Authors: Héctor Tobar
Edison wants to live, and to live he chooses to do as little as possible. Some will criticize him and the other men in the Refuge for not leaving that room, with its cheap white tile floor and steel door. But to Edison it’s what makes the most sense, really, when you’re not eating. To simply wait and rest. “I conserved my energy. I’d go walk sometimes. But then I started to see that my legs wouldn’t respond when I had to go to the bathroom. I was starting to feel really fatigued. I had enough intelligence, innate intelligence for survival, to not do anything to kill myself. A lot of us were like that.”
Edison is also in a room surrounded by people with hurt and rage, a long lament with many voices. “They’d say, ‘If I get out, I’m going to do this, that, and the other,’” Edison says. “They’d say, ‘I wish I’d been a better father.’ You’d ask someone, ‘How many kids do you have?’ and his eyes would fill with tears. And you’d look at the man next to you, and you’d realize that he was even more destroyed than you were. And that’s the great truth: that in the mine there were no heroes.”
* * *
They are not heroes, but ordinary men who are afraid, silencing their rumbling stomachs with large quantities of dirty water, and waiting until noon, when they all gather to eat. But first, just before the meal, the tall, balding José Henríquez begins the session with a prayer, and then a few words that serve as a kind of sermon. Sometimes he tells Bible parables from memory. There is, most appropriately, the story of Jonah, who was swallowed by a whale. Jonah was sent on a mission by God, to speak in a certain village, but instead Jonah got on a ship and went in the opposite direction. “Jonah was a guy with a bad temper,” Henríquez says, “so God put the squeeze on him.” The Lord sent a powerful storm to toss that ship about, and when Jonah’s shipmates realized he was the source of God’s wrath, they tossed him overboard, where he was swallowed by a great whale. “Disobedience is never good,” Henríquez says. Jonah was in the belly of hell and in the “depths,” Henríquez says, speaking a word that he remembers from a Bible passage.
Profundidad
is the word in Spanish, and hearing it spoken by a man of God inside the depths of the mine leaves a powerful impression on the mind of the diary writer Víctor Segovia, who will scribble the word down a few hours later.
“I went down to the bottoms of the mountains,” the Bible passage reads. “The earth with her bars was about me for ever.” Jonah submits himself to the Lord, he says God has brought him up from a life of “corruption,” and promises that he will sacrifice unto God “with the voice of thanksgiving.” The Lord then commands the whale to spit Jonah out. Here, in this horrific place, trapped inside stone walls, the message is more powerful than it will be when spoken in any church: It’s as if they are living inside a Bible parable, Yonni Barrios thinks.
They have survived two weeks without a true meal, with no certain prospects that they’ll ever eat again, and everything that’s happening to them seems to have some deeper message. Víctor Segovia never went to church much, but now he’s sort of going to church every day, because with each prayer session the sense grows that the union of those thirty-three men is a holy event. Before this accident befell him, Víctor writes in his diary, he’d thought of church as a place where sinners went to seek forgiveness. But Henríquez speaks to him now of a message of hope and love. The Pastor is, by now, a man physically transformed, too: He’s shed his shirt against the relentless heat and humidity, cut off his pants to shorts, and walks around in ripped-up boots that look like sandals. Speaking of God with his bare chest and its patches of hair covered in sweat, and with his bald pate and its matted fringe of hair, Henríquez is beginning to look like a crazed mystic who lives in some desert cave, an effect heightened by the fact that when he speaks, he seems utterly convinced of what he’s saying. Christ loves you in spirit, the Pastor says, and Víctor later records the Pastor’s words in his diary: “Look for him and you will see that he loves you, and you will find peace.” For Víctor, this is a revelation. “I see now that people who are thankful go to church, too, and that the people who go there have been touched by the grace of God,” he writes.
In another sermon, Henríquez tells the story of Jesus taking five loaves of bread and two fish and multiplying them to feed five thousand people. He then leads them in a prayer that the Lord will find a way to take their small supply of food and make it last longer, because very soon they’re going to run out.
“The Pastor would pray that the food be multiplied,” Mario Sepúlveda later says. “Afterward, I’d see one of
los niños
walk over to the cabinet and try to peek inside, to see if there really might be more food there.”
