Authors: Héctor Tobar
The prayer becomes a daily ritual. They gather each day just before they eat, at around noon, for a brief sermon from Henríquez, and then later from others, including Osman Araya, a man who converted to Evangelical Christianity after a tumultuous young adulthood. The prayers and the meals are the one time each day all thirty-three of them unite. Soon, each prayer meeting will include a self-criticism session at which the men apologize to one another for their transgressions, big and small. I’m sorry I raised my voice. I’m sorry I didn’t help get the water. With each passing day there are fewer headlamps illuminating their prayer and apology sessions, and those still working have a light that’s a little dimmer. This is frightening, to have each new prayer take you a little deeper into what may be a final and unending darkness. A little later, Juan Illanes removes the paper clip–size bulb from the headlight of one of the vehicles, and uses some strands of telephone wire to connect it to a battery he’s removed from one of the nineteen vehicles trapped with them. From then on, a weak, gray light hovers over the praying miners. To Yonni Barrios, in that light, they all seem to grow taller. He knows it’s an illusion of light and shadow, but there’s something magical about the way they look under that small bulb, standing or kneeling, listening to the word of God.
* * *
When Víctor Segovia begins to write again, it’s to say he cried during the prayers led by José Henríquez. He addresses his daughters. “I deeply feel the pain I am causing you,” Víctor writes. “I would give everything to soothe your pain, but it’s not in my hands.” He’s absorbed the ideas of the Pastor’s sermon, of his own smallness before the mountain and God’s judgment. In the course of a single day of writing in his diary he reflects on his life—“Now I understand how wrong I was to drink so much”—and he gets closer to accepting the idea that he’s going to die in the San José Mine. “Never in my life did I think I would die in such a manner,” he writes. Just days earlier he’d been at home surrounded by the things that made him feel good: his music, his friends from the mine, gathered for a party at his home. “I don’t know if I deserve this or not, but it is very cruel.” He begins to say goodbye, to his daughters, his parents, his grandchildren, promising: “I love you and will look after you wherever I am.” A few hours later he writes: “I feel guilty for causing you this pain. I should never have been in this mine knowing the shape it was in.” He begins to give his daughter Maritza instructions for settling his affairs and begs her to help his mother with her debts. Maybe someone will find their bodies, eventually, and take this note to Maritza, and if that happens Víctor will have cared for his family, in some small way, from beyond the grave.
* * *
Someone says that if you heat up food it has more calories and more nourishment. So on the third day they’re trapped the miners decide to cook a batch of soup and have a kind of picnic inside the mine, by the place where the mechanics used to work and the air circulates a bit. They manage to get all of the men out of the Refuge for the walk uphill to that place, on Level 135.
In the middle of a gray pile of stones, they make a fire that’s about as big as two cupped hands. They remove the cover from the air filter on one of the big machines, turn it upside down, and make that their pot. José Henríquez has a cell phone he brought into the mine and realizes he can use it to record this event—but he doesn’t know how to operate the camera, so he gives it to Claudio Acuña. Mario Sepúlveda becomes the main narrator of the video, speaking to Acuña and the camera with a voice that suggests he believes outsiders will find this recording one day. “Tuna with peas!” he announces. “Eight liters of water, one can of tuna, some peas. A little tiny fire here. So that we can survive this situation!” Around Sepúlveda, men move about with yellow and red helmets on, most of them shirtless, and a few are sitting on the pile of rocks by the fire, a dancing ball of orange light near the center of the dark frame of the video. Sometimes Acuña turns the camera and captures the lamp of one of the vehicles, but mostly the image is of a black space that’s filled up with Sepúlveda’s voice. “And we’re going to show that we are Chileans of the heart. And we’re going to have a delicious soup today,” he says. Acuña turns off the cell-phone camera to save the battery, and a few minutes later he turns it back on to record Sepúlveda serving his completed soup to each man, using a metal cup that clanks against the bottom of the air-filter pot. He pours the hot liquid into plastic cups to several different men, and the water is murky colored.
