Authors: Héctor Tobar
When the drilling isn’t so loud, and when the men stop talking, Víctor and the others in and near the Refuge hear an intermittent rumbling sound. It doesn’t come from the walls, or from a distant rockfall, but from inside the Refuge itself, and it’s loud enough that Víctor takes note of it in his diary. Víctor doesn’t know it, but this noise has a scientific name—borborygmus, the noises caused by the layers of smooth muscle inside the stomachs and small intestines of the men squeezing and pushing down food that isn’t there. It’s a gurgling rumble set off by the remnants of the very little food they put in their mouths a few hours earlier, a noise made louder by the echo chamber of an empty stomach. Each contraction is amplified and transmitted for other hungry men to hear, causing them to think about food a little more than they are already.
* * *
On a table in the Refuge, some of the men play checkers, from a set made with pieces of cardboard. Later, Luis Urzúa, concerned about the men in the Refuge beginning to wallow and snap at one another, makes a set of dominoes by pulling apart and cutting up the white plastic frame of the reflective traffic-hazard triangle in his truck. Higher up the Ramp, at Level 105, where the mechanics and Luis himself sleep, Juan Illanes is working hard to keep up the morale of the
viejos
. He tells them stories. Illanes has a deep baritone voice, and the clear, confident enunciation of a television anchor, and he’s articulate, educated, and has traveled widely enough in Chile that he has many interesting things to say.
Mostly, Illanes, on the sixth, seventh, and eighth days of their involuntary fast, talks about food. “Have you ever seen a lamb being cooked? On a spit, over a fire?” he asks the men grouped around him, sitting on their makeshift “beds” of cardboard and canvas scraps over on the Ramp by Luis Urzúa’s pickup. Several of the men say yes, they have seen a lamb on a spit. “Ah, but what about six being cooked all at once?” It might seem torture to speak of food to men who don’t have any, but no one tells Illanes to stop as he continues with his cheerful description of how it was he came to attend such a banquet. “I was on the pampa. By Puerto Natales,” he tells the miners. He was in the army during the near-war with Argentina in 1978. “I was out there, with fifty reservists, about twelve hundred meters, no, make that eight hundred meters from the border.” It was Christmastime, a season of traditional feasts, and “all we had to eat was army food,” the tasteless provisions doled out to men on the front. One of the soldiers, a local boy, said: “This isn’t the way we do Christmas down here. We make big meals.” At that point, another soldier spotted some horses nearby. “They were Argentine horses: big heads, all mangy, truly ugly animals,” Illanes recounts with a chuckle. “I can do a little business with these,” said the local soldier, who had the look of a gaucho, and he disappeared into the night leading several away.
“The next morning, we wake up, and there are
twelve
lambs on two poles, all skinned and cleaned and perfect,” Illanes tells his fellow miners, several of whom are now grinning. Six lambs each on a pair of long metal rods hanging between posts. “So we all go to get firewood,” scrambling around the treeless pampa in search of bits of scrub branches, he says. “Pretty soon, we had a nice little bonfire, a real tower of embers going.
Chiquillos
, it was beautiful.” Illanes hears little sighs of comfort from some of the miners around him, who are no doubt imagining the sound of meat and fat crackling over a fire, but he’s not finished yet. Because then, he continues, one of the gaucho soldiers showed up with a bag, and passed out a bit of golden tobacco to each soldier, and a piece of paper, and they each rolled a cigarette in the peasant style. “In short,
chiquillos
, it was a Christmas to remember.”
Illanes recounts the story with such detail that it must be true, and in the dim light, and in his slow telling, the miners around him feel as if they’ve been listening to an old radio show. He tells them another military story from the south, of riding across the Chilean pampa on horseback, and his encounter with a fungus known as the
dihueñe
. To the northerners from drier climes who’ve never seen these delicacies, he describes them: “They’re mushrooms that grow on the branches of trees, and especially roble trees when they’re young.” They’re orange and honeycombed, the size of a walnut, with a sweet, clear liquid inside. “So there I am horseback riding, when I come upon this shrub that’s not six feet high. And its branches are all covered, top to bottom, with
dihueñes.
You can’t even see the branch they’re attached to, there are so many. And each one is the size of an apple.”
