Deep Down Dark

by Héctor Tobar

  Eventually, Alex’s response to his emotional crisis is to hold on tighter to his wife, Jessica, and to depend on her more. He realizes he can’t leave home for a long trip without her, and when he goes to Santiago for a meeting with the other miners, it’s the thirty-three men and Jessica Vega, not because Jessica is a busybody but simply because Alex isn’t able to get on a plane or be in a hotel room without her. The other miners don’t hold this against him, because they all know exactly what he’s going through.

  Each time I meet Alex again—seven months later, a year later—he’s doing better. At his home in the Arturo Prat neighborhood, I meet his father and his sister and brother, and I interview Jessica, too. After a while, it’s clear to me that there’s a lot about what happened to Alex underground that Jessica doesn’t know. “Can I tell her?” I ask. Eventually, she’ll read it in this book, and maybe it’s better she hear it from me now. Alex says it’s okay, so I tell Jessica how Alex was sent flying by one of the blasts caused by the mine’s collapse; I tell her how, in his desperation to reach home, he risked his life trying to crawl under the stone blocking the Ramp; and I tell her how he offered not to eat on the sixteenth day, when the other miners said he looked painfully thin, weak, and hungry. The realization that her husband has been carrying these memories as he walks about their home causes Jessica to weep, briefly, and then later, perhaps, it brings her a measure of understanding, as if the plot and meaning of the movie in which she’d been living had suddenly been made clearer to her.

  * * *

  The accident at the San José Mine briefly made Copiapó the most famous mining city in the world. In the years since, life there has quickly returned to its everyday rhythms, to the routines of mineral extraction and the vagaries of weather and geology Darwin noted in his journal. An 8.2 magnitude earthquake shook the Atacama Desert. And nine months after the thirty-three men of the San José Mine were rescued, torrential rains fell on the city. The Copiapó River filled with water for the first time in fourteen years, and the riverbank flooded, forcing the evacuation of the Tornini neighborhood of squatters, much as another storm had driven María and Darío Segovia from their home as children. The Tornini squatters were later evicted by the city government to make way for an access road to a new nearby riverside mall that is yet another symbol of the city’s booming growth. After the neighborhood had been emptied but not yet demolished, stray dogs wandered through the ruins.

  About a hundred yards away, on the other side of the bridge that takes the Pan-American Highway across the Copiapó River, the city erected the most conspicuous local monument to the rescue of “the thirty-three of Atacama,” a tall, chrome-skinned woman holding a dove. Donated by the Chinese government, the sculpture faces the dry bed of the Copiapó River and greets all those who enter Copiapó in cars and buses from the south, including those who come to work in the region’s mines. Outside the city, at the San José Mine, a cross and monument have been erected at the spot where the families of the thirty-three men gathered and built Camp Esperanza. Only rarely do tourists undertake the forty-minute drive from Copiapó to visit. The entrance to the mine is covered, top to bottom, with a chain-link fence. If the guard at the site isn’t looking, you can walk up to the fence and peer into the gloomy tunnel that leads into an empty and broken maze of caverns below.

  * * *

  The last time I meet with Alex Vega and his family, it’s not to interview them but to share a meal together. I head out on foot to their home and enter a working-class neighborhood of Copiapó at twilight, a collection of homes hugging the low ground. There is no one else but me on the sidewalk, until I see a group of young men gathered under a weak streetlamp that’s just come on in the growing darkness. They look furtively down an asphalt avenue conspicuously absent of traffic, and I walk past them, and then past warehouse buildings, and homes of tin and wood clustered behind tall concrete walls. Once again I am alone on the street, though I sense that behind these barriers there are especially industrious families who have filled their properties to the brim with rooms, furniture, and appliances—but whose humility allows them to enjoy this prosperity only if they can be certain no one will see them. I take a wrong turn and come upon a pair of boys rolling a tire down one of the sloped streets; they help me find my way.

  When I reach Alex’s address I find his homestead is how I remember it: unfinished. Alex hasn’t completed the building project that sent him into the San José Mine to earn a bit of extra money. He’s still got one old room that’s crowded with stoves and a table, and one newer room with a big couch and some sofa chairs; in between, there’s an empty, open space waiting to be filled with new construction. The wall he’s been building with his wife is taller, however, and nearly done. When he shakes my hand I note how, for the first time, it’s with the firm grip of a man who works with tools for a living. After more than two years of emotional suffering, Alex has taken several steps to heal himself, including returning to work, at a job repairing vehicles. When we sit and talk, he tells me what he did to end his nightmares about being buried alive. “I couldn’t sleep, so I told myself, ‘I need to confront this fear. I need to go back into a mine.’” He asked a brother-in-law who worked underground if he could join him, and for a week Alex entered the mine every day, going three hundred meters below the surface. He drove down into the deep dark, wandering about the stone passageways, and then back up and out those dank caverns and into the sunshine. The nightmares never returned after that, and he stopped waking up and crying in the middle of the night. The next step in his recovery, he tells me, will be to host a gathering of all his family and friends, to talk about what he saw and survived during his sixty-nine days underground, a topic that he and the people around him have deliberately avoided for years. “I want to turn the page and leave it all behind.”

