Deep Down Dark

by Héctor Tobar

  La chimenea está colapsada

  Pero tu padre pronto te sacará.

  The rocks of the mountain fall apart

  The miners will soon come out

  The chimney has collapsed

  But your father will soon bring you out.

  The chorus introduces Alex’s family nickname—“El Pato,” the Duck, a name given to him when he was a boy—and speeds up to the livelier tempo of a protest song. It’s the kind of chanted tune you might hear a thousand people sing as they march through the streets of a Chilean city.

  Y El Pato volverá!

  Y va volver!

  Los mineros libertad

  Y va volver!

  En el campo o en el mar

  Y va volver!

  Y también en la ciudad

  Y va volver!

  And El Pato will return

  And he will return!

  Liberty for the miners

  And he will return!

  In the countryside or in the sea

  And he will return!

  And also in the city

  And he will return!

  The singers ask Alex to come back to the home he was building with his wife, to that little property on the sloping street where husband and wife spent the weekends building a concrete wall together.

  Pato vuelve a casa,

  Tu esposa y tu familia te esperan

  vuelve ya.

  Y El Pato volverá,

  Y va volver!

  Pato come back home

  Your wife and your family are waiting for you

  Come back now.

  And El Pato will return,

  And he will return!

  The Vegas and Roberto Ramirez sing the song several times, late into the night. Finally, they go to sleep, because the word from the government is that the drillers won’t reach the level where the miners are until much later in the morning.

  * * *

  As the Vega family sings during the early morning hours of August 22, Mario Sepúlveda, overcome from several days of insomnia and agitation, slips into the deepest sleep he can remember. All the tension lifts from his mind and body. In the surreal vividness of a hunger-induced dream, he finds himself transported to that place where all of his longing, his hurt, and his love of life were born. He’s in Parral, sleeping on the floor, and when he lifts his head he sees his grandmother Bristela and his grandfather Domingo, “all dressed up and beautiful.” They’ve been dead for many years, and in his sleep Mario feels the joy of a man witnessing a resurrection. They were his viejos, the people who cared for him most as a small, motherless boy. His grandmother has brought a basket filled with food. Porotitos con locro: beans in a winter stew with corn and meat still on the bone. “Get up from there, hombre,” his grandfather tells him, in the strong, country voice of an old man. “You are not going to die here.” Vos no vas a morir aquí.

  * * *

  Nelson Flores, the drill operator, is home for just two hours or so before the call comes in ordering him back to work. The driller from the night shift has had a family tragedy—his grandmother died. So Nelson returns to the San José Mine and borehole number 10B. He works through the night, the sound of the drill drowning out the singing from the Vegas farther down the mountain. Just after 5:00 a.m., with the winter sun beginning to turn the horizon indigo, he has the drill bit advancing at just 6 to 8 meters per hour. He stops to allow the crews to add another 6-meter-long tube to the shaft. It’s linked to 113 other tubes below it, the borehole 10B having now reached 684 meters, about 10 meters from the spot where they hope to break though. When the men are done, Flores closes his eyes as he raises the lever that adds air pressure to the hammering drill bit. The 114 interlinked tubes begin to turn, moving the drill bit at the bottom of the shaft and its tungsten carbide beads. Tungsten carbide is harder than the granitelike diorite, and in the friction battle between the two, tungsten carbide wins, grinding the diorite into dust that is shot by air pressure more than 2,200 feet to the surface, producing a cloud of lead-colored dust the drillers call a “cyclone.” With that pillar of dust shooting from its chimney, the Schramm T685 resembles some kind of stone-powered train, and Flores’s boss, the drill supervisor Eduardo Hurtado, sits nearby in a pickup truck and watches as the silhouette of the cyclone rises steadily against the sky, a sign that the drill under their feet is advancing as it should.

  * * *

  Sometime after 5:00 a.m., Mario Sepúlveda wakes up at the command of his dead grandfather, and the good, almost euphoric feeling of a dream come to life stays with him in the minutes that follow, as he takes in the grinding and pounding sound of a drill that’s become impossibly loud.

