by Héctor Tobar
* * *
When Minister Golborne arrives at the mine, he heads for Camp Esperanza first, before going to the drill site. He officially informs the families of the news they already know: that they’ve broken through and are hearing sounds from below. He finds María Segovia and the others and promises that as soon as the rescuers confirm that the miners are indeed alive they will be the first to know. By all accounts, Golborne has worked hard in the previous days to win over the trust of the family members; a few days before, they’d given him a miner’s helmet signed by the families, and it will soon become the most precious memento of his eventful days there. Vamos, Ministro, déle con fuerza. Confiamos en Usted, the helmet says. Go, Minister, give it all you’ve got. We trust you. The minister then heads up to drill 10B, where Hurtado and his team have a stethoscope for him to listen to. What the minister hears certainly sounds like men tapping at the shaft, but when he calls the president he is cautious. “I can’t be completely certain. It could be the power of suggestion.”
The president is in Santiago, and he also talks via phone to Cristián Barra, his fixer at the Ministry of the Interior. “Should I come?” the head of state asks. Barra tells the president to stay in Santiago, because it’s possible only some of the men are alive, and that the government will have to make a grim announcement about how many are dead. But it was only a rhetorical question, because the president is already in his car, on the way to the airport for the hour-long flight to Copiapó.
As the president heads north, the drill team is slowly raising up the bit and removing the 115 four-hundred-pound steel tubes from the shaft, one at a time, a process that will take up the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon. President Piñera is still en route as the Terraservice team prepares to remove the last of the steel tubes inside the shaft and the hammer and drill bit attached to it. Only a few workers and officials are allowed at the site, though dozens more are hovering nearby, outside the security cordon Barra has placed around the shaft. Barra has ordered that no one is to leave the area, lest some bad news filter out before the government can make an official announcement to the hundreds of people gathered in the camp below. By now it’s a bright, sunny, chilly afternoon of South American winter, and Golborne and the other Chilean officials are wearing both sunglasses and red government jackets. Finally, the last tube emerges from the shaft, covered in mud. The drillers pour water and wash away the muck, revealing a clear red mark on the metal: The miners painted several feet of the steel tubing, but only a single, palm-size smudge has survived the journey through stone and mud to the top. “Was that there before?” the minister asks. “No!” comes the excited reply from the drillers. They’ve found confirmation that at least one man is alive down below, and many of the men gathered around drill 10B exchange quiet embraces. Golborne can see there’s something wrapped around the bit, and he begins to remove it. It’s some sort of rubber tubing, and he lets it fall to the ground, because underneath the tubing a piece of paper is visible. Of the dozen or more notes the men attached to the drill assembly, three have survived, and Golborne has just found the first, removing the paper carefully, because it’s wet and it immediately starts falling apart in his hands. “No, don’t unfold it, Señor Ministro,” someone says. “Wait until it dries.” “If we don’t read it now, we’ll never be able to read it,” someone else says. Finally, Golborne gets the first note open.
“What does it say?”
The minister of mining begins to read out loud: “The drill broke through at Level 94, at three meters from the front. On one side of the roof, close to the right wall. Some water is falling. We are in the Refuge. Drills have passed behind us…” Part of the note is cut off. It ends with: “May God illuminate you. A saludo to Clara and my family. Mario Gómez.”
Barra begins to read a second note: “Dear Lilia. I am well. I hope to see you soon…”
“It’s a personal letter,” someone says. “We should save it.”
As two of the more powerful men in Chile are trying to decipher these messages, one of the sunburned roustabout members of the mining crew has quietly used his feet to move the piece of rubber tubing Golborne first tossed on the ground. The driller figures he’ll hold on to it as a souvenir, but when he begins to take a closer look at what he’s going to take home, he notices there’s something hidden inside. “It’s another note,” someone next to him yells, and soon the minister himself is opening this third message, written on a folded piece of graph paper.
ESTAMOS BIEN EN EL REFUGIO. LOS 33.
WE ARE WELL IN THE REFUGE. THE 33.
Even before Golborne can announce to the men what it says, those looking over his shoulder scream out in joy. ¡Vivos! Each and every one of those knuckleheads down there is alive. ¡Todos los huevones! Suddenly all the workers are cheering and embracing, and one of the drillers falls to his knees. Some of the men embrace again, but a few begin sobbing as they do so, bawling the way men do when their mothers die, or when their sons are born. These rugged men have been sending steel bits into the gray rock beneath their feet, and they are at this moment surrounded by piles of that rock, and the dust made from boring down into it. They’re men who drill holes looking for gold and copper and other metal, and they’ve drilled the greatest hole in their lives to reach thirty-three knuckleheads and find them, under this seemingly immovable, unconquerable mountain.
“Gracias, huevón, gracias.”
¡Lo logramos! “We did it!”