  When Alex’s sister Priscilla and her boyfriend, the mariachi Roberto Ramirez, arrive, and Alex’s brother Jonathan arrives a bit later, the mood is light and full of laughter. The presence of the author writing the book about Alex and his coworkers leads Jessica, Roberto, and Priscilla to remember what Camp Esperanza was like, with its bonfires and its families and its odd characters: the clown who came to make the children laugh, the celebrities who came to have their pictures taken, the workers who came to drill and search, and the reporters who came from every corner of the globe. Then, because it’s a pleasant night, and because some of the Vegas want to smoke, we go outside.

  As his two small children run and circle him several times in the chasing game they’re playing, scampering in and out of the cement courtyard, Alex has the calm, content look of a man who has returned home from a long journey, and who can see how his presence is soothing and a source of strength to the people around him. Under the black sky and the stars, I listen as his family tells more stories about the sixty-nine days they spent at the San José, and especially about the predawn hours of August 22 in Camp Esperanza. Remember that night, Roberto asks, what a magical night that was? Alex says no, he doesn’t remember, and everyone laughs: Well, it felt like you were there with us, Alex, even though you were still buried seven hundred meters underground. It was a cold August night, but the Vega family was full of hope, because the Plan B drill was said to be close to the Refuge, and they had faith it would break through to Alex. The desert around the mine was covered with flowers, after a rare shower a few days earlier. The Vegas remember the songs they sang that night, including the one that Roberto wrote about “El Pato” Alex and his seventy-year-old father entering the mountain to search for him.

  On that night, in a flower-covered desert, and in a fungi-filled cavern underneath, Alex and his family lived an epic story that belongs to the world and to the history of Chile; but it’s also a family tale as intimate as this small and still-unfinished space Alex and Jessica Vega call their own. For Alex, the odyssey ends with the renewal of the daily rhythms in his home: on mornings when he leaves for work as the fog called the camanchaca rolls in; on afternoons wh
en the desert sun burns through it; and on nights like this one when the cooling air calls him outside with his family. I look up at the unfamiliar canopy of the Southern Hemisphere night above me, and I see a sky similar to the one Alex’s family saw from Camp Esperanza, including a constellation called Phoenix, and the five bright stars of Crux, a cluster of stars also known as the Southern Cross. Under the southern stars, before dawn on August 22, they had faith they would soon witness a miracle, and they sang a song that declared Alex would be freed from his mountain prison. Tonight they sing it again, for a visitor from a faraway country, and for Alex.

  “And El Pato will return!”

  “He will return!”

  When the song finishes, Alex Vega looks at the people who love him, and who are smiling with the memory of the night they first sang those words.

  “And here I am,” he says.

  NOTES

  2. The End of Everything

  1 A common Chilean insult and term of endearment derived from huevo, or egg, a slang word for testicle.

  13. Absolute Leader

  1 In Spanish, Mario said “concha de su madre.” This means, literally, “your mother’s shell,” though its full, vulgar sense is more akin to “your mother’s cunt.” Concha de su madre is such a common oath in South America, however, that I’ve rendered it here as the slightly less offensive “motherfucker.”

  17. Rebirth

  1 Arriba ese ánimo compañero, tenemos que organizarnos primero / Júntense todos, tenemos que rezar.

  2 … decirles a mi esposa e hijos que lo lament / Ellos, con ansias, esperándome en esa puerta llegar.

  3 Si vos la cagáis, yo te meto preso.

  4 Oye, culijuntos. Andáis haciendo puras huevadas no más.

  21. Under the Stars

  1 Tenía ganas de sacarle la concha de su madre pero nunca me dejaron.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book is based, in large measure, on the hundreds of hours of interviews I conducted in Chile with the thirty-three survivors of the San José Mine collapse and their families, and on the diary kept by Víctor Segovia. Many of the interviews were conducted in the homes of the miners, individually and privately, or with their wives, girlfriends, children, and other relatives present. Some interviews were conducted in groups, and in hotels in Copiapó, and in the offices of the Carey law firm in Santiago.

  As with any life-threatening and life-altering experience lived by a large group of people, there are often dramatic differences of opinion about certain events, and about how certain individuals conducted themselves. The thirty-three men, as a group, entrusted me to tell their story fully, and to sort out exactly what is truth and what is myth, and I’ve tried to do so to the best of my ability. The responsibility for any errors in the text is mine alone.

  Many of the physical details of the miners’ experiences during their first seventeen days trapped underground are derived from my interviews of the miners—but also from several videos shot by the men themselves. José Henríquez took his cell phone into the mine that fateful August 5 (instead of leaving it inside his locker on the surface, as others did), and that cell phone’s camera provided the only visual record of those days. In addition, the Chilean government shared with me the unedited version of the first video shot not long after the men were discovered, footage that provided dramatic evidence of the physical degradation of the men and of the inhuman conditions inside the San José Mine. I also had access to additional private images and videos shot by the miners themselves (with cameras sent down after rescue shafts reached them). In reconstructing what it’s like to enter and work in a subterranean mine, I also benefited greatly from a visit to the interior of a nearby mine with the then minister of mining, Laurence Golborne.

