Deep Down Dark

by Héctor Tobar

  Ariel has resigned himself to missing his daughter’s birth, but in the meantime, he’s had an epiphany. After talking to his family via the video link, and seeing the images from the surface of the camp where thirty-three families and hundreds of rescuers have all gathered, he decides his daughter should be called Esperanza. On September 14, Esperanza comes into the world, at a hospital in Copiapó. His sister-in-law takes a camera into the delivery room and the Chilean channel Megavision prepares a video of the birth with music in the background. But Ariel doesn’t see it. Esperanza has been delivered via cesarean section, and the psychologists have decided, according to media reports, that Ariel should be spared the trauma of seeing a surgical procedure while he’s still trapped underground. Instead, Ariel sees a heavily edited video transmitted via the fiber-optic link to the big screen below. The other miners think Ariel should see his daughter’s birth in private, and they leave him alone with the screen. He sees blue-clad doctors standing over his wife, and then the video cuts to one of the doctors holding his new daughter, and he sees her with wet, matted hair and closed eyes next to his smiling, exhausted wife. Controlled by men on the surface, the same two minutes of video plays over and over again in a loop. The quality, however, isn’t sharp enough for Ariel to make out if Esperanza looks like him or his wife. No one before in human history has witnessed the birth of his daughter while trapped in a stone cavern, and when I later point this out and ask Ariel what it was like to first cast his eyes on his daughter, he says: “I don’t know what I felt. If it was emotion, or happiness, or what.” After speaking to Ariel’s brother, the world’s newspapers will report that Ariel wept copious tears upon hearing the news. They report his daughter’s vital statistics, too: 3.05 kilos (6 pounds, 11 ounces), 48 centimeters (19 inches), born at 12:20 p.m. These figures are tossed into their stories alongside the latest statistics on the drills trying to reach the trapped men. The Plan B drill has advanced 368 meters. The Plan A drill 300 meters. The Plan C drill will begin work in seven days.

  * * *

  The drill that breaks through first will be used to lower an escape capsule to the thirty-three men. The Chilean navy begins to build that capsule—coincidentally in the same shipyard where the mechanic Raúl Bustos repaired engines until the tsunami hit. A two-minute walk in the vast ASMAR shipyard separates the small workshop where Bustos worked from the machine shops where the escape capsule will be assembled. The interior walls of most of the buildings in the shipyard in Talcahuano still have seven-foot-high watermarks from the ocean water that swept through six months earlier, and parts of the vast complex are still waterlogged. But the navy has cleaned out all the dead fish, removed the grounded vessels, and gotten the shipyard working again. Now the team of naval engineers and machinists gets to work building what their colleagues at NASA have named—following a typically North American obsession with acronyms—the EV, or Escape Vehicle. The Chileans have received a twelve-page memo from NASA detailing the space agency’s recommended specifications for such a craft: “EV … shall have portable oxygen tanks of sufficient size … to provide medical grade oxygen at the rate of 6 liters per minute for up to 2–4 hours … EV shall be configured such that occupant is able to move at least one hand to his face.” But the design the Chileans come up with is entirely their own (they will soon consider patenting it), and on September 12 the government announces its basic parameters to the media. Built from steel plates, the Escape Vehicle will have an exterior diameter of 54 centimeters (21.25 inches), will be no taller than 2.5 meters (8 feet), and will weigh approximately 250 kilos (550 pounds) when empty. It will have the oxygen supply recommended by NASA, and also a roof built to resist objects falling from great heights, and it will travel up and down with wheels that keep the Escape Vehicle’s steel shell from striking the walls of the shaft as it rises to the surface. (Those retractable rubber wheels will eventually be provided by an Italian firm.) Should the man traveling inside lose consciousness, a harness will keep him standing up.

