licked the insides of their plastic cups.

  * * *

  After the meal, a few of the men get excited because they say they hear the sound of distant drilling.

  “I can feel something vibrating,” someone says. “I hear it.” Everyone turns very quiet, to see if they can hear it, too.

  “It’s a lie, you can’t feel anything,” someone answers, and the discussion goes back and forth for a while until, finally, even those who said they felt that faint and possibly imaginary vibration concede that it’s stopped, or disappeared, or that maybe it never even existed. Víctor Segovia throws himself on the warm mud of the Ramp outside the Refuge, and fights off depression by writing in his diary. “Down here there is no day, only darkness and explosions.” He describes how the men around him are sleeping, some using plastic soda bottles as pillows. Víctor and the others feel the monster of “insanity” welling up inside them, he writes. It’s his fourth day underground now. He draws a diagram of two dozen prone stick figures, scattered before a doorway in the rock marked REFUGIO, and in its stark crudeness it resembles the grim police sketch of some crime scene. He lists the names of his five daughters again, and of his mother and father, and of himself, and then circles a heart around them. “Don’t cry for me,” he writes. “We had good times, always, with our azados [barbecues] and making cocimiento.”

  At the next prayer session, at noon, the Pastor tries to keep them strong and Víctor records his words. Being trapped in the San José “is a test that God set before us so that we can think about the things we’ve done in our lives that were wrong,” the Pastor says. “If we get out of this place, it will be like being reborn into the world.”

  At 4:15 p.m. they think they hear drilling again. Two of the men get very excited and start to shout, but within an hour, the sound is gone. Víctor has broken into a rash again, from the heat and from the worry. All the excitement of hearing the drill evaporates and Víctor studies the now-quiet men around him. “We look like cavemen, full of soot, and we are skinny, which is very noticeable on most of us.”

  Finally, at 7:15 p.m. on August 8, seventy-eight hours after being trapped, Víctor records the sound of something spinning, grinding, and hammering against rock. For three hours it grows steadily louder. At 10:00 p.m., Yonni Barrios is ready to believe it, too. It’s unmistakably a drill, the sound traveling through two thousand feet of rock. Omar Reygadas says it’s a dirt drill, because those are the ones that use a hammer: A diamond-tipped drill doesn’t make that much noise. Soon it seems to be everywhere, coming from every wall. It grows louder, and to men who work with such tools, the pneumatic pressure at work is palpable. Rat-tat-tat. Grind-grind-grind. It’s a drill, powered by air, working its way down the rock, and it’s headed toward them, as made clear by the fact that as the hours pass the sound grows louder.

  “Do you hear that, huevones?” Mario Sepúlveda shouts. “Do you hear that? What a beautiful noise!”

  Someone up there is coming for them.

  “Those drills can make one hundred meters a day,” someone says.

  Everyone starts doing the math. Maybe by Friday or Saturday, at the ea
rliest, they’ll break through, which means another five or six days without a true meal.

  * * *

  When the men eat their daily cookies, some allow each bite to stay in their mouths a long time without swallowing, because the taste itself is sort of like eating, as if they were ingesting an entire package of cookies, and not just two. Even just a few days of hunger can lead a man to do things he might not do otherwise, which explains why one day the saline solution that was in the first-aid box in the Refuge suddenly disappears. “The saline solution is gone, niños,” someone says at the daily meeting. “Let the person who took it please step forward and return it. Or if you drank it already, let us know.” No one steps forward, even though several of the men know who is responsible for its theft: Samuel “CD” Avalos, the vendor of pirated music. “I stayed quiet,” Samuel later says with a chuckle. “It was just one of my crazy things I did one night.” He’s been secretly sipping at it, and has drunk about half the plastic bag already. “It tasted salty.”

  “Well, if no one knows where it is, we need to find it,” someone says. “Everyone start looking.”

  The men make a show of looking for the precious bag of saline solution, including Samuel himself, who declares suddenly, and not without irony, “Oh, look, here it is. I found it!”