“No!”
“Liar!”
“It’s true. As big as apples, and
riquísimas
, too. And
viejos
, let me tell you: I ate those. And I ate, and ate and ate. And since they’re so spongy and light, you never feel like you’re getting full.”
Illanes finishes his story and none of the men have asked him to stop talking about food. “When you’re hungry,” he tells them, remembering his soldier days on the pampa, “everything tastes good.”
* * *
Ever since his epiphany about God and the need to be strong for his miner brothers, Omar Reygadas has tried to be upbeat around them. God is with us, he says again and again. But the days of hunger, the rising and falling of emotions as he listens for the drills, begin to sap his strength. He is fifty-six years old, a number that hovers over him as he thinks about the pains that are spreading across his body. First it feels as if someone were squeezing his chest, then a burning sensation spreads in his arm, and finally he loses much of the ability to move the arm. He believes he’s having a heart attack, and he begins to imagine his own death, and visualizes the thirty-two remaining men being left with his body and how quickly his corpse will rot in this heat. The fear of death grows as he lies on the ground outside the Refuge, the heavy air around him transformed into invisible, suffocating hands. Suddenly, he feels the air moving. It’s cooler. There’s a fresh breeze blowing over him. He sits up, takes out a cigarette lighter, and watches the flame bend, pointing upward on the sloping Ramp. Air is coming up from somewhere farther down in the mine. Maybe they’re injecting air into the mountain. Or maybe one of the drills broke through farther down. Omar announces his discovery to the other men, and a short while later he’s on his feet and walking downhill, with a few others joining him in an expedition into the deeper reaches of the mine, to see if they can discover where the air is coming from. The idea that they might find a shaft drilled from the surface and make contact with the outside world drives Omar and the others down past several curves and switchbacks. They reach Level 80 and then Level 70, and the flame is still blowing upward. Finally, they enter the corridor called Level 60 South and here the lighter flame blows straight up and flickers and dies: There isn’t enough oxygen to keep the flame burning. At Level 60 North the same thing happens. They go farther down into the mine to Level 40 and there the flame moves back and forth and bends back on itself—the air is moving there, it’s fresher again, but then it goes out. They inspect many dark and abandoned corridors but they never do find the opening down below where fresh air is entering the mine. But in all that walking and searching, something else happens to Omar: The tightness in his chest lifts. Thanks to that light breeze, “I started to breathe well again. And when I had to walk back up to the Refuge, the breeze stayed with me all the way back.”
Near the Refuge he sees José Henríquez, the Pastor, and tells him what he’s seen, how the breeze keeps coming from below.
“Where could it be coming from?” Henríquez says. “The caverns are all blocked up. There is no drill that’s broken through.”
“It’s the thirty-fourth miner, my little compadre,” Reygadas says. “He hasn’t abandoned us.” The thirty-fourth miner is the soul of every miner who’s ever toiled, the spirit of the God that protects them.
The cooler air returns every day, at six o’clock in the early evening. “That little breeze [
vientecito
] would come and it would leave us calmer.” Omar decides that if he gets out, he’s going to tell the world about it one day. “This can’t just be forgotten here.” All his years in mining offer no explanation that he can think of other than that it’s God blowing into the mine. And even if he really hasn’t seen a miracle, but rather the product of another shift of rock, it doesn’t matter. Because Omar believes that in the bending flame he has seen something divine, again, the breath of God keeping him alive, feeding oxygen to his lungs. He relaxes, takes easier breaths, feels better.
* * *
The drilling grinds on, and it then stops, often for hours at a time, leaving a cruel silence that’s filled, as their ears adjust to it, with the sound of their breathing and their coughs. When the drill goes quiet the self-described athlete Edison Peña thinks:
This is insane!
A man next to him says: “What are those guys doing up there?” Edison asks himself the same question. He is a sensitive, articulate man who was already deeply in tune with the whole absurd cycle of human existence even before the guillotine fell over the Ramp and trapped him inside. He’s had prior bouts of suicidal depression, and going down into the bowels of the mountain always felt like a kind of ending to him. “Death was always there in the mine. I knew it, everyone did. You’d try to tell people outside, and they wouldn’t believe you. They’d look at you like you were talking about science fiction.” For Edison to enter the mine on a regular day was to face the existential truth most men grasp only near the end of their lives: We will all die. Death is waiting for us all the time. Perhaps
this
is his time, and his waiting will finally end: He thinks this, especially, when the drills stop and the silence inside the caverns of the mine goes on for two hours, and then three.
