Deep Down Dark

by Héctor Tobar

  “People come from the outside, ‘artists,’ they say, who don’t interest me personally,” she writes to her husband in the mine. “You know me, and know what I think about that.” Carmen ignores both the celebrities and the reporters who want to transform her into a celebrity. Luis Urzúa is, along with Mario Sepúlveda and Yonni Barrios, one of the miners getting the most ink and airtime, and the reporters want to make Carmen and her two children stand-ins for the leader down below. “The family made a promise: Noelia, Luis, and I will not respond to the ‘idiotic’ questions of the press,” she writes. “And your family, your mother, brothers, cousins, etc.: They also know how we feel about these reporters and they have to respect what we’ve decided. Only when the miners are rescued will we talk to them. For that reason, you will never find us in any newspaper.”

  Down below, Luis is devouring his wife’s letters. Carmen is herself, she hasn’t changed, and her daily letters are a measure of sanity amid so much around him that is absurd and frightening. He wants her to write more, because when she does things feel normal, for an instant, as if he were home at the dinner table listening to her. Carmen can’t help but note the irony: “You always said I talked too much,” she writes. Carmen tells him again and again to rely on their shared faith (“Are you reading that prayer book I sent you?”) and to keep focused on what’s important, the rescue and the safety of the thirty-two men who are his responsibility, and not the fame and wealth that might be coming his way. Not once does she mention the Farkas millions, and when he finally asks her about it, she writes back to say: Don’t worry about that, you need to focus on the rescue, because it’s ridiculous to talk about money when your life is still in danger. Luis trusts Carmen more than anyone, and she’s also become his eyes and ears on the surface. It’s one thing to have these officials telling him the Chilean government is doing everything it can to rescue them, but it’s quite another to read it in Carmen’s own words. “You can’t imagine the great deployment of machines, of workers … of huge floodlights, of shipping containers and of machines carving out roads over the hill to the south, north, west, and east,” she writes. “There are trucks moving and taking out earth, and huge trucks that go up every day filled with water, 5,000 liters at a time. We hear the buzz of the generator engines that keep the floodlights on: In every corner of the mountain there are huge floodlights, of the kind you’ve probably seen before only in Punta del Cobre [one of the biggest mines in Chile] or some other place, but never in the San José.”

  Carmen writes to her husband, above all, to remind him that he is loved. She writes a poem and sends it to him. “Generous, simple, suffering miner / drinking from the wounded innards of the Earth / looking without seeing with your tired eyes. / I say miner and I say your name / miner of coal, of dust, of minerals / your hands wizened by early winters / that know the shovel, the carved rock, and the pick.” Sometimes, her letters are playful and girlish, as if they’d just met a few weeks earlier, and hadn’t been married for twenty years. “Have you thought about me, missed me, or have you forgotten the kind of perfume I use?” she asks in one. (Luis has not forgetten: For several days after the collapse, he smelled her perfume on the seat of the pickup truck when he slept—it had hitchhiked from home on his clothing and affixed itself there somehow.) More often, her letters convey a devotion that is mature, romantic, and enduring. “Don’t forget me,” she writes. “Remember the good things that I gave you, and the bad things, too, which were just a few. Because we will see each other again, to begin anew, just like the first time.” She concludes that letter with a promise: “I will wait for you forever.” Te espero por siempre. When Luis holds Carmen’s letters in the white pickup truck that is his underground office he finds it a little easier to believe that he will escape this collapsing mountain with his sanity intact and that he could make it to December, or even January, underground with all these angry men.