  Richard Villarroel, the expectant father, has been trying to sleep. He’s about forty-five vertical feet above Mario, in the passenger seat of a pickup truck, at Level 105. The sound of the drill approaching is very loud, yes, but there’s no real way to tell if it’s actually as close to breaking through as Richard hopes it is. He’s been reciting the Our Father and Hail Mary over and over again, about one hundred times in all, with assorted pleas to Jesus. When the pounding stops, briefly, at 5:00 a.m. he says, “Papito [little father], help that operator change the bars [that house the drill], and guide him to us, please…” He still can’t sleep, so he goes down to the Refuge, where there’s an insomniacs’ game of dominoes in progress, with the set Luis Urzúa made. Richard joins a match with José Ojeda, a bald, short man and mine veteran. After a while, the drilling starts to get even louder.

  “It’s going to burst through,” José says in a matter-of-fact voice.

  * * *

  At about 6:00 a.m., several of the men around the drill operator, Nelson Flores, have fallen asleep. No one expects a breakthrough for several hours. Flores notices something odd: The last steel tube turning the 114 tubes below is starting to stutter in its rotation. The drill bit is grinding away at something with a different texture. Suddenly the cloud of dust coming from the Schramm’s chimney stops, and the pressure gauge drops to zero. Instinctively and immediately, Flores lowers a lever that shifts the drill engine into neutral and stops the air pressure being forced down into the shaft. As he does, the rig turns quiet, and the sudden silence is filled, almost immediately, by the sound of his boss and coworkers yelling and running toward him.

  * * *

  Far below, 688 meters under Flores’s feet, there’s a small explosion just up the tunnel from the men in the Refuge—poom!—followed by the sound of rocks tumbling to the ground. The grinding of metal against rock that has filled the ears of the men stops, and in its place there is a whistle of escaping air. Richard Villarroel and José Ojeda jump up and run toward the noise, Richard grabbing his 48-millimeter wrench as he goes. They are the first to reach the spot. A length of pipe is protruding from the rock, at the spot where the wall and ceiling meet, and Richard watches as a drill bit inside the pipe lowers and rises, and lowers again: Up on the surface Nelson Flores realizes he’s entered an empty space, and is “cleaning” the shaft. Then the drill bit falls to the mine floor and stays there, and Richard takes his wrench and begins pounding on the exposed pipe protruding from the tunnel ceiling.

  Richard has been waiting for days to put this wrench to use. It’s two feet long, the biggest chrome-vanadium tool in his possession, and now he strikes it against the exposed pipe with joy and desperation, a repetitive clank that’s meant to announce a human presence to the drill operator above: We’re here! We’re here! He strikes the pipe, and the idea that he will see his first son born takes hold of him, that his prayers have been answered by this drill bit and the men who sent it here. Richard pounds away until his boss, Juan Carlos Aguilar, steps in behind him and tells him to stop, because they have to think like miners, and reinforce the roof of the tunnel where the drill has broken through, to keep from being crushed by a loosened slab of rock.

  Soon all thirty-three men have gathered around the pipe and the drill bit, objects that have intruded into their dark world w
ith the promise of raising them up to the world of light again. With its parallel circles of pearl-size tungsten carbide teeth, the drill bit resembles some Assyrian sculpture, a kind of alien apparition, and the men stare at it in awe and joy, embracing and weeping. To Carlos Mamani, who falls to his knees before the drill bit, “it felt like a hand had punched through the rock and reached out to us.”

  José Henríquez, the jumbo operator who’s been transformed underground into a shirtless and starving prophet, looks at the drill bit and pronounces the obvious to anyone who will listen:

  “Dios existe,” he says. God exists.

  PART II

  SEEING THE DEVIL

  10

  THE SPEED OF SOUND

  For the first few minutes after the breakthrough of drill 10B, the men keep pounding at its shaft. They take turns, hitting it not just with Richard Villarroel’s chrome wrench, but also with loose stones and a hammer, not paying much heed to those warning that the rock loosened by the drill could fall on their heads. “We were like little kids hitting a piñata,” Omar Reygadas remembers. Como cabros chicos pegándole a una piñata. The shirtless boys in the yellow, blue, and red helmets keep hitting, until one of the miners drives up with a forklift, which lifts up Yonni Barrios and Carlos Barrios in a basket to perform the critical task of reinforcing the spot with steel bars. They’re frantic, yelling instructions back and forth: Above all, they have to erase any doubt the people on the surface might have about men being alive down here. Make a sound, leave a mark, attach a note. Someone says to stop hitting the bar, to see if the people who are at the top are answering, and Yonni puts his ear to the bar and says, yes, he hears them tapping back. A miner tosses Yonni a can of red spray paint, and he tries to leave a mark on the shaft, but the steel is covered in a stream of muddy water flowing from up above that erases the paint again and again. “We needed to dry the bar, but we didn’t have anything dry to clean it with.” Eventually some of the paint seems to stick. The men tie the notes and letters they’ve prepared, more than a dozen in all, wrapping them in pieces of plastic and strips of electrical tape and rubber tubing against the moisture that’s pouring down through that hole, worrying that a piece of paper might not survive the long journey back up through the slosh. They keep pounding on the bar.