  After that, Mario Sepúlveda pours a few salty drops from the bag into the glasses of water along with the spoonful of tuna the men get each day. And sometimes he inadvertently adds another salty ingredient to the water. Several of the miners notice that as Mario pours the water and puts a few peas or a few drops of milk in each cup, the sweat from his forehead drips into some of the glasses: He’s telling the men how good everything is going to taste, and is simply too excited and too wrapped up in what he’s doing to notice. Not only are the men eating meals made from Mario Sepúlveda’s bathwater, they’re drinking some of his sweat, too.

  7

  BLESSED AMONG WOMEN

  The driller Eduardo Hurtado reaches the San José Mine on Sunday at 9:00 a.m., after an all-night drive of 430 miles, having been summoned by his boss at the Terraservice drilling company the night before, a few hours after Minister Golborne’s tearful announcement that a “traditional rescue” was no longer possible. The machine Hurtado will use arrives two hours later: a Schramm T685WS rotary drill, manufactured in West Chester, Pennsylvania. It’s a portable drilling rig on wheels, a vehicle about as long as a gasoline tanker, and it carries a mast that rises up to direct a hydraulic-driven drill into the ground. On an average day Hurtado and his crew will take this kind of drill and, with the guidance of a geologist or topographer, sink a hole that searches for ore. “Yeah, I’d done a lot of deep holes, but always looking for minerals,” Hurtado says to me. “I’d never drilled for viejos before.” Other drillers have already started searching for the men, the first beginning on Saturday night. Hurtado steps into the small company office at the mine and finds Alejandro Bohn, one of the owners, looking exhausted and dispirited, though his manager, Pedro Simunovic, is much more alert and helpful. Hurtado needs a topographer to tell him where to drill, but for the moment there isn’t one to be found. “The situation felt chaotic and anarchic,” Hurtado says. “No one was in charge.”

  Finally, Hurtado finds a topographer and some blueprints of the mine. It’s obviously much faster and more accurate to drill a hole straight down, from a spot on the surface directly above the location they’re trying to reach, in this case, one of the passageways near the Refuge. The hunt for this ideal drilling spot leads them to climb the bare, rocky surface of the mountain and mark out a patch of ground, which a work crew then begins to flatten with a bulldozer, to create the “platform” upon which they’ll place the drill rig. They’re not quite finished when a geologist inspecting the area tells them to stop: He’s found several telltale cracks in the mountain. They are standing above the vacuum in the mountain left by the collapse of the mine. “This could all give way at any moment,” the geologist says.

  They hunt for another spot, where they’ll have to drill diagonally into the mountain, and by late Monday morning they’re ready to go. Hurtado feels the need to give a little speech, reminding his crew of eight men how important this job is, and says that maybe each guy should say a prayer for the hole they’re about to drill: “Let’s all put our trust in the skinny guy,” Hurtado says, meaning, of course, the skinny guy on the cross. As they bow their heads one member of the drilling team says: “Hey, boss, let’s hold hands as we pray.” The eight drillers stand in a circle of helmets, and then the operator, Nelson Flores, places a rosary on the drill. Soon the rig’s compressor and rotary drill hum and grind into action, the truck’s mast tipped at a 78-degree angle and aimed at a target below 2,000 feet of diorite. “It was going to be hard because of the angle,” Hurtado says. “I could end up anywhere. It’s impossible to control exactly what the deviation will be.” As they drill the shaft, the Terraservice crew will place a series of interlinking steel tubes in the hole they’re carving into the mountain. Gravity will cause this steel shaft to bend in the same way a series of linked plastic straws bends. If they hit the Refuge, it will be with what soccer-loving Spanish-speakers call a chanfle, a bend-it-like-Beckham curve shot. The deviation can be as much as 5 percent, meaning that by the time it reaches the level of the trapped men the drill bit could be 100 feet off its target—and the corridor they’re trying to reach is no more than 32 feet wide.