  Most of the families of the thirty-three men know it’s their duty to convey calm and a sense of domestic order to the men below, though this gets much harder to do after the new fiber-optic line from the surface is connected to a videoconferencing system. Omar Reygadas, the white-haired scoop operator who used a flame to follow a breeze to the bottom of the mine, can now see the face of his handsome adult son, Omar Jr., on that screen. For both men it’s an act of will to keep away the flood of tears that will follow as soon as their allotted time to speak is over and the connection goes dark. They feel shattered by this moment they are living, by their smallness before the mountain of stone that’s trapped Omar, which somehow feels more real and daunting now that they can see and speak to each other. “I wanted to cry, but I didn’t, and of course I found out later my family wanted to cry, too,” Omar Sr. says. Father and son don’t want their tears to add to each other’s burden. Instead, Omar Jr. says: “We always had the faith that you were alive, that God was going to protect you down there.” Omar asks about the elderly aunt who raised him, because she has diabetes and Omar has always cared for her. She’s okay, his son says. What about the bills, the rent? “Viejo, don’t you worry about anything, because I’ve got all your bills paid, on time.” Omar Sr. rents part of his house and the tenants are all paying on time, too, Omar Jr. says. “Everyone is behaving well, helping out, they’ve all paid. Don’t worry about anything besides taking care of yourself inside,” he says. His other relatives are equally upbeat.

  “They transmit good feelings to me,” Omar Sr. remembers. “Their good vibes.” Su buena vibra. In his letters he jokes with his family about wanting his favorite meal, steak and avocado, which is just another way of saying: I’m still the same old man who left for work on August 5, the man who works hard and eats his corazón con palta afterward. “In the letters we wrote to each other, there was never a misunderstanding, never a fight with my children or a complaint. To the contrary, we always had a very healthy conversation. With my wife it was the same. She’d go up [to the mine], turn in her letters, and go back to town to attend to her work. It was just pure love letters, that’s all.” In the letters from the surface, Omar Reygadas can feel the rhythms of normal life that are waiting for him outside. His job in the caverns of the San José is to do his share of the little work there is to be done, and also to recuperate and rest, despite the darkness, the rumbling of the mountain, and the complaints of so many of his coworkers. Mostly, he reads on his cot, by the entrance to the Refuge, with a box as his nightstand. His relatives have sent him several volumes in a series of pulp cowboy novels by the Spanish writer Marcial Lafuente Estefania, who writes books about Texas Rangers and bandits with titles such as El caballero de Alabama (The Alabama Gentleman) and El Capitán “Plomo” (Captain “Lead”). The hero on the cover is wearing the same wide-brimmed, flattop gambler Clint Eastwood wore in his spaghetti Westerns. But the book Omar finds most enjoyable is Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist. Several million people have read this book, and now Omar does, too, on his inflatable cot down at Level 90. He reads the story about a shepherd boy crossing the desert, and its many uplifting aphorisms: “… when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”

  As Omar reads, forty-two men are crossing the Atacama Desert, headed for the San José, conspiring to achieve his liberation from the mine. They are not shepherds, but truck drivers, hauling more equipment to try to pull thirty-three men out of the mountain. The huge oil-drilling rig that will be used for the Plan C rescue includes a 45-meter (147-feet) tower that has been disassembled into component parts. As the sun rises on September 9, the slow-moving caravan of trucks transporting it is just twenty-four hours away.

  * * *

  Jessica Chilla, who received a long, unexpected embrace from her common-law husband, Darío Segovia, on August 5, is another one of the family members who’s avoiding the press, mostly because she’s afraid she won’t be able to control her emotions if someone puts her in front of a camera. “If anyone saw me, I wanted them to see the same Jessica who was going to greet h
er husband when he came out of the mine,” she says. “The Jessica with her shoulders held high, waiting for him, giving him strength. Because anyone who says they heard me cry—well, they didn’t hear me cry. I had to be strong for him, so that he could get back on his feet when he came out.” Jessica wants Darío to see that she’s “super bien.” That’s why she makes the mistake of sending him a picture in which she looks cheerful as she stands with his sister María and the members of Los Charros de Lumaco.

  The picture was taken during Los Charros’ visit to Camp Esperanza, and Darío receives it in a letter delivered through the paloma. Is this some kind of joke, he wonders? The photograph shows his wife, up there in the midday sunshine, standing alongside six clean-shaven and handsome men dressed in identical black Stetson hats and black shirts with embroidered white flowers. These men all look younger and better fed than he does, and some of them actually have their arms around Jessica.