  A few days later, the Chilean government releases drawings of the proposed capsule, painted the colors of the national flag, and emblazoned with a name: Fénix, or Phoenix in English. Phoenix is a minor constellation in the southern sky, a group of stars in the shape of a triangle and a diamond, two simple shapes that, when joined together, form the bird that rises from the ashes in Greek mythology. The name has an obvious rhetorical purpose for the Chilean government: Chile itself is a country that’s rising from the ashes. With this capsule Chilean workingmen and Chilean technology and Chilean faith are going to pull off a daring rescue that will fill a people with hope just months after a disastrous earthquake and tsunami claimed the lives of so many innocents and sent the national mood into a funk. Lifting thirty-three men up from the bowels of the Earth in a Phoenix the colors of the flag also suggests how the government wants the rescue to be remembered: as a heroic, nation-defining myth, with real Chilean workingmen cast in the leading roles.

  In Greek mythology, however, even the gods are imperfect, imbued with vanity, courage, pride, familial love, vindictiveness, and other all-too-human qualities that can also be found among the men living inside the broken San José Mine.

  * * *

  In the days before September 18, Chilean Independence Day, the question arises: How will the thirty-three Chilean patriots trapped in the San José Mine celebrate? Several of the leaders of the rescue team on the surface want to send the men wine. It’s the biggest holiday of the year, after all, celebrated with family feasting and drink, and seeing these living symbols of national pride having a little glass in their mountain prison will make all of Chile feel good. “I wanted to send them wine, too,” the psychologist, Iturra, says. “But the doctors were completely against it.” Some of the men were heavy drinkers, and they’ve been abstinent now for more than forty days. The crisis of abstinence is over for them: All thirty-three are now teetotalers. After thinking about it, the psychologist agrees that wine is a bad idea. At about this time he’s received a troubling reminder of the battle some of the men have had with addiction. “One of the mothers came to me and told me, ‘My son is receiving drugs.’” The family members have been allowed to send the miners care packages with clothes and the like, and in these packages someone has slipped in something illicit. “It was either marijuana or cocaine, I don’t know which, but it didn’t really matter. I really couldn’t afford to have any men with altered states of consciousness down there.” Iturra changes the procedure by which items are packaged and any further shipments of drugs are stopped. As to the Independence Day wine, Iturra points out that the corridors of the mine are a work site, and alcohol is prohibited, by law and by common sense. Down below, the men have reached the same conclusion: We won’t be needing any wine, they say, thank you very much.

  The thirty-three men will, however, enjoy empanadas and a bit of steak, a simulacrum of the feast they’d be celebrating on the surface. They prepare for Independence Day by writing a poem to the president. “Even that almost caused a fight between Perri and Edison because they had different ideas about the poem,” Víctor Segovia writes in his diary on September 16. “Then Zamora jumped in and there was a very heated argument: all over a poem for the bicentennial. Hahaha.”

  But the bad feelings don’t last long, because the preparations for the bicentennial coincide with excellent news from the surface: The second stage of the Plan B rescue is nearly complete. On the morning of September 17, the drill breaks through. A 17-inch hole now links the trapped men with the surface. Once this borehole is widened to 28 inches, the men will be free. If all goes well, that might be in just a few weeks. “This is happening really fast and it’s making us very happy,” Víctor Segovia writes in his diary. The next morning, Independence Day, finds most of the men getting haircuts, taking baths, and changing into clean clothes, “as if we were prisoners and it was visiting day.”

  Outside, photographs of the miners are displayed again and again during public bicentennial celebrat
ions. A two-story image of the famous note “Estamos bien en el Refugio” is projected upon La Moneda palace in Santiago as part of a light show there. In the mine itself, the men eat their empanadas and down a cola drink. They raise a flag, sing the national anthem again, and watch Mario Sepúlveda perform a traditional cueca dance—which is videotaped and broadcast to all Chile.

  The only miner who chooses not to participate in the festivities is Franklin Lobos, “in order to avoid having problems with some of the guys he doesn’t get along with,” as Víctor records in his diary. In a mine filled with men growing frustrated at their confinement, Franklin has an especially angry beast in his breast, one that hasn’t stopped snarling since the mine collapsed. “I was always in a bad mood, even my friends will tell you,” he says. But what most of his fellow miners don’t know is that, underneath his irritable exterior, Franklin is a man softening and mellowing as each day passes, a man who believes he has learned to see himself as he truly is for the first time.