“Has everybody got some?” Sepúlveda asks. “There’s a bit more, if anyone wants it.” He scrapes his tin cup against the bottom of the air filter and starts to talk to his son, as if he were watching the recording. “Francisco, when God tells you to be a warrior, these balls [
esta hueva
] are what it means to be a warrior.” He imagines his son watching him, a warrior feeding these other warriors, refusing to surrender.
You see, Francisco, a warrior isn’t just someone who slays dragons—or Englishmen, like Mel Gibson does in our favorite movie,
Braveheart
. A warrior can also be a man who takes apart an engine to make soup and then serves it to his brothers, keeping up their spirits with the rising inflections of his voice
.
Acuña stops recording so that he can pray with the others when Henríquez blesses the meal. As the men around Henríquez bow their heads, he gives thanks to God for the food they are about to eat. Then they sit on or near the pile of rocks and sip from their “soup,” with its sheen of oil that might be from the tuna but also from the clouded industrial water they used to cook it. And sitting there, in that relaxed and convivial moment, a few of the men remember the last big meal they shared together, at Víctor Segovia’s house in Copiapó, when Víctor had most of the men from the A shift over for a party, on a Wednesday afternoon after their last shift was over, before the men from the south departed for home on the overnight buses to Santiago.
It was two weeks earlier in a neighborhood where the streets are named for minerals. Víctor Segovia’s house is on Chalcopyrite Street. Alex Vega brought a big pot that’s called a
fondo
in Chile. They were going to make
cocimiento
, with chicken, pork, fish, and potatoes with the peel still on, and a little bed of cabbage at the bottom. The recipe says to cook all this in water, then pour in some wine near the end. They set it all to boil, and then they imbibed Cristal beer and some wine, but not Mario Sepúlveda, because he’s a Jehovah’s Witness and doesn’t drink—he agreed to keep an eye on the pot instead. After a few drinks Edison Peña picked up a microphone—Víctor Segovia is a musician, he has a lot of sound equipment around the house—and started singing some Elvis tunes, including “Blue Suede Shoes,” in his thick, Chilean-accented English. “Hey, that’s music for old people,” Pedro Cortez and some of the younger guys said, teasing Edison, because they live in the world of reggaeton and cumbia, and that old music from the U.S. South sounds like something their parents might listen to.
Yeah, we were all having a pretty good time, out there at Víctor Segovia’s house, the men remember. But then the party ended, not long after Pablo “the Cat” Rojas’s cell phone sounded at about 4:30 p.m., just when Sepúlveda was saying the
cocimiento
was ready to go and the scent of stewed meats was floating about the house, and the guys were feeling nice and warm inside from the wine and the beer. Pablo Rojas and Víctor Segovia are cousins, and the call brought word that Pablo’s father had just died. This was not unexpected news, because the elder Rojas was a lifelong miner who had become a hopelessly addicted drinker after he retired. You could find him in the plaza of Copiapó, after drinking for several days at a time, begging for money to drink a little more. José Rojas had been slowly killing himself for a few years, and now the inevitable had happened, and the news hit Pablo pretty hard. Pablo didn’t cry, but his cousin Víctor could see he was in a bad way, so he said that maybe Pablo should go to the hospital to see his father and not worry about the party and the meal.
No one was in the mood to eat after Pablo left, and the party broke up pretty quickly—Luis Urzúa arrived late, when the last of the guests was leaving. Urzúa didn’t have any food either, and that huge pot of
cocimiento
went uneaten.
“All that food! And we just left it all there and went home!” Pedro Cortez shouts out now, as they sit around a pile of rocks at Level 135. Freshly cooked pork, fish, and chicken, boiled in white wine, in a huge
fondo
. And now they’re drinking a cup of “soup” cooked in a truck’s air filter from a single can of tuna and eight liters of Mario Sepúlveda’s bathwater, with no salt and only a few peas and some motor oil for flavoring—all divided among thirty-three men!
