Deep Down Dark

by Héctor Tobar

  The men are feeling weaker now, it’s getting harder to walk up and down the 10 percent grade of the Ramp, and the sense of physical degradation grows as the space around the Refuge fills with the water flowing from the drills that are trying to reach them. The water is turning the ground to mud, and the mud is swallowing their boots when they walk on it, and the vehicles slip and slide when they try to drive on it. Several of the men take one of the front loaders and try to build a kind of levee against the water and mud but it’s quickly eroded away. Mario Sepúlveda goes walking through the mud, shirtless and soot-covered, confusion and worry on his face. He stops talking and the men stare at the lonely spectacle of him as he walks off: There is a thickening layer of black hair covering his cheeks to match the kiwi hair on his scalp. He walks up to the mechanics’ camp on Level 190 and tells the men there how he’s feeling, how disgraceful it is that he’s going to die down here, and the men try to cheer him up. Later, back down at the Refuge, he manages to fall into a fitful sleep. Víctor Segovia sees him dreaming, speaking in his sleep, saying his son’s name: “Francisco.” It’s a painful thing to witness: a grown, middle-aged man who longs to be with his son so much, he speaks to him in his sleep. Then Mario wakes up, looking sullen and crushed, the man of so many words suddenly unable to speak any at all.

  * * *

  The other men note that Carlos Mamani is especially quiet, having set himself apart in a corner of the Refuge. Days pass without him saying much. To the twenty or so men sleeping near him day after day, the long silences of this very young man with the indigenous face are disturbing and morbid. Carlos is simply afraid and confused. He got trapped on his first day working underground at this mine, and all these men seem to know one another, or be related to one another. They frighten him because they’re constantly arguing over whether they’re going to be saved and who’s to blame if they aren’t. “I didn’t know who I could trust.”

  Now Mario Sepúlveda, the same man who’s been wandering the mine in a funk, snaps to attention, and looks directly and very intently at Carlos Mamani. With all the others near the Refuge listening, he stands up and addresses the boliviano. “Down here with us, you’re as Chilean as the rest of us,” Mario says loudly. A lot of working men in Chile resent Bolivians in the same way working people in other countries resent outsiders, and everyone knows that being a Bolivian in Chile isn’t easy. “You’re friends and brothers with all of us,” Mario says. The speech ends with all the men around them breaking into applause, and some wiping away tears, because it’s true: They’re all dying together, and no human being, not even the Bolivian among them, deserves this fate. Carlos has been watching the men spend hours playing dominoes, and now they invite him to join in, and since he’s never played dominoes before, they teach him the rules. It’s a simple game—twenty-eight tiles, match number to number, etc., etc.—and Carlos learns quickly. He sees how these endless rounds of dominoes can make the nights shorter, the darkness less dark. After a few games, he wins one. And then another. Pretty soon, he’s beating everyone.

  “He won? Again? Who taught this Bolivian guy to play?”

  In Chile, among men, when you really are brothers with someone you mock them. This is called echándole la talla, which can be translated roughly as “taking his measure.” Being able to mock someone without causing a fight is a valued skill, and among the men Víctor Zamora is best at it: That’s one of the reasons hardly anyone is really all that angry at him anymore, even though he did lead the raid on the food supplies and thanks to him they’re hungrier than they need to be. At any given moment, Víctor has got half the men in and near the Refuge laughing at the other half. Look at that Mario Gómez, with his block of wood, listening to the walls, he might say. Is the drill nearby, Mario? Which way is it coming from? And then Víctor will stand up and point the way Mario Gómez does, like some Labrador retriever. Sometimes, if Gómez isn’t looking, Zamora will point with his hand showing just three fingers—the miners know it’s mean, of course, to mock a man with a maimed hand, but in the context of this cave it’s very funny. From over here! No, from over there! It’s close! Zamora’s jokes at the expense of Gómez are so funny they keep the men repeating them and laughing for days afterward.

  Eventually, to bring Carlos Mamani into the fold, Mario Sepúlveda directs a bit of ribbing at him, too. Like the jokes the men tell about the others, it draws on the quality that sets him apart.

  “Mamani, you better hope they come for us. Because if they don’t, since you’re Bolivian, you’ll be the first one we’re going to eat.”

  Mamani isn’t especially bothered by the joke—does anyone take any of these Chileans seriously? “I never thought they were going to eat me,” he later says. But when Raúl Bustos hears this joke he thinks: Now that crazy Mario has gone too far. So do a few other men. What kind of lunatic jokes about eating someone to men who haven’t eaten a real meal for ten days now? They really are starving to death, some of the men think, and it’s not outside the realm of possibility that they might have to eat the first guy that dies. “I know Mamani didn’t sleep well that night,” Florencio Avalos says. Raúl is also troubled by this macabre humor: He’s not entirely sure these men will all hold together if they truly begin to starve to death. After the tsunami in Talcahuano, people very quickly surrendered to their baser instincts. Mario Sepúlveda is a man of swinging moods, and Raúl senses now what Mario’s closest friends and family know about him: He’s a man who is not entirely in control of his emotions. He’ll say he loves you one moment, and threaten you the next, and it seems likely that he will do anything to survive.

