Deep Down Dark

by Héctor Tobar

  A few days later, Ariel Ticona finds himself in a Madrid studio with his wife and new daughter, Esperanza, answering questions from a talk-show host for a Spanish television show. We have a gift for you, the host says, and on cue a young woman in a form-hugging dress emerges from offstage, pushing a brand-new stroller. Ariel’s next stop in Spain is the Santiago Bernabéu stadium, that temple of world sport that the Real Madrid soccer team calls home. Along with three other miners, Ariel gets a VIP tour that includes a walk on the field itself—with a television camera in tow. “This is the most beautiful thing I’ve begun to experience,” Ariel says as he stares up at eighty-five thousand empty seats through his Oakley sunglasses. There’s something magically innocent about the way Ariel smiles and his face widens as he turns to take it all in.

  In the first weeks after emerging from the dark corridors of the San José Mine, the thirty-three survivors are standing in an arena of public adulation, while also living with the private memory of their humble backgrounds and the ten weeks they spent at the mountain’s mercy. Edison Peña is soaking up as much media attention and praise as anyone—a man who jogged and sang “Heartbreak Hotel” underground, after all, seems to represent the epitome of the strength and joyfulness of the human spirit. But after surviving inside a thundering mine, Edison can see there is something cruel about being on the surface, watching people go about their “normal” lives. Edison’s mind has lagged behind his body: It’s still in that mountain that’s falling on top of him over and over again; it’s still trapped behind the stone guillotine. The mountain stays with him as he travels the world as an ambassador of Chile, and of mining and jogging culture, visiting Tokyo and Tupelo, Mississippi, and many other places in between. It especially haunts him back home in Santiago. “All the evenness of life, the ‘light’ part of it, really stunned me,” Edison says. “It shocked me to see people walking around, living normally. It shocked me because I would say ‘Hey, where I come from isn’t like that. I come from a place where we were fighting desperately to live.’ I came out to life and I found this shit called peace. It threw me off. It threw a lot of us off.” In the mine Edison ran to forget where he was, and now on the surface he runs to forget where he is. On October 24, eleven days after the rescue, Edison Peña participates in one leg of a triathlon in Santiago, running 10.5 kilometers. “The doctors, the psychologists, they have me on a strict regimen I have to follow,” he tells a television reporter at the race. “I feel sort of abnormal.” Edison confesses to other people, privately and publicly, to feeling unstable, but that doesn’t stop him from accepting an invitation to watch the New York City Marathon. In New York, he sings an Elvis tune on the David Letterman show, and answers questions at a press conference before the race. Why did he run in the mine, someone asks. “I was saying to the mine, ‘I can outrun you, I am going to beat back destiny,’” Edison answers. Edison was more of a cyclist before the accident than a jogger, but he decides he’ll not just be a spectator at the New York City Marathon, he’ll run it, too, and try to finish. A doctor and members of the local running club that invited him tell him that entering a marathon without having trained for it is a foolhardy thing to do, but Edison is determined. Sure enough, his knees start to give out after an hour or so, and he ends up walking about ten miles of the race, but he finishes (with a time of 5 hours, 40 minutes, and 51 seconds), thanks in part to two Mexican immigrant restaurant workers and running-club members who escort him along the entire route. “In this marathon I struggled,” Edison tells the press afterward. “I struggled with myself. And I struggled with my pain.” Several of his colleagues in the mine will say afterward that New York was bad for Edison Peña: It was there he started to fall deeper into alcohol addiction. “If we had really been united, as thirty-three men, we would have looked after Edison and he wouldn’t have had the collapse that he did,” says the young miner Pedro Cortez. In New York, Edison starts to get in arguments with his girlfriend over whether he should be traveling, but he can’t say no when he’s offered another trip. “You start to become a puppet. We became puppets. We’re going here, we’re going there. ‘Stand like this. Over here, over there, under the lights.’ We wanted to go out and bite the world. We had been born again and aaahhh … That first year … I wouldn’t know how to explain it, but it was rough. Pack your luggage, stand in line. Do this, do that. Do! I think, looking at it honestly—it’s like we lost our lives.” Edison is falling deeper into the spiral when he reaches Memphis and Graceland in January, just in time for Elvis’s birthday. At another press conference, Edison sings a few lines from “The Wonder of You,” in an accented but swooning baritone. “When everything I do is wrong / You give me hope and consolation.” He gives his Graceland audience the heartfelt rendition of a man who’s living inside the bluesy world of the song, and several of his listeners, who have no way of knowing what’s tormenting Edison, scream with approval even before he finishes.

  * * *

  For the first few weeks, the miners talk to psychologists and therapists. “My girlfriend says I wake up yelling in the middle of the night,” Carlos Bugueño tells a psychologist, and he later gets pills that help him sleep. “At night, all the memories come back,” Pedro Cortez says. During the day, long silences are haunting, and so are loud, cracking noises. Pedro gets into a van with a group of five mine survivors, and he and the others all fall to the floor at the sound of a motorcycle’s backfire. Bugueño and Cortez join a large number of the survivors at a clinic of the Chilean social security administration in Copiapó for a group therapy session. When the therapist closes the door, for privacy, several of the men stand up to leave. “You have us locked in here,” one says. “Don’t shut us in!” The sight of the closed door, combined with the familiar faces of the men with whom they were trapped, sends several of the men back to their underground emotional state. “We went to the windows and opened all of them,” Cortez says. “They couldn’t have a meeting with all of us together, because the stress was just too much.” They will continue with individual visits to therapists, but most will last only a few weeks.

