by Héctor Tobar
The thunderclaps inside the mountain end with a huge rumble coming from below, what feels like a massive rockslide. Later, the men travel deeper into the mine and find several corridors have collapsed and caved in, including the gallery at Level 44 where Mario Sepúlveda used to pray.
* * *
On Monday, October 11, the rescuers on the surface test the Fénix capsule to a depth of 600 meters. Inside the mine, the men begin to clean up the Refuge, like travelers who want to leave an orderly home behind before undertaking a long journey. Luis Urzúa summons them to a meeting, their final one as thirty-three trapped men. He tells them they should remember how they helped one another when the mountain was collapsing, when they were starving, and how they worked together to stay alive for sixty-nine days. Several of the men then step forward to acknowledge debts and friendships. Víctor Zamora speaks of his gratitude for Mario Sepúlveda, who inspired the men in the Refuge when they were at their lowest moment. Jorge Galleguillos, the old miner and northerner who spent many days suffering from swollen legs, steps forward to thank Raúl Bustos, the mechanic and nonmining southerner. “He was always a true gentleman and I appreciate that. Yeah, he can be a bit of a grump, but he always helped me.” When Galleguillos is finished, Luis Urzúa looks at him, and at Yonni Barrios, and says: “There’s two men here who spent a lot of time together, who helped each other out, and who’ve always been friends, but who recently had a bad fight. And I think they should both step forward and shake each other’s hand.” With thirty-one men watching, Galleguillos and Barrios clasp hands and embrace.
Eventually, Juan Illanes steps forward and speaks in his authoritative baritone. “Since this is the last time we’re all going to be together, I think we should reach an agreement that will serve us in the future,” he says. From here on out, he says, a decision reached by a majority of the men on the surface should be respected by the entire group. They’re all about to return to their homes, many of them in places distant from this mine, and “it will be impossible to get all of us together again. And whether you like it or not, you should all agree to respect the decisions of the group.” Illanes reminds them of what they’ve agreed to before: They will not reveal, individually, what they suffered as a group. That story is their most precious possession, and it belongs to all of them. “I want people here to show that they’re going to respect what we’ve agreed to, as men. It’s not just about the group, it’s about how much you love yourself. Because if you love yourself, you will the defend the rights of others.” Illanes loses his composure as he reaches the end of this speech, because he’s asking the men to believe in a promise expressed in words, a weighty and sacred idea that is also as fleeting and passing as the breath with which those words are spoken. He’s asking them to remain loyal to abstract notions of honor and solidarity, against the temptations that await them—real fame and real money, up there in the crazy, unfettered world of the surface. One of the miners steps forward to express his dissent—Esteban Rojas says he doesn’t trust Illanes and doesn’t agree with much of what he’s said. There are murmurs of agreement with Rojas and suddenly the meeting turns very tense. Everyone has to look out for their own families, without depending on a group; it’s just the responsible thing to do. But these are minority voices and eventually it’s agreed the men will share the proceeds of any book or movie equally. Then they vote to make Illanes their official spokesman on the surface.
For Mario Sepúlveda, the appointment of Illanes as spokesman is a wound inflicted by men for whom he suffered and toiled. In this mine he’s found a new calling, to be a voice for justice and truth and the workingman, but he won’t be able to tell the full story of the miracle of Atacama when he reaches the surface. “They took me out of the leadership,” he says. “It was the biggest betrayal I suffered in the seventy days I was down there.”