  “Why did you send me this?” Darío writes as he sends the photograph back to her. “I don’t want to see any huevones. And much less do I want to see musicians touching you.”

  “He was always jealous,” Jessica says. “And now, being stuck down there, he was doubly jealous.”

  Jessica is doubly hurt—by Darío’s angry words about the photograph, and by the implication that she’s living it up on the surface while he’s suffering down below. No, they aren’t living a party in the camp. Sleeping in a tent isn’t fun. It’s cold at night and she’s exhausted from the effort of keeping up her spirits for Darío’s sake, amid people who don’t seem to understand that his life is still in danger. There’s no guarantee Darío or any of the other thirty-two men are going to get out alive, and yet all around her in Camp Esperanza there are people who treat that growing gathering of relatives, rescuers, and reporters as if it were some sort of neighborhood street festival. “There were people showing up just to get a free meal, since there was stuff there that had been donated by the Jumbo supermarkets. You could eat whatever you wanted. They’d give you chocolates, boxes of tea, and there was a little cart where you’d line up and they’d give you French fries, hot dogs, tortillas.”

  Many of the people of Copiapó and the surrounding towns in this mining region have lived a very austere and hard-fought existence, giving thanks to their Creator for every piece of fresh-baked bread, second-rate cut of beef, or first-rate chicken breast that comes into their home. In Camp Esperanza they are presented with the abundance of a Jumbo hipermercado, all the firewood they could possibly use, and some truly excellent samples of the local seafood. Some can’t help but get carried away.

  Something similar is happening down below. The young miner and hard drinker Pedro Cortez is thinking what he’ll do with all the money coming his way. He went in on August 5 to work one shift, and will end up getting the equivalent of an entire year’s pay, or more. Before, he spent too much of his pay in the chopperia beer establishments in downtown Copiapó. But now he has enough money to buy a house for his parents to live in, and he tells his fellow miners that he’s going to pay for his daughter, the one he all but ignored before the accident, to go to a really good private school. A lot of the younger guys around him are getting car magazines and brochures sent down to them, including Jimmy Sánchez and Carlos Barrios, and they spend many hours in their cavern prison leafing through glossy pictures of European sports cars and American pickup trucks—suddenly the multimillion-peso price tags attached to these vehicles don’t seem so daunting. Pedro tells his friends he’s going to buy a yellow Chevrolet Camaro, like the one he saw in the movie Transformers. His friend Carlos Bugueño has a more modest dream: A little Peugeot 206 would suit him just fine. Some of the older men talk about buying big delivery trucks, the kind of vehicle you can use to start your own little business.

  Complicating these dreams is the fact that a lot of these prospective car buyers—including Pedro Cortez—don’t have a driver’s license. In Chile it’s harder to get a license than in most Latin American countries, since you have to take a “theoretical” written test and you can’t bribe anyone to “pass” it. Some of the thirty-three trapped men write to their relatives and ask them to send down study materials for the driver’s test. Soon, Level 90 is like a little traffic school, as men ponder the Chilean vehicle code and the hidden subtleties in questions such as: Why should you reduce your speed when you drive in fog? If there’s a horse rider on the highway, at what speed should you pass him? If you strike a pedestrian at 65 kilometers per hour, how likely is it he will die?

  Studying for the driver’s test while your life still hangs in the balance is madness. It’s cash fever, and Carlos Bugueño can see that he and his fellow workers are caught up in it. “The money was starting to cloud things for us,” he says. The reminders of the easy life that awaits them come from everywhere. For a few mornings, the fiber-optic link from the top brings a four-hour television show broadcast live from Santiago, Buenos Días a Todos. One day the “Good Morning Everyone” team announces that the government of the Dominican Republic has offered to bring all thirty-three miners and their families to a relaxing resort in that Caribbean island nation. “We’re going to the beach!” someone shouts. The men haven’t seen daylight in a month, most of them have never set foot outside Chile, a few have never traveled beyond the fringes of the Atacama Desert, but one day soon they will all visit this new and heavenly place of hot sand and turquoise water together.

