by Héctor Tobar
“What kind of technology is this?” Golborne asks.
“Well, it’s very complicated,” the treasure seeker says.
“I’m an engineer. Explain it to me. Is it based on sound waves, heat, voltage differences?”
The treasure seeker says it really is too complicated and declines to explain further, but Golborne grants him access to the mountain anyway, to please the families more than anything. The treasure seeker spreads long rugs across the surface of the mountain, he takes some measurements with a device Golborne has never seen before. When he’s done, he announces to Golborne in a haughty tone that his drilling teams are looking for the miners in the wrong place. The treasure seeker says Golborne, Sougarret, and the rest of their team are a bunch of idiots who are going to let those thirty-three men die if they don’t listen to him and pay attention to what his instruments are saying: You won’t find them unless you drill in a totally different area.
Golborne ignores the treasure seeker’s advice and walks down the mountain to sit with a woman who earns a living selling pastries by the beach, a woman who has earned the trust of the families and whose trust he must earn, too. He has to make her believe that he’s trying everything that can be done, that he and the government are using every resource and all the knowledge at their disposal to find the trapped men. He speaks to María Segovia, the sister of Darío and the “mayor” of the family camp. María has heard the news of the drill passing 530, 550, 600 meters, each number another blow. “We’re running out of time,” she tells him. She repeats the phrase. Se nos está acabando el tiempo. There are more drills working, he tells her, though his face betrays both exhaustion and concern. We have not given up.
María Segovia will remember that moment with the minister as her lowest. “You have to fight and fight, but at the same time, you feel this sadness, this worry, this sense of powerlessness,” she later says. She’s bundled against the cold, listening to the minister in his official red jacket. GOBIERNO DE CHILE, it says in white letters. The minister often comes down to her camp, and sits with her and her family and drinks maté tea with her, and in this way he’s won more of her trust. The minister acts oddly humbled in her presence, and he says another drill is just two days or so away from its target. María is fighting her natural skepticism for the privileged and everything they say, and she’s trying to believe him.
* * *
The average human brain requires about 120 grams of glucose each day to survive. The thirty-three trapped men are ingesting, on average, less than one twentieth that amount. During a man’s first twenty-four hours without steady food, his body produces glucose from the glycogen stored in his liver. After two or three days the body begins to burn the fat stored in his chest and abdomen, and around his kidneys and many other places. His central nervous system cannot survive on such fats, however. Instead, his brain is fed the acids, or ketone bodies, produced by his liver as it processes his body fat. When his body’s fat reserves are exhausted, the protein in his body—muscle, primarily—becomes his brain’s chief source of energy. The body’s protein is gradually broken down into amino acids that the liver can convert to glucose. In effect, a man’s brain begins to eat his muscles to survive: This is the moment when starvation begins. After two weeks the smaller and thinner of the thirty-three men trapped in the San José have lost enough muscle mass that their colleagues begin to notice.
Alex Vega’s clavicle is starting to push out against his skin. “Hey, Bicycle Chassis, look at you!” Omar Reygadas says to Alex, the man who came to the mine so that he could add some rooms to his house. Then Omar thinks that, no, a bicycle chassis is too heavy and big a metaphor to describe the way the shirtless, thinning Alex looks. He looks like charqui, a Chilean idiom roughly equivalent to “jerky.” “Charqui is what animal meat looks like when you dry it up.” Charqui de mariposa, he calls Alex. Butterfly jerky. “You can imagine what butterfly charqui would be like. That’s basically just dust.”
Alex takes this with the humor and endearment with which it’s intended. Omar isn’t looking so great either, after all. None of them are. Their metabolisms are slowing down, even the most energetic among them are sleeping longer than normal, and there is a haze starting to drift over their thoughts. Several are beginning to experience one strange, unexpected side effect of prolonged hunger that’s been noted again and again by people who fast for a week or more: When they sleep, their dreams and nightmares are unusually long, vivid, and lucid. Their dreams seem more like real life, an effect many devoted fasters attribute to the purification of the body and brain during fasting. Deprived of sustenance, their brains take the men to places of memory and desire, mind dramas crafted from the material of their personal histories, with a cast drawn from their families and loved ones.