Instead, each opening of the cabinet reveals less food. The men begin to scavenge around to see what they might find to eat. Yonni Barrios, the man who failed to protect the food against the hungry men on the day of the collapse, sees one pick up a discarded can of tuna and take his finger to it, wiping the inside and licking his finger again and again: Yonni never thought he’d see a well-paid man like him reduced to such a state. Other men begin to go through the trash cans, and when they find orange peels they clean them well and eat them. Yonni himself devours the brownish remains of a pear. “That was good to eat. The hunger was terrible.” Víctor has also eaten half-chewed fruit he found in the trash, and on Wednesday, August 11, he writes about it in his diary, remembering how he used to see the poorest of the poor in Copiapó sifting through the garbage. “We ignore it. People think that it will never happen to them and now look at me, eating peels, trash, and anything that is edible.” Carlos Mamani, the Bolivian immigrant, scans the ground to see if there are any bugs or worms crawling around: He would grab one if he saw it and eat it. But, just as there are no butterflies in the mine, there are no beetles or caterpillars either. “I didn’t see a spider, or even a termite, nothing.”
The men are feeling weaker now, it’s getting harder to walk up and down the 10 percent grade of the Ramp, and the sense of physical degradation grows as the space around the Refuge fills with the water flowing from the drills that are trying to reach them. The water is turning the ground to mud, and the mud is swallowing their boots when they walk on it, and the vehicles slip and slide when they try to drive on it. Several of the men take one of the front loaders and try to build a kind of levee against the water and mud but it’s quickly eroded away. Mario Sepúlveda goes walking through the mud, shirtless and soot-covered, confusion and worry on his face. He stops talking and the men stare at the lonely spectacle of him as he walks off: There is a thickening layer of black hair covering his cheeks to match the kiwi hair on his scalp. He walks up to the mechanics’ camp on Level 190 and tells the men there how he’s feeling, how disgraceful it is that he’s going to die down here, and the men try to cheer him up. Later, back down at the Refuge, he manages to fall into a fitful sleep. Víctor Segovia sees him dreaming, speaking in his sleep, saying his son’s name: “Francisco.” It’s a painful thing to witness: a grown, middle-aged man who longs to be with his son so much, he speaks to him in his sleep. Then Mario wakes up, looking sullen and crushed, the man of so many words suddenly unable to speak any at all.
* * *
The other men note that Carlos Mamani is especially quiet, having set himself apart in a corner of the Refuge. Days pass without him saying much. To the twenty or so men sleeping near him day after day, the long silences of this very young man with the indigenous face are disturbing and morbid. Carlos is simply afraid and confused. He got trapped on his first day working underground at this mine, and all these men seem to know one another, or be related to one another. They frighten him because they’re constantly arguing over whether they’re going to be saved and who’s to blame if they aren’t. “I didn’t know who I could trust.”
Now Mario Sepúlveda, the same man who’s been wandering the mine in a funk, snaps to attention, and looks directly and very intently at Carlos Mamani. With all the others near the Refuge listening, he stands up and addresses the
boliviano
. “Down here with us, you’re as Chilean as the rest of us,” Mario says loudly. A lot of working men in Chile resent Bolivians in the same way working people in other countries resent outsiders, and everyone knows that being a Bolivian in Chile isn’t easy. “You’re friends and brothers with all of us,” Mario says. The speech ends with all the men around them breaking into applause, and some wiping away tears, because it’s true: They’re all dying together, and no human being, not even the Bolivian among them, deserves this fate. Carlos has been watching the men spend hours playing dominoes, and now they invite him to join in, and since he’s never played dominoes before, they teach him the rules. It’s a simple game—twenty-eight tiles, match number to number, etc., etc.—and Carlos learns quickly. He sees how these endless rounds of dominoes can make the nights shorter, the darkness less dark. After a few games, he wins one. And then another. Pretty soon, he’s beating everyone.
“He won? Again? Who taught this Bolivian guy to play?”