* * *
Being trapped in the San José Mine has given Mario Sepúlveda a new sense of purpose, and it’s made the greatness of his life of a workingman clear to him. He owes the mine something, and on the afternoon of October 12, with twelve hours to go before the first man ascends in the Fénix, he prepares to say goodbye to the mine’s caverns and corridors. He goes to the spot where he slept in the Refuge and builds a memorial to his time there. When the last man leaves these passageways they will become a kind of time capsule, a landmark of Chilean and mining history destined to remain sealed and unseen for decades and centuries, perhaps. So Mario writes a letter to leave behind, and on the steel mesh that covers the stone wall near his bed, he places a piece of cardboard and writes down his full name and his date of birth, and the words “Mario Sepúlveda lived here from August 5 to October 13.” He attaches some of the pictures he’s been sent of his family, and places a plastic wreath around them, along with all the little Chilean flags he’s collected. Then he goes about gathering rocks as souvenirs, from nearby on Level 90, the site of many adventures, including an attempt to set off an explosion to send a signal to the surface. “For me that level represented life, hope, a desire to live,” Mario says. He’s going to give the stones to André Sougarret, and to the engineer Andrés Aguilar, who played a key role in the rescue, and to the president, too.
As Mario does these things, Raúl Bustos prepares to leave, too. Raúl also gathers up rocks—but he takes them to the Pit and vents his fury by throwing them into that empty cavern. Take that, San José Mine! ¡Concha de su madre! Then, with other miners, Raúl takes some permanent markers and angrily scribbles graffiti on the vehicles that are the property of the San Esteban Mining Company, writing vulgar “thank-yous” to the mine owners and the owners’ mothers. Raúl also says farewell to the space where he slept, up at Level 105. He’s assembled a collage from the photocopied family pictures his family has sent to him, and he gathers these pictures that were his companions for so many lonely days when he longed to be home. “I looked at that, and remembered all the thoughts that went through my head there, thinking of meals I couldn’t have, of birthdays that I missed,” he says. He walks away to a quiet, private corridor in the mine where no one can see him, and then he sets fire to those pictures. “I wanted it all to go away, it was all bad memories,” he says, and very soon the pictures become ashes carried away by the faint breeze in the corridor. When he returns to Level 105 he makes sure to erase any trace he might have left there. Like Mario Sepúlveda, Raúl Bustos imagines the San José in an unseen future, a time when men with cameras return to that place of Chilean history, those caverns where he suffered the deepest loneliness he’s ever known. “I didn’t want anyone else to see it, to come and say later, ‘See, look, this is where Raúl Bustos slept.’”
“It was all very private, and it was mine.”
* * *
Before he leaves the mine, Víctor Segovia takes a moment to write a final entry in his underground diary. “The earth is giving birth to its 33 children after having them inside her for two months and eight days,” he writes. He takes time to reflect on his work history for the San Esteban Mining Company and its complex of mines, a series of memories that take him back to 1998, and all the jobs he had and the accidents that befell the men who worked alongside him during twelve years. He was a driller, an explosives handler, and a jumbo operator. A truck driver died in a cave in the adjacent San Antonio Mine, and another worker was killed in a road accident while on his way to the complex. He saw two men killed in the San José itself. Víctor doesn’t blame the mine for their deaths, but rather “those who didn’t invest enough money to make this a safe and secure mine.” After all these years, the mine itself feels like a second home to him, he has an abiding and unbreakable affection for its improvised architecture, for the humility and crudeness of its serrated walls. Víctor draws a heart inside his diary, and writes “I LOVE SAN JOSÉ” inside it. The mine is like him: flawed and neglected but worthy of respect and love. “The San José was innocent,” he writes. “The fault was in the people who didn’t know how to run the mine.”
* * *
Among the Chilean and NASA officers and engineers who shared ideas on the design of the Fénix capsule, there are two navy men, one American and one Chilean, with long experience in their respective country’s submarine fleets. The submariners have both practiced rescues that are analogous to the mission about to be undertaken at the San José and they agree that the miners’ ascent to the surface should follow a principle of submarine rescues: The strongest, most able-bodied man will enter the capsule first, because he’ll best be able to deal with any complications that might arise. For that reason, the leaders of the Chilean rescue team decide that Florencio Avalos, the fit thirty-one-year-old foreman and second-in-command to Luis Urzúa, will be the first of the thirty-three men to ascend to the surface.