  In addition to my interviews, a key document in writing this book was the report on the accident and its causes prepared by an investigative commission of Chile’s Congress. The NASA experts who traveled to Chile told their stories to a NASA oral history project, and I drew upon those accounts in the chapters on the rescue effort. More details came from the interviews the American driller Jeff Hart granted to a Colorado television station and a talk he gave at the Colorado School of Mines. A 1993 study of the geology and “mineralization” of the southern Atacama by several scientists for the International Journal of Earth Sciences (Geologische Rundschau) was a source for the passages on the geological history of the region. Darwin’s reminiscences of Copiapó and the Atacama are from his famous journal The Voyage of the Beagle. The account of Pedro Rivero’s unsuccessful rescue attempt is drawn, in part, from his November 2010 interview with the mining magazine Area Minera. The excellent 2011 retrospective on the rescue by the industry magazine Minería Chilena also provided and confirmed critical facts. Many details about the rescue come from the voluminous daily coverage of the events in Chilean newspapers, especially from La Tercera and El Mercurio, and from the work of Carlos Vergara Ehrenberg in his book, Operación San Lorenzo. This longtime veteran of newspaper reporting would like to acknowledge the professionalism of the Chilean writers and photographers who covered the San José Mine disaster, and he hopes that they will see the influence of their collective labors on this account.

  Among the many interviews I conducted with rescuers and officials, many stand out, especially those with Golborne, Cristián Barra, Pedro Gallo, André Sougarret, the drillers Eduardo Hurtado and Nelson Flores, the rescuer Manuel González, the shift supervisor Pablo Ramirez, and Carlos Pinilla. The psychologist Alberto Iturra said he spoke to me because “my clients, the miners,” asked him to do so. And, finally, I am especially indebted to the families of Darío Segovia, Florencio Avalos, and Alex Vega for the many hours they spent with me in their homes.

  The attorney María Teresa Hola guided me around Copiapó when I was just learning to navigate the city, and also shared her knowledge of her native city’s history, as did many other Copiapó residents. At the Carey law firm in Santiago, Paulina Silva and Pilar Fernández recounted their experiences with the miners to me, and Claudia Becerra and Soledad Azérreca helped track down the miners for interviews and organized the logistics of my trips to Chile. The attorneys Guillermo Carey, Fernando García, Remberto Valdés, and Ricardo Fischer were among those who agreed to entrust me with this project, and I am grateful for their support.

  At Phoenix Pictures, Edward McGurn, Patricia Riggen, and the legendary Mike Medavoy offered many wonderful words of encouragement after reading my manuscript when it was still a work in progress. Nuria Anson transcribed hundreds of pages of my interviews—without her tireless and exceedingly fast work, this book would have taken years longer to write. Jessica Boianover in Buenos Aires transcribed additional interviews, as did Jazmin Ortega in Los Angeles, and Ricardo Luis Mosso in Buenos Aires conducted research. Idra Novey provided much helpful advice on my Spanish translations. The screenwriter José Rivera was my partner during many interviews, and his insights on the miners’ story were invaluable. The film producers Leopoldo Enríquez and Cecilia Avalos also helped set up many interviews.

  I wrote most of this book while employed at the Los Angeles Times, and I’d like to thank the colleagues who helped me fulfill my responsibilities there while I simultaneously took on this massive project, including Nita Lelyveld, Joy Press, Carolyn Kellogg, and David Ulin. And I am deeply indebted to Judy Baldwin for her insights about the creative process and the human soul: Her counsel helped keep me sane and centered while writing this book.

  Thank you to Jay Mandel, Alicia Gordon, and Eric Rovner at William Morris Endeavor for bringing this project to me and entrusting me with it. My longtime friend and editor Sean McDonald didn’t flinch when I told him I wanted to write this book, and he gave it a home at FSG.

  Finally, and most important, my wife, Virginia Espino, sustained our family for the three years I spent working on this book, and endured my absences during the five trips I made to Chile. I could not have written this book without her love and support. Thank you, amor de mi
vida.

  ALSO BY HÉCTOR TOBAR

  FICTION

  The Tattooed Soldier

  The Barbarian Nurseries

  NONFICTION

  Translation Nation

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Héctor Tobar is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and a novelist. He is the author of The Barbarian Nurseries, Translation Nation, and The Tattooed Soldier. The son of Guatemalan immigrants, he is a native of the city of Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife and three children.

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

  Copyright © 2014 by Héctor Tobar

  All rights reserved

  First edition, 2014

  An excerpt from Deep Down Dark originally appeared in The New Yorker.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint “It’s as if I’m pushing through massive mountains” from The Poetry of Rilke by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated and edited by Edward Snow. Translation copyright © 2009 by Edward Snow. Reprinted by permission of North Point Press, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

  Composite picture of the 33 miners by AFP / Getty Images.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Tobar, Héctor, 1963–