In Chile, among men, when you really are brothers with someone you mock them. This is called
echándole la talla
, which can be translated roughly as “taking his measure.” Being able to mock someone without causing a fight is a valued skill, and among the men Víctor Zamora is best at it: That’s one of the reasons hardly anyone is really all that angry at him anymore, even though he did lead the raid on the food supplies and thanks to him they’re hungrier than they need to be. At any given moment, Víctor has got half the men in and near the Refuge laughing at the other half
. Look at that Mario Gómez, with his block of wood, listening to the walls
, he might say
. Is the drill nearby, Mario? Which way is it coming from?
And then Víctor will stand up and point the way Mario Gómez does, like some Labrador retriever. Sometimes, if Gómez isn’t looking, Zamora will point with his hand showing just three fingers—the miners know it’s mean, of course, to mock a man with a maimed hand, but in the context of this cave it’s very funny.
From over here! No, from over there! It’s close!
Zamora’s jokes at the expense of Gómez are so funny they keep the men repeating them and laughing for days afterward.
Eventually, to bring Carlos Mamani into the fold, Mario Sepúlveda directs a bit of ribbing at him, too. Like the jokes the men tell about the others, it draws on the quality that sets him apart.
“Mamani, you better hope they come for us. Because if they don’t, since you’re Bolivian, you’ll be the first one we’re going to eat.”
Mamani isn’t especially bothered by the joke—does anyone take any of these Chileans seriously? “I never thought they were going to eat me,” he later says. But when Raúl Bustos hears this joke he thinks:
Now that crazy Mario has gone too far
. So do a few other men. What kind of lunatic jokes about eating someone to men who haven’t eaten a real meal for ten days now? They really are starving to death, some of the men think, and it’s not outside the realm of possibility that they might have to eat the first guy that dies. “I know Mamani didn’t sleep well that night,” Florencio Avalos says. Raúl is also troubled by this macabre humor: He’s not entirely sure these men will all hold together if they truly begin to starve to death. After the tsunami in Talcahuano, people very quickly surrendered to their baser instincts. Mario Sepúlveda is a man of swinging moods, and Raúl senses now what Mario’s closest friends and family know about him: He’s a man who is not entirely in control of his emotions. He’ll say he loves you one moment, and threaten you the next, and it seems likely that he will do anything to survive.
Even as they all grow weaker, Mario is picking fights with people. He argues with Omar Reygadas over the drilling and the drillers. The older Omar has worked with drill crews before, and each time the drilling stops, or when it seems to be going off course, he shares a bit of this experience. In the middle of one of those long silences when no drilling can be heard, Omar tells the men around him not to worry, reminding them, again, that he’s worked with drill crews and knows a bit about their routines. “They’re not giving up,” he says. “It’s just that they have to reinforce the bars…” By now the men are experiencing new, unmistakable symptoms of malnutrition and starvation. Walking to the spot where they go to the bathroom takes effort, and when they reach that spot, it’s often the site of a squatting torture. Their bodies want to push something out, but it takes too much agonizing effort, and what finally does drop to the ground is strange looking. Their feces are compact, oval-shaped pellets, as hard as stones, and to the men who’ve grown up on farms and lived in the country, they look like goat or llama droppings.
Mario Sepúlveda is as constipated, exhausted, and freaked-out as the rest of them, and finally he decides he’s had enough of this white-haired bullshitter. “You’re always saying the same thing!” he barks at Omar. “You’re lying. You don’t know anything. You’re an idiot!”
“You can’t talk to me that way.”
“Shut up already!”
Omar protests the attack on his honor by standing up and taking a few threatening steps toward Mario, unconcerned that the man with the heart of a dog is taller, stronger, and younger than he is. “Let’s go and settle this … down by the water.”
As several men watch, the two men walk away from the sleeping area near the Refuge and begin to walk down the Ramp. They’re headed toward a side passage where there’s a pool of water, built up by the trickle flowing into the mine since the rescue drills began working. Mario walks and thinks of the violence he’ll inflict on this annoying man, how he’ll finally let loose this anger that’s been welling inside him. But the pool of water is more than a hundred meters away, and in the minute or two it takes to walk this distance, his anger lifts. The older man seems really determined to fight, he’s not going to back down, and looking at him, Mario realizes Omar is as desperate and hungry as Mario is, and how absurd it is to be fighting in this place when they’re so close to death already.