  * * *

  Nelson Flores, the drill operator, feels the pulse in the steel from down below before he hears it. At first he wonders if it’s just the weight of the 115 steel bars, 22 tons’ worth, striking and settling against one another in the shaft. Putting his ear to the uppermost bar in the shaft, he hears a tapping that’s fast and frantic, but which then slows, “as if the viejos down there were getting tired.” As word goes out for all the other drills on the mountain to stop, several other men listen to the sounds coming from the steel tube. “It’s them!” The drill team moves quickly and carefully to add one more steel bar to the shaft, so they can measure how deep the cavity is by lowering the bit until it strikes something and stops. When they’re done, Flores watches as the shaft moves four meters before it stops, which is exactly the height of the passageway they were aiming for. Listening to the shaft again, they hear that the sound from below is shifting in rhythm: It begins tapping out as if sending a Morse code signal, or making music, mixing short and long pauses. “At that point, we had no doubt,” says Eduardo Hurtado, the drill supervisor. “There was someone alive down there.”

  Calls go out to various Chilean officials. Sougarret, the engineer in charge of the rescue, is skeptical. He issues an order to the drill team that will be immediately disobeyed: “I told them not to tell anyone, because I remembered what happened the last time we broke through. I didn’t want to cause another crisis with the families.” Minister Golborne is cautious, too, and since it’s still before 6:00 a.m. and President Piñera in Santiago is likely asleep, Golborne sends his commander in chief a text message: “Rompimos.” We broke through. There is to be no news, officially, to the families or anyone else, but after so many days of frustration the drillers can’t contain themselves, and word starts to spread among the dozens of rescuers and support staff gathered inside the mine property. Pablo Ramirez, the friend of Florencio Avalos and the man who first entered the mine in search of the trapped men with Carlos Pinilla, hears the news and rushes to the site of drill 10B. Many of the rescuers know Ramirez by now, because he’s been consulted time and again for his knowledge of the mine, and they know he has many friends buried down there, and when he arrives at the drill they allow him to listen. The sound coming from below is louder: It’s clearly and undeniably human, even after traveling 2,200 feet through steel. The trapped miners are so far away that if they were simply yelling into that shaft it would take more than two seconds for the sound of their voices to travel through the air to reach the top. But sound moves through metal twenty times faster, so Ramirez can hear within a fraction of a second each time his friends below strike the drill bit.

  There is now cell phone service at the mine site, thanks to the efforts of the Chilean government, and Ramirez calls the first person he wants to know, Florencio Avalos’s teenage son, Ale. It’s Sunday morning, and for once Ale isn’t rushing back and forth from the mine to the school.

  “Ale, your father is safe,” Ramirez says. “Don’t worry. They’re all alive. Listen.” Ramirez places the phone against the steel shaft.

  At home in Copiapó, Ale hears the sound coming from the place where his father is buried alive.

  “It was like a bell,” Ale remembers. “Like a bell you hear at school.”

  Ale calls Camp Esperanza, where his mother is inside her tent, having drifted off to sleep an hour or so earlier.

  “Mamá, Uncle Pablo says they’re all alive.”

  Mónica gives thanks to God, and “only to God,” and there is something defiant in the way she says this, because she realizes at that moment how alone she’s been since the night of August 5. “It felt like my heart had opened up again.” Florencio is alive and her life is going to start over. After seventeen days of eating only sparingly, of briefly forgetting her own children, of sleeplessness, hunger, and sleepwalking, Mónica will once again start to cook and eat on a regular schedule. When she steps out of her tent and into Camp Esperanza, she sees her in-laws at their own tent nearby. She wants to tell them the good news, but before she can open her mouth it’s clear they already know. While she was sleeping, a few rescuers have come running down from the drill site yelling: “We found them!” Those words have reached the ears of her in-laws, who haven’t thought to wake her up and tell her. Since their son Florencio was trapped they’ve kept their distance from their daughter-in-law, they’ve watched as Mónica fell apart, and did not, or could not, help her. They’ve seemed angry with her, and perhaps it has something to do with the fear that their undeniably bright son has been killed working in a mine to support the family that he and his pregnant girlfriend started when they were only fifteen. Mónica is confused and hurt. Her moment of joy is mixed up with this new family wound she never expected.