It’s funny what can happen to a miner in the course of just two weeks: They’ve finished one shift, working hard to lift gold and copper from the earth, and they’ve lived well, cooking up big, miner-size portions of food to eat, with beer and wine to drink (even if they never did get around to eating the meal); and they’ve lost a father and an uncle who killed himself when he couldn’t be a miner anymore; and then they’ve gone back to work, got trapped in a mine, made soup from water meant for machines, and blessed that dirty water as “food” and shared it with their brothers. If they manage to get out of here, they will tell this to the people they love, a story about food, family, and friendship. It’s a tale of two meals: one aboveground, with nice dishes, lots of food, and very little eating; and one belowground, with very little food, in which they licked the insides of their plastic cups.
* * *
After the meal, a few of the men get excited because they say they hear the sound of distant drilling.
“I can feel something vibrating,” someone says. “I hear it.” Everyone turns very quiet, to see if they can hear it, too.
“It’s a lie, you can’t feel anything,” someone answers, and the discussion goes back and forth for a while until, finally, even those who said they felt that faint and possibly imaginary vibration concede that it’s stopped, or disappeared, or that maybe it never even existed. Víctor Segovia throws himself on the warm mud of the Ramp outside the Refuge, and fights off depression by writing in his diary. “Down here there is no day, only darkness and explosions.” He describes how the men around him are sleeping, some using plastic soda bottles as pillows. Víctor and the others feel the monster of “insanity” welling up inside them, he writes. It’s his fourth day underground now. He draws a diagram of two dozen prone stick figures, scattered before a doorway in the rock marked
REFUGIO
, and in its stark crudeness it resembles the grim police sketch of some crime scene. He lists the names of his five daughters again, and of his mother and father, and of himself, and then circles a heart around them. “Don’t cry for me,” he writes. “We had good times, always, with our
azados
[barbecues] and making
cocimiento
.”
At the next prayer session, at noon, the Pastor tries to keep them strong and Víctor records his words. Being trapped in the San José “is a test that God set before us so that we can think about the things we’ve done in our lives that were wrong,” the Pastor says. “If we get out of this place, it will be like being reborn into the world.”
At 4:15 p.m. they think they hear drilling again. Two of the men get very excited and start to shout, but within an hour, the sound is gone. Víctor has broken into a rash again, from the heat and from the worry. All the excitement of hearing the drill evaporates and Víctor studies the now-quiet men around him. “We look like cavemen, full of soot, and we are skinny, which is very noticeable on most of us.”
Finally, at 7:15 p.m. on August 8, seventy-eight hours after being trapped, Víctor records the sound of something spinning, grinding, and hammering against rock. For three hours it grows steadily louder. At 10:00 p.m., Yonni Barrios is ready to believe it, too. It’s unmistakably a drill, the sound traveling through two thousand feet of rock. Omar Reygadas says it’s a dirt drill, because those are the ones that use a hammer: A diamond-tipped drill doesn’t make that much noise. Soon it seems to be everywhere, coming from every wall. It grows louder, and to men who work with such tools, the pneumatic pressure at work is palpable. Rat-tat-tat. Grind-grind-grind. It’s a drill, powered by air, working its way down the rock, and it’s headed toward them, as made clear by the fact that as the hours pass the sound grows louder.
“Do you hear that,
huevones
?” Mario Sepúlveda shouts. “Do you hear that? What a beautiful noise!”
Someone up there is coming for them.
“Those drills can make one hundred meters a day,” someone says.
Everyone starts doing the math. Maybe by Friday or Saturday, at the earliest, they’ll break through, which means another five or six days without a true meal.
* * *
When the men eat their daily cookies, some allow each bite to stay in their mouths a long time without swallowing, because the taste itself is sort of like eating, as if they were ingesting an entire package of cookies, and not just two. Even just a few days of hunger can lead a man to do things he might not do otherwise, which explains why one day the saline solution that was in the first-aid box in the Refuge suddenly disappears. “The saline solution is gone,
niños
,” someone says at the daily meeting. “Let the person who took it please step forward and return it. Or if you drank it already, let us know.” No one steps forward, even though several of the men know who is responsible for its theft: Samuel “CD” Avalos, the vendor of pirated music. “I stayed quiet,” Samuel later says with a chuckle. “It was just one of my crazy things I did one night.” He’s been secretly sipping at it, and has drunk about half the plastic bag already. “It tasted salty.”
“Well, if no one knows where it is, we need to find it,” someone says. “Everyone start looking.”