Carlos Mamani, newly crowned domino champion of the ongoing game in the Refuge, finds his subconscious setting out on a series of journeys. “I would sleep not to feel the hunger,” he says later. “Then I’d dream and in my dreams I’d go to see my siblings. I’d wake up a bit, fall asleep for a long time, and I’d see another of my brothers.” His ten brothers and sisters have been dispersed across Bolivia: from his home village of Chojlla in the province of Gualberto Villarroel, to the big cities of La Paz and Cochabamba. The Mamanis were all orphans, and raised one another. “The only one I didn’t see was my older sister, the one who made me study after my parents died. I went to their houses. One right after the other. I went to see my aunts and my cousins, too.” In his dreams he’s walking on the Altiplano, down those unpaved roads, past corrals for llamas and goats, and into small living rooms crowded with furniture in big cities, or back in his village, where the glacier-covered peak of Illimani, the “Golden Eagle,” is visible in the distance. He grew up on that plain, where the people grow potatoes, oats, and the seeds cañahua and quinoa. “I grew up in the campo, in the provinces,” he says. “In the countryside they say that when someone is about to die, they walk at night. In my dreams I was walking.” When he wakes up, the implications of the dreams sadden him: He isn’t prepared to die so young. He remembers his days as a schoolboy in Chojlla, an orphan going to school at the insistence of his oldest sister. It was a long walk across the Altiplano back home, and he might get home at 8:00 or 9:00 p.m. Some nights, on these boyhood walks, he’d see the silhouette of a person in the blink of an eye, and then it’d disappear. It was the spirits of those about to die, he thought, and now he’s one of those people, his spirit wandering when he dreams. He sees one sibling after another in a chain of dreams, but he never sees his older sister, the one who helped raise him when their mother died when Carlos was four. He remembers the day of his mother’s funeral, what seemed like a very long party with food and kids running around, but the memory of growing up with his older sister getting him ready to go to school is much stronger. He has not yet and will not dream of his sister. “I figured if I saw my sister in one of my dreams, that would mean I really was about to die.” Instead, Carlos has another, hopeful dream. He’s standing in a huge metal bucket—like the one in a mine he used to work in—being carried up to the surface, like a man riding an elevator to the top, to sunshine and safety.
* * *
Eduardo Hurtado and the Terraservice team, fresh off the failure of their previous hole, are now drilling hole number 10B. They had begun this, their third attempt to reach the men, on Tuesday, August 17, before dawn. Every hundred meters they stop drilling and the topographer, Sandra Jara, lowers a gyroscope into the shaft and measures their progress. Jara and Hurtado and the drill operators consult with one another, and as the shaft gets deeper they combine their collective knowledge of the science of topography and the craft of drilling to reach a critical decision: They will drill very slowly, sacrificing speed for accuracy, at just 6 rotations per minute, less than half the usual 12 or 15. Nelson Flores, one of two men operating the drill for twelve-hour shifts, understands the need to do this, though it goes against his instincts. “You get bored, you want to m
ake it go faster, to get the job done,” he says. When his twelve hours are done and he joins the other men passing through the gate, they get a round of applause from the families waiting there.
* * *
On one of those nights when the skipped meals and the distant drills eat away at his soul, Edison Peña moans for several minutes about his imminent death as he tries to sleep. “I’m dying, I’m dying,” Edison says. Mario Sepúlveda is trying to sleep next to him, and is at his wits’ end listening to this. Enough, Edison, he thinks. Finally, the trickster in Mario kicks in. He tosses his head back and forth in imitation of the dying Edison, mouth open to make a choking, gurgling sound, as if he were beginning to suffer a final, starvation-induced seizure. He launches into a movie-like death speech—Mario loves movies, especially anything with Mel Gibson in it. “This is the end, Edison,” he moans weakly. “I’m dying. I’m going. Tell … my … wife … that…”
When the actor Mario closes his eyes and goes silent, Edison sits up, leans over Mario’s chest, and starts to shake him desperately.
“No, Perri, no!” Edison cries out. “No! Don’t die!”