* * *
Before Florencio Avalos can come out, one man must go in. At 10:00 a.m. on the day the rescue is set to begin, Manuel González finds out that he will be the first rescuer to enter the Fénix. After a lunch in the beach town of Bahía Inglesa, a driver takes him to the San José Mine and the site of the Plan B hole in a van with tinted windows, which offers a kind of protection against the spectacle that’s unfolding outside. The once-barren hillside around the mine is covered with people: family members and rescuers who can sense that a celebration is about to unfold, and reporters and cameramen who are there to broadcast that celebration to places near and far. After González goes down and the first miner comes up, two navy medics will follow him into the mine, but for now he is the focus of all the attention. After night falls and the final preparations of the capsule and the shaft are completed, González’s tense face is broadcast on the giant screen down in Camp Esperanza set up for family members to follow the rescue. He looks up from the drill site and sees reporters and cameras lined up on a ridge above him, and many lights, as if he were entering an amphitheater and a great drama were about to begin.
González approaches the capsule and at 11:08 p.m. he’s strapped inside. He’s wearing a bright orange jumpsuit, a white helmet, and the expression of a man unable to completely suppress his fear of the unknown. He’s been told that the system that will send him into the mine has been designed with several redundancies—among other things, the Austrian-built crane that will lower and raise the Fénix can lift 54 tons, or about one hundred times the weight of the capsule itself. And yet, when he places his feet on the steel floor of the capsule, he’s standing over an open shaft that’s as tall as a 130-story building; a free fall from top to bottom would last twelve seconds and result in certain death.
“Just stay calm,” the head of the rescue team tells him. “I have total confidence in you.”
The president and the minister of mining are there, too. “Good luck, Manolo,” the president says, using a diminutive for his name.
At 11:17, the Fénix begins its descent. González can’t see the shaft below him as the Fénix enters the mountain at an 82-degree angle. He has a radio, but the signal lasts only the first 100 meters or so, though there’s a camera inside the capsule and he can communicate with hand signals if he gets into any trouble. “My mission was to make sure everything was working,” he says, and he spends much of the seventeen-minute journey looking around. At about 200 meters down, he sees a trickle of water coming out of a crack in the shaft. The heat is building: It’s a cool spring night on the surface, but in the deeper reaches of the mine it’s a tropical summer. González feels a faint shift 150 meters from the bottom as the shaft bends from its 82-degree angle and heads straight down. His biggest worry is the state of the men when the capsule opens, the possibility that one of the miners will panic and try to force his way into the capsule before it’s his turn.
In fact, down below, the miners are faced with the opposite problem. There’s a man who doesn’t want to leave the mine. An earlier test of the Fénix in the shaft has sent some stones tumbling down, and now Víctor Segovia is convinced that those loose rocks will cause the capsule to get stuck once he’s in it. Even worse, the rumbling in the mountain has produced a huge crack in the wall of the cavern where the capsule will enter the mine. “I’m alive now, down here,” he says. “Why should I go and die in that hole?”
“Look,” Florencio Avalos tells him. “I’m going in first and if I get stuck none of us will come out.” Florencio’s words manage to calm Víctor. Later, as Florencio begins to prepare for his ride to the surface, the men bow their heads and say a final prayer. Sixty-nine days earlier they fell to their knees and asked God to lift them out of this place; now they ask God to protect Florencio in this first “journey” of deliverance. It’s a final private moment before the public show of the rescue begins. Adding to the sense of theater is the bright light they’ve set up to illuminate the spot where the capsule will emerge, and also the camera that begins transmitting a live video image to the surface via the fiber-optic cable. The Chilean government, in turn, provides a feed to the assembled media and their cluster of satellite trucks, which send signals aimed at the desert stars, and several hundred million people around the world gather before screens large and small to gaze at the interior of the San José Mine as the capsule approaches. It’s 11:30 p.m. in Santiago, before dawn in London and Paris, about midday in New Delhi, and dinnertime in Los Angeles.