  * * *

  Before all thirty-three men trapped in the San José Mine became famous, only one of them had tasted fame. A soccer hero is a glorious thing for a young man to be, even in (or especially in) a provincial town like Copiapó. Franklin Lobos was enough of a hero that he had a nickname, and not just any nickname, but one with explosively martial and perhaps virile connotations: “The Magic Mortar,” he was called, for his ability to fire missile-like free kicks into the enemy goal. He’d been named to the Chilean national team (fleetingly) in the early 1980s and worn the coveted red jersey. At about that time, which was also when he got married and started having children, he never lacked for auxiliary female companionship. “Mujeres, mujeres, mujeres,” he’ll say, recalling those years. If he tried to go to downtown Copiapó and buy a drink, no one would let him: “Please, Franklin, it’s on us! Let us buy a drink for El Mortero Mágico!”

  In his thirties, Franklin’s career started to fade; he held on until he was thirty-nine, later than most players. Retirement was a vacuum he could not possibly fill. “One day you have all these friends, and people want to buy you things—and then you don’t. One day you have all these women at your side—and then they’re gone.” After his career turned to rubble, so did his marriage. He was making his wife suffer with his foul moods, his absences, so as an act of compassion he actually divorced her, “with papers and everything.”

  The Magic Mortar became a taxi and truck driver, and at age fifty-two he was down in the exceedingly dangerous San José Mine, moonlighting to help pay for his daughter to go to college: Carolina, the same daughter whose tears outside the entrance to the mine caused the minister of mining to weep copious public tears. Now Carolina is up there in Camp Esperanza and so is her mother, his ex-wife, Coralia. After all that he’s done, Coralia is present in that weather-beaten camp, for their adult children and also for Franklin. Is she writing him love letters? “No, she’s always been kind of cold that way. She didn’t want to show her feelings. She would just tell me to take care of myself: that kind of thing.” Her mere presence, her daily vigil on behalf of her cheating but now caged ex-husband, is a kind of love poem. Finally, his nephews started to lobby on her behalf, telling him: Uncle Franklin, Coralia is here every day! She really cares about you. So now Franklin Lobos, the Magic Mortar, is considering a step that would have been unthinkable when he reported to work on August 5: getting back together with his ex-wife.

  Franklin is contemplating a return to an earlier, simpler, and nonfamous version of himself: He will be part of a couple again, with the mother of his children. As he thinks about the goodness of this personal transformation, his embrace of humility, he sees the workingmen around him getting puffed-up heads about how important they are and the glory that awaits them on the surface: They’re even wearing a kind of national team jersey as they gather for their underground Independence Day celebration. It seems silly to Franklin for his fellow miners to think of themselves as national heroes when all they’ve done is gotten themselves trapped in a place where only the desperate and the hard up for cash go to suffer and toil. They are famous now, yes, but that heady sense of fullness that fame gives you, that sense of being at the center of everything, will disappear quicker than they could possibly imagine.

  Franklin tries to speak this truth to his fellow miners, but he does so halfheartedly, because he knows the only way to learn it is to live it. Instead, he watches as his fellow miners’ obsession with their public image drives them to pettiness. I’m going to buy a Camaro. Italian television wants to talk to me. My hometown wants to give me a medal! Franklin is especially angry with Raúl Bustos, the man from Talcahuano, for teasing Mario Sepúlveda mercilessly in the wake of the story in which Mario proclaimed himself “absolute leader.” Franklin believes Raúl’s own vanity is responsible for the bad feeling between the men of Level 105 and the men of the Refuge, and it’s to avoid seeing Raúl (among others) that he’s skipped the celebration. But up on the surface, as luck would have it, Franklin’s adult daughter, Carolina, has become close to Raúl’s wife, Carola, in Camp Esperanza. In a letter, she tells her father about her new friendship, how the two women talk every day and make each other stronger.