The burst of triumphant emotion makes everyone forget the Ministry of the Interior’s security “protocols,” and no one moves to stop several drillers as they run downhill, away from the Schramm T685, toward the fence that separates the mine proper from Camp Esperanza, toward the tents and the shrine and the kitchen there, and the television satellite dishes, and the cords of firewood, and the lines of smoke climbing up from the recently extinguished campfires, including the one where Alex Vega’s family and friends stayed up late into the night singing a ballad to him. The rule-breaking drillers shout, loud enough to be heard back up at drill site 10B, because now all the drills have stopped and all the machines that have filled the mountain with machine noises are silent, and the mountain is covered instead by human sounds, a cheering that’s spreading, with the cries of the drillers loudest.
“All those bastards are alive! Alive! All of them!” ¡Están todos los huevones vivos!
A short while later the helicopter that is transporting the president from the Copiapó airport to the mine lands nearby. The families and the media gather before him, to once again hear officially what everyone on the mountain already knows. The president has the honor of showing José Ojeda’s note publicly for the first time, with its bold red letters as proof to any skeptics that the improbable is true, an image that when broadcast sets off celebrations across Chile. From the northern border town of Arica, where Víctor Zamora, the miner who is always hungry, lived in a children’s shelter, to the Patagonian towns halfway to Antarctica, where the soldier Juan Illanes passed through one Christmas, there are cheers and shouts as people run from their televisions to the streets and plazas. In Copiapó the discovery of the thirty-three men is celebrated with peals of church bells, each percussive collision of metal against metal sending sound waves racing through the Sunday winter air.
11
CHRISTMAS
A camera, speaker, and microphone are lowered into borehole 10B, as the president of Chile, Minister Golborne, and assorted officials watch. A psychologist, Alberto Iturra, is also present, and he’s deeply concerned about what condition the men will be in after seventeen days buried alive, since according to the government’s best (and private) statistical calculations, they should be dead. They are almost certainly suffering from some sort of state of altered consciousness, and Iturra is irritated because his advice to the leaders of the rescue team has been ignored. The psychologist thinks that the first voice the miners hear from the surface should be a familiar one, and he’s suggested that it be
Pablo Ramirez, Florencio Avalos’s compadre and a friend to many of the thirty-three trapped men below. But the officials present have overruled the psychologist, because the president is there and wants to speak to the miners in the name of the Chilean people and who can say no to a president? The miners are safe and the whole world is tuning in to the great miracle of the San José Mine, and a few rays of the miracle’s holy glow are going to shine on the recently elected Piñera. Now that the story is a happy one, and not a tragedy, a bit more politics and vanity will mix with the undeniably abundant altruism and selflessness so far displayed by the rescuers and officials at the San José. “We started to have a lot of issues with egos and flags,” the psychologist Iturra says. Take, for example, the very camera, speaker, and microphone now descending toward the trapped men below. The Chilean navy and Codelco have just had a small bureaucratic kerfuffle over which arm of the government would send down that equipment and provide the operators to control it. The navy has some excellent cameras it uses for submarine rescues, but Codelco has its own technology, and in the end it’s clear that Codelco “owns” the hole, says Iturra, who adds wryly: “But Codelco didn’t own the miners: The miners belonged to the Chilean [social] security administration.” The middle-aged psychologist, who is a bit vain himself (he volunteers the fact that he was a math prodigy as a young man, and also an engineer), thinks that he should be there at the microphone, too, or nearby at least. But he’s in the background as the Codelco camera descends into the shaft, transmitting to a screen on the surface the image of an endless tube carved into the gray diorite, its edges looking moist and fleshy, as if the camera were probing the entrails of some great stone beast. The camera reaches the bottom and the image shifts out of focus and into darkness.
* * *
Darío Segovia, Pablo Rojas, and Ariel Ticona are keeping watch at the hole, babysitting the steady stream of water passing through the opening that leads to the surface. They are waiting to see what comes down next, and after a long time they finally see a gray electric light falling toward them, growing in intensity, and they begin to shout.
“Something’s coming! Hurry!”
All thirty-three men gather around the hole. They see a glass eye, on a kind of swivel. Luis Urzúa thinks it’s a mining scanner of the kind he’s seen used in exploration before, but then another miner says the obvious: “It’s a camera.”
“Lucho, you’re the boss, speak to it! Show yourself!”
Urzúa walks up close to the camera. He wonders if it has audio attached to it. (It does, but it isn’t working: Unbeknownst to Urzúa, the president of Chile is on the surface, speaking into a microphone.) “If you can hear me, move the camera up and down,” Urzúa says. The camera begins to move—in a circle. Urzúa follows it, doing a funny circle dance, until it catches his eyes and stops.
Up on the surface, the president, André Sougarret, and a team of officials and technicians look as two eyes stare back at them on a black-and-white screen, looking eerily neutral, dreamlike. The psychologist, Iturra, sees those eyes and a light above it, and then more lights attached to the helmets of men moving in the background. Seven lights in all. And he thinks: Well, there are at least seven men down there who can help us take care of the other twenty-six if it comes to that.