Mario opens his eyes and breaks into a wicked smile, a peal of laughter, and then a few choice vulgar Chilean idioms about foolish men. Mario thinks that his fake death scene is one of the funniest things he’s ever done. Edison starts to act as if he were in on the joke, and a bit later, in fact, he and Mario repeat their death sketch with Edison throwing in the line: “Perri, tell me where you hid the money! Where’s the money?” Another miner who witnesses these death scenes says: “At first it started out as a joke, but after a while it started to seem real.” You’d think that men who are as close to death as they’ve ever been wouldn’t be able to joke about it, but Mario and Edison are different. Edison explains it this way: “I think that sometimes the only thing that can make you laugh is accepting the idea that there’s no way out.” For a short while after their first, absurd little show, the suffocating veil of imminent death inside the Refuge is lifted by the memory of Mario’s laughing at Edison’s expense. Who else would do such a thing? Who would mock a man’s death lament? The same man who can call them all to prayer, or who can tell a group of starving men that he’s going to eat someone.
Up on Level 105, where the mechanics sleep, the level-headed, good-natured Juan Illanes, the man with the deep radio voice, is keeping up the spirits of the men around him with his steady storytelling and his expositions on a series of topics. On an ordinary day, he can be kind of a bore, but to the trapped men his endless talking is a welcome distraction. He knows a few men are worried about their loved ones and whether their wives and children will or won’t survive in the absence of their incomes, should it come to pass that no drill ever reaches them. Raúl Bustos, who has two young children, and Richard Villarroel, whose wife is expecting his first child, are especially distraught, so Illanes begins to expound on Chilean labor law.
“Let’s say we don’t get out—hypothetically speaking, of course,” Illanes says. “The labor laws with respect to social security and accidents are very specific. There’s an insurance plan. I’m not sure exactly how much it is. But it’s around two thousand UFs. Or maybe three thousand.”
“Really?”
“That much?”
The men forget, for a moment, about their difficulties and start doing the math in their heads. A UF is the “Unidad de Fomento,” an exchange rate adjusted to inflation that’s used by the Chilean government for certain financial transactions; at that moment, a UF is equivalent to a little more than 20,000 Chilean pesos, or about $40. So Illanes is telling the men their families will get anywhere from $80,000 to $120,000, or nearly a decade’s worth of wages for your average Chilean working stiff.
“But that’s not all,” Illanes continues. “Your widow, hypothetically speaking, of course, is entitled to receive your salary if you die in an accident. It’s law sixteen thousand, seven hundred, and forty-four.” Illanes claims to know the law’s exact number (the correct one, as it turns out). Dieciséis mil setecientos cuarenta y cuatro. The sound of that number, like the details in his stories about barbecues and exotic South American fungi, makes what he’s saying sound all the more real. “According to this law, what you get is calculated based on the average of your pay the last three months. Your wife gets this until she’s thirty-five years old. But if your kids stay in school, if they go to college, she’ll get it until she’s forty-five. And by then, let’s face it,” he says with a wicked smile, “she’ll probably have found some other viejo to take of her.” How does Illanes know these things? “If you read the law, it says the company has to inform you of all this,” he tells the men. “And I’ve worked so many different mines, I’ve heard it over and over again so many times I finally memorized it.”
He sounds like a lawyer, this Illanes, and not like the mechanic he is, and for a while his confident summary of Chilean labor law leaves the men around him a bit calmer in the knowledge that they really will be able to provide for their families even if they never leave the mine.