  Even as they all grow weaker, Mario is picking fights with people. He argues with Omar Reygadas over the drilling and the drillers. The older Omar has worked with drill crews before, and each time the drilling stops, or when it seems to be going off course, he shares a bit of this experience. In the middle of one of those long silences when no drilling can be heard, Omar tells the men around him not to worry, reminding them, again, that he’s worked with drill crews and knows a bit about their routines. “They’re not giving up,” he says. “It’s just that they have to reinforce the bars…” By now the men are experiencing new, unmistakable symptoms of malnutrition and starvation. Walking to the spot where they go to the bathroom takes effort, and when they reach that spot, it’s often the site of a squatting torture. Their bodies want to push something out, but it takes too much agonizing effort, and what finally does drop to the ground is strange looking. Their feces are compact, oval-shaped pellets, as hard as stones, and to the men who’ve grown up on farms and lived in the country, they look like goat or llama droppings.

  Mario Sepúlveda is as constipated, exhausted, and freaked-out as the rest of them, and finally he decides he’s had enough of this white-haired bullshitter. “You’re always saying the same thing!” he barks at Omar. “You’re lying. You don’t know anything. You’re an idiot!”

  “You can’t talk to me that way.”

  “Shut up already!”

  Omar protests the attack on his honor by standing up and taking a few threatening steps toward Mario, unconcerned that the man with the heart of a dog is taller, stronger, and younger than he is. “Let’s go and settle this … down by the water.”

  As several men watch, the two men walk away from the sleeping area near the Refuge and begin to walk down the Ramp. They’re headed toward a side passage where there’s a pool of water, built up by the trickle flowing into the mine since the rescue drills began working. Mario walks and thinks of the violence he’ll inflict on this annoying man, how he’ll finally let loose this anger that’s been welling inside him. But the pool of water is more than a hundred meters away, and in the minute or two it takes to walk this distance, his anger lifts. The older man seems really determined to fight, he’s not going to back down, and looking at him, Mario realizes Omar is as desperate and hungry as Mario is, and how absurd it is to be fighting in this place when they’re so close to death already.
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  “I looked at this guy, who was older than me, and I thought: If I, the young ram, beat up this old goat, I’ll have a lot of explaining to do. And if this old goat beats up the young ram, then I’ll have even more explaining to do.” As they face each other by the pool of water, each man’s helmet illuminating the other man’s face with a beam of light, Mario breaks into a mad grin. He shares his observations about young rams and old goats, and apologizes to Omar and wraps the older man in a sweaty and heartfelt embrace. They’re starving and they’re going crazy, but they’re still brothers. “I’m sorry, viejo. Perdóname.” Forgive me. Omar looks relieved, exhausted. They walk back to the Refuge. As they approach, the other miners stand or sit up straight at attention, expecting to see two men who’ve pummeled each other. Instead they see two bare-chested, soot-covered, hungry miners laughing and joking like fast friends.

  * * *

  Juan Illanes has installed lights near Level 105 and Level 90, but the sense that the men are surrounded by forbidding darkness grows as the days pass and many of their lamps dim and go out altogether. The prospect of being surrounded by complete darkness causes Alex Vega to remember a miners’ legend: Men left in the dark for too long will eventually go blind. And Jorge Galleguillos remembers a few times in his mining career when his lamp stopped working and he found himself in total darkness: You can get disoriented quickly, and it can be frightening to be lost and helpless, reaching out with your hands to try to find the cavern wall you remember is nearby. Finally, Illanes discovers that he can charge some of the batteries of their lamps using the generators of the vehicles trapped below, and the dark isn’t quite as forbidding after he returns the light-giving devices to them.

  Eventually, the doers among the men decide they just can’t sit and wait for the drills to reach them. The rescuers will eventually give up without a sign of life from below. So the trapped men renew their efforts to send a message to the top. They have dynamite and fuses, but not blasting caps, since no blasting had been planned for the day they were trapped. But Yonni Barrios and Juan Illanes come up with a plan to make blasting caps by extracting the black powder from the fuses and using the foil inside the discarded milk cartons to collect and concentrate it so that it will ignite and set off the nitrate-based explosive they use for everyday mining work. They walk up as high as they can in the mine and set off Yonni’s homemade detonator, waiting for 8:00 a.m., when the drilling stops every day for what is clearly a change in shifts up there on the surface. When the silence comes, Yonni lights a fuse leading to his improvised blasting cap. It works, the dynamite explodes, and the explosion is a powerful one—but no one on the surface hears a thing.

  We’re seven hundred meters underground, Juan thinks. How could they hear anything?

  When the drilling starts again, the sounds get closer and closer, the vibrations and the pounding palpably close in the rock. The miners say things like “This one belongs to me” and “This is the one that’s going to burst through.” They go up and down the levels of the Ramp and the side passageways looking for where the drill might come out. Then the drilling gets farther away. It stops.