* * *
Down below, the joy of being found alive is starting to wear off quickly. “We are very hungry,” Víctor Segovia writes in his diary. “The mountain cracks and rumbles a lot.” Several hours pass as the rescuers above work on the shaft. “There are a lot of arguments. The mood is very bad.” Mario Sepúlveda gets in an argument with Juan Carlos Aguilar’s contract mechanics: A “misunderstanding,” Segovia writes. All the miners start talking about what kind of food they’ll get first. A Coca-Cola, a chocolate bar, perhaps. What can fit in that tube? A beer! Many delicious and filling foods and beverages can fit in a tube 4.5 inches wide, but for the moment the orifice exudes nothing more than dripping, dirty water—there’s so much water, they’re going to have to fashion a gutter to drain it off. “What’s going on up there? Why are they taking so long to give us food?” Finally, at 2:30 p.m., more than thirty-two hours after the drill first broke through, and more than eighteen days since most of them have eaten a meal worthy of the name, another object comes down the hole. It’s an orange-colored PVC tube, sealed off with something inside, like some oversize and stretched-out plastic Easter egg. The tube has a wire dangling from it. “There’s a wire attached to this, get Edison,” someone yells, because Edison Peña is an electrician. Edison opens the tube, and he sees there’s a telephone wire inside, and a handset receiver.
* * *
There are all sorts of experts and technicians in the army of rescuers, and the Chilean government at this point is getting advice from around the world, including from NASA. But the phone that’s been lowered down into the tube is a secondhand instrument, fashioned from recycled phone parts by a thirty-eight-year-old Copiapó businessman. Pedro Gallo runs a communications company that serves the local mining industry, and he’s been hanging around the mining site since August 6. He’s been trying to volunteer his know-how, but to some he’s become a bit of a pest, and certain rescue officials with Codelco have told him he’s not allowed on the site. Gallo has no relatives inside the mine: He’s there, like dozens of others, because he senses that an epic story is unfolding on the windswept mountain. Gallo has stayed at the mine, hoping to play a role in the drama, even though his wife has been calling him to come home—she’s seven months pregnant. Finally, on the morning of August 23, he gets his chance. “We need you to make that phone line you’ve been talking about,” a Codelco official tells him. In forty-five minutes, using some old telephone components, a piece of plastic molding, and a few thousand feet of discarded wire, he’s put together a telephone receiver and transmitter.
At 12:45 p.m., with Minister Golborne and Carlos Barra and assorted other people watching, Gallo’s telephone is lowered down toward the trapped men. The wire attached to the receiver is composed of nine separate stretches of phone line linked together rather crudely, with knots and electrical tape, and at one point the minister asks: “What are those things, are they transmitters?” Gallo answers: “No, Señor Ministro, that’s where I patched the wires together.” After fifty minutes, the handset has been lowered 703 meters and has reached the bottom. Gallo connects the final stretch of wire to the kind of cheap phone set you can find in a million offices around the world.
Golborne lifts the receiver and speaks a few words of mining protocol suggested by the phone technician.
“Attention, mine shift,” the minister says. “The surface here.”
“Mine, here,” Edison Peña answers. “Can you hear me?”
“Yes, I hear you,” the minister says, and when he does the two dozen men clustered around the telephone on the surface burst into cheers and applause.
Down at the bottom of the shaft, Edison can hear what’s happening on the surface with unexpected clarity, the earpiece filling with the robust, hopeful voices of living people in the outside world. “I could hear this collection of people. [La colectividad de esta gente]. And I heard this very firm voice … I broke down.” After eighteen days in darkness, after the hours of silence when he lived with death and the thought that no one was coming for him, Edison is overcome by emotion. The sound of those strangers’ voices makes him weep. “I just wasn’t capable of speaking.”
“This is the minister of mining,” the minister says.
Someone takes the phone from Edison and says they will pass it to the shift supervisor. “Yes, with the jefe de turno, that’s the right thing to do,” the minister says, and the minister turns on the speakerphone so that everyone around him on the surface can hear.
“It’s the shift supervisor, Luis Urzúa.”
“There are twenty of us here ready to provide you with immediate help,” the minister says. “How are you? How do you find yourselves?”
“Well. We are well. In
good spirits, waiting for you to rescue us,” Urzúa answers, though his voice is hurried and uncertain.
The minister says the rescuers will soon be sending down drinking water, and some liquids with instructions from a doctor.
“We’ve been drinking some water,” Urzúa says. “But at this moment we’ve already eaten the little we had in the, the, the, the Refuge.”
The minister says he will soon put them in touch with a doctor who will be in charge of feeding them. The men below are excited, and desperate to get out, but no explanation of how and when they will be rescued takes place in this first conversation. Instead Golborne, swept up in the emotion of the moment, feels the need to give the miners a sense of how much their survival has meant to the Chilean people. “I want to tell you the entire country has been following you these last seventeen days. The entire country has participated in this rescue,” the minister says. “Yesterday all of Chile celebrated. In all of the plazas, in all the corners of this country, people celebrated that we’d made contact with you.”