  The psychologist, Iturra, is sharply critical of the postrescue treatment afforded to the men. His recommendations are largely ignored, including his argument that the men should return to a new, moderate work routine (aboveground, of course) after a week or two of vacation. Instead, most of the men continue to sit at home expecting to enjoy the fruits of their worldwide celebrity, and feel obliged to attend all the official and unofficial events in their honor. “They became trophies,” Iturra says. “They became symbols.” If you make a man a symbol of things that are bigger than any one person can possibly be, you risk stripping that man of his sense of who he really is. “The worst thing that anyone did was to call them heroes,” says one of the miner’s wives. The same government that worked so hard to pull off a technical feat never before seen in history, to rescue thirty-three ordinary men, should have realized that those ordinary men were about to undertake an emotional journey that was also without precedent. But their surface suffering unfolded, for the most part, in the private world of each man’s home, and no official stepped forward to boldly take charge of their recovery.

  Instead, in late October, all thirty-three men are asked to visit La Moneda presidential palace for a public celebration. For a handful, like Florencio Avalos, it will be one of the last times they submit themselves to display. “I went to La Moneda because I had never been there and I always wanted to see that. After that, I never went to anything.” The thirty-three miners receive Chile’s recently minted Bicentennial Medal for heroic actions that encapsulate the proudest qualities of the two-hundred-year-old republic. They listen to the president make a speech in which the rescue becomes a metaphor for what Piñera hopes to accomplish during the rest of his still-young tenure. The president talks about building a country without poverty, a society that treats its workers better, and he says that the 700-meter rescue shaft crafted “by our engineers and technicians,” and which se
rved as “a bridge of life, faith, hope, and liberty,” won’t be the last great project Chile undertakes.

  For the thirty-three men of the San José Mine, as for Chile itself, the future appears to be filled with promise. The miners are rising to new heights, literally, when they visit the offices of their new Santiago lawyers in December. Following a series of recommendations, the miners have chosen the biggest law firm in the country, Carey and Company, to transform the oral agreement they reached underground into a legally binding document. Carey and its specialists will also represent them in the negotiations for movie and book rights, contacting talent agencies in New York and Los Angeles, and the Washington, D.C., law firm Arendt Fox. But first the men must see exactly what Carey has to offer, which requires a group visit to the firm’s new offices on the forty-third floor of what is, at this moment, the tallest building in Chile—the recently completed Titanium tower in a swank neighborhood of Santiago known as “Sanhattan.”

  Carey has assigned ten lawyers to draft the agreements. They are among the country’s best attorneys, bright and ambitious multilingual men and women educated and trained in law schools and law firms in Chile, Europe, and the United States, but when they finally meet the men of the San José Mine, they are momentarily awestruck. “When you looked at them, you felt this overwhelming feeling of patriotism,” one of the lawyers says. Looking at these Chilean everymen is like looking at the flag, or the Andes, though the feeling of awe dissipates fairly quickly as the lawyers get down to business. They’ve prepared a twenty-page contract, and a PowerPoint presentation, but the interest of the miners in the subtleties of intellectual property law as practiced in Chile and the United States soon wanes—one of the lawyers notes a young miner in the back playing a game on his phone, looking childlike.

  When the presentation is done, the lawyers leave the miners alone in a meeting room to decide whether they’ll agree to it. The corporate meeting room on the forty-third floor is one of the most impressive in Latin America—it’s called the Manquehue Room because it faces a peak in the Andes of the same name. The discussion is short and civil, even though several of the miners are furious at Mario Sepúlveda because he granted an interview to a BBC journalist who is writing a book from which the miners won’t make a cent. Mario has also spoken independently with a Latin American movie producer who said he could offer an astronomical sum of money for movie rights. The agreement with the Carey firm will create a new entity called Propiedad Intelectual Minera, S.A. (Miner Intellectual Property, Inc.), but that agreement is worthless unless all thirty-three men agree to join it, including Mario Sepúlveda. The man with the heart of a dog is, at that moment, one of the most popular men in Chile, and he could easily go off and sign his own deal. “Mario was very much aware of his power,” says one of the lawyers. Mario brags to the lawyer that he can make a call “and have tea with the president this afternoon.”

  Mario Sepúlveda, feeling the pressure of his colleagues, and faced with the prospect that they might all lambast him in the press if he does otherwise, agrees to sign. Propiedad Intelectual Minera is born and the men, who on August 5 entered a subterranean workplace that was among the least desirable places to work in Chile, can take a moment to feel like corporate bigwigs in the tallest building in Chile. The skyscraper isn’t even a third as tall as the San José Mine is deep, but the view through the meeting room’s windows is limited only by the smog of Santiago’s southern hemisphere summer. The building is flooded with light, and from their perch in the sky the former miners can see a new highway being built beneath the Mapocho River, a massive construction project that is a symbol of Chile’s entry into the “first world.” A new Chile is being born, and its future is boundless, and so is theirs. They are symbols of that nation’s fortitude, the president himself has said this, and Congress has given each of them a medal forged from ore extracted from the mountains of Chile by men who suffer and labor deep below the ground.