  So Franklin finds Raúl at Level 105 one day, and puts an ironic arm around his shoulders and tells him: “My daughter says I have to be buddies with you now. Because she’s friends up in the camp with your wife. Look, it says so in this letter.” Franklin shows Raúl the letter with a grin. “But you know what, Bustos? I’ll never be your friend. Never. You know why? Because you divided the group and I’ll never forgive you for it.” Franklin knows he sounds like a jerk, but he has no qualms then, or later, about saying what he feels: “It was one of the hardest things I said down there. But I told him to his face, I didn’t say it behind his back.”

  The same Franklin Lobos who is willing to reconcile with his wife isn’t ready to forgive Raúl Bustos. He will hold on to his enmity in the days to come, even as the thirty-three men begin to work toward the day when, God willing, they’ll enter a steel capsule and rise toward the surface and the light.

  * * *

  On September 20 the American drillers Jeff Hart, Matt Staffel, Doug Reeves, and Jorge Herrera and their Chilean colleagues begin to drill the third and final drilling stage of Plan B, using the recently completed 17-inch borehole as their guide. When they’re done, they’ll have widened the hole to 28 inches, and thus created a passageway big enough for the Fénix rescue capsule. If all goes well, they should be done in less than a month. “If it takes us until Christmas,” the Americans say to one another, “we need to get out of the drilling business.” To speed up the drilling, the Plan B team allows the crushed rock produced by their T130 drill to fall down into the mine itself. In all, the T130 will send several thousand cubic feet of crushed stone down the pilot shaft to the old workshop, near the spot where the mechanics used to gather to feel the breeze that came in through the cavern of the Pit. Luis Urzúa assigns Juan Carlos Aguilar to lead a team of workers who use a front loader to pick up the crushed diorite and haul it away. The engineers on the surface have offered to send him fuel to operate the machines, but Aguilar says he doesn’t need it, because he’s calculated how much is left in the pickup trucks, the personnel truck, the jumbos, and the other vehicles (there are sixteen in all trapped with the men), and there’s more than enough to operate the front loader for several days. The grinding, whining noise of the loader makes the broken mine feel unbroken. This is what the men did when the mine was still producing ore laden with gold and copper: They lifted and carried and dumped with machines that were like extensions of their own muscles. The sound and the feel of small quantities of stone being scooped up and then falling are familiar and comforting to the men working below. For a short while, they are truly miners again, men toiling in a cavern, each thinking about the home that awaits him when the work is done.

  * * *

  When the Fénix and the Plan B passageway are complete, a rescuer will ente
r the capsule and journey down into the mine. His job will be to supervise, from below, the loading of the thirty-three men into the capsule—and then be the last man to leave the mine. It’s a mission with enormous responsibility and great honor, and the man who gets it will remember it as the capstone of his career as a professional mining rescuer. To choose that man, the Chilean government has set up an informal competition akin to the one among American test pilots in the 1960s to select the first astronauts, as described by Tom Wolfe in his book The Right Stuff. The government selects sixteen finalists, all employees of three agencies that have had a hand in the rescue—the national mining company Codelco, the Chilean navy, and the GOPE elite team of the Chilean national police.

  Manuel González is one of these sixteen men. He’s a miner and rescuer at El Teniente mine about fifty miles south of Santiago, one of the world’s largest underground mines. El Teniente has a rescue crew of sixty-two men who are a kind of volunteer fire department inside the mine. They go about their regular mine jobs—in González’s case as an explosives expert and shift supervisor—but in an emergency they roll into action. A few times, his work has led him to recover the bodies of crushed miners. There are other rescuers at El Teniente who have better climbing skills than González, and they were chosen weeks ago for the first, frustrated attempt to reach the men via the ventilation chimneys. Climbers are not needed for the journey in the Fénix, however, but rather fit men with patient dispositions and strong leadership skills. With fifteen years of mining rescue experience, and with a résumé that includes work as a shift supervisor and as a professional soccer player, González qualifies on all counts. In 1984, as a member of the O’Higgins team, González played in a match against Franklin Lobos and his Cobresal team and scored the only goal of his short professional career. Now González is one of half a dozen mining rescuers from El Teniente selected to travel to Copiapó.