  The grinding and pounding Terraservice drill spits a constant cloud of dust skyward from a chimney pipe, and sends a flow of wastewater over the ground. The sound and the dust fill the cold night as a fog begins to descend over the mountain. On other patches of mountain around him, more teams begin to drill, too; Sunday is drifting toward Monday, and for the moment, no one is in charge of coordinating the rescue effort.

  * * *

  When Cristián Barra arrives at the mine on Monday, the sense of disorder is palpable, and troubling, because it’s his job to prevent chaos. Barra is there at the behest of President Sebastián Piñera—Barra is one of those strict and severe men who work behind the scenes to keep the best Latin American democracies running with a no-nonsense, kick-’em-in-the-balls-and-get-it-done efficiency. He works at the Ministry of the Interior, traditionally the most powerful agency in any Latin American country, and the one in charge of Chile’s police forces and security apparatus. Barra seeks out the mine owners, Alejandro Bohn and Marcelo Kemeny. He finds them in their small office with the tiny window facing the desolate stretch of desert mountain range they own, two middle-aged, sleep-deprived men in oxford shirts and white helmets. They tell anyone who will listen that they thought the mine was safe—Kemeny says a few months back he entered the mine with his own two sons, ages fifteen and nine.

  The night before, Kemeny and his manager, Pedro Simunovic, had a brief, tense encounter with the families. The angry men and women staged a protest to force the owners to “show their faces.” Amid much pushing and shoving despite the police officers assigned to protect them, Kemeny and Simunovic entered a tented meeting area set up by the local government. Simunovic withstood a hail of insults and was able to utter only a few words, while Kemeny stood in the background saying nothing, and most of the family members didn’t even notice he was there.

  The rescue efforts are moving forward without the owners’ input. “They weren’t psychologically or emotionally able to make any decisions, or to plan what to do next,” Barra later says. Anticipating this state of affairs, Barra has come armed with an official declaration of a State of Emergency, issued by the minister of the interior at the order of the president, at a meeting at La Moneda, the presidential palace, a few hours earlier. Barra is Piñera’s fixer; they’ve known each other for more than twenty years, since the early days of the National Renewal party. Barra has come to take charge of the mine, and one of his first acts will be to deploy police officers and erect barriers that will keep the miners’ fathers and brothers and sons from entering the mine on more
quixotic rescue attempts.

  Barra also establishes a series of protocols—who can enter the mine property and who can’t, the identification required to pass through. He is the vanguard of an army of federal officials on their way not just to rescue the thirty-three men trapped beneath their feet but also, in a sense, to rescue the minister of mining. Like everyone else in Chile the top members of the Piñera government saw the minister cry on television because he couldn’t tell the miners’ families exactly how he would get the men out alive. Now the Piñera administration has assumed the responsibility of giving him a plan, despite some grumbling from the president’s advisers that it’s not politically expedient: Why assume responsibility for the lives of thirty-three men who are probably doomed anyway, when tradition and the law dictate that you need not and should not get involved?

  The president has made a quick stop in Copiapó on his return journey from Quito, Ecuador. He met briefly with a small group of family members, and with several local officials, including the provincial governor, Ximena Matas (she is one of his appointees), and a pair of conservative members of Congress, though not with the leftist legislators present, including the Socialist senator and novelist Isabel Allende. Later, in Santiago, he convened that first meeting at La Moneda at which he agreed the government should take over the rescue. The next obvious question is: Who knows more about mining rescues than anyone in Chile? It has to be someone at Codelco, the state-run National Copper Corporation, the world’s largest producer of copper. Soon a call is out to the man who runs the largest of the Codelco family of mines, André Sougarret, at El Teniente mine in Rancagua, south of Santiago. Sougarret is an engineer and administrator at a mine that’s so big—it has seven thousand employees—that rescues are a routine part of the worklife there. As he begins to assemble a team of about twenty-five men he gets a second call with an urgent question: How quickly can you make it to the presidential palace?