  On August 15, their eleventh day underground, Víctor Segovia notes in his diary the many signs that he and others are losing hope. “It’s 10:25 and the drilling has stopped once again. Again they sound really far. I really don’t know what’s going on up there. Why so many delays?… Alex Vega yelled at Claudio Yáñez, who sleeps all day and doesn’t cooperate with anything…” There’s still work to do: primarily, gathering water from the tanks at the upper levels. The next day Víctor writes: “Hardly anyone here talks anymore.” On August 17, he sees miners gathered in a small group, murmuring. “They are starting to give up,” he writes. “I don’t think God would have saved us from the collapse just to let us die of starvation … The skin now hugs the bones of our faces and our ribs all show and when we walk our legs tremble.”

  The drilling stops for several hours, and the men wander the mine searching for any sound, and then it starts again. The thing inside the rock pounds and grinds for a day, and suddenly it’s quite close, and the men start to talk about the preparations they’ve discussed before. They find a can of red spray paint, used in routine mine operations to paint a red square or circle on the mine wall indicating the path to the surface. If the drill bit breaks through, they’ll paint it, and when the drill bit operator pulls it up, he’ll find that unmistakable proof that there are living men down below. José Ojeda once worked at El Teniente mine, the largest underground copper mine in the world, and in the safety training he received there he was taught to include three pieces of basic information in any message left for potential rescuers: the number of trapped men, their location, and their condition. With a red marker and a piece of graph paper, he now prepares such a message, boiling it down to seven words. Richard Villarroel, the expectant father, hunts about his tools for the hardest piece of metal he can find, and comes up with a big wrench. If and when the drill bit breaks through, his job will be to pound on its steel casing with this tool, making a sound loud enough to travel up the two thousand feet or so of metal leading to the top, where some rescuer might have his ear to the pipe, listening for a sign of life from below.

  After a day it becomes clear the drill they’re hearing is actually beneath their feet, and they try to follow its sound, walking and driving deeper into the mine, listening in one of the twisting passageways farther down, going lower and lower until it fades away. On August 19 the diary keeper, Segovia, writes: “We are getting desperate. One of the drills just went by the walls of the Refuge but it didn’t break through.” The following day he notes, “Perri’s spirits are very low.” The only sustenance for the men that day is water, because the food is running out and there’s only enough now for a cookie every forty-eight hours. “The drill does NOT break through,” Segovia writes the next day. “I’m beginning to wonder if there’s a black hand up above that doesn’t want us to get out.”

  The trapped men have now heard at least eight different drills approach them, only to stop, or fade away in the distance. Several of the miners follow the last drill down several levels, and listen, disbelieving, as it passes below the lowest spot in the mine, Level 40. “That was horrible. That was like a second death,” one of the miners says. The idea that they’ve been doomed, again, by the mine’s owners becomes a real possibility: The San Esteban Mining Company’s blueprints are so unreliable that the driller-rescuers up on the surface will never find them. “The mine’s blueprints are shit,” they shout. La planificación de la mina es una hueva. The thirty-three men now sit in the dark, wondering if they’ll die suffering this final assault on their dignity: trapped here, starving, with other mining men working to reach them, their efforts betrayed by a company too cheap to even know, with certainty, where its own tunnels are.

  9

  CAVERN OF DREAMS

  Laurence Golborne, the minister of mining, is desperate, and he’s getting all sorts of crazy advice. His drills are missing their target, or the drill bits are breaking before they reach the level at which the miners are trapped. More than a dozen such holes have been drilled, each a failure. On August 19, with the men having been trapped for exactly two weeks, one of the drills passes 500 meters. It’s headed for one of two open galleries in its path, and Golborne and André Sougarret and the others are optimistic they will hit something. The families have been informed that the drill is close, and a series of hopeful all-night vigils begins at Camp Esperanza—but the drill just keeps on going, never finding an open passageway, and eventually it will reach 700 meters without striking anything. “The driller was so emotionally invested he couldn’t stop, even though we knew he’d gone too far already,” one official says.

  Golborne tells the press that he isn’t sure what’s gone wrong, though he suggests the mine owners’ diagrams could be inaccurate. Sougarret, the lead rescuer, says the same thing to the newspaper La Tercera: “With bad information, it’s hard to make deci
sions.” Another, unnamed government source tells La Tercera that it’s possible the entire mine has collapsed, one of many pessimistic statements that filter down to the families. “That night, there was a revolution among the families,” Golborne says. You don’t know what you’re doing, they say. Codelco has no idea what it’s doing. We know! Listen to us! A union of small miners, perquineros, announces that they will enter the mine, “on our bellies,” de guatitas, if only the government will open the sealed-off mine entrance.

  Finally, at the behest of some desperate relatives, the minister of mining agrees to talk to a few “wise” people who the relatives believe might be able to help. One is a psychic, and Golborne meets with her on a freezing cold night. “I see seventeen bodies,” she says. “I see one whose legs are smashed. He’s screaming.” Golborne decides it’s best not to pass on her “findings” to the families, who have also insisted he talk to a “treasure seeker,” a man who uses a kind of secret divining-rod “technology” to study the surface of the mountain where the men are buried.