  Mónica and her in-laws look at each other for an awkward moment.

  “No importa,” she says. It doesn’t matter.

  In Copiapó and across Camp Esperanza and the ground underneath, the drama and the longing surrounding the fate of the thirty-three men has been entangled with the messy complications of everyday family life since August 5. This hopeful morning of August 22 is no different. Susana Valenzuela shares the news with Marta, her boyfriend Yonni’s wife, and in other families siblings and cousins who spent years avoiding each other are joined together, again, by the sudden wonderful possibility that the man whose love they all seek, whose life they’ve prayed for, might be alive after all. It isn’t easy being a miner’s wife, or his girlfriend, or his son, or his daughter, or his ex-wife. Before the accident Darío Segovia’s adult children from his previous marriage had never talked to Jessica, his current love and the mother of his baby girl. With Darío buried underground, Jessica has met two of thes
e adult children for the first time, and for seventeen days the two hitherto separated halves of Darío’s family have been thrown together by worry and the possibility of imminent, permanent loss. But the old resentments haven’t disappeared. “I was never married to their father,” Jessica says of Darío’s adult children. “And sometimes I think they didn’t want me at the camp.” Her love with Darío was as real as the home they shared, as real as that last, long embrace he gave her before going to work, and perhaps Darío’s older children have seen this love in the way Jessica waits with their half sister at the camp. Or perhaps they think she’s “just one more woman” on Darío’s “list” of conquests, as Jessica puts it. For one moment of happiness, none of that will matter—and then it will matter again. The thirty-three men are alive—it has not yet been confirmed, but that’s what many at Camp Esperanza believe already—and they will return from the shift they started seventeen days ago. And everything in their aboveground lives is going to remain as complicated as it was before.

  Mónica Avalos begins walking around the camp amid the embracing siblings, spouses, cousins, and children of miners. Many a prayer is heard, and it will be a day of piety and thanks in the camp some have called a “Jerusalem.” Once, Mónica strode across the dry, dusty surface of the mountain in her sleep. Though they are filled with tears, her eyes are open this morning and she is fully awake and alert and present for the first time in seventeen days, watching the camp and its wives and girlfriends and brothers and sons speak, their breath visible in the air of a morning just turning to light.

  * * *

  The drill bit with its tungsten carbide beads spends four hours on the floor of the passageway above the Refuge before it begins to rise up into the 4.5-inch shaft through which it came. The thirty-three men watch from a safe distance as it disappears into the hole, carrying their messages: a few personal letters, details about where, precisely, the drill has broken through, and one very pithy note written by José Ojeda, who’s condensed the most critical information (how many of them are alive, their physical condition, and their location) into just seven words written in big red letters. He’s wrapped his note behind the hammer, because one of the miners said that would be the safest place. The thirty-three men gather around to celebrate, Mario Sepúlveda calling the last stragglers to a gathering by the Refuge, “Florencio, Illanes, get over here!” They start to chant “¡Chi-chi-chi, le-le-le, mineros de Chile!” José “the Pastor” Henríquez has turned on his cell phone camera to record the moment. More than half of them are stripped down to their underwear against the heat, and they look like a group of homeless men who’ve decided to stage a scene from that novel and film about castaway boys, Lord of the Flies. They are laughing and cheering, and passing around a plastic bottle filled with dirty water as if it were champagne. The haunted, concentration-camp look that covered their faces just a few hours earlier is gone. Mario Sepúlveda throws up his hands and makes the aggressive, pleading gesture Chilean men make at soccer matches. Alex Vega wraps his arm around him and soon the entire group launches into a rendition of the national anthem. As they begin to sing they are shouting the lyrics, especially the first lines about Chile being a “happy copy of Eden,” though by the time they get to the third repetition of the final line about “the refuge against oppression,” their unfed voices have started to sound meek, and the song peters out.