There is no drill coming for us now. They gave up!
Four hours. Five. With his relatively alert and lucid thirty-four-year-old mind he is seeing firsthand what a true kick in the ass it is to be a human being, because he can see he’s trapped inside a kind of metaphor about the cycles of life and death, halfway on that metaphorical journey from the sunshine of being fully alive to the permanent blindness and deafness of death. “I felt an emptiness. A vacuum in my body,” he later says. Some of his fellow miners try to fill the silence by doing things like honking horns to let people know they’re still alive down there in the mine. Edison hears the noises they make and thinks:
How innocent these people are, how naïve. We’re seven hundred meters underground! No one can hear us! No one!
Perhaps more than any other miner, Edison feels fate descending upon him, like some angry creature residing in his rumbling stomach, pulling the life out of him from the inside. Eight hours. Nine. There’s no drill. No one is coming for them. Edison tries to fight the emptiness he feels growing inside him, to shake it away, and he starts tossing and turning on the floor of the Refuge, his eyes wildly out of focus. To his fellow miners, he seems to be losing his mind.
The truth is this: Edison was already a bit of a lunatic before he came into the mine. And his was not the loquacious, extroverted madness of Mario Sepúlveda, but a darker, lonelier, more morose introspection. More than once during the routine workdays at the mine another worker has pronounced Edison “crazy” for his tendency to violate certain safety rules: for example, the rule that says a man should never walk anywhere alone in the mine. It’s a self-destructive, rash thing to do underground, to go off where you might accidentally step into an abyss, or have a rock fall on you, and not have anyone nearby to hear your muted cry for help. His I-don’t-give-a-shit attitude and the possessed look in his eyes earned him the nickname “Rambo” from Alex Vega. Edison walked alone in the mine all the time, daydreaming in those fatal corridors, where he once found a massive, murderous slab of fallen rock at a spot he often walked past.
As he waits for the sound of drilling to begin again, Edison is living in a space of physical and emotional desolation. The thunder of falling rock, the textures of the colorless walls, with their millions of serrated edges, and the increasingly fetid air all suggest that he and his fellow miners have been sent here for punishment.
How can God be doing this to us?
Edison thinks.
Why me? Why us? What did I do?
There is judgment, too, in the simple absence of light. “The darkness around us was really killing us,” he later says. Edison the electrician has helped Illanes bring a battery and some light to the Refuge and the space next to it. But then there is a moment when the battery fails, and suddenly everything around Edison disappears in complete darkness. “That’s when you really feel you’re in hell. That’s where hell is, in the darkness.” Aboveground, Edison was in one of those tempestuous relationships that is colloquially called “hell,” in which objects fly across the room, where the love and hate two people have for each other causes them to treat each other poorly. But now he’s in a real hell, as he can see when the weak light comes back on again. It’s like he’s in the catacombs of the purgatory described by a certain devout Italian poet at the end of the Dark Ages. He sees bodies of men sleeping, or not sleeping, fitfully, stretched out on pieces of cardboard, on tarpaulin, their faces painted black with soot and sweat, in the Refuge and just outside, in rows of that tunnel, that defile of stone that leads down toward the hot center of the Earth. “Visually, it looked like my time had come.”
Or maybe not. Because after twelve hours of silence here comes the drill again.
Rat-a-tat-tat, grind-grind. Rat-a-tat-tat, grind-grind.
The sound of other men working to reach him provides some comfort, a muted joy for an hour or two, or three. And then it stops again. “The silence just destroyed us. Because you would feel abandoned, alone. Without a positive sign, your faith collapses. Because faith isn’t totally blind. We’re vulnerable, we’re really a small thing. I knew what it was like to feel alone and helpless, to feel there was no way out. Because your faith empties out second by second, it doesn’t get stronger as the days go by. People say that, but it’s a total lie. You’ll find a lot of my companions who make those stupid statements about feeling stronger. I don’t know. I hear them and I want to kill them.”