The capsule slides down out of the shaft, and into the cavern at Level 135. Yonni Barrios, shirtless and wearing white shorts, is the first to move to the door and greet González, who steps out in his pristine orange jumpsuit. Yonni has tears in his eyes, González notes, and the two men quickly embrace. Turning to the rest of the men, the rescuer declares: “There’s a shitload of people up there waiting for you guys!” As the rest of the men move toward him to shake his hand and embrace him, the rescuer makes a nervous joke: “You guys better not take advantage of me! Because there are two navy special-ops divers coming down after me and they’re really good at fighting!”
To the men who have been trapped for nearly ten weeks, the tall González looks impossibly clean and fresh-faced. With a winning smile, big cherubic cheeks, and skin that’s been colored by the days he’s spent in the Atacama sun, he looks like a visitor from an impossibly bright and distant world. “We felt no other people existed,” one of the miners says, and now a real, fully alive member of the human race is here among them.
To González, the thirty-three men look like primitives. Several of them are bare-chested and are wearing rolled-up shorts that look like “diapers” and cut-up boots, he says. “It was like they were a bunch of cavemen.” González will be inside the mine for twenty-four hours, and later he will have a chance to explore a bit: Around the corner, he’ll see a shrine to a man killed in an accident, and as he wanders more it’s as if he’s stepped back in time, to a simpler and more dangerous era of mining history. “They were completely without protection,” he says of the men. He sees no respirators or safety glasses, and the heat and humidity are unlike anything he’s felt in a mine before. The everyday working conditions are “inhuman,” he says. One day in this mine would be a test of physical endurance, and yet the men here survived sixty-nine. How in God’s name, he wonders, did they do it?
Now he must work to get them out. “I’m Manuel González, a rescuer from El Teniente mine,” he says in a calm but authoritative voice. He tells them what the trip through the shaft will be like. “Look, you’re just going to feel a little swaying, don’t be afraid of it … The change in pressure will be noticeable.” The final preparations include checking Florencio’s blood pressure and pulse. “Ah, it doesn’t matter,” González says as he notes the high readings. “This is all for legal purposes anyway.” He runs through a checklist and connects monitors to the harness Florencio is wearing and another to his finger. Less than fifteen minutes after González’s arrival in the corridor at Level 135, Florencio Avalos is ready to step into the Fénix capsule. “We’ll see each other up on top,” he tells the other miners as he enters and González closes the door. A few seconds later the Fénix begins to rise, as smoothly and evenly as an e
levator, and the capsule disappears into the shaft. As he rises, Florencio feels as if he were entering a body made of stone. “It feels good!” he yells down to the men below. ¡Se siente rico! “It feels good in here!” The men yell back, their voices beneath his feet as he rises away from the caverns that were his home and his prison for ten weeks.
On the surface, Florencio’s wife, Mónica, and his son wait for him near the opening: Mónica who once sleepwalked over this very mountain, and his seven-year-old son, Bayron. Farther down the hillside, in Camp Esperanza, María “the Mayor” Segovia watches the rescue on the giant television and thinks of those adult men squeezed into a stone channel and concludes: The mine is like a woman that’s giving birth to them. Like many of the women who’ve been living on the property of the San Esteban Mining Company, she can feel the analogy inside her body. “If you’re going to have a baby, you know that the baby might be born, but with complications, or the baby might not make it at all.” A baby can be strangled by an umbilical cord, or he can get stuck in the birth canal and suffocate. As the men rise up through the stone, the capsule carrying them might fall back down into the mine, or the mountain might rumble again and destroy the borehole, causing it to crack and trap the Fénix and its passenger inside. María Segovia has given birth to four children, and now the men whose lives she’s been fighting for will rise up through a 2,100-foot birth canal carved into the mother mountain. If the Earth doesn’t want to let them go, they won’t be able to leave, she thinks. But maybe the Earth doesn’t want to hold on to them any longer.