When Illanes finally stops talking and is left with his own thoughts, he occupies his mind with small tasks. He imagines he is aboveground, about to resume his normal life, with mundane household chores awaiting him. In the sort of mind game that kept the French prisoner Papillon sane while in solitary confinement on Devil’s Island, Illanes transports himself away from the prison of the mine, to his own home, where he left the materials for a table he was building. Now he assembles that table and does other things. “I need to fix that leak in the ceiling. So I’m going to have to fix that gutter. I’m going to have to buy three gutter channels, and two meters of downspouts. How much will that cost me?” He performs the calculations in his mind again and again, imagines each wood screw and fastener and the tools he needs. He climbs up the ladder outside his home with a drill, and then he climbs down again, and when he’s finished he does it again. When this is no longer satisfying he tells himself he needs to remember those church hymns from when he was in the choir at fourteen. Illanes sings at his church in Chillán, but he wants to sing an old hymn he hasn’t sung in years. He can remember only a few words from the beginning. “Quiero cantarle una linda canción…” How did the rest go? For three nights, Illanes strains his memory in search of the rest of the lyrics. Slowly, bits and pieces come to him, and this, too, is like building something. By the fourth night he’s remembered the whole thing, all four stanzas, all sixteen lines, including the last one, “Only in him did I find happiness,” Sólo en él encontré la felicidad. With the completed song in his head, Illanes goes off to one of the many passageways in the mine, alone, to a spot where no one will hear him. He sings the hymn out loud, like the teenager he once was, and weeps as he does so, because he realizes now how beautiful it was to be young and to be asked to sing.
* * *
On the fourteenth and fifteenth days underground, even the men who’ve kept the busiest and worked the hardest begin to surrender to exhaustion and hopelessness. For two weeks Florencio Avalos, the second-in-command to Luis Urzúa, has driven up and down the mine, gathering water, looking for passageways out, trying to send messages to the top. He’s been going to the Refuge, too, to try to keep up the spirits of his younger brother, Renán, who has spent nearly all his time lying on his makeshift bed there. Get up, Renán, he says, cooperate with something, get out of here, it smells horrible, he says, and sometimes Florencio succeeds in getting his brother on his feet and working for a while. The unspoken truth is that Florencio has been worried that his younger brother might take the miner’s traditional way out of a desperate situation: leaping to his death in El Rajo. When a man stands over this abyss and shines a common miner’s headlamp into it, he sees nothing but blackness. Killing yourself in the Pit is like jumping into a black hole. A fall of just ten feet or so can kill you in a mine, but in the Pit you can fall one hundred feet. A few of the men will confess to thinking about this kind of death as an escape from the unre
lenting aural torture of the mountain, its constant thunderclaps of falling rock.
Finally, it’s not Florencio’s brother Renán, but Florencio himself who feels utterly defeated. Florencio, the shift’s foreman, or capataz, is one of the few miners universally admired by his peers—“our capataz is young but an extraordinary person,” Mario Sepúlveda will say while the men are still trapped underground, “a man who is always overcoming obstacles [tirando para arriba] and who has beautiful qualities.” But Florencio begins to lose his fight with despair on the night he falls asleep on a bed of big rubber tubes and wakes up to find water rushing over his legs. He rises to his feet and finds himself flailing in mud that moves over his boots in sticky waves. Walking is literally a slog, and even when he tries to drive over the mud the wheels of his pickup truck spin and slide and refuse to climb, adding to the sense that it’s useless to try to do anything to rescue himself and the others.
Florencio is walking up with a team that’s driving uphill with the bucket truck the miners use to transport water when the futility of his situation finally becomes too much to bear. He decides he cannot and will not take one more step, and he drifts off toward a parked truck without the men ahead of him noticing. He enters the cab, and as the members of the water crew walk away and their lights dim, he’s left in the dark because the battery to his own headlamp is dead. Hasta aquí llego, he thinks. He’s reached the end of his journey. Florencio leans back in the truck’s seat, exhausted. The truck’s battery was removed to bring light to the Refuge, and Florencio has deliberately placed himself in a state of blindness and helplessness. He feels weaker than he’s ever felt before. Let starvation take me away here, he thinks, on this cushioned seat with the windows closed, away from the mud and thunder. Alone in absolute darkness, he surrenders to the idea that he’ll fall asleep and never wake up again. He begins to think about his children and imagines them growing up in his absence: César Alexis, “Ale,” who is sixteen, the boy he and Mónica had when they were teenagers; and Bayron, who is seven. What will they look like as men, his two sons? How will the passage of time unfold in his absence, how tall will they grow, what will they achieve? Will they start families and homes of their own? It’s easier to imagine Ale as a man because he already is one, almost, responsible and studious. Florencio’s death in this mountain will help make one thing about his sons’ future certain: Neither of them will ever work in a mine.