  20

  UNDERGROUND

  In their widely publicized visit to Disney World in January, the men of the San José Mine wear yellow faux mining helmets with black mouse ears attached. In February, twenty-five of the miners visit the Holy Land, and the Israeli ministry of tourism gives each man a hat emblazoned with the slogan “Israel Loves You.” The men of the San José are grateful to the Disney Corporation for the opportunity to take their family members to “the Happiest Place on Earth”; and they’re grateful to the government of Israel for the chance to visit the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Jordan River and so many other sacred places and thus pay homage to the faith that helped save their lives. But mixed in with that gratitude is the oddness of the celebrity treatment that follows them as they circle the globe. “To be treated like a rock star—that was stressful,” says Pedro Cortez, who goes on both trips. “We got to Disney World and people wanted to touch us. As if we were God, almost.” A visitor to the Magic Kingdom sees a man in a yellow helmet walking down its pretend Main Street and is told he’s “one of those Chilean miners.” The visitor remembers the story attached to that helmeted man: He’s been resurrected from the deepest stone tomb in human history. How often is one in the presence of a miracle? So they point cameras in the helmeted man’s direction, follow him a bit just to watch him walk. “Yes, it’s a miracle we’re alive. We’re grateful to God and all the people who helped us,” Pedro says. “But it was like being in a movie about Holy Week, where Jesus is walking and everyone is following him.” This odd behavior of strangers continues in the Holy Land itself.

  When he returns to Chile, Pedro decides it’s time to stop feeling like a hero or a character in a Bible story. He’s going to get his life back in order. For starters, instead of buying the pricey yellow Camaro he dreamed of when he was trapped in the mine, he buys a used Jeep. More important, he decides to enroll in a university, to get a degree in electronics. But as he begins attending classes, there is the small problem of being the only worldwide celebrity on campus. Journalists stake out his classroom to talk. “I wanted to be relaxed but everything turned against me,” he says. Television news reports and long silences both trigger memories of the mine, and the faces of his girlfriend and relatives trigger feelings of inadequacy. One day Pedro leaves class, weeping, and misses two days of school. “I felt like I was drowning.” He believes he is disappointing all the people around him, that he’ll never live up to their expectations, but he struggles to explain these feelings to the professional who is supposed to be helping him. “Even the psychologist didn’t understand,” he says.

  Víctor Segovia does not suffer from nightmares or a sense of worthlessness in the first months after he’s liberated from the San José Mine. But his cell phone is ringing constantly with the voices of friends and relatives, who see him as the person who can summon the magic that will solve their problems: not because he’s a living miracle with access to the divine but rather for the money that’s in his pocket. They call with a series of laments and requests: “Víctor, I don’t feel well.” “I’ve got a problem at home, huevón.” “I need a million pesos” (about $2,000). “They’re going to repossess my television, my dining-room furniture, help me!” Víctor says his friends and relatives are treating him “like a bank.” “I’d have a guy call me and ask for forty or fifty large,” he says, or about $80 or $100, “and he wouldn’t even invite me to a beer first.” “The whole thing was just to get money out of you.” He is surrounded by many concentric circles of need: eventually friends of relatives, and friends of friends start to ask him for help. When Víctor finally stops loaning money, he realizes he’s doled out about 6 million Chilean pesos (about $12,000, roughly a year’s salary), most of which will never be paid back.

  * * *

  I start to meet the miners at about the same time it’s beginning to dawn on them that their postrescue bonanza isn’t going to be as big, or last as long, as they expected. Like Víctor Segovia, they begin to burn through their Farkas money fairly quickly—a million Chilean pes
os doesn’t go as far as it used to. And with much of Chile believing they’ll get rich selling their story, no one follows through on Farkas’s call to raise one million dollars for each of them. Richard Villarroel is the very first miner I talk to in private, at a table in an empty restaurant in Copiapó. He tells me about hitting the drill bit with a wrench when it came through, about growing up without a father, and about the recent birth of his first son. He brings the conversation to the present and his mental state, because now that he’s no longer visiting foreign lands and he’s home, the burden of what he’s been through is all the more apparent. “I’m in the hardest part right now,” Richard tells me. “I don’t have any feelings. I’m a more serious person. A harder person. I don’t cry for anything. My wife has noticed it, too. Whatever happens around me, it’s like I don’t care. I have this disorder in my head. I could be talking to you one moment, and then suddenly I lose the thread [se me va la onda]. I have to wait for you to bring up what we were talking about so that I can remember what it was.” I ask him if he’s been seeing a psychologist or a psychiatrist. I was, he says. But the professional treating him said: “You’re fine. You can go.” To which Richard responded: “I am? But I don’t feel the same. Talk to my wife. She’ll explain to you how I was before and how I am now.”