  “It was surreal,” Luis Urzúa says. “But after a while, surreal things like that started to seem normal.”

  Urzúa decides that the men are spending too much time watching Buenos Días a Todos. They sit there for hours and neglect important work. For example, now that the men are eating regular meals, there’s a lot of shit, literally, to clean down in the toilet area. And not the isolated little llama pellets of before, but rather man-size, miner-size, smelly turds, in large quantities. To get the men to clean their excrement, Urzúa calls to the surface and asks the rescuers to turn off the television in the morning. With no more Buenos Días from Santiago, the men finally get around to latrine duty. From then forward, the television is on only during the afternoon, for soccer games involving Chile’s most popular teams, La Universidad de Chile and Colo-Colo, and for movies “to keep us calm and to keep us from complaining,” one of the miners says.

  * * *

  Not everyone trapped below is taking it easy while waiting to be rescued. In this first week of September, Víctor Segovia notes in his diary an odd sight: Edison Peña is running through the mine. He’s taken a pair of boots and cut them down to ankle height, and uses those to run up and down the dark passageways, alone with the beam of light on his helmet and the sound of his breathing through the thick air. Edison has long been the eccentric of the A shift: He used to walk alone in the mine, and sang Elvis songs in the Refuge, and when they were starving he performed those morbid death skits with Mario Sepúlveda. But running for exercise down here in hell is lunacy of a higher order. Why is Edison running? After the contact, Edison says, he was overcome with joy and gratitude. He’s seen a “blue light” in the mine, the light of faith. He’s promised God that he’ll do something to show his devotion, and what could be more devoted than to run uphill, against a 10 percent grade, in those passageways carved from the Earth? But he’s also running because he senses his body needs exercise to become well. Once he started eating real food he became painfully constipated, as did many other men. Going to the bathroom is an ordeal. “I’d go and push and push. What was coming out was really thick. Then it got stuck, somehow, and no, no, no, no. It was like trying to deliver a baby. It hurt a lot.” He needs to do something with his ailing body, and he has no bike to ride, so he starts to run. Many of the guys see him and start laughing. “They’d make fun of me. No one said anything supportive. Except maybe Yonni Barrios: He was worried something would happen to me.” To Florencio Avalos, it looks like Edison is running “to forget things, to make himself tired so that he can sleep.” Flor
encio also knows how dangerous it is to wander around a mine alone, and concludes that Edison, as a Chilean expression puts it, “is one plank short of a bridge” (le falta un palo para el puente). For Edison, running through those corridors where a falling slab might kill you is his way of saying he’s going to stand up in the face of adversity. Later, he will have some running shoes sent down, from a certain globally popular brand, and then a pair of neoprene slippers. Running liberates his mind, but it also reminds him where he is and what he’s been through. “I felt completely alone,” he says.

  * * *

  While Edison Peña runs, other men drill above him. The Plan B drill has advanced 200 meters by September 9. The hardness of the diorite, the profound depth, and the angle and curve in the original, smaller borehole it’s following cause the drill bits to wear out more quickly than they would otherwise. They have to change bits every twelve hours. The drilling slows from 20 meters an hour to as slow as 4. In the drilling team there are Americans from Center Rock Inc. and Driller Supply, and Chileans from the local mining company Geotec, and others. All of them, working together, are pushing their bodies and the drill past their limits. They’re so eager to reach those living souls that they succumb to a phenomenon that Laurence Golborne and André Sougarret have seen before: Like the man who kept drilling long past the lowest level of the mine when the rescuers were first searching for the miners, they can’t “let go” of the hole. In their anxiety to reach the men at the bottom of the shaft, they drill when they shouldn’t. Unfortunately, while the men on the crews can summon the will to work past the point of exhaustion, the metal in the drill bit must still obey the laws of physics, and it finally and inevitably shatters, at a depth of 262 meters (860 feet), as revealed by a sudden drop in pressure in the T130 drill, and some schizophrenic behavior from the torque gauges. The crews raise the massive hammer to the top, and lower a camera to discover a basketball-size chunk of the drill bit is stuck in the hole, rendering the shaft useless.